In the grand scheme of things....

...it's not that big a deal that my pre-order of Alien Frontiers is taking longer than expected.  I was a little annoyed and wondering where it was this weekend until I read the apologetic response by the company in this thread on BGG.  It looks like their shipment stopped in Yokohama, Japan for a transfer near the end of last week right before the earthquake and devastating tsunami.  Oh.  Right.  Okay, take your time.  I think I'm gonna go donate some money now.  And not just to Japan, maybe to Haiti and New Zealand, too.  And then I'm gonna go home and hug my dog and be thankful that I live in the centre of a very large, stable land mass.  My thoughts go out to everyone affected by these disasters.

Oh, and Opinionated Gamers is doing posts about Japanese games only this week.  Very thoughtful.

Godzilla!!!!!!

Enjoyed a few expansions in the last week or so.  Dominion: Prosperity (which really should have been called Dominion: The World Is Friggin' Yours!) has reignited our love for the game after a long Tichu-filled hiatus.  All the reports are true, the Scarface edition is a riot and every person who ever loved Dominion should try this one out.  Worth every platinum coin.

Oh, the poor mid-west.

Also, played TTR: The Monster Expansion yesterday night.  Definitely adds a nasty element to the game although in our 5-player game, the person who won by a lot actually moved the monsters the least.  This might not bode well for the expansion.  We shall see...

Dexter humbly ponders the utter devastation of LA.  Sigh.

Side note:  Biblios, the long-awaited reprint of Dr. Finn's acclaimed Scripts & Scribes, finally arrived in the mail today.  Most of us only heard about how good this indy card game was but never got a chance to play it.  Now, it's time...

First Plays: Magical Athlete and Gloria Picktoria...

In keeping with my February goals, Monday night we played two of my many games that had yet to be cracked open. And much to our delight, they were both quite a lot of fun, one being hilariously chaotic and the other being tactical and quite tense.

The first, Magical Athlete, is a rather silly game from Japan which is very easy to explain.  Everyone bids on various different characters and they all race them over a series of rounds.  The races are actually quite simple - one 6-sided die determines how far you move down a track with 30 spaces to the goal. 

Where it gets interesting is the interaction of the different characters.  Think Cosmic Encounter meets Snakes and Ladders.  Some characters move others back or cause others to lose turns, others  can guess on a winner or steal victory points earned from previous races.  It's all rather random and quite chaotic but it was also quick, hilarious, and fairly close at the end.  Unfortunately, the artwork on the board is god-awful but I still seem to like it a lot.

The second game of the night was a big hit and got played twice-in-a-row which is always a good sign.  You've probably never heard of it, but I did mention Gloria Picktoria in a previous post as it's a remake of a great Alan Moon card game which is a remake of an even older Alan Moon card game.  I love this game.  Love it.  And I'll be doing a more detailed review fairly soon (it'll probably start with the words "Alan Moon is brilliant") so I'll just talk about it briefly here.

GP is a little card game about getting majorities in one of the ten different colours.  First and second place are worth points, third is worth nothing.  One draws cards Ticket To Ride-style and plays them down in front using 3 action points a turn.  Fairly simple.  What ramps the tension up tremendously are the scoring cards that are mixed into the deck and come up fairly randomly.  There are 10 scoring cards and when the 4th, 7th, and 10th come out, scoring occurs immediately.   The brilliant addition to this version of the game is the nasty fox who leaps around the board like a hot potato, canceling out whomever's pile of cards he sits on.  This fox element takes what was already a great little card game (Get The Goods from 1996) and makes it an even more agonizing game of pushing your luck.  Fantastic.

I can't recommend the new version from 2007 enough.  I'll tell you more in a detailed review soon.  While you're waiting, go out and buy a copy!

On The Horizon: Inca Empire

Add this one to the list of "must-buys"...  Inca Empire is Z-Man Games' reprint of a fantastic crayon train game from a small publisher years back called Tuhuantinsuyu (which I always wanna pronounce in a deep voice whilst Phillip Glass plays in the background - see Koyaanisqatsi).  The game was raved about by Bruno Faidutti in his Ideal Game Library and of course sold out quick due to it's small print run.

This new version is looking great, with wooden sticks instead of crayons and new symbology on the cards to make them easier to understand.  It has route and empire-building galore and an interesting element of left-right binding in the play of cards.  Even better, the game has been compared to Puerto Rico and Power Grid in terms of depth and that is more than enough for me.  Essen can't come any quicker...