Triqueta

Triqueta looked like it would be fun and different, production was solid and the tiles were big and sturdy.  The setup was a pain (especially when one of our gaming group has shaky hands): getting all those pointy pieces into the perfect stacks.  Meh.  I guess they could have just been piles.  They looked nice in the clean stacks with the big tile for a lid.  My own hands were shaking by the time I got them all lined up and pushed together.

It turn out that gameplay was odd.  When I read the rules, it sounded so simple: just pick a tile and either keep it face down or add it to a line of tiles, OR take a line of tiles and end your turn.  There are a total of four turns, and the face down tiles were limited to two PER GAME, not two per turn.  So we got it wrong first, then we tried a round with no face-down tiles, then we added the face-down tiles rule after we got a feel for the rest of the game.

The scoring is easy: you try to make a triqueta (3-fold pattern) of each animal tile.  If you end up with only one tile for an animal, you get one point, two tiles scores two points, the triqueta of three scores the number of points on the tiles (which ranges from 3 to 10), but any tiles above three are a penalty of two points each.

Our first two times through the game, we felt we had to take as many tiles as possible, but that just overloaded our piles and cost us both points in the end. 

On our third try, it felt like I needed to get the right number of tiles and bow out, and watch Anne overdo it.

I think we know the basics and a bit of strategy now, but we got really irritated by it somehow.  It's just pulling tiles from stacks, how did it go sideways?  We don't know.  I'm not sure when we will give it another shot.