About a year ago I started helping out at the Solid Board Gamers (SBG). This opened up a whole world to me, as I suddenly had access to a myriad of games, including Terra Mystica, Seasons, Castle Panic, Lords of Waterdeep, Alhambra, Neuroshima Hex, Yggdrasil, and so on. These are vastly different than the games of my childhood, as you may have guessed, based on their names.
As you may have surmised, being a gamer yourself, that The Settler’s of Catan was the game to de-virginize me. Countless hours of collecting wheat and bartering for wood showed me the light. Board games didn’t have to be collecting rent from unintentional tenants, world domination by dice rolls, or creating words on a grid. While all classics, I found little pleasure in these games. The irony is that this new world of games made those classics better for me.
Now, as an associate of SBG, I have access to their horde of boards [Editor’s note: I love this phrase, and will be co-opting it for further use]. I usually have one or two of their games in my house at a time. This has led to me learning LOTS of different games, and I was beginning to become a bit bored. I was beginning to feel like all games were just similar to another game I had already played.
Today I write about a game that, in the crux of my dilemma, stood out above the rest. In fact, it’s a variation on one of the boring classics that I mentioned earlier.
