Even though I moderate the What Couples Have Been Playing – June 2022, I haven’t been playing too many games as a couple in recent months. I have; however, been playing occasionally with groups and family.
A couple of weekends ago, Karen and I went over to our daughter’s house to celebrate her boyfriend’s 40th birthday. Both are gamers. Nick is very much into D&D and computer gaming but has played many board games over the years. Courtney is an occasional gamer since she was in her mid-teens when we used to go to our FLGS to play on a regular basis.
I’ve talked in the past about how my wife, Karen, regularly wins the first time she plays a game. That is NOT the case if Courtney is playing because she almost always wins the first time. This goes back to the mid-90’s at the FLGS where she was well known for wiping out the veteran gamers when learning new games.
We started out the day with The Quacks of Quedlinburg, which neither Courtney or Nick had played. Even though I’m not the best at teaching games, I got the basics across fairly easily and, a couple of hours later, Courtney had smoked us. Big surprise.
I know we could have played faster but we went person-by-person instead of simultaneous just to make sure everyone was doing things right. Eventually, we moved up to the next person drawing while the previous person was buying their new ingredients.
Quacks has become a favorite of Karen and myself and it looks like it could be the same with Courtney and Nick. She was already planning out buying the game AND the Geek-Up bits in the very near future.
We then moved on to Trash Pandas as we didn’t have a lot of time left.
A couple of weeks earlier, Karen came home from Wal-Mart with this game and, upon first look, I kind of figured it was just going to be one in a long line of kids games in which adults can participate.
Yeah, I was wrong.
While definitely on the simpler side, this is a game that has quite a bit more strategy to play than your normal 8+ title.
At it’s heart, Trash Pandas is a push-your-luck game. There are six discs on the table, each with a different symbol that correspond to one of the dice sides.
In your hand, you have a few cards (three for the starting player, four for the next player, etc.) that can be used in one of two ways, either “stashed” for end-of-game scoring or as a procedural card (for lack of a better term) that might let you take a card from the discard pile, stop someone from stealing a card from you, force a person to continue rolling even when they want to stop, etc.
On your turn, you roll the dice and take the disc of whatever side comes up. It is your choice to continue rolling or stop. If you roll a different symbol, you keep going but, if you roll the same symbol again, you bust and all you get to do on that turn is draw a single card.
If you do stop before busting, you get to execute ALL of the discs you had collected including:
– Drawing two cards
– Stashing two cards
– Drawing one card OR stashing one card
– Steal a card from another player’s hand
– Draw a card and show it to everyone who, in turn, can stash a card of the same title from their hand. You then get to draw another card for each one stashed by another player
– A “wild” disc that allows you to choose the action of any disc that was NOT rolled on that turn.
Play keeps going around the table until the last card of the deck is picked up at which point you score the cards you stashed away.
Each different type of card has a first, second and third place number of points. Whoever has the most of that card gets the first place points and I’m sure you can see where this is going.
For a simple game, there are decision points. Obviously, the roll or stop decision each turn but you also need to constantly decide whether you want to keep a card in your hand for eventual stashing (and end of game scoring) or use the card’s special ability to offset some other part of the play.
Guess what? Courtney won.
This game is a keeper for those days when you just want to play something but don’t want to think all that hard. There’s just enough strategy to keep things interesting and a game only takes about 20 minutes.
This past Friday, Karen and I went up to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada for the day and, after the sticker shock of everywhere in town charging $4.95 per hour to park (this ain’t New York City folks), walked around the quaint town to eventually find a small toy/game store.
While they carried most of the standard fare that one might have in a tourist town where people may be looking for an evening diversion (not counting the one copy of Gloomhaven), Karen found a tiny dice rolling game called Pizza Party.
It wasn’t expensive so we picked it up and, last night, gave it a try. Well, this was about as simple as possible. You start by pulling a pizza slice which can show from two to five ingredients and you roll your five dice until you can cover each of them with the matching ingredient on the die face. When filled, you move that piece to the side, draw another one and start over. First to six pieces, making a whole pie, wins.
That’s it and, while I might say that it’s too simplistic to be a real game, I look at Cuphead and wonder.
Looks like this one might be going to our Granddaughter.
On the brighter side, we hit our FLGS and, even though I wasn’t really planning on buying anything, we walked out with used copies of Railroad Rivals and My Village along with a new copy of Welcome To…. I really have to stop my wife from buying so many games
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