#tsuro

Pink and Blue were the first to arrive, bringing guests from eastern Europe, Orange and Lemon.  Orange and Lemon were new to our sort of board gaming.  After an explanation of what mushy peas are, food and some chit chat, others started arriving.  The “Feature Game” was the Moor Visitors expansion to Viticulture.  Teal had been keen to play the Tuscany board and the plan was to play both…

This past Sunday my wife (Wonder Woman), children (Robin [7] and Nightwing [15]) and I went to an FLGS to play board games from their collection of over 1000 games. The store has an all-day pay fee for each person with the option of a subscription which we may be looking into when we are a bit more sure about the Delta COVID variant and Robin being vaccinated. I have played most of the games we played. But, it was fun to introduce them to the family.

I started us off with ICE COOL, a dexterity game where you flick wobbly penguins through doors and try to collect the most fish. I first played this game as a break between rounds of LCG Card game tournaments. The whole family enjoyed watching mom try to escape one room for the majority of the first turn. She turned it around on the third turn and caught all our penguins. I won the game. But, it was a perfect way to get the energy up for a board game day.

Robin got to choose first. He kept grabbing games that basically had campaign modes and would be hard to play in one sitting. So, we promised return trips to play those games. He finally settled on TSURO. I love this game. It is a simple path-building game where you try to keep your dragon flying around the board the longest. ROBIN laughed maniacally when his brother and mother were forced off the board. In the end, it came down to the last tile which forced myself and Robin to run into each other, resulting in a tie.

Nightwing picked a game I hadn't seen before. SUPER MARIO LEVEL UP was a racing and voting game. You advance characters up a mountain to get to the castle. when a character reaches the castle all players vote on if that character is champion. each player has 6 characters they are trying to get points for. When a champion is declared the remaining characters get points based on the level reached. If the champion is not voted in they are eliminated and score zero points. This was a fun bluffing and racing experience. I enjoyed the thematic elements of the Mario game. I also won after promoting some champions that weren't on my card to get my family to waste their no votes and eliminate each other's characters.

I chose MYSTERIUM. Robin was excited about this game when I described it to him and he wanted to be the ghost. I explained to him fo the first game it was better to be one of the psychics. He had never heard of or played CLUE. So it took a little bit more explaining for him. In the end, he was the only one who figured out his cards in time. So we never made it to the second portion of the game. Nightwing thought I was a bad ghost. He gets to try his hand next time. Then Robin will probably show us all how it is done.

Wonder Woman picked the last game we played before heading home. She liked the art on the box of LANTERNS. Lanterns is a tile-placement game where we take turns placing lantern tiles and exchanging cards to earn the most honour at the Lantern Festival. This is an easy to learn game with a cute theme to match. I squeaked out the win over Robin by collecting one last honour tile on the last turn.

I can't recommend highly enough supporting local game stores with this style of pay to play and subscription service. Most of them have discounts for members and offers where the money spent on the first day can go towards the first month's membership. This is an innovative way to help out and form a bond with a store of your own.