So, each year (well, nearly each year) since 2000, I have been able to attend the Gathering of Friends – an invitational event which is unlike any other that I go to. The Friends all meet at a hotel, and pretty much spend ten days playing games, eating food, possibly drinking drinks – having a good time without much agenda. Sure, there are some business meetings and prototype pitches that happen – but for me, it’s just games. Wake up, drink coffee, play games, go to dinner, play games, go to bed. Repeat. I only get five days right now due to some IRL responsibilities – but here’s what I played…
(I used to try to do this real-time, but as I age, my ability to write late at night has waned. By the time I’m done gaming now, I’m pretty much straight to bed)
Thurs 4/16
Twisted Trumpets – a tile laying game from Play to Z where you make the most convoluted bugle you can, scoring more points for the longer and twistier it is. As you would expect, special scoring conditions for each player give people different motivations. Full review to come soon.
Prototype. Can’t say more.
The Secrets of Warden Keene – a soon to be released game from Bombyx; we’re playing a nearly finished pre production copy. A super interesting puzzle game where you cooperatively using the information on the headstones to solve the mysteries. We’re only about a third of the way through the puzzles, and some of the logical jumps needed have been challenging – and they’re supposed to get harder as we go deeper into the game.
The Dig: Treasure Island – one of the free games that we got at registration – a neat idea that uses a deck of regular cards which is augmented from the 18 cards that come in the mini card sleeve that comprises the whole game. Here, you play cards into a 3×4 grid trying to score patterns shown on the scoring card for the round; sometimes you want the highest sum and sometimes you want the lowest sum.
Cmyk prototype – another prototype, can’t say more
Catan: On the Road – a card version of the classic game. It has a lot of the same feel as the boardgame, but in a much smaller package. You only play to seven points, and the whole thing finishes in about 15 minutes. It’s interesting, and it has the advantage that while it’s a different game than base Catan, anyone who is familiar with Catan should be able to pick this up in about 90 seconds.
Rapa Nui – a classic Wittig design, brought back out in part as a tribute to the designer’s recent passing. It’s a beautiful wooden board and pieces and was a worthwhile game to return to the table. At least one person at the table said it was good for about a play every 15 years. Nevertheless, a nice tribute to a great designer.
FlipToons – another deckbuilder with an interesting twist – each round you shuffle your deck and deal off the top six* cards to make a tableau. Score your tableau each round, and use your points to buy new cards to add to your deck. Everything comes down to the final hand as the winner is the player who flips up the best hand in that final showdown; everything else earlier in the game doesn’t matter. Review here
Up or Down? We played the second edition of the game (from Capstone). It’s still a fine game, but I’m pretty sure that I’m never going to play the full version of the game ever again. It’s really too long for me and frankly I don’t think anything is lost in the game in the short version. Review here
Friday April 17
Trick takers guide to the galaxy – let’s combine a trick taking game with No Thanks The game goes through a round of bidding for rule cards; using a No Thanks style of bidding. If you have multiple rules of the same type, you choose which one of them you want to follow. Then once the rule cards are acquired, you play a standard trick taking hand. Score positive points if you succeed at following the rules, negative points if you fail plus points for coins leftover from the bid phase. It always seems this is more about failing the least (i.e. scores are generally negative).
The Crew Journey to the End of the Earth – this third version of The Crew has you playing cooperatively and you are racing on a map against the timer. This map for the chapter has track on it, and you team generally starts behind the time. As you play, each round, you get to choose a task card and depending on whether the team makes it, you move forward a certain number of spaces on the path. You are graded each chapter based on how much you beat the timer. Different spaces on the track have different movement rules, force you to choose tasks in a certain way, or they might even force you to rotate hands around the table!. The game should be out at Gencon – we played the first few chapters and it’s definitely an interesting game thus far. I look forward to trying it out a bit more this week.
Mystery prototype – a second play of this game
Botswana – a classic Knizia game, redone by 25th Century. Play a card (of one of 5 animals), and then take an animal figurine, which does not have to match the one you played. Continue until one animal has 5 cards of its type played, at which point the round abruptly ends, and each animal is worth a number of points equal to its most recently played card (value 0-5). Repeat for five rounds.
Catan on the Road – a second go this week at the new card version of this Classic. A four player game finished in about 18 minutes (after the rules); so this is clearly going to be a faster version.
Biddle – a great game for five players in a con setting. Play the odds and use Name that Tune bidding to state how many rolls of 6d6 will be needed to accomplish a goal on the task card for the round. The group will eventually be split up into two groups, the rollers and the people who think they will fail. One of those groups will score points depending on the result of the roll. After ten rounds, score it.
Hooky – a wonderful word game from James Miller, a dear friend and original Opinionated Gamer (RIP). Three letter cards are hidden, four given to each player and three are revealed in the run of play. Ask players questions made up of 5 letter words and then they tell you how many of their secret letters are in that word. After the 6 rounds of the game, score points for knowing the three hidden Hooky letters as well as the cards in each player’s hand. Trust me, like Black Vienna, the game fails entirely if someone (say Craig) messes up an answer along the way. Review here.
DnUp – a new version of the shedder previously known as Revolve. Play cards to the table, if someone plays a stronger combination of the same size, you take yours back and flip them as you put them back in your hand. You can also choose to take a combo on the table (again flipping it) as your turn. Finally, you can always simply flip your hand over. 2 points for the first to go out in a round, 1 for second place. Game is a race to 4 points. This was one of the giveaway games this year at registration, so it’s in play a lot.
Wildblooms – new from Kosmos and Kasper Lapp. Pick a flower card (of 5 colors) and then look at the space on the board where you took it. All the flowers of the color of the board space now grow – you move the marker up on their track. There are all sorts of special actions that are triggered as you move on the track, so you’ll be trying to choose the right flowers to grow in order to chain your actions. We didn’t finish as our dinner reservation made us had to put it away early, but it looks to be a nice family plus level game.
Exit Puzzle The Sacred Temple – well, after dinner, I got roped into a game that I’d played before – but long enough ago that I didn’t exactly remember the solutions. In this game, I could at least fully participate in putting together the four mini-jigsaw puzzles. Still lots of fun even if I couldn’t really play in the puzzle solving time.
Codenames Critical Role Adventures – to end the night, we got a run-through of this new cooperative version of Codenames. One player is the DM, and the others are the team of adventurers. Players get a stat sheet and they will progress over the course of the game, gaining abilities via XP (XP are gained by giving correct Codenames answers). You can also earn coins which can be used to buy equipment at the shops you encounter. These items also give you one time or ongoing abilities for the quest. Each round of Codenames represents a location on the map, and your group will progress along the map, even getting to make choices at certain branch points. It’s a super neat system that really brings a bit of RPG feel to the base game, and one that I definitely want to play again soon. I think there are three full quests in the box, but there is a lot of replayability of even a single quest as you can choose different branches and/or play with different combinations of the seven characters – as each has different abilities and “tech trees”.
Sat 4/18
Bare bones – A deck building dice chucker. Build your deck with dice cards and action cards. Dice provide either coins to buy more cards or points. Action cards
Hummingbirds – put a bunch of sand timers in the middle. Claim a tube with your magnetic hummingbird or reveal a timer with your hummingbird on top of it. If you look and the timer is empty, collect a scoring token.. If there is still sand in it, you actually lose a previously collected timer.
Eternal Decks – a limited communication cooperative game that is super neat. Players work together to play cards to the board; if you’re able to finish a row of the board, the player who did so gets to take a new stack of cards to add their deck. At the same time, this adds an obstacle to the group – limiting what cards they could play. Now, in addition to the rows on the board, you can play cards to eliminate the obstacles. The team wins if they meet four victory conditions, but they lose if a player doesn’t have a card to play.
Oddball – a card from the artist of Miracle Merchant and the designer of video game UFO50. Cards are procedurally generated, so every box will have different cards. It’s a 2p duel in a futuristic soccer-like game. Draft a hand of cards, then secretly and simultaneously choose and play one. Strongest strength wins the duel, the owner putting their card on the winning side of their bench, and the loser putting their card on the losing side of the bench. Cards have all sorts of special actions, triggered on play at times, triggered by being put on the bench (sometimes depending on what time). Coming from Scorpion Masque in the near future, and I can’t wait to have a copy to play on my own.
Foils* – can’t talk about it. Ask Jon Perry to play his amazingly fun prototype about hosting party animals.
Daytime Minutes – a super interesting may follow* three suited trick taking game where you try to manage your 1980s cell phone minutes. Cards have varying amounts of minutes on them (different from their rank) and they are collected by the players in the trick who played the highest ranked card of each color. Interestingly, the tricks progress through the cycle of morning – afternoon – evening. And as any kid from the 80s will remember, minutes are free in the evening, so no one collects the cards in that every-third trick. The round ends when all the cards are played OR someone exceeds the minute limit.
Soothsayers – a tarot card based engine builder / tableau builder from Play to Z. Draft action and tarot cards to play to your tableau. There are four actions to choose from and a Race for the Galaxy like following action process for everyone else. The player with the highest ranked card in any of the eight tableau spots holds a victory point (can be passed back and forth). You can also buy victory points or gain them from other actions. The first player to 5 VPs wins immediately. Maybe a bit of a “kill doctor lucky” feel at the end where your entire turn might be just preventing the next player from winning – and then the cycle repeats itself.
The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth – a few more rounds of the third Crew edition. Neat to see a few more tricks up their sleeve. At this point we’ve played through about a third of the booklet; we’ll have to wait until the full release to finish the box.
CMYK proto – umm, everybody probably wants more CMYK games, right?! Unclear yet if and or when this will come out, but they’re working on it.
Tea Garden – A game from Holek / Capstone / Albi. A multilayered game of harvesting and selling/trading tea. It’s one of those games where you have to plan well to get your actions in the right order. Many of the action cards also come with secondary actions on them which you’ll have to manage. The game is quite tight action wise as there are only 3 free actions in each of five rounds (with an optional fourth action which can be paid for). We didn’t finish this game due to some dinner reservations.
Adrift: A Puzzletale – it’s a puzzlegame in a box. Can’t tell you much without spoiling it, but a nice way to spend two hours with friends.
Sunday 4/19/26
Reef Gardens – another play of this remake of Citrus. Now with an underwater theme. Always enjoyable for four players.
Prototype – can’t say more
Eternal Decks – another play of this cooperative, limited-communication game that I really shouldn’t like. But it was another tense game, and I’m really digging it.
Deathstrikers: Overkillers of Epochalypse – a climbing game of sorts; perfect for the con crowd. Not too taxing on the mind, and short enough to work as a filler or ice breaker. As things happened, I taught the rules wrong in the first game (completely my fault) but we still had a good time. It’s even better with the right rules as we later found out! Review here.
Legends of Andor: The Eternal Frost x 4 – Our group played through the whole box in a day. During the Pandemic, we had a group of four gamers that played through the Andor series over Zoom, using webcams and a homebrew PC.io setup for the board. Once regular life resumed, we never managed to play the Eternal Frost. At the Gathering this year, we were finally all in the same place and we concluded our Andor adventures. We nearly won the fourth and final chapter in the box, but we all had a great time.
Tippi Toppi Hoch Hinaus – it’s like Cahoots, but better. Thus ends my one line review. Oh, but it’s in German, so you need to translate cards on your phone. Doesn’t matter, still lots of fun. Thus ends my three line review.
OINK prototype – i’ll give you a hint, it will likely come in a small rectangular box.
Monday 4/20
Glorious Guilds of Buttonville x 4 – So many people were asking me to show them how to play, so I pretty much taught it to about a dozen people. I still really like this one, and it remains my choice for Kennerspiel des Jahres. Review here
Wave – an interesting cooperative game that had a bit of a Hanabi feel to it. Half of your cards are visible to you, the rest only visible to the team. Always play a better card – either a higher ranked suit or a higher number. Try to play them all.
Tea Garden – we didn’t finish our first game, and we wanted to try to play to completion. We set it back up and had a very good fight to the end. So many choices to make here in so few turns. If you like Holek’s other crunchy games (Seti, Galileo Galilei) – you’ll probably like this one too
Countryside – by request, a game of Countryside to help a friend decide if he loved it or not. I still love this big deck of cards game, and I have a great time trying to figure out how to make them work together to score all the goals. You really do need a big table to play this, and we nearly ran out of space on our standard 8ft table. Review here.
Deathstrikers – more bash-em-up climbing fun here. As mentioned earlier, it’s a lot more fun when you remember to draw cards at the end of each hand.
Petiquette – a read-my-mind game/activity which worked fine once around the table. There is a set of cards in the middle with one missing. Everyone tries to match the leader in saying what card logically fits in the space.
Lions of Lydia – Started but not finished. Because we got pulled into a party game.
Inspeaquence – a game I hadn’t played in awhile. Split into teams. In a round, one teammate in the answerer – the other try to give clues to words but each player can only say one word and then the next teammate has to go! This always ends up devolving into hilarity because of the unexpected twists of the clues. To add to the level of difficulty, this game was published in 1995 in England, so you do need to adjust your Pop Culture antennae a bit to get the right answers.
Prototype – it was swell, but I can’t say more.
Tuesday 4/21
Prototype – my fourth play of this particular game, based on that, it’s definitely up my alley.
FlipToons – One more play of FlipToons – a nice easy going morning game. I thought I lucked out in the last flip, but I ended up 2 points short.
Bounce It! – an unlikely dexterity game from Deep Print games. Try to bounce a foam ball into the center ring in the box to collect VPs. You can also try to push your luck and get higher VP chips by getting multiple balls in the middle in a round. Completely not what I expected from the company that brought us Civolution!
And with that, it’s time to hit the road. Mostly the speed limit until I got to Ohio because the New York Thruway was crawling with cops.
Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor
