First Play: Mord Im Arosa...

Back for a day now and headed to the UW games night for the evening.  7 Wonders definitely got played.  A lot.  As well, I also participated in a 4-player game of Innovation.  I'm still not sure what I think of it.  I do know now that it needs to be played fast.  VERY fast.  Every 3 or 4-player game I've played so far has clocked in at about 90 minutes which is way too long but there has always been someone new to the game.  That and the math group tends to overanalyze their choices.  Just sayin'.  But I still wanna play it again and I guess that is a good sign.

The winner of the night for me, though, is a cute little dexterity-ish game about murders in a hotel.  In Mord Im Arosa, players place cubes in a hotel (tower) and try to listen to what level they drop to.  They then take turns revealing levels and trying to guess which opponents' cubes will be revealed there.  That's a bit of an oversimplification but the game really is pretty simple.  And silly.  But, boy, did the 6 of us "serious gamers" enjoy it!  It's quite nasty as you try and guess your opponent's pieces to cause them to gain unwanted points and by the end we were all very quiet listening to each cube fall and trying to locate exactly where they landed. 

A blast, an absolute blast, and a reminder to me that not every game I play has to be deep or elegantly designed or streamlined or loaded with different strategies.  It just has to be fun.  And that's really why we keep moving cubes and rolling dice and playing cards and counting scores, right?  Because it's supposed to be fun.  And this lovely game delivers that in spades.