HoodedHawk

We played a 4-player War of the Ring last night. Game was about 5 hours. I played Sauron, George played Saruman, Mike and Dave played the Free Peeps. The Free peeps won by dropped the ring into Mount Doom; but we Shadow players almost won as well, with 8 of 10 victory points. We mis-played some of the new rules/cards in the 2nd edition, but still had fun. The Fellowship basically ran all the way from just outside Rivendell to Mordor by moving 9 regions at once. Shadow hunted them all along the way, but the dice favored the Free Peeps. Precious!

Dylan and I played a game of Trajan last week. I won, but only by a few points (something like 145:137). Fun game. Now that we have the mechanics down, the game time really is ~30 min per player. Fun!

We finished our game of Twilight Imperium on Wednesday (continued from previous Wed). In our 4-player game, only one of us had played before. Fun game, though it will take a number of plays to get all the rules, actions, special tech, etc. down. However this game doesn’t get to the table very often due to its length.

I’d play it again, but only if nothing else more interesting was offered (e.g. Eclipse, War of the Ring, or some new game I haven’t played).

This year was easiest yet. Amazingly, before and after the “shoot”, Olivia was running around all over the place like a skittish rabbit. But for the fewer than 10 minutes I took pictures everyone was calm! Wonderful. Setup was simply putting PJ’s on the kids and putting a chair in front of the tree. I used an external off-camera flash sitting on the kitchen divider with a diffuser.

The only complaints were from Preston, and were along the lines of “Hey, tell her not to kiss me again!” (which resulted in another kiss) or “She’s hugging my neck!”

One of the shots I turned off the flash control by mistake – and that was quite nice of just Olivia, with flattering outdoor light streaming in the sliding glass doors to everyone’s right side. I turned the flash back on and took another. I liked the no-flash one.

I’ll let you figure out which of the pictures below was NOT used on the card this year…

Kids relaxing after Thanksgiving dinner. Before dinner we played physical board games (though I forgot to take pix). Good times!