TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2005
Exploding the Volcano

Upon reading about the decision not to reprint Zendo over and wunderland.com, we headed over to Pegasus and picked up a few more stashes of pyramids. Now with six colors, we should be able to play almost all of the games designed for the system. As tonight is game night, we pulled out all the pyramids and set up Volcano. It's an abstract game but with a theme that seems to fit, as you're popping off tops of pyramid stacks like volcanoes and moving the rest around like lava in the hopes to capture sets of pyramids you need to score. Matt, Kathleen and Keith joined us for this one, and even though I taught a rule wrong, we had fun; there aren't too many abstracts that work for more than 2 players.

Matt noticed Space Walk, one of our thrift-store finds on the shelf, and since it's a quick one we brought it out next. People must think I want to be an astronaut, with all the constellation and space games I have. Space Walk is a variant of Mancala with a twist where you want to put other people's color in the black holes instead of your own. The setup of the board was most of the game, and then it quickly turns a vicious matter of bumping people into black holes whenever you can and trying to save your ships in the process. Suprizingly, it's another no-luck abstract that works for multiple players.

Our final game of the night was Foil, a word game Keith used to play with his Dad growing up. The main object was to draw letter cards until you can make words. Then, you jumbled your letters up and people had to guess what words you were making. As they get points for being correct, it is helpful to make words that have anagrams as to confuse them. It had a nice incentive to make longer words, as they score more points and are harder for others to guess, all in all a nice end to the game night.

Posted by Mark @ 7:45 PM CDT [Previous] [Next]