What I Played Today: May 25

FITS, Race to the Galaxy, Citadels

Game night at the store, and got to try a new game and play another that I don’t get to play enough. I tried FITS, which got a bid for Game of the Year in Germany but lost, obviously, to Dominion. It uses a mechanic fairly similar to Tetris, in which you drop shapes into a small space and try to make lines. For each space you leave open, you lose a point. There are further rounds in which you can only score points for leaving certain spaces open, and it’s actually a bit harder than I thought it would be. An interesting puzzle game I lost...very badly.

I also got to play a large game of Race to the Galaxy, which was interesting. I got some early mining cards, so I tried to play a mining heavy tableau, but couldn’t get it moving fast enough and didn’t get the cards I really wanted until it was too late in the game. But I do remember like this game, it has a lot of options and choices involved, and while it’s tough to change strategies midstream, I like playing it.

A game of Citadels happened afterwards, and I did terribly, only being able to build a couple of buildings, but what buildings. I got a goofy card in play that required people to say “Thanks, your excellency” whenever I called their names as King, which I caught one player in a couple of times. I let it pass the second time because he didn’t seem to enjoy the rule. I also had a card that gave points for each card in my hand, so I spent the last couple of rounds making sure I had as many cards as possible. It didn’t help, but I got close considering how few buildings I had.