Classic replays and a puzzle

This weekend, we picked some favorites off the shelf and had some good sessions.  

Careers: a few moves away from meeting her winning conditions, Anne lost all her hearts and had to start over.  I was stuck with about 30 stars and 50 hearts when I really only wanted 10 of each, but just could not make any dollars.  And then, when I got within sight of the $40K I needed, I lost 54 hearts.  And you know what?  The game is not really designed to go on for that long.  We both had all of the careers checked off and could just hop on any career track, but it still felt like we were spinning our wheels and going nowhere.  Conclusion: losing all your fame or happiness is too much of a penalty -- losing half would be a better balance and prevent the game from going into the doldrums.

Finding Nemo: This is always quick and fun.  Sometimes it is just a nice even run to the ocean, and sometimes one player just gets terrible rolls and can't go anywhere.  It is fun to build your track while cutting off your opponent and leaving them stranded.  It's just so simple.  Probably the only challenge is remembering which die means how many tiles to add/remove (it's the red one, the one with the X on it) and which die gives the number of spaces to move (the blue one).

On Sunday, we swung over to Barnes & Noble and picked up a few more games to try, but ended up doing a jigsaw puzzle instead.  Old school stuff.  We had been putting off this experiment for years because we figured the cat would mess it up.  But Mango got bored and left us alone, and was a very enjoyable afternoon.  

The jigsaw puzzle had a vague sense of a strategy game, of sorts.  First, I chose a puzzle that would not take forever (500 pieces), and an image that had readily recognizable elements across the entire image ( to avoid the bore of ending up with a box half full of sky pieces).  The first sort was to find the edges and corners, of course. We figured we should put together all the pieces with words next.  Then I pulled out just the pieces with large white areas, then just the heads and feet of the characters.  After that it was just looking for tiny bits and filling in holes.

It came together in just over two hours and involved a lot of elements that we enjoy in our gaming sessions: pattern matching, "find the differences" (in this case "find the similars"), looking for clues, lots of little mysteries, and helping each other out.  More fun than expected.