13 Jan 2007

Some Thoughts about Board Games and Board Gaming

1. I have yet to know the cities of "Ticket to Ride", the other knights are already used for me to look at a ticket and ask where is X (X=Random City Name). :) Yet its a good way to learn while playing. If you need a argument to buy board games remember that you are always learning something, either logic reasoning, mathematics, city locations or even reading skills on biddings.

2. I think we have made a good selection of games, since every game caters for a type of playing, in fact there are no duplicate games, either in mechanics or in flavor, so good in fact that not playing our favorite game (Puerto Rico) is good for a change.

If you see Gameboard Geeks you will find out that all the games we bought are at least with a positive global rating of 6, generally speaking that means that will some people might dislike it and give it a 3 or 4, most of them probably voted 7 or higher. Reading the reviews of a game before buying it is also a good way of making good purchases.

3.Another curiosity is about our gaming group that wihout much trouble evolved from a core 3 player group to a consistent 4-5 player that allows for some games to become better than they were before.

Ex: Puerto Rico becomes much more brainbuster than before especially when using the "captain" or determining in what way other players may take advantage of your action, while others like Bonanza suffer a bit more from the downtime between player´s turns, since you cant do much during the time other players are haggling over a deal.

4. Board gaming has the advantage of being social, in the end of a gaming session we all enjoyed it, especially when we use the downtime of games to talk about other stuff, like WoW. (World of Warcraft) We usually bring food to our games so that we can sustain ourselves during the session wihout much breaks, with the bathroom being about 10 seconds away.

5. Since games are usually rotated, each knight having 2-3 games average (some with more, some with less) insure that the combinations of games played in a afternoon, usually 1 Light game (up to 60 min) and 1 Heavy game (4 hours with about 2 to 3 games, can become potencially huge. And even that "formula" has exceptions, like not playing the Light game and skipping to playing 2 Heavy games in the 5 hours available.

6. Managing Time, aside from the first time playing where we are extra careful about the rules, trying to figure out strategies and just enjoying the beautiful artwork on the games, we discovered that playing a game 3 times is faster than playing 3 different games, because of the setup time, and altough this might not seem like a big discovery it really helps the flow of the gaming session

There are many things i didnt talked about but i believe this post is already big as it his :)
Hopefully you might take some ideias to your own gaming sessions.

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