Posts

Butterfly Garden

Butterfly Garden is a gorgeous hexagonal tile placing game.  I grabbed it because it reminded me a bit of Tsuro , but with a nature theme.  The game designed was Reiner Knizia, a name that saounded familiar ... I turns out he also created Botswana, which we reviewed recently . Among hexagonal tile placement path-building games, for simplicity Tsuro would win every time.  But there is alot of room fr variety.  In Butterfly Garden, the players have sections at the edge of the board marked as their "flower beds", and there are six fountain tiles around the edges that each start with one blue butterfly, and one tile in the middle where the remaining six butterflies start with the purple one flying last. As you place tiles, you try to guide butterflies to you own flower bed, then score them by placing them behind your player screen.  The blue butterflies count as one point each, pink scores two and the solos purpler butterfly scores 3. After the first few moves, the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is This Prickly Thing?

Image
At our regular boba place, one of the owners brought in yet another odd game for customers to play with.  This one looked vaguely familiar but had no markings at all, no brand or name.  The lady who brought it in said she didn't remember what it was, either.  The place was busy and there wasn't a chance to ask more about it. It was a wooden box with a grid of holes on all four upright sides and about twenty plastic sticks pushed through those holes.  With the sticks in place, it left room for five or six wooden balls at the top.  Clearly, the goal is to either bring balls to the bottom or prevent the same. I was able to find the same exact game on Amazon and Temu, but with such generic names that they are clearly knock-offs of something else.  They were called things like Ballfall and Montessori Drop Game.  I do not link to sites that are full of knock-off games. Now, if you Google the phrase "game with balls and sticks poked through holes" the top con...
Post a Comment
Read more

Skyjo ... on a hotel bed

Image
I was trying to burn through the last of my birthday gift cards this week and stopped at Barnes & Noble again.  Gotta go where the gift cards take you.  I got book 7 of the Expanse and a little card game called Skyjo.  I almost didn't pick it up because it looked like Uno without the fun cards, or just another Skip Bo.  I watched a how-to-play video last night and Skyjo sounded like a quick learn.  We brought it to the hotel where we were planning to stay out of town on July 4th to avoid the fireworks noise that always upsets the dog. Again, the hotel had no place to actually play a board game.  There was a table about two foot by four but with only one chair.  Again, we thought about gaming at one of the tables down in the lobby, but then people would walk by and ask bothersome questions. It turns out that Skyjo can be played by two players on a firm hotel bed.  Each players gets 12 cards, which they put face down in a grid of 3 rows, 4 colu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wooly Wars

Image
We got to play a round of Wooly Wars in the back yard today, under the shady canopy.  Our little round table was barely big enough to hold it, and the last few tiles had to be put somewhere else because we ran into the edge.  Here is the BGG page . This is a simple tile-placing game, trying to build the largest enclosed sheep pen of your color.  You oddly start off without showing which color you are playing. A sheep pen is enclosed by fences or forests, and if a wolf is placed in that adjacent forest, all connected pens are threatened, though a hunter tile can cancel out a wolf tile.  In the end, the protected pen with the largest population wins. There are some odd extra rules that happen in the middle of the game, like exposing which color you are playing.  With two people, it felt irrelevant.  Then there is the shepherdess tile that lets you change colors, also irrelevant.  You can also choose to stop placing tiles and take a bonus; I think the fir...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game!

Image
This was just hilarious.  It's a very simple game for kids, but one of the cutest ideas we have seen in a while.  Your goal is to collect five different colors of acorns.  You spin the spinner, and it says to either pick an acorn of a specific color, or 1 or 2 acorns of your choice, or steal one, or lose a turn.  That's all. There is a large squirrel prop in the box, and it turns out to be a big pair of pliers.  You use that thing to pick up the acorns in its squirrely hands and put them into the matching color holes in your stash. The presentation of the game in its big tree-shaped box with all the colorful pieces and pet squirrel inside -- it made us feel like kids again. That's the whole game, but the game was so darn cute, it was hard not to chomp on Anne's fingers with that big squirrel toy.  This one is going straight to the 4-year-old grand-niece (sort of) who needs a squirrel to play with.     The squirrel even helped us put the pieces bac...
Post a Comment
Read more

Game Trip Right Here at Home

Image
After a two-day trip to Temecula found no worthwhile games in any thrift shops, and no game shops in the area, we hit a jackpot on the way back from a haircut in Vista today.  The Goodwill shops in Temecula had hardly any games of any kind, and a disgruntled guy explained how they "sell everything good on their website these days," but the Goodwill in Vista says otherwise. We found Chickapig (which looked like a strategic piece-moving game), Shut the Box (because we've mentioned it a few times recently), a rudimentary molecule model kit (my house feels oddly empty without one ... once every few years) and the Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game! (which qualifies as a WTF find). Then we went to Pair-a-Dice games again, because the Leggs gave me a gift certificate at my birthday party.  Of course I overdid it.  Gift certificate times 5.  These days, one of the challenges in shopping for games is trying not to buy something that's just an expansion you can't use.  There ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Diced Veggies ... on a bed?

Image
We finally got to play Diced Veggies at a hotel room.  Sadly, while the preview photos of the room showed a long desk, there was only one chair, so there was no comfortable place to try a new game. Boy, this does not work on a bed.  The main gimmick is to set up the 35 dice in the square frame and trim off some dice with the cardboard cleaver.   You start with two recipe cards and a booster card.  Basically, each turn you try to carve out some dice you need from the grid of dice and match the colors to the colors in one of your recipe cards.  If you can match the numbers or sums on a booster card, you score those points too.  As I recall, at the end of a turn there is a max of two recipe cards, two booster card, and 8 dice that you can keep.  The rest have to be discarded.  The dice go back into the rectangular frame.  And when you complete a recipe, those dice also go back into the grid.  Each card scores around 4-5 points. Each pl...
Post a Comment
Read more