Hi there! Ready for some blog? Let’s get to it.

We had our first campfire get together this past weekend. It was a nice couple of hours with friends even if we no longer have the stamina to stay up as last as we used to.

Star Wars Carcassonne and Star Wars Timeline came in last week. I got to play Carcassonne with my mom and I thought it was solid. Instead of abbeys, you lay down planet tiles. Instead of cities, you build asteroid fields and instead of roads, you build trade routes. There’s no equivalent to building fields which my friend tells me is for the best, since they made the game much more swingy. The other big difference with the original Carcassonne is that instead of sharing points for having meeples in the same scoring area, there’s a combat mechanism where the winner scores all the points and the loser only gets points equal to the number of dice they rolled in the fight (two dice for the big meeple, one die for the regular meeples and an extra die if there’s a symbol (equivalent of shields in the original) matches your affiliation to a maximum of three dice per player. Each player rolls and keeps their highest die. The player who rolled highest wins. In our game, there was only one combat and I won, but still ended up losing. So I won the battle but lost the war. My mom thought the game was decent, but she said she wouldn’t want to play more than once in an evening while I could see myself playing a few games in a row. It’s pretty mellow. An expansion is set to be released sometime this year which will add a sixth player and new scoring tiles. I’ll definitely pick it up. Having now played, I can see just how heavily Galaxy of Trian borrowed from Carcassonne in its design.

I had a feeling that Star Wars Timeline would be too easy for me and it looks like I was right. If they hadn’t limited themselves to scenes from the original trilogy and added stuff from the expanded universe, there might have been some challenge to it, but with just the movies, it doesn’t look to be a challenge at all. Even casual fans should find it pretty simple with only a couple of card coming close to being able to trip someone up. If you recognize which movie the card is, the game has a chance to play itself, especially for a small group. I don’t regret buying it, because I still think it’s a cool idea.

Moving on to Animus stuff, any thoughts on the latest mash-up theme? Any guesses on which video games with be featured? Todrick should be the easiest one to guess.

I guess that covers all I have to say for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.