A Very Crabby Session Report

by Susan Rozmiarek

Once, in a blue moon, we have a game night where things just don’t click with me. I’m feeling off; I don’t like the games, or whatever. This past game session was just such a night for no particular reason. Thank goodness this happens rarely.

 

Thingamajig

We had a little time to kill before Ed had to pop out for a bit and collect Kevin from soccer practice. We suggested Thingamajig and mustered some support from Doug to shout down the vetoers. Yet again, it was a bad choice. Ed and I keep trying to inflict this game on our group and it falls flat every time. Sigh. We’ve had a riot playing this game at Gulf Games and The Gathering but obviously it is not everyone’s cup of tea. The funny thing is that Ed cannot stand most party games, but he actually likes this one. However, other opinions in our group range from “I don’t mind it,” to Mark dubbing it “Thingafromhell.” We didn’t even finish the game.

Results: Ed/Susan 14, Doug/Mark 10, Adam 6, Marty 5

Medici

With Ed gone for only a short time, we chose this highly regarded auction masterpiece by Reiner Knizia. Or is it? I’d only played this a few times and those games were probably at least two years ago. I didn’t get it then, and obviously still can’t get a handle on it now. Hmmmph. I thought I’d finally mastered this sort of thing. The bad graphic design gave me fits the entire game too, although normally things like that don’t bother me much.

Mark 105, Doug 92, Jon 89, Susan 74, Adam 70, Marty 58

Medici with Doug, Mark, Adam, Jon, Marty and Susan. Wake up, Jon!

Elfenwizard

So, in the spirit of The Alphabet Game, we pulled this off the shelves as a game collecting dust that starts with the letter “E.” Ed had found this highly collectible White Wind game on a business trip to Germany a few years ago. Being a Moon game, I had high hopes of enjoying it. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s a nasty, evil game. Just as we started playing, Marty left for home, leaving us with advice from the voice of experience – play with negotiation or the game will be too dry. Oh, did we ever take his advice to heart.

The mechanisms of the game all work well enough. The board is this big mountain and you have these wizard guys you are trying to advance up the mountain. The further up you can get them, the more points you will get. For the right to advance, you usually have to duke it out with another player’s wizard that is with you on the same spot. You throw this big handful of dice which are your spells to duel with. You assign these dice to wizards on the board for a war of most pips. The thing is, while you are mostly assigning them to your own wizards, you can also assign them to others to help them out, which introduces that nasty negotiation element. It turns into a lot of “if you don’t hose me, I won’t hose you and we can work together to hose Doug.” Ugh. This is exactly the type of discussion that drug out the final round, after an ugly little kingmaking situation that had Doug rolling a dice to decide who he was going to slam. To top it off, the dust cleared to find Adam, who wasn’t much of a contender previously, as the winner and the rest of us in a five-way tie for second. Arrrghhh!! This is the result after ninety minutes?!?! I swear, the bitterness from this game will be carried over for weeks. I actually woke up the next morning still irritated. I do have one nice thing to say about the game, though. It has the Coolest Start Player Marker Ever.

Doug, Mark, Adam, Jon, Ed and Susan playing Elfenwizards.

The Elfenwizards start player marker.

And thus, my crabby night of games finally came to an end. Let’s hope the next blue moon doesn’t come for a long, long time!

For more pictures from this gaming session and others, see our Gaming Picture Gallery.

Posted by Susan Rozmiarek at March 21, 2005 8:56 PM