02D7B: Narrow But Deep Gaming

Saturday - On Mars Board Game

When we get strictly objective about things, we only played three different games last night. The games were Mythwind, 2 rounds of The Initiatives, and finally On Mars. But the first two are campaign-style games and the last one was just a massive Vital Lacerda game, so that's how it took up the entire night.

Mythwind continues to be a weird campaign experience. It was presented as a cozy game and I think it largely lives up to that. We treat each 10-round season as a game session and hope to play one season whenever the group meets. Our group consists of Tobie's farmer, a crafter, a ranger, and my merchant. And the 10 rounds go by as we mainly worry about our individual goals with character interaction largely limited to the beginning of every round as we determine our Town Actions. Our biggest milestone for this last session was a wedding between NPCs after more than a "year" of their developing relationships despite the disapproval of their parents. 

The other campaign game that continues to preoccupy our time is The Initiative, which has us players portraying kids who find a mysterious board game and thus we experience them playing the game. This narrative within a narrative structure is an interesting way to present the game. Plus there's the fact that it's all about codebreaking and other related decryption puzzles and it's quite a lot of fun all around. We're approaching the end of the 14-chapter story and I can only wonder what will happen next. 

Finally, we managed to return to On Mars, which is another complex big box game created by Vital Lacerda. I thought we had played it a few times by now, but it turns out we only had like two playthroughs more than a year ago. I like the game but I recognize that it's also quite challenging and it's not the easiest thing to get to the table. We practically had to re-learn the game and I will make an effort to play more often in the coming weeks maybe because I do like the game. 

We have another big game night later today and I'll get back to documenting all the games we're going to play then. It does make for a good weekend with a nice degree of challenge for our gaming brains.

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