Oh, how I hate Spring
Apparently today is the first day of Spring. I wouldn't care, except that with Spring comes hay-fever. Happens every year, and so for the next two or three weeks I'll be a horrible, snotty, red-eyed mess--unless I decide to take benadryl, in which case I'll be groggy and blank-faced for three weeks.
Played an interesting boardgame yesterday, Big Points. I heard about this one on a gaming podcast, and being in Germany I decided to pick it up, as it isn't available in the US, and the bits are language independent. For a game that takes only 20-30 minutes, it's suprisingly deep--if you want to know more about the game, it's after the cut.
The game is actually really simple--there are a lot of disks in 5 different colors, plus 5 black and 5 white disks; these are randomly placed into one continuous path. On a player's turn, they move any of the five colored pawns forward to the next disk of it's color (ie, a red pawn moves to the next red disk, regardless of how many spaces away that disk is), and then take either of the adjacent disks (the one in front or behind) to the disk the pawn is on.
Eventually the pawns will reach the end of the path, and the next move will put them onto a staircase, each of the stairs being marked with a number from zero to four, the four being at the top. The first pawn to reach the stairs goes on the four, the next on the three, and so on. Once all the pawns are on the stairs, the game is over, and players score the number of disks they have in each color by the value the colored pawn sits on (ie, if a player has three red disks, and the red pawn is on the "2" step, they score six points).
The black and white disks are special disks. After taking a black disk, on a subsequent turn a player may discard the black disk to immediately move another pawn, and can move the pawn forward or backward. Black disks are worth zero points at the end of the game. The white disks are worth points equal to the number of different colors a player collected that game, including black; thus, if a player collects two colors, the white disk is worth only two points. If, however, the player collected all five colors and has a black they didn't use, each of the white disks is worth a whopping six points.
Alright, I'm done nerding it up for now.
Played an interesting boardgame yesterday, Big Points. I heard about this one on a gaming podcast, and being in Germany I decided to pick it up, as it isn't available in the US, and the bits are language independent. For a game that takes only 20-30 minutes, it's suprisingly deep--if you want to know more about the game, it's after the cut.
The game is actually really simple--there are a lot of disks in 5 different colors, plus 5 black and 5 white disks; these are randomly placed into one continuous path. On a player's turn, they move any of the five colored pawns forward to the next disk of it's color (ie, a red pawn moves to the next red disk, regardless of how many spaces away that disk is), and then take either of the adjacent disks (the one in front or behind) to the disk the pawn is on.
Eventually the pawns will reach the end of the path, and the next move will put them onto a staircase, each of the stairs being marked with a number from zero to four, the four being at the top. The first pawn to reach the stairs goes on the four, the next on the three, and so on. Once all the pawns are on the stairs, the game is over, and players score the number of disks they have in each color by the value the colored pawn sits on (ie, if a player has three red disks, and the red pawn is on the "2" step, they score six points).
The black and white disks are special disks. After taking a black disk, on a subsequent turn a player may discard the black disk to immediately move another pawn, and can move the pawn forward or backward. Black disks are worth zero points at the end of the game. The white disks are worth points equal to the number of different colors a player collected that game, including black; thus, if a player collects two colors, the white disk is worth only two points. If, however, the player collected all five colors and has a black they didn't use, each of the white disks is worth a whopping six points.
Alright, I'm done nerding it up for now.