Tonight was the one year anniversary of First Friday Gamers. A big congratulation should go out to John for putting in a lot of effort to keep this group active.
We started out with a new Funagain game called Uptown. The name and theme are clearly pasted on. They should have just called it Sudoku. Because that is exactly how it plays. You have 27 tiles (9 for the nine rows, 9 for the nine columns, and 9 for the nine blocks (3×3 section)) plus one extra wildcard. You start with a hand-size of 5 tiles. On your turn, you place a tile and then draw back up to five. You can place the column tile anywhere in the column, the row tile anywhere in the row, the block tile anywhere in the block, and the wildcard anywhere on the board. You are allowed to place your tile over someone else’s. But only if this does not split that other person’s group into two groups. This continues until you cannot draw another tile. Your score will be the number of contiguous groups of your tiles.
I was doing alright in this game. I had two sections that I was trying to join up. But I could not join it with one of the three tiles that would connect! Argh!! Stupid randomness. And then I noticed that Ed was going to connect up his two groups right through the middle of mine. So I had to play my wildcard to stop Ed. Later on I was able to finally join up my two sections and make them safe.
Next up was a game that I have been wanting to play for a while now. When Caylus came out, it was a huge hit. So it was no surprise that a follow up game was created. This game is the card game version of Caylus. And it does a great job of matching the theme and mechanics of Caylus. I am certainly going to buy a copy for myself and play it again in the future.
Oooh! Next up was a new dice fest game that Susan had alerted me about in her blog. I like me some cool dice games. This one does a good job of keeping within the Monopoly theme. It is a light game where you are trying to push your luck. You want to roll dice to match properties. When you get a set of dice to fill in the property, you will get to score it when you quit. However, if you roll three policemen dice, then your turn is over. The first person to 15,000 points wins the game.
There are houses and hotels in this game, but they really don’t matter much in this game. They only score you extra points and do not cost the other players anything.