Ahh game night, it turns out that there were hidden problems with the camera. Last week, I was playing around with photographing Tichu hands. It worked well. Since I was in the experimenting mood, I decided to mess around with the white balance as well. I put on an Expo Disc on the camera and took a white balance picture. Which I then applied to the default white balance. It worked well and I forgot about it. Fast forward until tonight. I take some pictures, Ed takes some pictures, I take some more pictures. And then I realize that there were three problems with the camera. The first was that the color balance was off! Doh! The second was that I had forced only one auto-focus point to be active. The third was that the camera was recording small jpegs instead of large jpegs plus raw pictures. Sigh. The camera remains a persnickity beast…
While we were waiting for Peter and Francesca, we played a game of Bluff. And the dice were in my favor. I kept most of my dice during the game and ended up victorious.
Mike had brought along the new Hangman game called Crystal Faire. It continues to have the same production values of the other games that they have made. That is to say, not good at all. Adequate enough to be functional. And in one case, you have problems telling the difference between a light grey circle and a white circle.
On to the mechanics. This is a set collecting game by trading. There are six types of “crystals” with differing amounts of availability. You start with nine hidden behind a flimsy screen (which kept getting blown down by the air conditioning). A start player is chosen and a trading round occurs. That person draws five more hidden crystals and then chooses two of three sets (a set of four with one hidden, a set of five with three hidden, or a set of six with five hidden). The other players only choose one of their three sets. Every one places the crystals out on the displays. The start player then chooses someone’s display and then that person will choose one of the two displays of the start player. They then secretly exchange the crystals (adding the hidden ones). The start player changes and trades continue until everyone has traded. After the trade, we draw three crystals (since there were three players in the game) and move each of the crystals that were drawn down on the status display. Players then will have the opportunity to either take 0, 1, or 2 of those crystals and move a number of crystals up or down on the display depending on how many crystals remain for other people to potentially take. Now players have the opportunity to try and score their crystals. For each crystal, players can pass or place crystals out to match or exceed what is currently out there. The person with the most crystals out (where ties are good) will score victory points (which is money). They then have to discard a number of crystals. The victory points are the following as crystals move down the status display: 1 (-1), 2 (-2), 3 (-2), 4 (-2), 6 (-3), 9 (-3), 12 (-4), 16 (-4), 25 (-5), 36 (-6). The numbers in parenthesis are how many crystals the winners are required to discard.
There is a lot of keeping up with what everyone else does in this game. No one used their 6 crystal set in trades. People would offer their 4 and 5s and the others would offer their 4s. Which means that the trader will loose a crystal in the deal since their 5 would be chosen against the offered 4. In scoring crystals, people would usually go after the 3 or 4 victory points and loose two crystals. Rather than waiting and trying to score 6 or more. So I kept up with the Joneses. Then the purple crystal starting to make a run for higher victory points. I had majority in it and Mike was a close second (so two people were rooting for it and only one was opposed to it). I decided to let Mike continue scoring with me equally since we both lost the same number of purple crystals and I still had a slight majority. However, on the last round, Mike was able to grab one purple crystal and tie me to score 36 points. I was able to score more in other crystals for the win.
We ended the night with this game. A light game supposedly about delivering sushi but really about trying to make laps around a loop. When you pass the sushi express tile, you can get a customer card or tip card. The first of a customer scores 3 and additional customers of that color score 1. The fewest tips score minus points. There are some special action cards that you can play during the game. But it is a short and simple dice rolling game. The only problem was the flushing of the customer cards. This tended to speed up the game a lot quicker than it should of been. But I won, so why was I complaining?
Other games that were played:
An obviously off color Hacienda board…
and Geschenkt…
