Intro
Jacki joined the party as her 1st Gen Con!
Gamernauts 🧑🚀
Board Games
Legend
- 💰 - Bought/will buy
- 🥳 - Fun but won't buy
Oh No, Volcano! 🥳
A competitive game where you play cards to move your meeples up the the volcano to collect gems. However, at the end of each climb, a boulder will roll down the hill potentially knocking your climbing meeple. While it was a fun game, I'm not confident that the replayability is great.
A Midsummer Nights Fayre 💰
A dice strategy game where we place die on a goal card. The winner of the goal card gets a chance to score lots of points and there are also consolation winners. Players can change the dice of the winning criteria to favor their winning condition, change their own die, or sabotage another other player's die. It's a thrilling game.
Skyrockets 🥳
Skyrocket is a successor of the game Kite and is a great quick/camaraderie game. Players work cooperatively to prevent any of the 5 timers from running out. I think I would get bored after playing this 5-10 times.
Foundations of Metropolis 💰
Foundations of Metropolis is the affordable version of Foundations of Rome. It's similar to Acquire where instead of drawing a row/column tile, you can purchase the tile as a reserved lot. With the combined reserved lots, you can place a fitted building, which could gain income or influence victory points.
Stalk Exchange 🥳
Super simple and a lot of strategy. The goal of the game is to place a flower tile to surround a target flower tile. The surrounded flower tile is then removed to increase the value of the target flower; if you own any of those flower tiles in your hidden tableau, then that's the amount of victory points you gain at the end game. I enjoyed the game but I'm not excited.
Mycelia 💰
A mild deck building game with a bit of an engine building. On your board are many dewdrops that needs to be discarded (through means of cards or through a portal on your board). Your cards can gain leaf (currency), discard dewdrops, or move dewdrops. It's really exciting and engaging!
Looot 🥳
The placement of a meeple will gather resources and then placed onto your board in order to score points. This game is engaging, but I'm not excited about it.
Sherlock The Game Is Afoot 🥳
To win, a player needs to guess the missing card ranging from 2 through Ace. You can move your character to different rooms triggering different accusation of missing card or asking a question to help deduce the missing card. This game is very similar to the game Sleuth, but Sleuth is better.
River Valley Glassworks 💰
On a turn, you can drop a gem on a tile to collect gems in an adjacent tile to place onto your board. Your board will score both horizontally and vertically. This game reminds me a lot of Azul, except, it's much better. The mechanics works more smoothly than Azul.
A Message From The Stars 💰
A cooperative game where the hint giver help the remaining players decode 5 encoded letters based math and deduction. The players and the hint giver will write a word (hint) along with the calculated value to help players figure out the letters. At the end, the players need to figure out what the 5 letters are and then there are 2 more side puzzles based on the hinted words.
Gnome Hollow 🥳
With a Carcassonne element, you are trying to form a ring to form an closed loop by placing tiles. Unlock your board to get bonuses by creating an enclosure with more tiles. Gather resources to exchange for points. Engaging, but not exciting.
Adulthood 🥳
The theme and art is really great. It reflects an adult life of working to earn money, switching jobs, getting engaged, and then married. However, the mechanics of the game is okay.
Survive The Island 💰
A bit more than a simple game but with lots of sabotaging. Get your meeples onto a raft to escape the island while dodging the dangerous creatures lurking around. Each player gets a chance to move the creatures to impede your opponent's meeples from escaping. Super exciting game! This game won the Lam Doan Gen Con Game Award 🏆!
Expeditions: Around the World 🥳
Similar to Ticket to Ride, except, there are 3 expeditions that are shared between the players. Each player have a set of hidden destination cards where any of the expeditions must come cross a destination that corresponds to your cards in order to score. It's very engaging, but I feel like I would get bored of it after a few plays.
Wandering Towers 🥳
Mages are on top of tower(s) and each tower can stack on top of each other. The goal is to try to move all of your mages into a black tower while trapping your opponents' mages 5 times.
Biomos 🥳
Your own tableau can store 15 tiles and when adding a tile, it can be shifted in between placed tiles.
Goal cards can be collected if it meets the placement of your tiles. It's a fun game, but I'm not big on games that depends on the draw of the cards (in this case, goal cards).
The Gang 🥳
A cooperative hold'em poker where we have to guess how strong our hands is in comparison to other players' hands. As we go through each of the flop, turn, and river, each player will try to identify how strong their hands are.
Reef Projects 🥳
It's about reef exploration and traveling across different areas of the the underwater with a sea crew. A complicated board game that has many tracks to to act upon. I think it's fun and I would play again. However, for new players, it's really tough to grasp what to do and the strategy behind it.
Other
True Dungeon
True dungeon is a live action role playing game which includes combat and escape room. They give you a bag of collectable coins. Based on what you received, it can dictate what DND class you want to be. I had a great weapon and armor which made sense to be a barbarian. We had 2 combats and 2 puzzles to solve. The combat consists of a shuffleboard mechanism where if the hit roll value depends on which body part the puck lands on.
Tlaolli
Very delicious taco joint that is vegan/vegetarian/carnivore friendly. The vegan birria is close to the real thing!
Costumes
Nazgul
Star Wars
