Ah, how often has this happened to you? Revisiting an older game and thinking that you still know the rules. How hard can it be? We’ve played it so many times! I’m sure I still know how to play it. And before you know it, you’re still having to read the rulebook because you forgot about all the tiny but not unimportant details. Whoops!
Speaking of things going wrong, we only played one short game together this week because of complicated life things and rearranging a part of our garden! We played a game of Ticket to Ride: San Fransico because of excitement over Ticket to Ride: Berlin being announced (two types of trains?!). It’s on the more complex end of the smaller Ticket to Ride games and it’s hard to rank it over or under the other because they’re so similar but all of them offer an excellent concise version of Ticket to Ride for a relatively low price. We also played a game of Kluster which is a very cool-looking game that uses magnets. Although we didn’t play it right and with way too many players, the idea of the game is simple. Players place their magnets inside the area delimited by the cord and the first player who places all of their magnets wins! Of course, the magnets are rather strong so it’s tricky not to attract the other magnets within the area. It’s silly fun and magnets are cool.
Hopefully, we can fix this lackluster week this week with some more games. We’re having a game night on Tuesday, and Friday, plus Heinze is playing Age of Steam for the first time this weekend. Plus Heat has been released in the Netherlands and we’ve been very interested in it since seeing it at Spiel. So we’ll probably be buying, and hopefully, playing that as well! Exciting!
In this worker placement game you have to build up your farm by collecting resources, building fences to hold cattle, expanding and upgrading your tiny wooden shack you call home, grow crops, make lovely babies and collect food. But there are only a limited amount of rounds in the game, so you're going to have to make difficult choices and above all: don't forget that you, your spouse and your kids have rumbling tummies.
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Pillow
I have a worse story: I got two games mixed up and muddled up Game of Thrones with Fallout Infinity. How you ask? I changed the rules for losing a battle to you had to lose one piece plus any from the cards. It just meant fighting lost you so many troops that it was pointless and the Greyjoys (who stayed out of the fights the entire game) swooped in with their army last turn to win.
JML
Puerto Rico, 7 Wonders, Agricola, Settlers of Catan, Flapjacks & Sasquatches, DC Heroes Deckbuilder…all games I could set up and play without needing the rules. A possibility that with some of them that a question could come up that might need a rules reference, but played all of them enough that I could get through them without needing the rules, at least to set up and play. Maybe Terraforming Mars, if we didn’t use the Venus or Turmoil expansions? But I would feel weird not having a rulebook to reference if a question did come up.
Chris
Oh for sure I’ve encountered this, some games are shockingly hard to remember parts of.
Although I felt pretty proud teaching Caverna at Gridcon (First time I’d played it since COVID restrictions so it had been a while), since there was no rulebook but I somehow did a good enough job 😄. Not many games of that weight where I’d get away with that.
(Okay so I think we looked up 1-2 things online but they were things I’d got right, but wasn’t 100% sure on so we checked :P).
I did catch myself on Sunday though – Almost got us into a game of Small City, which is a game I love and could totally teach without a rulebook…Yeah I almost certainly would screw that up, especially as it’s a new edition of the game and minor graphic design tweaks would probably throw me for a loop 😆.