Patrician review posted

by Susan Rozmiarek

I have finally finished a review of Patrician, which can be found here. Actually it's been mostly finished for a while but I haven't been very satisfied with it and kept tweaking it. For some reason, I've been having trouble writing my usual serious, formal reviews. It's been easier just to spit out my informal observations on games in this blog but I feel like I should do something more for games received as review copies.

Gaming snippets:

Ed and I did get to play our first game of 1960: The Making of the President. Wow, what a struggle! The whole game felt like we were both trying to scale a mountain and kept getting knocked back. I was Kennedy and Ed was Nixon. I was very surprised at how wide open the game seemed. I thought the cards would really limit you as to what you could do on a given turn but I found myself with so many choices that it was mind boggling. I can see now that you need to be familiar with the total number of electoral votes in each region and really map out a strategy. I was just trying to hang onto the big states and react to what Ed was doing. We fought a lot over New York and the south near the end. If he hadn't challenged me in New York, I had plans to attack the west. I let Ed control the media and issues too much. I lost by a wide margin but it could have been worse. I can say without a doubt that nobody is going to be hiring me as a campaign manager anytime soon! This game takes me out of my comfort zone as it is so very confrontational, but I can hardly wait to play it again. It was so engrossing that I had a throbbing headache afterwards.

We leave tomorrow for BGG.con. Or should I say, for BGG.con and our son's soccer tournament in north Dallas. We should be able to play board games all afternoon and evening on Friday, but all day and early evening on Saturday will be spent at the soccer fields. If his team advances to the semi-finals, we'll miss gaming on Sunday as well. Talk about a parent's dilemma - I want his team to do well, but............

Posted by Susan Rozmiarek at November 14, 2007 4:45 PM