What I Played Today: June 16

Zombie Dice, Mystery Express, Hey, That’s My Fish, Halo

Yeah, I’ve been slacking, I apologize, I’ve been doing stuff, and frankly I’ve got no excuse. So let’s talk about what I played today!

Got together with the dudes to play some games, playing a couple of quick rounds of Zombie Dice, and no real comment here, there were some crazy improbable rolls, but otherwise a good time.

Then, after over a year and a half sitting in the back of my car, I finally got a chance to play Hey, That’s My Fish, and found out that it’s actually a simple but deep area control game about penguins. There’s a small playing field with each hex providing a resource of 1 to 3, and whenever a penguin moves, he takes the space with him, so nobody can move past him. So, it becomes less about getting the hexes worth 3, and more about blocking off regions so that only your penguins can access them. Pretty good for what is disguised as a family game.

Also got a chance to play Mystery Express again, and I think it doesn’t play nearly as well with three players, because you keep seeing the same cards over and over. Each turn, I was able to narrow down one category, and a couple of missteps by my opponents made it easy for me to quickly determine what the M.O. was, or the motive, and I got lucky when counting the times, so I was the only one who caught it. The only thing that I couldn’t narrow down was the location, and that’s because the player to my left had all the location cards and couldn’t possibly look at them all. But I would like to try the game with more. It also went a lot faster than the first time, mainly because we had a good idea what we were doing this time around.

Also Halo, which I have gotten both better and worse at. I completely failed on the one level I usually do great at, the grenade joust, but I was on fire in the rocket level, being able to pull off some hits that I never was able to do before, some lucky, and some just plain skillful. I had a great shot where I was in a one-on-one close ground fight, and traced my opponent’s jumppath and shot at where his feet would be in a second, and down he went. I am inexplicably proud of that, for some reason.