After the Gathering of Friends finishes, I fly over to Salt Lake City. I take a day off after flying in with a cold on no sleep, no food, ending up with fevers and chills. But the next day I crawl off my death bed, not perfect but good enough to go. It’s a brilliantly blue warm sunny day, a smattering of clouds, and I’m driving south out of SLC for 40 minutes, the valley surrounded its whole length by steep snow-capped mountains. So, so pretty. When I commute at home, I always make a point of getting my head out of my book as the train crosses the Sydney Harbour Bridge to remind myself how lucky I am to live where I do – the harbour, the opera house, the ferries, a city alive. But commuting up the I-15 every day must be something special. There was a 5-mile long jam on the other side and I know exactly why. Somebody got awe-smacked by the majesty of it all and lost attention. And how do I know this? Well I can neither confirm nor deny whether I may or may not have directly or indirectly been a little awe-smacked myself a few times which may or may not have led to 3 separate pile-ups in my wake, but I was never there and any camera footage has clearly been faked. So say we all.

On the flip-side, it takes 40 minutes down a busy 5 lane highway to clear SLC. American traffic is insane. But I’m finally on country roads and it reminds me so much of country roads back home in Australia. Brownie green, sparse vegetation, low traffic, shredded truck tires, roadkill (I could have sworn the first one was a kangaroo but I’ll concede my eyes may have been playing tricks on me), rivers only 10 metres wide (now THAT’S what we call rivers), small towns an hour apart, and it’s warm! That sense of everything being alien has finally eased 3 weeks in, except … the scenery is AWESOME. Every crest I rise, every sweeping turn made, another Western Movie Landscape reveals itself. Mesas, buttes and pinnacles to the right. Waves of rock wall formations to the left. Snow-capped mountains ahead. Oh, and now let’s go through a deep rock canyon with a bubbly creek. *sigh*. For 4 hours. *double sigh*

I arrive at Arches National Park mid-afternoon and decide to push a little more. Is there any more majestic entrance to a national park than this one? Half Dome is spectacular but it’s not the entrance. Climbing up the red rock wall with a sky that goes on forever out to the La Sal mountains, my heart just lifted and lifted as it got more and more magnificent. And then rounding that corner to enter the red rock canyon, oh my gosh, my heart just exploded with love for this place. Utah is AWESOME. I did all the hikes worth doing the next day and felt like I’ve explored everything that’s worthy. Tired but happy.

I drove over to Capitol Reef next morning and did 4 hrs of hikes in the afternoon and I’m happy I’ve seen the best of and enough of that. In Australia, Capitol Reef would be the go-to NP above all. Here it’s a poor cousin to Arches. I’m getting jaded already 😊

The next day, Bryce Canyon has an amazing view, gorgeous. Then another 2 hours over to Zion, and its canyons are awe-inspiring, different again from the others.

I spent a long day driving up through Utah and Idaho to get to Jackson, Wyoming, where I holed up for 3 days checking out the Grand Tetons, doing a scenic cruise down the Snake River (bald eagles over there, pelicans over there, beavers over there, …). And then three days checking out Yellowstone. The geysers and bubbling volcanic pools were fine, but the real highlight was getting up into the Lamar Valley in the north end and seeing bears (I saw 6!), elk (about 60), and bison (600 I swear) coming right up to the car and walking past. So cool. A wildlife extravaganza.

Anyway, the whole trip has been way better than expectations, I’m happy I pushed to make it happen. You hear about all the division and issues in America and sure, that’s rife at the political media level. But all the people I met along the way were absolutely lovely, so welcoming and always happy to chat – and I chatted to mostly everyone, a lot, because I didn’t have a “travel partner bubble” to move around in. It was an amazing trip.

But, let’s get back to why we’re here. New-to-me games played recently include …

CABANGA (2023): Rank 2971, Rating 6.9

Fun fast-paced game. There’s a high and low card in each colour on the table, and you must cover up one of them. If that increases a high-low range and players now have cards within it, they auto-shed them and you draw the same number from the deck. That’s not good because you want to be the first to clear out your hand. The play is easy in a sense – tighten a range when you can, work out your danger cards and look for a chance to work the high-lows towards a place where they may be played more safely. Rocket science it ain’t but it’s easy to pick up, quick to play, and it generates plenty of pleasure/groan laughs along the way.  Our review from a few years ago.

Rating: 8

CALICO (2020): Rank 253, Rating 7.5

Take a tile from the display and add it to your tableau, trying to arrange the perfect setup of colours and patterns allowing every tile to satisfy different combo requirements and score multiple times. Which is nigh impossible to achieve but satisfying to attempt. There are so many options that you can expect anyone with AP to suffer a meltdown, and you really want to get lucky at the end hoping tiles fall into your lap that score in those final holes to be filled in, much like Take It Easy. But … too abstract and AP prone in the end, so not for me.

Rating: 6

DALE OF MERCHANTS (2015): Rank 945, Rating 7.2

Mix a bunch of themed mini-packs all together, one per player, and make a central deck. Allow players to buy cards from the display for adding to their personal decks. The decision ongoing is whether to keep cards for their buying power or turn them into a scoring card and diminish your buying power. As the game progresses, you need more and more cards to satisfy the next scoring condition, which must be from the same pack, and the randomness of a card to get you over the line appearing in the display at a time when it’s your turn and you can afford it is up there random. And there are so many irritating effects that dragged out the game forever – moving cards between players, discarding cards, etc – that planning was worthless. Not an experience I wish to repeat.

Rating: 4

FISHING (2024): Rank 1556, Rating 7.3

I think the catch-the-leader mechanism might make this the most roller-coaster game I’ve ever played. The cards you win make up your next hand (or hands). Win a bunch of low cards and you’ll score points now but you won’t be winning tricks next hand. If you don’t win tricks, you won’t score points but you’ll make up your next hand with souped up cards from the better-card deck, which will allow you to win tricks next hand and allow you to catch up on points. Up and down we go for 8 rounds, trying your best to time the ups and downs so you come steaming home like a runaway train in the final rounds. There’s a lot of schadenfreude in hearing the snarls to “every point is a good point” each time someone wins a trick of low cards. After a few games though, the patterns seem to repeat themselves with nothing much more to learn.  Hey, we reviewed this earlier.

Rating: 7

MOON COLONY BLOODBATH (2025): Rank 2493, Rating 7.6 – Vaccarino

There’s a communal deck made up of 4 action cards and a bunch of event cards. The game is to keep running thru the deck, which keeps getting bigger as more and more events that cause players to lose resources and cards get added, until someone loses the last card in their tableau. Then whoever’s got the most points left wins. Everyone’s always hoping an action card will be revealed, which allows players to get more resources and buy more cards to stave off the inevitable as long as possible. Your main agency is to draw into cards that provide more economies than the other players. That’s not a lot to hang a game on, and it goes on way longer than the mechanic warrants so, let’s face it, you’re playing this for the drama and if you’re in gaming for that, this could be for you.  Our review of the game

Rating: 6

ROARING 20’S (2024): Rank 9102, Rating 6.4 – Colovini

It’s nothing but auctions, which I’d normally shy away from, but on most auctions here you’re often passing to collect high valued bidding cards from the display and because the points card being auctioned isn’t what you’re after – you want point cards that form pairs, triples and the longest straight you can. So, aim for cards others don’t want, go all in when you need to and hope you’ve got enough to win it, or save up for later. As a result the auctions whip thru quickly and it’s all over in 20 minutes which is good, but … it’s auctions only and how often do I want to go down that road.

Rating: 6

TRIO (2021): Rank 571 Rating 7.4

Pick your lowest or your highest card. You want to collect the other two to form a trio and meld them. Ask either other players or reveal a face-down card from the middle. It’s a memory game, hoping other people will reveal where they are without forming a trio before it’s your turn to pluck them Go Fish style, swooping for the kill. Memory. Go Fish. Not the game of my dreams. How this game is rated and ranked so highly is beyond me.   A review that likes it a lot more than Alison does.

Rating: 4

XENON PROFITEER (2015): Rank 2763, Rating 7.2

This little deck-builder had some cool features I’m not sure I’ve seen before. If you can’t afford a card (ie ongoing effect) at full cost (to put it directly into play), you can pay a reduced cost, put it in your discard pile, and pay the rest when you draw it later. Neat. There’s still luck in what’s available in the draft when it’s your turn, but this mitigates. Then, each time you buy good cards, the game loads your discard pile with junk cards – and you need hands without junk cards to get out the currency cards (Xenon) to buy VP cards for the win. Challenging. Despite the interesting game-play, replay seems like it’s going to be iffy due to its limited card set and the geeky them.  Review here

Rating: 7

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Mark Jackson: Cabanga can fall flat – slow play sucks all the fun out of the room – but played at speed by those who get into the spirit of the game, it’s a delight. And I’m not worn out on Fishing yet – I just love the clever use of the drip feed deck and the infinite reversals of fortune.

Larry:  I’ve played a bunch of these:

Calico – So precious.  So boring.  Just didn’t engage me at all.  Neutral.

Fishing – Like Alison, I’m at the “rollercoaster” stage of this game.  But those who have played it much more than I assure me that you can control the pitch and yaw to your advantage, so it’s one I want to play some more.  Plus, it’s damn clever.  I like it (provisionally).

Moon Colony Bloodbath – The design works, it’s just not a whole lot of fun and it lasts too long.  Kind of puzzling, but I think I’m done with it.  Neutral.

Trio – You wouldn’t think that a spinoff of Go Fish with a memory element (I have a dreadful memory) would work for me, but the combination was quite appealing and it’s actually pretty neat.  I’d be happy to give this another shot.  I like it.