I was a little nervous about how this weekend would unfold and was in the weird space of still wanting company but not wanting to bother people. Even last night's gaming could have been called off as our friend actually had no voice and that felt like a good reason to just rest. But at least that ultimately pushed through and we had a good night with me doing most of the talking.
Our games last night included a first playthrough of Dog Park followed by a repeat play of Let's Go to Japan. Dog Park is presented as a family game and I could certainly feel that in terms of its design. It's not directly a "Wingspan for dogs" just because it has dogs - but it is a solid game on its own merits. Then for Let's Go to Japan, we tried the Grab Your Passport mini-expansion that adds variable player powers. It was a nice incremental add-on to the core game experience without making it crazy difficult.
On that note, our final game for the night was Inventions: Evolution of Ideas, which is a big box game from Vital Lacerda of Kanban fame. We knew it would be a challenge to take this game on but it is a little easier to learn a game when it's just two of you. Learning alone denies you the option of having someone to bounce ideas off of. Learning with a full table means a greater potential for people to make mistakes with no one feeling confident enough to make rulings on the right or wrong way to play. Even with that methodology in mind, I think we only fully grasped the game at the very end and by then it was too late to change course. We ended up playing a second game right away as we felt a bit more confident about the general gameplay loop and were starting to explore potential strategies.
I'll still probably need to watch a few more how-to-play videos to make sure we got everything more or less correctly, but I still like the game as a whole. It has an easier cycle versus games like Weather Machine and a stronger/more relatable theme to boot. I can't wait to introduce this game to the rest of our gaming friends.
Beyond that, today is shaping up to be a "proper" Star Wars day as a friend has come over to binge-watch the movies with me. This is an annual tradition for him, it seems, and this year I'm getting to share the experience with him.
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