A friend brought some new games home from GenCon and brought them over this past weekend. We played each of these games once, for three players.

Mystic Vale is a deck-building game (like Dominion, for example), but instead of adding cards to your deck you augment cards. Your deck always has 20 cards, each of which has three "slots". Some are ( Read more... )

Last Shabbat, friends introduced us to a new-ish board game, Splendor. Here's how Board Game Geek describes it:
Splendor is a game of chip-collecting and card development. Players are ( Read more... )

Forwarded by siderea: How to win at Monopoly and lose all your friends.
Your goal is to play conservatively, lock up more resources, and let the other players lose by attrition. If you want to see these people again, I recommend not gloating, but simply state that you're playing to win, and that it wasn't your idea to play Monopoly in the first place ( Read more... )

For his birthday Dani received a copy of Caverna, a worker-placement game in the style of Agricola. We quite enjoy Agricola but hadn't heard of Caverna before.

This was pretty serendipitous; his family knows we like board games, doesn't know very much about the games we like, but found their way to this. They got advice at Snakes and Lattes, ( Read more... )

We went to alaricmacconnal's and Elsbeth's yesterday for a New Year's Day party, which meant more gaming. I had fun playing more Dixit (blackpaladin, which expansions were in there?), and Dani played Constantinopolis, a resource-management game that sounded similar to Puerto Rico but is twice as long (or thereabouts). I haven't played it yet.
2013 was getting off to a ( Read more... )

Friends invited some people over for gaming yesterday. I played one new game and two new variants of games I already knew ( Read more... )

We did Thanksgiving dinner with my parents, sister, and niece, as usual. (My nephew is currently away at law school.) Someday my parents will decide that this is too much fuss and that's what they have children for, but apparently not yet. My niece brought her boyfriend, who I enjoyed talking with. I overheard my mother say to my father "that's ( Read more... )

I don't think I've ever seen mammatus clouds before. They sure are pretty.

This information visualization on population per land area surprised me at the extremes (Bangladesh and UAE).

Avram's letter to his parents on leaving home, an interesting little d'var torah for Lech L'cha (starts with Genesis 12).

A few weeks ago I played Quack in the ( Read more... )

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.
unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel ( Read more... )

A few years ago Dani bought a copy of American Megafauna, which I have written about beforeThe idea is that it's 250 million years ago and the players are playing ( Read more... )