Christmas Games

I hope you all had a great Christmas! Ours was exhausting; my wife's birthday the day before always makes it hectic and, once again, we hosted my son and his family as well which, whilst nice, is a lot of work for us and makes for a very full and very noisy house.

Our guests had to leave late in the afternoon, though, which left the three of us time to play some games. And a few new games have entered our house this year, mostly through Catherine getting some. We played two of them yesterday.

The first is Nekojima, which is a tricky dexterity game with a peripheral cat theme (always an excuse to buy a game in this house). It can be played co-cooperatively or competitively. On a small island with four districts you are in charge of erecting the power-poles. On each turn you get given one or two districts via a dice roll, and must then place one of the 21 power pole pieces between those districts. Each piece consists of two wooden dowels linked by a piece of string. You can stack them, but the strings can't touch either each other, the poles or the ground. If it falls down, you lose.

The added wrinkle is that sometimes you must also hang cats from the strings.

There's a couple of cats in play here, and you can also see the variety of poles on offer. 

At the bottom of the picture you can see the scoring mechanisms; as you draw coloured cubes from the back (which tell you what coloured string you have to place) you put them on a grid. Four cubes complete a level and there are seven levels. The best we managed in four games was Level Four.

Two seconds after this picture was taken the whole structure collapsed.

Catherine also got an escape room game (we played one a few weeks ago, and really enjoyed it) and Hive, a two-player asbtract game with an insect vibe (it has bees in it, which is why I got it for her).

I got two games. One is 'No Thanks', a family card game I played and enjoyed at our work Christmas party (because who doesn't play games at their work Christmas party?). The other was Flamme Rouge: BMX.

This is a children's version of Flamme Rouge, but has the advantage of being smaller and quicker than the original. Instead of professional tour cyclists you are a bunch of kids racing around a backyard on your BMX bikes. The course is a simple circuit, although the track pieces are double-sided and have a basic track on one side and a variant on the other. There's an optional ramp you can add too to get a movement boost. Instead of cards you draw three numbered tokens from a bag and choose one for the turn (which is then discarded for the rest of the game). 

Slipstreaming in this game is random, with a dice being rolled at the end of the turn. You might get the basic one-space Flamme Rouge slipstream, but there's also the possibility of no slipstreaming that turn (bad) or being able to do it across two spaces (good). For a game aimed at children this is a nice mechanism that helps anyone who has fallen badly behind to catch up.

This game lacks the depth and versatility of the full version but it's a great quick game to take on holiday and play in a pub or whilst camping.

I did get some figures as well, for a club project a couple of us are looking at for next year. We'll see how those go, given my current lack of interest in painting anything.

I hope you Christmas saw lots of gaming goodies added to your pile.