Recap of International Tabletop Day and other gaming

First off, I wanted to give a big thank you to friends and the folks of the Internet for voting for me in the Passport Game Studios International Table Top Photo Contest. I won a runner-up prize! Pretty sweet!! You guys are totally the best!

This past week has been a blur with work and, of course, lots of board gaming. Last Saturday was International Tabletop Day, which my friends and I took full advantage of. Our hosts at one of my gaming groups also had a raffle of board-game prizes and a cornhole tournament in which you could win $25 to Game Depot, our friendly local game store in Tempe.

First game I played was Chicago Express. It’s an auction, stock-holding train game that plays about 90 minutes. You can do one of three actions in the game: bid on railroad companies’ stocks, expand the railroad, or develop lots along the railroad. Game play is fairly quick but it can get tight, especially in our five-player game. After each round, you get paid dividends according to a stock’s price, divided by how many shares are in play. I ended up winning that game by having one stock of each of the main four companies.

Next up was the cornhole tournament. I grew up in LA, and I had never heard of cornhole until I moved out to Arizona, where I ran into a lot of folks from the Midwest. Us West Coast folks know this game as a bean-bag toss. Anyway, my friend and I signed up for it, and I wanted to do well since he’s originally from Ohio, so cornholing is in his blood. I watched a few videos online on how to actually toss a beanbag, and lo and behold, it worked! We crushed our opponents and ended up winning first place! We decided we would buy different games from Game Depot, so that our group wouldn’t have duplicates. Hurrah!

Next up was Lords of Xidit. This was my first time playing this game. I really enjoyed the programming mechanic of this game! There are 12 rounds, and in each round, you pre-program 6 actions and everybody’s actions are done simultaneously. You are trying to recruit soldiers to fight monsters, which then give you coins, influence and castles. If someone beats you to a location, you might not be able to recruit the soldier you want or there might not be anybody left to get. That goes for monsters too. If you’re planning to fight one and gain the benefits, you better be sure to get there first!

In between our Xidit game was the raffle. As you can see, our Game Day hosts went above and beyond with the prizes. My name ended up getting drawn and I was able to score Firefly Fluxx. Score!

Next up, I played two quicker games, both of them twice: The Grizzled and Rolling America. Shockingly, we won our second game of The Grizzled! I have never won a game the entire time I’ve own it! It was a four-player game, and we had four speech tokens. We agreed to spend them all once we all had one, so in four turns, we were able to discard a whole bunch of cards.

I ended up winning one game of Rolling America.  But the thing I was most excited about was using my newly laminated map sheets for the game. Yes, I went to FedEx Office to laminate 9 maps (since that’s all that could fit on a large sheet), and I purchased some dry-erase markers. It makes game play easier because if you make a mistake or change your mind about your number placement, you can just rub it off, instead of making scratch marks on your map, which can make a big scribbly mess since there isn’t much room for error.

At this point, I was in the mood for something heavier but some of my other heavy-euro-gamer friends were tied up in their own games, so we decided to play more shorter games until we could all join together again. We busted out Rise of Augustus, which I seriously have not played in about two years. It’s basically Roman Bingo. Different symbols are pulled out of a bag, and you place your meeples on objective cards that have that same symbol. When you complete an objective card, you gain victory points or benefits. Complete seven objective cards, and you score up your VPS and the person with the highest wins the game. And that my friends was me!

The next game we played wasn’t heavy either, but still a whole lot of fun. We played Survive: Escape from Atlantis. I’ve actually been playing this game A LOT in the past two months. It’s quick to explain, it has cute meeples, people love to kill each other, and (I believe this is the reason that it keeps coming back to the table) it easily handles 6 players! I unfortunately did not get enough meeples to safety to win this game.

Lastly, we saved the best for lost. We busted out a five-player game of Caylus. This is a solid heavy euro-game worker-placement game. I love this game. You are basically trying to collect resources to gain money and political favors, or build buildings, which then other players can use to your benefit. The coolest mechanic of this game is — what one gamer likes to call “sh$t rolling downhill” — that locations are resolved in order. So you better make sure you have the resources you need in order to do your action. It was a tight game, and by the end, all of our brains hurt so bad, but in a good way!

We called it a night (I seriously think it was about 1 a.m. at this point), and then decided to meet up on Sunday for even more gaming! We busted out with Le Havre, as one of the guys had never played it before. Again, there were five of us playing the long game, and it was an uber tight and crunchy. I was nerdily showing off my plastic organizers for the game, which they conceded in the end, was a good idea. After that, three of us stuck around for a quick game of Glass Road.

Later in the week, we met up twice to play two more games on the long side. On one night, we played Viticulture, another game that’s been on the table a lot recently. It’s a worker-placement game about harvesting grapes and making wine. The interesting mechanic about this game is that there are two seasons for the game. If you spend all your workers in the first season, you have no more actions for the next. So you have to balance taking actions or taking your actions first, as each location has a benefit for being the first person there.

Lastly, we played an oldie-but-goodie Puerto Rico. And I just realized that I didn’t take any photos during this game, which is a bummer because we played with my friend’s collectors edition, which has some really sweet metal coins. We decided to use one of the expansions that added new buildings. We then draft which buildings come into play for our game, so that added new changes.

And that’s a wrap! Thanks for making it all the way down here. We played a lot of games this past week, and it was awesome. The guys and I were able to bust out some heavier games that we hadn’t played in a while, and I was able to play a game that was new to me, Lords of Xidit. What games have you played this past week?