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Dog Park - New Tricks

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We just got our package today with the New Tricks expansion to Dog Park.  Of the four lots offered on eBay, I picked this one because it included a Kickstarter special pack with stickers, postcards, a little pack of 7 wild dogs that all sound like pups the designers have known personally, and limited-edition wooden tokens for resources and dog walkers, and an 8-space board for one player to use as their kennel. The New Tricks pack adds a whole new deck of dogs, including mixed breeds who count for both breeds. There is a fold-out row of 8 spaces to put the new Trick cards, so that each breed can access a trick and they are shuffled to start each game.  There are new forecast cards, new Location cards and expanded location modifiers including cardboard pieces that completely cover the dog park space with its new effects. We will be testing it out over the weekend, but for now, here is Anne's dog Dory next to the matching Dog Park card.  As a mix of cairn terrier and chihuahua, Dory
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Donation: Boys & Girls Club

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As we try out so many games per year, we keep our favorites and try to find homes for the others.  There is only so much shelf space.  It used to be fun to resell them, but with shipping costs higher than most of the games are worth, we started looking for other outlets.  We want them to get played.  We tried listing whole boxes of them on NextDoor for bargain prices, but only ever got gripes about not being settling for crummy offers.  We don't want to take everything to Goodwill.  We don't really like them anymore.  There are lots of other thrift shops and charities in town, but it feels like they will just disappear into the system, maybe end up on a shelf, maybe someone will buy them trying to make a buck.  Are they going to get to the gamers, or possible future gamers that way? We tried letting family members know about them, but either they were non-gamers and didn't care ... or they were gamers who only want a few very specific things, as gamers do. So we finally fig
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Penny Black

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We stopped at Barnes & Noble to see if they had any of the expansions for Dog Park, but they did not.  There did have a new game called Penny Black ... really, a game with a stamp collecting theme in a major retail store.  I grabbed it, not even wondering at the price.  From the box size and weight I figured it would be $35-$40, but it was only $30. We tried it out on the patio after dinner, and it was different from anything else we have played in the last 100+ blog posts.  There was a mild annoyance at first, since there was a barcode on the box cover that said to click here to watch a video about how to play, but the page had no video.  It wasn't hard to find someone else doing the work for them , but really, if your barcode says X, you need to make sure that it goes to a page with X on it. The parts are all nice and solid, with a big bag of plastic stamp tiles and four cute albums to put those stamps into.  The stamps fall into four colors/denominations, and three sizes (sm
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Dog Park

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While finding and trying new games, we have a soft spot for games with a theme of cats or dogs, so when I saw a preview of Dog Park, I quickly hopped onto eBay to get a copy. At first glance it looked too complicated, with too many little pieces to fuss over.  But I felt it would be worth having an actual copy of this one to see how it feels. Yes, it has a lot of pieces, and multiple sets of cards, and a big board that gets cluttered, but since the turns are clearly split into phases, and each phase uses only a few pieces or cards, and one section of the board, it ends up feeling like three different games that you play in an alternating pattern.  There are also handy cards that outline what to do in each phase, so all players can follow along or look ahead to see what's coming next. Like usual, for the first run through we went with just the basics, so we ignored the Forecast cards, Objectives and the dog abilities.  Each turn has four phases: Recruitment (bid on new dogs for your
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Colorful Puzzle Games by Snapbreak

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I have been having a lot of fun playing what I think of as "colorful puzzle games".  These are apps with a highly graphical theme, where each level has some series of visual puzzles to solve.  You usually have to find some wire or battery or key or wrench and figure out where it goes to unlock more complex puzzles.  Or the other way around: you see a cabinet with a hexagonal hole and have to go find whatever crank or screwdriver will fit.  The basic "find the object" parts are usually preety easy, but they tend to have a relaxing vibe and the developers go out of their way to throw in some visual effects that you never see coming.  A simple suitcase might cause the entire platform around it to twist and rise up and open into some weird computer console.  What looks like a violin might unpack into a missile silo.  I have to give these developers credit for imagination and attention to detail, and though every one of these apps has Google Play reviews saying the hitbo
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Smallest. Games. Ever?

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On a trip to Tucson this week, we stopped at the Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures .  It was so fascinating, with so many displays of different styles of miniatures, we ended up spending almost 3 hours gawking at them.  I was even inspired to write two poems capturing some of that feel.  But for my gaming blog I wanted to share this little gem: It was a poker table in a miniature house at what looked like the standard 1:12 scale.  I needed my glasses to see that the cards had details, and had to zoom in on my phone to see just how detailed they were.  The cards were barely 1 by 1.5 mm, yet the face cards were vibrant and realistic.  I looked for other games in other miniature exhibits, but this was the only one I saw.  Just another example of how games have always been a part of our lives, part of so many stories, so many evening gatherings. For fun, another exhibit was a re-creation of the famous "Dogs Playing Poker" painting:
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Thrifting in Yuma

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We did a quick run through some thrift shops in Yuma on the way home from our trip.  The one that had the best selection of games was the Humane Society of Yuma Thrift Shop, although that was probably skewed by the fact the our top pick of thrift shops is usually humane society (who help needy animals), and maybe some charities that help needy humans. I came home with National Geographic Mission: Survival, Dysfunction, Ono-99 (a Uno variant), and Quiddler (which I didn't think we had a copy of, but we probably do). When we finally got home, I looked over the rules, cards, etc, and the first two look like they are going to be duds for us.  Mission: Survival has a gorgeous game board but is essentially a Trivial Pursuit with difficult geography questions that I would have no problem with, but Anne would not enjoy at all.  She won't know about the Ivory Coast or some specific fjord in Norway.  I wonder if we can just roll dice to score the points instead of answering questions.  I
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