Session Report, in which disappointment occurs

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up here. Games played: Zendo, Bernini Mysterie, Power Grid, Colossal Arena, Gipf.

Both Bernini Mysterie and Gipf appear to be games that devolve into endless loops with no winner, assuming reasonably good play on both sides. I am willing to believe this about Bernini Mysterie, a fairly new, simple, and not well known game, but I find this hard to believe about Gipf. Surely someone else would have mentioned it by now.

In last night's game, we simply kept taking off our own rows, or forcing our opponent to take off his, having no clear means of trapping and winning without one of us making a mistake (and I mean a fairly foolish one, not an incredibly subtle one). I eventually won to such mistakes, but it didn't feel like a victory.

... A consultation with Gipf's website indicates that we played the "basic version". The "standard version" requires one to make use of stacked pieces to form "Gipf pieces". Perhaps only the basic version is broken (or we are still missing something).

Yehuda

Barry Goldstein points me to some tongue-in-cheek Monopoly cards on Dribbleglass.