My sister and brother-in-law visited Vegas this week so it gave me a chance to play some games between chasing the kids around.
Innovation (twice)
Circus Flohcati
Aton
No Thanks (twice)
Times Square
When you have a limited time budget, it’s interesting what came out to be played.
I’ve always acclaimed Carl Chudyk, the designer of Innovation, as a “minor deity”. And this assessment hasn’t changed. His ability to have a completely chaotic game result in a memorable gameplay experience, is really something to behold.
As for the other games, Aton and Times Square are both excellent, albeit slightly 2 player fussy games. Aron is a gridded area control game and Times Square is a linear tug of war, but both games have multiple levers to push and pull constrained by the card draw making for great 2 player experiences.
It was also a lot of fun to introduce No Thanks and Circus Flohcati to my sister and brother in law. Just fun light fillers, easy to teach but with meaningful decisions. Both well designed games, also by Thorsten Gimmler and Reiner Knizia respectively. My daughter even joined in for No Thanks and enjoyed it well enough.
Interestingly, all of them were card games, as were almost all the other games I would have thought to pull out. Amongst the board-dice-cards categorizations, I definitely lean towards cards.
But honestly, my daughter had the most fun of all when we played hide and seek in the house.