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 →