Today has been an oddly unproductive day, so this update should be quick. I only managed two games in the first 7 hours and then finished with a leisurely dinner and a lot of small games that I didn’t take a picture of.

I started the day with a great game of La Granja.  

It was only my second time playing and, while I thought I was doing better than last time, I ended up third.  Larry Levy won by a decent margin over William Attia.  Great table, lots of fun.  This is certainly one of the better designs of the last year.  I’m considiering hanging onto my copy, but it’s the kind of complex, thinly game that can be hard to get to the table at home.

I followed that up with a pseudo war game called 1714.

The game’s mechanics were neat, but the number of decisions per minute was relatively low and some wonkiness kept me from enjoying it as much as I might otherwise.  One player started the game in the last position in turn order as went acetal rounds without the ability to make a crucial decision (it is a card-driven game where the cards are drafted, so he was left choosing the least-desired card in several rounds).  

The game’s events were also a little swingy and out of proportion to its other mechanisms.  So you may have worked very hard to acquire a key victory point source only to have a subsequent event give it to another player at little cost.  I had fun, but would probably not revisit it.

One game I did revisit today was Elysium.  (Yes, that’s a terrible picture, but I didn’t take a better one today). 

Unfortunately, today was a little more tedious than yesterday.  I won again by a decent margin, but today felt more like playing a long game of Splendor with lots of upkeep than playing something like Deus (the comparison I made yesterday).

Honestly, I didn’t get much else in.  A great game of Mysterium, a half-game of Diamonds (we all agreed it wasn’t for us), and a few hands of a trick-taking game while waiting for our dinner reservation. 

I will leave you tonight with a bit of a sneak preview: Czech Games Edition is here with a new “Quests” expansion for Galaxy Trucker that works to adapt the board game to the app.  My wife loves the app, so I can only imagine this is will be exciting news in our house.