Shabbat and Hanukkah Gaming

Dinner at Nadine's. I brought Tribune. It supports up to five players, and is fairly easy to understand.

We played with Beth, a longtime friend of Nadine's from LA who comes from a gaming family, and I-can't-remember-her-name-but-Nadine-will-in-the-comments, a friend of Nadine's son who just made aliyah. She is not a gamer I think, but had no problem learning the game.

In fact, Tribune goes very smoothly if there is someone around to teach the game. The game narrative is very straightforwards, but there are all these little niggly things to remember. Even though these are all printed on the cards or player boards, they're not so easy to remember, anyway.

Everyone enjoyed the game, and we also all saw the potential for getting better at it as we learn how the mechanisms interact and can make particular choices as to which paths to take. And begin to make our decisions based on what others are doing. So it looks like a keeper.

We played a medium game, and Nadine was the only one to get the victory condition. Beth was one coin away (29 instead of 30). I was one faction marker away, which is not quite as close.

Hanukkah Jeopardy

Saturday night I had a Hanukkah party. It was supposed to be music and a game, but nobody brought music. In one corner, Nadine taught four others how to play R-Eco.

Later, the whole group played a Hanukkah Jeopardy game that I made. Since our group is fairly knowledgeable, I tried to make it a little harder than the usual "on this day of the month of Kislev is the holiday of Hanukkah". My questions were more on the order of "this was Antiochus' second in command, who dispatched the Greek/Syrian armies to Israel". And the group managed to answer correctly 80% of the questions.

Details about the answers/questions are available upon request.