With Kel and the girls out of town for the night at a “Camp-In” this past Friday, I was home alone after an evening of studying…

It had been over a year since I played this last so I decided to send a few adventurers in to kill a dragon :)

I used the Fighter, Cleric, and Ranger. I thought about adding the Rogue, but didn’t as I’ve almost never had traps in the dungeon and when we did, they were usually easily avoided. Big mistake this game.

So yeah, lots of traps. And giant spiders that immobilized my characters within range of the traps. Damn. Managed to avoid them enough though and an initial teleportation scroll really helped. Also helping was a ring of regeneration the rogue found (heal 1HP instead of drawing treasure).

After racking up a ton of kills to get some decent XP in the pot, coupled with some pretty tame encounters, the big ol’ dragon appeared and my team was in a really good position to take him down. Although the poor dragon rolled pretty bad and didn’t give the adventurers much of a tough fight, the tension was still very high as traps were everywhere on the board and the dragon likes to throw people around (positioning was key in the fight).

Lots of fun and really like this game.

Family game night, waaaaay overdue.

Pretty quick game with the whole fam. Middle kid was coaching everyone in an effort to extend the game length and in the process inadvertently ended up losing the game herself.

Lots of fun, lots of laughter.

Game night with Kel on Saturday night after the kids went to bed. Totally screwed up my start and felt like I was two or three turns behind the rest of the game. I think Kel almost doubled my score.

Can’t remember when we played, think it was last Friday… two games with Kel. She won the first by one point (and I had trashed an Estate at one point) and I won the second by less than 12 (so it was a race to get that last Province). Good games.

Played Speed with the oldest before bed, first to three. I won 3 to 1, though the last two games were extremely close. In speed the first person to play their last card and yell “SPEED!” wins. Both the last games oldest would play her last card then I’d play my last card, but then I’d be the first to yell out “SPEED!”. Lots of laughter from both of us, definitely going to be a few re-matches.

Played with Jerrod and Kel awhile ago (the 28th?). Can’t remember a lot about the game except that Jerrod royally kicked our butts. On the order of around 250 to 150 to 100.

Middle kid got this for Christmas from Aunt Jess and Uncle Jeff and fam and REALLY wanted to play it on Sunday so we broke it out. Only got to play one game with Jerrod and middle kid, but we had fun and the game was very close: I had 31 at game end, both Jerrod and Middle kid had 30. Great game.

Got to play four games of this with Brett on Friday after we finished with 7 Wonders. I had been telling Brett that we should play this sometime as I knew he played and I had never really played face-to-face before, only online or against an AI. Brett brought over two decks, a green heavy deck with big hitters and an artifact deck that brought a whole lot of crazy to the table.

A lot of the time was spent with Brett re-teaching me the rules (a lot has changed since I last played), but it was a ton of fun once I groked everything. Looking forward to playing this in the future… now to get Kel hooked…

Played with Angie, Brett and Kel last Friday. First time playing for all of us and we all really liked it. I can see why this one is so popular. The different boards give each culture a slightly different feel and there are several ways to get victory points. Played two games, won both.

Almost forgot to post these, going to post one entry for all the games played over the last few days of which there were about 8, all with oldest and middle kid.

Middle kid has been really into Pokemon ever since a friend at school gave her about 10. Definitely not enough to play with, but more than enough to get her really interested. She had been reading Pokemon books (though they’re still a bit above her level), and had been given a handbook and a few booster packs as a gift earlier this year. Sooo… Santa brought her a 100 pack of energy cards (so she can actually play with her cards) and a trainer kit that included two 30 card decks that you can learn with, but can be combined into one standard 60 card deck.

Reading the directions I thought the game was a little too confusing at first, but our first time playing “on our own” (not using the guided directions), everything was really easy and the game flowed really well. We quickly realized that one of the trainer decks vastly overpowers the other (due to it’s pokemon’s weaknesses), so I quick whipped up a deck using some of the other pokemon she has… And now, god help me, I think I really like this game and have been finding myself wanting to play it more and more: I *need* to tweak that deck I created.

Couldn’t really care less though as I’m having a blast playing with my kids.

Played with Kel, Jerrod, and Mike after the kids went to bed on Saturday (but before Santa came). First game of this for Mike and I think he liked it. I played the Zombies while the others played two humans each.

The Humans won, but not after I was able to kill off one of Jerrod and Mike’s guys. We laughed at first when somebody found a walkie talkie as they’re usually useless unless somebody else finds one: two more were found during the game. They were used to their full advantage with one human getting 12 actions on one of their turns. Really fun game though, and tons of tension as usual.

Oldest (re-)taught me how to play Speed. Played best of 7, I won 4 to 2. It was an exciting couple of games though as I got off to an early lead winning three games straight. Oldest came back though and won two in a row pretty decisively. Scared me. Lots of laughter and trash talk between the two of us. Made me really, really happy.

Catching up, played with Kel on Friday. It was a close game throughout with both of us trading province buys. Kel won by grabbing two provinces in a row (one of them being the last). Fun game.