Jedi by Knight

This is the 3rd weekend in a row I’m away from home.  It’s kinda exhausting!  Right now I’m at a scrapbooking retreat…more on that later.

For TableTop Day I’d like to talk about what I did last weekend: the 5th annual retreat of the Board Gamers of Greater Akron, which takes place at Camp Carl in Ravenna.  We got to start on Thursday evening this year, and went until 3pm on Sunday.

Here are some of the games I played:

• 7 Wonders (Cities and Leaders expansion)–My first time playing with expansions!  I got to play the Catan board, too.  7 Wonders is a great game for 7 players that doesn’t take forever.  And it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s winning until the end, which I think is fun.
• Star Trek Deck Building Game (Explorations scenario)–My first time playing the non-coop version, and I crashed and burned.  I played my husband to 400 points: he had 400, I had 0.  I hope there’s a learning curve!
• One Night Ultimate Werewolf–I hate social deduction games, but this is definitely an improvement on the classic Werewolf game.  It’s only one round, has lots of different character roles, and you can run it with an app that takes the place of the moderator (it also has a timer-we did 10 min).  I was a Mason 3 out of the 4 times we played, so luckily I didn’t have to lie at all!
• The Builders: Middle Ages–A quick, simple game for a few players.  It’s quite new, just released in English in late February.  I enjoyed it, but I was also pretty tired when I played it.

One of the great things about BOGA is that it has its own subgroup of game developers, called the Design and Prototype Committee, so BOGA players are frequently trying out new games.  A big group of us enjoyed World Series of Russian Roulette, a kind of press-your-luck game whose pieces consisted of a standard card deck, 6-sided dice, and some slips of paper with special abilities written on them.

There were nearly 100 people at the retreat this year…after a while I retreated to a corner with a book and let B play Battlestar Galactica, etc.  Sometimes introverts just gotta recharge. 🙂  Gamers are such nice people in general, though, that it really is always a fun time.  We had a potluck dinner on Thursday, and everyone brought the most delicious, healthy food!