Games night: Oh, the expansions....

Another night of games and even time for a quick beer afterwards.  There were only 9 of us so we only ended up playing 3 different games but by the sounds of it people had fun.

The first of us to arrive started off with a new Queen game Mammut that was quite different and a lot of fun:

Each player gets a set of adorable skinny and fat mammoth meeples...  Mammeeples?

The idea behind the game is quite simple and very unique.  A pile of about 30 tiles are dumped in the middle of the table and the first player takes as many of them as they want.  Each following player then has a choice:  take as many tiles as they want from the remaining tiles OR steal all the tiles from one other player who was "too greedy" and return one to the center of the table.  This goes on until everyone has a set of tiles and then scoring occurs.  For anyone who's played Ra, the scoring will seem familiar. 

Some of the different tiles to pick up.  Is that a sabre-toothed bunny?!?!?

Very simple premise, lots of interesting decisions.  And tons of stealing from your opponents.  This one was a whole lot of fun and full of a bunch of interesting but not agonizing decisions.  A great new family game that doesn't feel too much like anything that has come before. 


Giant start mammoth!

After the warmup, the group split in two.  One crowd of 5 went for Galaxy Trucker with the expansion:

The other 4 of us settled into one of my all-time favourite strategy games, The Princes of Florence:


The additional character actions from The Princess & The Muse

We have been playing this game a lot lately with the expansion cards from 'The Princess & The Muse'.  The expansion is absolutely phenomenal and does exactly what an expansion should do:  increase the risk, increase the reward, and deepen the strategies without adding rules complexity.


My game-winning estate.  Quite lovely having the Opera beside two lakes, if I may say so...

If you do play and enjoy Princes, I have to say now that the expansion is a must for us.  It takes an already great game of agonizing choices and adds way more agony with hardly any new rules.  If you haven't played Princes, you're missing out on a modern masterpiece of elegant and very tight game design.

The new characters in the excellent expansion.

Oh, and I even won Princes yesterday evening.  That's definitely new for me.