After our fun round of Magic: The Gathering Commander, we managed to play a few board games before wrapping things up. Let me run through them along with relevant Amazon links because I'm trying to up my affiliate game just a little.
We first played Raising Robots (Amazon affiliate link) after dinner, as there were at least 2 players at the table (including Tobie) who hadn't had a chance to play the game before. I had already talked about this game the other day, and my feelings about it haven't changed that much with a second playthrough. I do feel the pangs of missing more player interaction, but I don't think the later expansions address that aspect of the game. At least it plays quite quickly - that's the main benefit of having simultaneous player turns. So it boils down to what you're looking for in a game, I suppose. It's still fun, but not a player-interaction kind of fun, which made for a slightly weirder experience after a very interactive Magic game.
We also played 13 Animals again, which I rather love, given how it's such a clever reinterpretation of mahjong. What is even crazier about our game was the fact that there were two separate rainbow wins - I got one in the second round, but someone else got one in the third round, and that was enough to secure victory.
Our last big game of the night was SETI, which I do love a lot. We almost played a round of Unconscious Mind (Amazon affiliate link), but realized that our last guest hadn't tried looking for aliens yet, so we went for it. Both are solid games, but SETI is still quite the conversation piece. I rather surprised myself by managing to teach the game only using the player aid and not the full manual, which speaks to how much I like this game (and how many times I've had to teach it). This game has a LOT of moving parts, but once you fully wrap your head around the process of finding aliens, the game really comes alive. This game has so many potential paths to victory, combined with a very tight resource economy, that makes the game feel that much more intense. Bringing this game to the table again has made me even more excited about the upcoming expansion - I'm pretty sure the new content is going to tighten the game loop overall and might even make for slightly shorter games.
And those are the other games we played last night. Commander games take up a LOT of time on their own, so that doesn't leave a lot of time for other board games. And both Robots and SETI were quite heavy, but totally worth the investment of time.
Today, we managed to push through with our Pendragon RPG session, a true relief after our August session not pushing through at the last minute last time. It was a solid session, but you could also tell that we all needed a bit of time to warm up and get back into the minds of our characters. Hopefully, we won't have to wait so long before our next session.
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