We have been doing a game night with our friends, Mark and Janet, for well over a year. Every 4 to 6 weeks, we try to get together. We usually do a quick dinner, but then try to get in a couple of games.
Last week, it was our turn to host, but Mark and Janet invited us up to their cottage instead. We got there early afternoon and enjoyed a nice pontoon boat ride around the lake.
One of the games we’ve played quite often is a little card game called The Crew. It may be little, but it’s really hard after a while. It’s a cooperative game where we are all trying to complete one of the 50 ‘missions’. We are currently stuck at around mission 25/26. I’m very frustrated and my desire to continue this game has waned. But the others are still up to trying whenever we get together, so on we shall trudge.
It was still a couple of hours before dinner time, so we decide to show them a game called Space Base. It is one of Mar’s favorite games. It’s also not the easiest to grasp and teach. After 90 minutes, we were far from done and since it was getting closer to dinner time, we decided to stop knowing Mark and Janet had at least gotten a good feel for the game.
While the girls started some food prep, I grabbed Mark to try out the Sky Team, which I had just recently received. It’s a quick playing game using dice action to try and safely land an airplane. It’s been well received and just recently was awarded the winner of the 2024 Spiel de Jahres.
After a quick review of the rules, we were off and running. Unfortunately, we crash landed on this attempt. We immediately started another game, but had to break for a wonderful dinner. I’m glad to report that Mark and I successfully landed the plane in Montreal this second time around. There are several more scenarios that add different types of challenges and we look forward to a future date to try some of them.
With the dinner dishes all cleaned up, we decided as a group to play a game of Alhambra. We have played this game more often than any game in my collection, perhaps save The Crew. But The Crew is a quick round card game, so it’s easy to play it many times in an evening. Alhambra is a game that takes about 90 minutes for us to play.
You can easily see what this game is about by visiting the site with the link above. I think the cool thing about this game is when we started and what it looked like when we were done.
It was still daylight as you can see at the start of the game.
But darkness soon started to descend upon. Janet’s first attempt was to put some party lights and they worked for a while. Very cool game environment was starting to shape up.
But even that was not enough after a while, and so the final solution was to bring the indoors to the outdoors.
How cool is this. What an end to a perfect day and night. Mark ended up winning with a rush at end narrowly defeating Janet. Marian finished a respectable 3rd and yours truly finished way, way dead last.
I’m really happy to have another couple to help get my gaming fix in on a regular basis. My wife is not the biggest gamer, but she will always show up and enjoy the time together with friends.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever thought of myself as “a gamer” but I must say my wife Janet and I are proud to wear that label. Of course having such great friends like Ron (our gaming mentor) and Marian to play games with this past year or so has a heck of a lot to it.