01738: Dodging the Dragon

A lot of gaming this weekend - definitely a good thing. We spent all of Saturday night playing board games with some friends and today we're back with our Sunday gaming group for another session of Houses of the Blooded. Then again, most of our weekends are rather gaming-centric.

I'm really happy with the mix of games last night. Initially we had intended to revive a one-shot Vampire game, but instead this gave way to board games since everyone was rather tired. We started things out with a rather simple game, Tsuro of the Seas, and then games became increasingly complex. Other games for the night included the base set for Bang! and increasingly complicated rounds of Carcassonne. From just playing the base set with the River II expansion, we moved on to a much larger game with the base set, River I, The Phantom and Princess & Dragon. Those four sets together resulted in a pretty much 3-ish hour dive back into the tile-laying world.

I didn't win the first Carcassonne game, but I did manage to come out on top during the second one. With the titular dragon in play it's really hard to determine how things will turn out. Thankfully I got a little lucky with my tile draws and I was able to redirect the dragon away from the meeple - at least most of the time.

I was especially happy with the use of The Phantom over time. At first it just seemed like a bonus follower to play here and there, but in time I finally figured out a better strategy for using the piece. It certainly helped me score additional tile features while still advancing more traditional strategies.

Then the night ended with my first foray into Level 7. Not a totally amazing game, but certainly an interesting to a horror game with a nice science fiction twist to things.

We played two more rounds of Bang! today with the Sunday group before we got back into our Houses game. I feel the game is definitely more fun with more players and certainly lends itself to some rather crazy strategies.

In other news, I'm totally loving the new vacuum. I'm definitely trying to make it a habit to once-over the Sietch to help keep the overall fur level down. With luck, this will also help keep my asthma attacks down to a minimum - I'm already getting beat up by the significantly colder weather.