Saturday, February 18, 2006

Weekend Gaming

For lunch we had a woman and two of her three children. I don't know why so many people we have over are divorced women with children; something about our social circle.

This one was a very old friend of my wife's. She was married to a gamer who once left me a large bag of Magic cards when we stayed at their apt in New York. Apparently he is also in Israel for the year. I invited him for Wed night games but haven't yet heard back from him.

Where was I?

So she came with her two kids, ages 10 and 13. After lunch, while she and Rachel discussed Pseudopigrapha and such stuff, I played Settlers with the kids. They took to it pretty well.

Settlers is one of those games that is just complicated enough that it is hard to teach all of the rules in one go before people's eyes begin to glaze over. Leave out the development cards or the robber and you could do it. Also, the setup phase also tends to confuse people. With some people you have to start playing a bit and then tell them about the cards.

I am extremely well versed in teaching Settlers, so I generally do teach it all at once, anyway. These kids were very bright and didn't have a problem. Their previous game experiences included Risk as well as most other board games.

Of course, the dice were screwy, but they got into it anyway. The ten year old boy won (with a little assistance of showing him how to build settlements) which was great. Both of them liked the game.

I decided to go read some Dragon magazine issues for ideas for the upcoming game, so I left them playing Yinsh. They seemed to get it, but when I came out to check on them I found out that they had disagreed over which ring they had to remove and had prematurely ended the game. A little while later they were playing Settlers with their mother.

She wanted to know if I take a commission in selling the game.

Yehuda

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