I'm The Fool

This week I got straight into Beasty Bar, one of Alex's new purchases. It's a pretty simple little filler where you're lining animals in a row trying to get them into a bar. There are twelve different animals and each animal has a different power like moving ahead in the queue, flipping the queue, removing other animals from the queue etc. Dan assured me I'd get the hang of the powers after a few turns. I did not. But with the rule book as a reference and luck on my side somehow I managed to win.

Afterwards we played Venture, a Sid Sackson classic. It's a sort of rummy, set collection game with a company building theme. I did terribly. I'm pretty sure more of my companies got taken over than everyone else's combined. Mike got some huge scores in the last few turns and ended up winning. It was an alright game but for the amount of time it took I found it a little simple and repetitive, with too much down time. We were playing with five players though, perhaps with less players it shines a little brighter.

Danny played Tragedy Looper which seems to happen pretty much every week recently. I think he spends a lot of weeks playing the first scenario because he's playing it with new people. I've still not played it so he'll probably have to play the first scenario again at some point.

Another group played Coup, Skull and a couple of games of Mascarade. Philip won both games of Mascarade by managing to keep track of the cards while everyone else just got confused. I finished off the night with a 10 person game of Mascarade. I think it fell a little flat, 10 people is probably too many. The problem I find with Mascarade is that it's too easy to get into a run of people that know who they are, so instead of swapping their cards they use their power. The next person then does the same, followed by the next person. This is why I always include the fool when I play even if it's not in the official list for that player number. His power is to swap the cards of two other players. I find that even if you're not the fool you can almost always claim to be him and no one will challenge. Although we had the fool in play, with 10 players this still wasn't enough to avoid the issue.

And Michael managed to fit in a last minute game of Guilds of Cadwallon.