We had a moment of silence this week for Owen, who is still missing from our gaming table. Not to worry, he’s over in England visiting family, but we still miss him.
This week we learn why <most> gamers don’t carry guns. If we did, Ben would be dead and Mike would be in jail…later to be acquitted after he explained how Ben caused us to lose the game. But I get ahead of myself.
Our first game was Ghost Stories; our favorite cooperative game. Ghost Stories has several difficulty levels beginning at Initiate (or some word that means about the same thing) and going all the way to Nightmare. We play at the Hell level—one before Nightmare. The game wasn’t going that well for us and soon we saw we would be in dire straits. Mike offered up a solution to forestall the inevitable. It was Ben’s turn, but Mike’s silver tongue could not persuade Ben to take his suggested course of action. Mike vowed, “If we lose this game it will be on your head Ben Hodgson!†We soon lost the game. It then became apparent that neither Ben (nor I) completely understood what Mike had earlier argued to do. Now that we were dead, and had time to further discuss it, we decided that Mike had been correct.
Undaunted, we tried again. This time the game was going pretty well for us. We had killed one of the four horrific phantoms we needed to kill to win the game, and two of the remaining were on the board. Still, fate is a fickle mistress. The dice grew cold and Ben once again led us down the path of disaster. (Actually I don’t remember what exactly Ben did to lead us to disaster, but no matter. What’s important is that I had nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.) Oh, and yes, we all died horribly.
We still had time for one more game, so I broke out a game I had won at Con on the Cob called Kachina. Our friend, Andy Hopp did the art work for the game and my copy is signed by him. Kachina is a tile placement game with a Hopi Indian theme. This game sort of reminded me of many of Reiner Knizia games where the mechanics of the game could easy be slapped with any ol’ theme and it would still work. I suggest they put out a more whimsical version of this game based upon condiments. But I digress… Each tile has a number and possibly a special power. The idea is to place a tile that is the highest number in either the row or column that it is in. That’s how you score points. The special powers of the tiles influence either the row or column or surrounding tiles.
We liked this game. Easy to learn, but a lot of strategy went into each placement. In the end, Ben whooped out butts good. Mike was one point ahead of me and came in second.
2 Comments
Ok, Ghost Stories has 4 levels. We play on the highest level “Hell” and not on the second highest level “Nightmare”. And Ben’s transgression on the second game was not near as bad as the one on the first game.
Kachina was a good game. There was one tile type we all agreed was not really as useful as the others, but maybe with additional playing we’ll figure out the best way to use it. It was a great game, I thought.
<> (Emphasis mine)
A pun wrapped in an enigma? :-)