A Year in Board Gaming – 2013.8-18; A Bunch of Games

I haven’t written one of these for a while, but I have an excuse! Really! On Monday morning, 1/28, we decided to go on a cruise. Three hours later, we booked it for Saturday, 2/2. Most of these entries are from the cruise. The rest of the time we were packing and unpacking.

2013.8 – Escape: The Curse of the Temple – 1/24/2013

We got a chance to get away from the kids for an evening and spent some time with our friends, Brian and Shanna. We brought out Escape: The Curse of the Temple and played a couple of quick rounds. In this cooperative game, you are exploring a cursed temple that threatens to fall down around you. You move about revealing tiles, trying to find precious gems that will allow you to escape. The exit tile is somewhere at bottom of the tile stack, so you have to keep moving. Sounds easy, right? Well, you accomplish all this through some custom dice. Any action requires a certain combination of dice rolls, and guess what? Your dice can be locked, causing you to be delayed at the most inconvenient moments. Not too bad, but wait, there’s more! You only have ten minutes to get through the entire temple! The game has an actual 10 minute soundtrack, and if you can’t escape by the time it’s over, you lose. Oh, and don’t forget that twice during that ten minutes, a gong will sound, requiring everyone to return back to the middle of the temple. This game is a real-time game, meaning that no one takes turns. Each person has their own set of dice and controls their own explorer, but you have to work together if you have any hope of success.

A Year in Board Gaming – 2013.4-7; Agricola ACBAS, Pandemic, Mage Knight

2013.4 – Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small – 1/13/2013

I think this is the third time we’ve played this one. We acquired it at BGG.Con last year. It is a light, fast worker placement game derived from the classic Agricola which is much heavier and more expansive. While Agricola deals with all the aspects of raising/developing a farm, All Creatures Big and Small (ACBAS) is just about raising and keeping the animals.

A Year in Board Gaming – Mage Knight, 2013.1

So, I’m going to attempt something ambitious this year. I will write a session report of all our board game plays that we have this year. I normally don’t write these or log my plays on boardgamegeek.com which has an extensive database of just that from thousands of people. I will cross post these there, but my main motivation will simply be to keep track of everything we play.

I know this won’t be of much value to anyone who visits our blog, and that’s ok. Our blog is just as much a historical record of our family as much as an information portal for others to the goings-on of the Jeppson clan. Board games have become very important for Jessica and I as a couple. They have moved on from simply a means of entertainment and a way to pass to time. Now, we learn about each other through them. We work together on common goals in some games. We learn how to better engage in conflict with each other. And we simply, well, learn together. Well-designed games will teach you something. Whether it be math, economics, game-theory, or whatever, we are learning together, and that is wonderful.

Ok, so our first game of the year was Mage Knight on Jan. 4.