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| Tanglewood Restaurant, where the kind wait staff puts up with us playing games in the corner. (We tipped them well!) |
Some of what we played were old favorites. Lunch Money, for instance, a fairly quick game with plenty of opportunity to trash talk and back-stab your neighbor. Or Lord of the Fries, which I was mildly surprised to hear was out of print and tough to find...my copy is still in good shape after sitting in my closet for a few years! Rumor is that they're printing a new version soon.
Other games were new, at least to me. Epic is a fairly new customizable card game that several of the guys backed on Kickstarter. Similar to a trading card game, same deck construction aspects and similar game-play to other games of that type, but sold as boxed sets with no random packs. Had a lot of fun playing that one, particularly in one of the several draft modes (since I didn't have my own decks). Epic is from the makers of Star Realms, which we also played...first time for me with the physical game, though I've played the online version quite a bit.
We found time for some longer-form gaming, too. All of us are major Tolkien nerds, so Lord of the Rings games are almost always on the table. We played both the Hobbit and Fellowship versions of the Lord of the Rings deck-building games. Those take a couple of hours to play with five people, but it's good fun all the way. I like that these are a cooperative experience...if you don't defeat the last enemy before running out of cards, everyone loses. Of course there's still a score and someone does win, so I might be a bit biased since that was me both times. But I like to think that I'd have enjoyed it just as much regardless of the end points.
The only real downside to these play sessions is that my buddies live on the other side of Michigan. It's a long drive, 3-4 hours round trip. It's worth it to make the trip occasionally, though, for some good gaming time!
