Game Trip Right Here at Home

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 were a lot of odd things on the shelves, including expansions to Uno (just some weird cards to make it more annoying) and a stack of Gloomhavens almost as big as I am.

They don't just have a big selection, they have a selection of selections, from the high-end new games to the RPG library, to the games sold by members to the discount shelf.  I tried hard to look them over and not get stuck with ones we won't like.  The most complex one is Stamp Swap, but as a 40+ year stamp dealer with a separate blog about stamps, I couldn't pass it up.

I bought Looting Atlantis because I saw the mechanic of having lava leak out from the volcano, and assumed the players would be dodging the destruction.  Butterfly Garden looked like a kind of Tsuro with a fun naturalist theme, Quads was an old school thing that made me think of tangrams, Woolly Wars looked like a fun tile-placing game, and Sail was a small box with a tiny kraken.

We had fun unboxing them all.  Pieces went skittering all over, but all were located.  The newer games all came with extra baggies.  Quads was packed so tightly we could hardly get it out or in, but we got a chance to see what we were in for.



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