Yesterday evening Stewart finally got Cal and Alina and me together for some delicious Pyrennean sheepmilk cheese from Les Amis du Fromage -- we call it "Cheese Friends" -- and a game of Puerto Rico, the latest came we bought by Rio Games, who also makes Princes of Florence. I've played a ton of games since moving to Vancouver. I played a lot of games as a kid, but I've gone through gusts of intense gameplaying followed by years of never playing a single game. I'd played a bit of Dungeons and Dragons when I was a teenager, and had inherited a few Magic decks, but the only complex board games I'd played were Cosmic Encounter, which we played a lot at college, as well as Diplomacy, which I just discovered was created in 1959 (! Is that true? How crazy! I'd thought these games were fairly new). Some other games we have are Settlers of Catan, which is a particularly good one (and we haven't played any of the game board variations yet, just the standard setup) and Quo Vadis, which had an interesting outcome in several games: the winner didn't win by his or her own merits, but instead was chosen by a "King Maker" -- another player who at the end of the game had to decide on a move that would make one or the other player win. The thing that makes these games interesting is watching the dynamics of the rule sets, their sometimes unexpected outcomes, and playing different strategies to see the outcomes.

On the web I discovered that there is a German Board Game Night at Drexoll Games here in Vancouver every Friday night, which is great, we'll have to go.

LINK | 11:48 AM | TB

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