HoodedHawk

George, Dave, and I played “Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar” Wednesday night. I bought the game last week after seeing a lot of great reviews online; this was the first time any of us had played. Consensus was positive, and we all thought that a second play would be more enjoyable as we now have the mechanics/rules/possible strategies down. Initial setup/rules reading took about 30 minutes, and the game itself about 2 hours or so.

The big new mechanic of the game are the rotating gears. After each round (i.e. all players take a turn), the large central gear is rotated one notch counter-clockwise, which in turn moves all of the smaller (connected) gears one notch clockwise. Any workers on the smaller gears will move to the next “action” space. Thus, by the time your next turn comes around your workers will be a few more spaces forward from where they were placed. This mean you have to plan ahead in order to be able to perform your desired actions. I think the theme of the game holds up well (even if the big central gear is actually an Aztec round calendar, not Mayan).

The next game will go much faster. Definitely will play again, and is a keeper!

Final score: Me (49), George (41) and Dave (31).

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).

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