Hello Top Men and Top Women. It’s that time of the week again. BLOG ON!

With the goal of picking up a friend’s spirits, we had a pretty big gaming weekend this week. I got to bring a number of played and unplayed games to the table. There’s definitely some more good stuff on my game shelves.

The biggest surprise was Dungeon Fighter. It was an impulse buy when I visited the new gaming cafe in town, Les Dés Truqués. It’s a dexterity party game where players try to bounce dice onto a target to hit monsters. After giving Tumbling Dice a chance and liking it, this was the next logical step. In a word, it’s fun! Great fun in fact and funny to boot. There are all kinds of trick throws you can (or have to) do to keep things interesting. After just one play I had to go out and buy all the available expansions (one eludes me still). That’s how much I liked this game. You definitely can’t be afraid to look silly to play this game.

I’ve already talked about Star Wars Destiny and Masmorra. I got in some more plays of both this week. I want more Destiny dice but it seems sold out everywhere unless you’re willing to pay big mark ups. The cooperative version of Masmorra was good. For a while it didn’t look like we were going to come close to reaching the third and final level, but we did. Unfortunately, our luck stalled out and we failed on our attempt to defeat the evil Malaphyas.

The Big Book of Madness is a cooperative game with some deckbuilding and…I’ll say resource management. Each player chooses an apprentice wizard with his or her own starting deck and the same four spells. Throughout the game, they have to use their resources to counter curses in order and keep from going insane to defeat the monsters they’ve accidentally freed from the Big Book of Madness (with a title like that, why would anyone even think of opening it?) As you go along, you’ll try to improve your deck by buying stronger resource cards and also new spells to sling. It’s a puzzle in the style of Pandemic, though I’d say we took it a little too seriously and it ended up being a little too brain burny. I think a more casual approach (wins and losses be darned) would make it more enjoyable.

Finally, Star Trek Panic is a retheming of Castle Panic. Instead of trying to keep a castle from getting overrun by a seemingly never-ending throng of baddies, in Star Trek Panic, players are trying to keep the Enterprise flying to complete a series of missions. I really liked this one, but it came on the tail end of playing the Big Book of Madness and my fellow players were still feeling the brain burn so it didn’t go over as well with them. I hope to get it back to the table to try a full game (the introductory game is only two missions long and pretty easy to breeze through).

I’m late to blog this week and I don’t really have anything else to report, so that will conclude this week’s game blog. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. BLOG OFF!