Game night 3

Rachel is up in Washington with the kids. I'm going to join her Wednesday, but in the meantime I'm temporarily living the bachelor life. Last night I went up to Game Night Games again to try some new games and to have something more interesting to tell Rachel than "I programmed all day." Mmm, programming without interruptions...

When I got there there was a group of six playing power grid and a group of 3 playing something that looked kind of like scrabble, only more boring. So I read the newspaper I'd brought until a group of four came in and wanted to play Incan Gold.

I'd played Incan Gold with Howard a while ago. It's a pretty light filler game; maybe the most interesting thing about it is it supports up to 8 players, and since everyone "plays" at once (just throwing down either a go / leave card) it moves quite fast even with a lot of players. Not much strategic depth, but it's a good "gateway" game for non-gamers, and it's simple enough that kids can play without being mind-numbingly tedious for adults. Hmm, maybe I should pick it up to play with Matthew -- I thought Mille Bournes would be simple enough but when I actually re-read the rules it was more complex than I remembered, and we tabled it for another year or two.

Then we played Ticket to Ride: the card game, which I actually like more than the standard board version. There are train cards just like the board game, but since there is no board, the destination cards each have a train card requirement printed directly on them. You try to get train cards into your "on the track" pile to get to your destinations, but once cards are in the pile, you can't look at them again. This adds an element of skill to the game that is absent in the mostly luck-based board game. Of course it's memory skill, not calculation or strategy skill which are less like "work," but I'll take what I can get. On the down side it is only for up to four players, not five like the board game. I would pick this up if we didn't already have a copy of the board game; I'm not crazy enough about TTR to want to own both. Although I might be in the minority there, given TTR's dominance of board game sales month after month.

Still haven't found a (good) game you could reasonably play on an airplane. Needs to be two player, not have a huge board, and not have small pieces either.