I’m The King Of The Castle

After lamenting the fact that I miss my friends and haven’t played board games in months in a recent post, I got to play a board game with friends tonight!! Hah!!

I decided to have a few games picked out of my collection that I’d enjoy, but let my friends pick which one we actually play. I’ve been in the situation that all board gamers dread where friends call over for a night of games, than spend an hour just trying to narrow down their options from a huge selection. It’s not fun. 

As such, I pulled out three games from my shelves that I thought would be interesting, but also were varied in play style, and dusted them off. Literally. I had to get a cloth. It’s been a while. Most of my game shelves ahven’t been touched since I rearranged everything way back at the start of LockDown 1. 

Tales of the Arabian Nights is a storytelling game, with a huge book of adventures that you can encounter on your. journey, in classic Choose Your Own Adventure style. It’s fun and funny but a little random at times, and I prefer to play it with the goal of telling a fun story, than reaching the victory conditions and winning. 

Quantum is a space strategy game of colonizing planets. It is compact, tight and clean. I’m terrible at strategy games, but this one is just at my level. Plus, your spaceships are represented on the board by dice, with each face a different ship! Very neat. 

Kingsburg is a dice rolling worker placement game, I guess? You usually roll three dice, and depending on the rolls, you can decide the board spaces you want to use. If you roll 2, 3, and 4 on your dice, you could use spaces 2, 3, or 4 with individual dice, but also combine them to potentially use spaces 5, 6, 7, 8, or even 9! The choices become really interesting as you develop your kingdom, with some buildings allowing you to modify dice rolls. All this, and you have an ever looming threat of attack at the end of each of the five game years. 

My friends chose Kingsburg, and we had a blast. Lots of blocking one another by taking the exact space someone else wanted, and plenty of space during the game for chitchat and relaxed discussion. Despite the fact that neither of my two friends had played before, and I hadn’t played in about eight or nine years, it was a supremely easy teach. I had brushed up on the rule book this evening, and watched a How To Play video, which was more than enough. 

It felt good to be back playing games among friends. I wonder why I haven’t been doing it more often…

Oh…

Oh yeah. That.