Funk Family Game Night
Game night with the Funks!I was fortunate enough to be sent a preview copy of the Corruption expansion for the game Council of Verona from designer Michael Eskue and Crash Games. I love the base game, and my family loves playing with the Poison expansion, so I was really excited to get an opportunity to play it early! You can see my mini preview here:
G-G-G-Game Breaker (Autograph) Cards.. Thoughts?
Saturday , 29, November 2014 General Leave a commentOne of my favorite things about GenCon 2014 was being able to meet so many of the people from the board game community. Everyone from designers to publishers to artists to reviewers to enthusiasts were in attendance. I got to meet YouTube celebs like Boyan Radakovich. I got to play games with publishers/friends like Randy Hoyt. I got to ‘talk shop’ with Kickstarter gurus like Jamey Stegmaier. It was definitely one of my most social experiences in the past few years.
Unfortunately, I’m not always very good at starting up the conversation. I’m even worse at keeping it going. With a common interest, I did find it easier. But I’m much better when I can start with a purpose. Plus, I like having ‘souvenirs’ of things. My memory isn’t the greatest, most of the time, so having something to jog it after the fact is useful 🙂 I took a lot of blank game cards with me (for those games that came with them), but only got to have a couple of designers/publishers to sign their cards.. Bummer.. But, that gave me an idea..
Tl;dr. I needed a better way to keep track of multiple backed Kickstarter projects and developed a nifty spreadsheet. I’m looking for community feedback on how it could be improved.
Hello, my name is Jason and I’m a Kickstarter addict. My addiction started simply enough. I discovered a project that promised to transport me back to my youth, a time of playing old school Sierra adventure games on my computer. The Two Guys from Andromeda were developing a spiritual successor to the Space Quest series. I was in. That was in June of 2012, 27 months and 90 backed projects ago.
Gen Con, as expected, was AWESOME! While I didn’t get to do evertying on my list, I did get to do a GREAT many things. And, as I hoped, I got to experience more than I had planned on.
My first day of GenCon started with an official TableTop event run by Boyan (thegamesmith)! I got to play Formula Speed (Formula D with an excellent ‘speed bus’ variant) with a fun group of people. Casualties piled up quickly, but 3 of us made it to the final round. I was poised to take the win, a couple of spots away from the finish line in 6th gear, but I rolled the absolute lowest roll I possibly could and the person behind me went further past the finish by 2 spaces more than me. *sigh* Hey, 2nd place in a great game with a great group of people is more than ok with me!
GenCon is just around the corner, and I. CAN’T. WAIT. Last year was the first year I attended, and was lucky enough to go with some friends who had gone before. It was OVERWHELMING. There was so much to see and do! I’ll admit that I spent the majority of my time in the Exhibit Hall and only wondered outside of that a few times to check the various games being demoed and played. Between that and only spending ONE DAY there, I feel like I missed out on WAY too much.
This year, though, I bought a 4-day pass! I probably won’t make it all four days, but I have the option. In addition, I’m planning on doing more than just browse the various wares for sale. That’s not to say I won’t be buying a lot, but I want to do MORE this year. I want to play games, meet people that I’ve interacted with on Twitter, and just participate in general. That’s why I’ve decided to create my ‘ToDo’ list. I’ll try to update it whenever I come across something new in the next couple of weeks.
So, here it is, organized by the type of things I want to do…
It is pretty rare in our household when a game is thoroughly enjoyed by the majority of the family (that means 3 of 4, not 5, since Maddie isn’t really old enough to play). It’s even more rare when Jenn is one of that majority. And even rarer STILL when she specifically suggests playing games in the evening just to play a particular game.
Machi Koro, by IDW Games, is one such rarity. Machi Koro is a Japanese dice-rolling, card-building game set to be released in the US in August of 2014. Starting with just a wheat field and a bakery, you are tasked, as the mayor, with building your city into one of which all of your residents will be proud. Do you focus on a few specific industries? Do you diversify and hope that the sheer variety in your town is enough? Many strategies may appear promising, but only one mayor will be the first to build their 4 landmarks and become the savior of their town and the envy of their peers.
With vacation on the horizon (CAN’T WAIT), we’ve been putting together a stack of games that we thought would be good to take with us. Our vacation is mostly a beach/sun/outdoor vacation, but I’m sure when we’re tired from a long day of playing, we’ll be looking for ways to settle in and relax. And I’d MUCH rather play some games than flip on the TV!
My personal goal in choosing games to take was three-fold:
Brynna wanted to play some games this afternoon before they went over to swim with the neighbors. We decided to play a couple of quick card games.
First, she chose Spot It. Spot It is Brynna’s go-to quick game. Unfortunately for me, I have to REALLY concentrate to have a chance at beating her. There’s something about the quick pattern recognition that makes it almost a dexterity game.. And I’m NOT good at dexterity games. None of the 3 games we played had a spread larger than 3 cards. It always amazes me how close our games are 🙂 We played the ‘party’ version without the big hand. And we always play the ‘draw your match’ version because it’s the quickest to set up. Spot It remains one of our favorites 🙂
Got a chance to play some Formula E with my girls the other night! I’ve been excited to try this game since it first landed on Kickstarter. IMO, Clever Mojo Games knocked it out of the park! We’ve had luck with card-based racing games (especially Salmon Run) in the past, so I couldn’t see how the theme and mechanics of this game could go wrong!
Lat night was Funk Family Game Night #50! We should’ve planned something big, but it was fairly spur-of-the-moment. We decided to have a trivia game night. 🙂