Since today was a holiday and the stock markets were closed, Marty had the day off. So he called a game day. And since, over the weekend we had freezing rain and I didn’t want to drive in that environment (400+ wrecks in Austin) so I worked instead. Therefore, I decided to take today off and game.
We started out with Lexio. After the rules explination (with one hiccup that I didn’t catch when Marty explained the rules), we played. Lauren had all the luck in this game. On one hand, she had all of the twos! Another odity that I noticed was that no one was caught with a two in their hand when the round ended. So no one was really rushing to play 2’s.
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The next game out on the table was Hacienda. And what was amusing was that Ed had stopped by during his lunch hour and was roped into explaining the rules to this game. This game was fustrating in that Lauren asked questions during every play that she made. And at the end of the game, everyone else performed a group-think and advised her on how to score the most points. Sigh!
Susan seems to be a natural at this game and used lakes and haciendas to get her the win. An amusing quote that she made was that she wanted to eel her bull first before she sent it to the market.
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Susan brought out a new game that I had wanted to try before possibly buying it. This game has some interesting mechanisms that turn out to be annoying. The first is that people can make any bid amount for cards in a one around bidding. The person who put the cards up for auction can then take any bid or overbid and keep the cards. So you may bid the highest amount and yet loose the auction because the person gave it to someone else. The second mechanism that I didnt like was the blind allocation of cards. You can group your cards into three areas. One gets you money, the other gets you victory points and the third is for the next round. Everyone reveals their selections at the same time. So you might get hosed if you guess wrong. Not a game that I would buy. Or probably play again either.
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This is the first time that I played this particular Alan Moon game. Although I have played the mechanics a lot. It feels exactly like a condensed card version of Union Pacific.