Hello all! It's been a great week! We're doing wonderfully out here. Brooke has been working on walking a whole bunch! And she's getting much better at carrying things, even large things like her blanket.
Brooke has also been trying to feed herself more. I think her best utensil is a fork because she typically holds silverware vertically and then stabs downward. Don't get me wrong, that works to slowly eat yogurt with a spoon, but that's about it. So fork foods are best, and apparently this week that includes toast...
As the title mentioned, this past Saturday was Table Top Day, a day dedicated to playing board games. Monica and I typically buy a new game each year to celebrate, but I thought this year we'd go a little further. We both made a list of our top 10 favorite games at the moment, gave each a score based on where it occurred on our lists, and then played the top 5 games that appeared on both our lists through the week so we could share them all with you! I'll include our top 10 lists toward the end of the post. We played one game a night, and played through them in order (almost... we had to swap some games around depending on how much time we had each night... but close to in order). So with that, here are our top 5 games for 2017 (If you read the blog only to see pictures/ get updates about Brooke, you can stop reading here! :) ).
5. Gubs.
Gubs is a game in which players try to collect the most gubs by the end of the game. There are a lot of different cards in this game, so it takes a few rounds to really get a feel for it. You can protect your gubs with barricades, trap other players gubs, and even steal them from each other. In the deck there are cards with the letters G U and B on them (in the top of the picture) and when the last one is drawn from the deck the game ends, and the player with the most gubs wins! It's a lot of fun, and no lead is very safe. There are cards that can quickly shift gubs from player to player, or even into the discard pile.
Monica won the first round. My gub that's under the light reflection is trapped under a ring, so it didn't count toward my total...
But I won the second game! For those keeping track, that brings the series to 1-1.
4. Takenoko
In Takenoko each player is a gardener in the Emperors bamboo garden. Players must place garden tiles, grow bamboo, and feed the emperors panda. There are various goal cards that align with each of these aspects, and on each turn a player picks to do 2 of 5 available actions. The actions will help you to complete your goal cards, which give you points, and the player with the most points at the end of the game wins. Here we are early in our play through.
And here's the final board. We tried to get a picture of the results at the end of each game. Monica won this one 44 to 43... so close. That brings the record to 2-1, Monica.
3. Rampage
Rampage is very different from just about any other game I've played, and will probably forever be one of my favorite games. To set up the game you build a little city by using meeple (the little colored, people shaped cutouts) as spacers and cardboard tiles as floors. Once the city is built, players take turns as monsters destroying the city. Each monster has 2 parts, a body and feet. To move you must flick the feet around the board. If you can get the feet to stop close enough to a building you can demolish it by picking up the body and dropping it on top of the building. There are also cars throughout the city you can pick up and throw at each other. We took a bunch of videos and I'll stick them all together at the end of this games section. The goal of the game is to score the most points. You gain points by eating floors (by clearing all meeple off of them), knocking other monsters over and taking their teeth, and eating complete sets of meeple. Here we are part way through the game.
And here are our monsters after some vicious combat! Note that they're both laying down.
And a little stare down before the final counting of points.
Here's the final results. I won the game, 88 to 62! That brings us back to tied, 2-2.
And as promised, here are videos of game play (with slow motion!!). Apparently slow motion videos don't upload my custom slow motion sections when they go to cloud storage, so I had to upload, download, and re-upload one of the videos to get it right. That one is below. The different slow motion in the other videos works fine. The video below is of Monica throwing a truck at my monster. This video is me demolishing the stadium. Here is Monica demolishing a building. And lastly, I fail to return fire...
2. Galaxy Trucker
Next on the list was Galaxy Trucker. In this game players fight over a pile of space ship pieces in real time trying to assemble a space worthy ship. There are various cards that represent the difficulties that will be encountered on your flight, and most of them can be viewed while building your ship. There are rules on how you can build your ship, such as all items must plug together with the right connector. Here is a picture from us building a space ship. All the tiles start face down, and you can only use one hand and pick them up one at a time, and you're not allowed to look at them until they're over your board.
And here are our assembled ships, ready to fly!
A full game consists of 3 flights, each with a larger ship than the last, and greater hazards than before. Here are the ships we build for the 3rd flight. Here's mine (using the alternate design).
And here's Monica's.
It is very possible throughout a flight to have your ship broken apart by asteroids and pirates. I was really hoping we would have severely mangled ships at the end of the flight... but alas, we made it out with only a few pieces having fallen off. Monica wailed on me in this game. I don't even remember the final score due to bad memory suppression. I know she was over 100, and I was around 50. In my defense, Monica had played the app more recently so she had more practice, and this is a game were a little practice can go a long way. Monica again leads the series, 3-2.
1. Roborally
Roborally is amazing. We don't play it a ton, but I'm not surprised it was toward the top of both of our lists. In Roborally each player controls a robot, racing between various flags in numerical order. The robot to reach the last flag first wins! Below you can see the game set up and under way. Each player is dealt cards, and then picks 5 of them and places them in order on their play mat. Once everyone has done this everyone flips over their first card at the same time, and all robots take that action. This could lead to robots driving into each other and pushing each other into different spaces, completely messing up a players strategy. Believe me, one time I pushed Monica's robot so she would drive into a hole, and she got SOOOO mad at me! I haven't made that mistake again.
Here is a picture of my robot making it to the first flag.
And here I am pulling through the second flag as Monica arrives at the first.
I got some good cards on my next turn that let me get across the board really quick and pull away!
The final flag was on a conveyor belt, so it moved each turn. I hopped on the belt behind it and tried to catch up.
I kept getting closer each turn.
Until I finally caught it! You can see Monica was not far behind. In fact, she was able to make it to the marker on the turn after me (a turn is flipping a the full 5 cards on the play sheet). I'm glad I was able to win the race so I could tie things up again, 3-3. With everything even through the week that meant everything depended on our new game we ordered for Table Top Day!
As mentioned, Saturday was Table Top Day. Our new game for this year is called Harry Potter, Hogwarts Battle. It just so happens this is a cooperative game, so we either both won, or both lost, keeping our series tied...
Hogwarts Battle is a deck building game. For those unfamiliar with the term, in a deck building game each player starts with a small deck. The cards in your deck provide you with some form of money, victory points, etc. On your turn you can play cards to earn money for that turn, which you can then use to try to buy better cards. There is then also some other aspect outside of money which will determine a winner. In Hogwarts Battle that other thing is attack! Here is a picture of the game all set up.
So in the game on your turn you would use the cards in your hand do do damage to the villains, or to collect money to buy better cards for your deck. Together we would fight various villains, with the goal of beating them all before they overtook all of the locations. The game is designed to build in complexity, and game 1 (corresponding to year 1) that we played was very basic. Then as you complete the various years/games there are additional boxes to open that include new cards/elements to the game. These will make the game progressively more difficult to beat, as well as add additional rules to the game. So far this seems like a great game for someone new to deck builders as it starts off very basic and easy to understand. Here are the boxes containing future components.
We were able to beat game 1, and so we got to open game 2. Here's a picture of the contents... kinda. We're planning to play again tonight, and hopefully we'll have success again!
And with that we've come to the end of our games for the week! If you want to know more about any of the games let me know!
And as mentioned before, here are both Monica and My top 10 lists:
| Alex |
| Descent |
| Roborally |
| Rampage |
| Formula D |
| Galaxy Trucker |
| Vast |
| Titan Race |
| Gubs |
| Takenoko |
| Tsuro |
| Monica |
| Sushi Go Party |
| Roborally |
| Galaxy Trucker |
| Patchwork |
| Takenoko |
| Gubs |
| Rampage |
| Stratego |
| 3 up 3 down |
| Water Works |
And with that I think this post is long enough (and I'm out of things too)! I hope you all have an amazing week!
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