Boardgaming Retreat

My buddy Oscar doesn’t like roughing it at gaming conventions, sleeping on classroom floors, eating cup noodles etc. So for two years now he’s organised civilised boardgaming weekends where he’s gotten a bunch of gamers together and booked a small hotel for us (here’s about last year’s). It’s 48 hours of gaming in good company with meals and nice rooms, all for a very reasonable off-season price. This past weekend. I played sixteen sessions of thirteen different games, as follows.

• Innovation. Card game out of MIT, nominally about the rise of civilisations, where the cards keep interacting in novel ways.
• Werewolf. Party game that opened our event, all 24 of us playing. Every night the werewolves eats a villager, and every day the surviving villagers lynches someone and hope it’s one of the werewolves…
• Stone Age. Worker placement / resource management game about the transition to agriculture.
• Macao. Resource management among Portuguese traders in 17th century Macao. Innovative resource allocation mechanism using dice and a future-turn track. You can either get small amounts of stuff soon or large amounts in the far future.
• Ubongo. Solve tile-laying problems against the clock and collect beads strategically.
• Hansa Teutonica. Nominally about Medieval trade in Germany, but the abstract bones of the game mechanics are much in evidence.
• 7 Wonders. Card drafting / resource management game where you select a card from your hand, give the remainder of it to the person to the left, receive the hand of the person to your right, play the card you chose, etc. No down time for anyone even when we played it with seven people!
• Whist. Classic trick-taking game with everyday playing cards. Another practice round for next weekend’s Regency LARP.
• Dixit. Improvise captions to beautifully surreal paintings by Marie Cardouat. To win, make them just specific enough but not too specific.
• Dutch Blitz. Sort cards faster than your opponents. I sucked basket balls through drinking straws at this one.
• Brass. Resource management and route building in early industrial England.
• Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck. Nifty dice mechanics by the great Dr. Knizia. And nice chunky mah jong-like plastic tiles. Has almost nothing at all to do with the title’s “fuss at the barbecue worm corner”.
• Ablaze! Three semi-abstract games about forest fires played with the same cardboard hexagons and plastic markers.

All said, my favourites this time around were Innovation, Stone Age, 7 Wonders, Dixit, Brass and Heckmeck. I need to mark them as “Want to play” on Boardgame Geek.