Green Board Games

Thanks to my cousin Ela and her friend Ania, recently I had a chance to play two board games, which were completely new to me. Funny coincidence was that they were both mostly green.

Shear Panic /pol. Owczy Pęd/
When Ela told me about this game for the first time, I told her that I've seen some friends of mine playing it once and I didn't like it too much. Ela was quite suprised coz I was not enthusiastic about it at all. Next time we met, she told me about this game once again, about how lovely the figures are... and I asked: "What figures???". It turned out that when she told me about Shear Panic for the first time, I confused it with a different game which also has sheeps as main characters.
After seeing those adorable sheeps, I can't be critical about this game anymore. They're just too pretty!

My own summary of this game is: cute chess, and that is more or less what it is about - the board is similar to chess and strategy plays the main role. The difference is that Shear Panic is a game up to 4 players or 4 groups of players. I believe that its difficulty level depends on the players.
What else can I say? Niiiccceeeeeee!

Keltis
The other game we played that night was Keltis. The game is based on cards mainly but also on the board which includes some stones, magic diamonds and shamrocks. Players have different colors of shamrocks - mine was white- and their aim in the game is to collect as many cards in the right order as possible, what enables them to collect many magic diamonds which are being converted into points at the end of the game.

It is perfect to play with people who get scared when the see regular cards. In reality, Keltis is a very friendly looking card game.

Both of those games are perfectly adjusted to the needs of the XXIst century customer. Classic stuff in new layouts... and that's what everybody loves!

One... two... three days in Poznan!

One February weekend, when the snow was about to start melting on the streets, I went to visit my cousins - Ela and Ula - in Poznan.

Not many things have changed since we've seen each other during Christmas but entirely new were 2 board games that Ela bought few days before I got there. The 1st one - Power Grid - was the game which I already knew from the board games night in Porto and which I liked and kept on talking about so much that Ela didn't hesitate while ordering it. As Ela's set contained 4 different boards/maps, we've tried them all - Benelux, USA, Germany and Central Europe. I'm still looking forward to play on different maps that were published, such as Iberian Peninsula, Brazil, Nordic Countries or Italy.

Meanwhile, we also had to eat something so we did shopping in a nearby shop where we found something that totally surprised me - pasteis de nata - my favourite portuguese pastry!

The process of baking them is extremely simple (actually the Polish translation on the box says that the proper temperature is 275*C, while in English, German and Portuguese it says 250*C haha), the price is similar to those in Portuguese bakeries and what is the most important, they are as tasty as they should be!

If you were following my blog carefully during the last year, you should already know where the best Pasteis de Nata are being served - in Belem, close to Lisbon.

The 2nd board game was The Fury of Dracula - 2 players were vampire hunters trying to catch the 3rd player - Dracula, who was hiding and running away from them around Europe. At first the rules were very confusing for me. After Ela and Ula were Draculas in each game, it was my turn and we started kidding that probably I will ask them where should I hide my Dracula from them. It turned out that I was much better as the Dracula than I expected and I'm looking forward to play it again, even though I didn't like the game at the beginning.

Christmas - how to not get bored

Christmas 2009 passed without getting bored thanks to the board games!

Just before the Christmas Eve dinner, together with Ela, Ula and Daniel, we've played the game called Shogun, which I was looking forward to since last January.
Generally speaking, Shogun is about scoring the biggest number of points by possessing as many prefectures of Japan as possible, fighting with enemies, making rice supplies so that people won't die of hunger in winter, building castles, temples and Noh theatres.

While playing we all had different strategies, but the ones of Ula and Daniel deserve to be described here. Ula's aim was buying loads of rice, while Daniel's main objective was making Nagoya a powerful city with a beautiful castle and attacking all his neighbours without caring about rice supplies. It's also worth mentioning that each player represented different famous shogun, for example I had a card of Ieyasu Tokugawa. Shogun is probably my no. 1 board game of all we've played.

Another 2 board games were this year's presents from Santa Claus - I've received Ticket to Ride - Europe and Ela got Small World.

Ticket to Ride - Europe is all about constructing railways around Europe's map from 1912. At first, the rules seem to be a bit complicated but it is a truly family game and each of my family members played it at least once during Christmas and enjoyed it.

Concerning Small World, it is a board game about possessing lands and scoring points for that by the use of supernatural powers - the players are representing different creatures - dwarfs, tritons, elves, giants and so on. Personally, I'm not a big fan of monsters and fairytale creatures, however, my second impression on Small World was much better than the first one.

Another game we've tried playing 2 times was Mystery of the Abbey, which I already knew before. In my opinion Mystery is a very interesting game and what makes it even more cool is being based on the book "The Name of Rose" by Umberto Eco. At the beginning each player receives a bunch of cards with names of different monks, while one of the cards remains hidden.
During the game the players are trying to find out which of the monks is the murderer, for example by asking questions to other players. The necessary thing during the game is taking notes about the facts that are already known.
In our case, Daniel didn't take any notes and then kept on refusing to answer questions (yes, it is allowed) or he gave Ela and me some fake answers, which finally lead to getting lost in our investigations. When we've played Mystery of the Abbey for the 2nd time, Daniel was trying to cheat, but luckily, thanks to the special card, Ula got a possibility to exchange cards with him.
Obviously it was annoying to have such a rebel player among us but in the 2nd game somehow it made it more funny and interesting.

Except the board games we've also played 2 games that might be considered as card games. The first game MahJong, is a kind of an Asian equivalent to European cards, was brought to us by Japanese Santa Claus. As I've attended a workshop dedicated to this game few days before Christmas, I already knew what is it all about and after watching 2 videos on youtube we were ready to play. Well, I still need to learn more about MahJong so I'll explain the rules of the game some other time.

Last but definitely not least game was the one widely known as Bohnanza, in Poland named Fasolki (pol. beans). The aim of the game is exchanging cards in all possible ways with other players to be able to plant as many beans as possible and receive the coins for that. There are few kinds of beans, in polish version of the game they are named in polish so I recommend the foreigners eager to learn polish to play Fasolki at least once to learn few useful words. In our case, the winner of the game was Daniel - the only non-Polish speaker.

WAW-ZRH-OPO

I left Warszawa early friday morning on the 6th of February and flew to Porto with a short stop in Zurich...

As soon as the plane started reaching Porto airport, it went very low above the buildings giving a scary feeling of crashing down for about 15 minutes. The view was impressive. The mountains, the ocean, the colors... Finally, we've landed at the best airport in Europe at 15:30 - 30 minutes before the scheduled time. I've picked up my luggage (which was half wet - especially the sleeping-bag) and went out to the arrivals hall to wait for my great friend - Ze Mario, who took care of me, together with his amazing girlfriend - Carla, at the beggining of my portuguese adventure. Thanks to them I was not like an Englishman in New York during my first hours in Portugal. Well... maybe I was... a bit ;)

We've spent the first night on playing the boardgames - Neuroshima Hex (a polish game I brought for Ze Mario who is a big fan of boardgames) and Funkenschlag/Power Grid. I didn't like the first one too much, oficially because of not very handsome characters, but I really liked the second one - Funkenschlag, which is about building powerplants on the boards with maps of different regions of the world. We've played on the map of Poland and I've ALMOST won! ;)