Tag Archives: Carcassonne

BGG.Con 2010, Part 2

I talked about the games I was hoping to play and did in my first post. Many of the games fall into multiple of the categories I broke them into, I’m grouping them with whichever group my whims lead me to.  These are games I wasn’t planning on playing or didn’t know about, but did play.

Not on My Radar: On the Table

Carcassonne: Wheel of Fortune (2009)  This is a modification of Carcassonne (2000), a tile laying game.  I find the original quite fun and portable, and good for a various number of people (though it can slow down with higher numbers). For a while I was on a bit of a collecting binge for Carcassonne expansions, but some of them just aren’t that fun or elegant.  So the additions to this game slipped off my radar.

This is a nice change to the original and comes as a complete game itself.  All the tiles are nicely marked with a subtle wheel, so you can sort them out of you’ve combined them with other sets. The addition of the “wheel” which moves when a specially marked tile is played, the wheel is located on a central 16×16 sized location that you can play your tiles off of.

This is a nice change to the start game, from the highly suggested The River (2001) and/or The River II (2005). The Wheel of Fortune part of the game will score or penalize something each time it is moved.  It’s a somewhat random element, but not overly so.  I would definitely suggest this version to beginning gamers as a gateway type game.

Sator Erepo Tenet Opera Rotas (2008) – This game has been sitting around at one of my regular gamer’s house since it came out, and we’ve never played it.  It maxes out at 4 players, and we often have more than that.  It also doesn’t play ideally with 2-3 players.  I ended up at a table where someone had pulled this out.  It looked interesting. I played.

It was a great game and I really enjoyed it. Four players is a must.  You are trying to navigate swinging passages over a cavern.  You play cards to allow various movements.  It was quite enjoyable.  The text on the cards can be a bit difficult, but they are explained in the rules. Continue reading

BGG.Con 2007

I spent four days in Irving, Texas playing board games with people from all over the place. It was a fabulous good time. With a game library of over 1000 games, not including those brought by the attendees, there were orders of magnitude more options than time allowed.

My photos are on flickr, and are mostly of games.

My only regret is not playing a game of Dune, and out of print game. They had an unpunched version of it in the library. A $100-$200 value in the current market. The game is going to be re-released in a year or two but without the Dune theme.

The hottest game of the convention was Agricola, which isn’t even available yet. There was one English copy and a few German ones with the cards in sleeves and printed translations accompanying them.

There were raffle drawing giveaway items each day with fabulous lists of prizes. And every attendee received a free game of our choice (in the pile) in addition to the two small games in the swag bag. Continue reading