What I Played Today: July 24

Three Dragon Ante, Pandemic, Endeavor, Dixit

I played a lot of games today, mainly because a friend was in town after a long while and we had the whole day free. There was a lot of board gaming, interrupted by a nap and dinner, followed by even more board gaming.

We played a lot of Three Dragon Ante, my friend’s favorite card game that was released by Wizards for D&D about five years ago, and recently received a stand-alone expansion (which is mysterious in itself). It’s a clever game, with a lot of luck involved though, and has a lot of fun elements, even if you can potentially get screwed a bit. The game can end pretty fast too if you’re not careful, as it ends when someone is out of money, and if there a few high rollers on the table, that happens pretty quickly. But I feels like a fantasy tavern game, if a bit complicated, which is nice.

There were two games of Pandemic, one we lost horribly when the Far East exploded, and the other we won pretty decidedly...even though we weren’t playing quite right. We had forgotten to move up the infection track after the third epidemic card, which means the game was going a little too easy on us. We did go out of our way to make sure that we got the killer combo of dispatcher and medic. I played the dispatcher, and I was awesome, moving everyone exactly where they needed to go. It was kinda neat, I wish we were playing perfectly.

There was a game of Endeavor that I lost by one point. I tried a slightly different strategy, quickly ramping up my culture to get more dudes and “considering” war, but I didn’t follow through, and ended up losing by one point. My moves were pretty forecast too early, and a player went out of his way to steal points from me by declaring war on my interlinked colonies. But he didn’t win either...so...

Also, I had a very interesting experience with the Spiel de Jahres winner, Dixit. I introduced the game to a few relatively non-gamers, started the round, only to have everyone guess the image I used. Then...I was completely and utterly ineffective, able to score only 1 point. I never guessed the correct image, and only once did someone pick my image, it was miserable. The second game we played went better, I’m getting better at how to make a decent sentence, but man, this game kicked my ass, and I have a bit of a vendetta against it currently. Stupid, lousy, blood candle.