Christmas Board Game Fun

Ahhh Christmas, when a young teacher's fancy turns to board games. At least mine does. It's a great time to play games and be introduced to new games. I got two games for Christmas (expansions, actually): Clank! Expeditions: Temple of the Ape Lords and Dragonfire Adventures: Chaos in the Trollclaws. I now have every Clank! expansion (not including the space side of things). I haven't been able to play these yet, hoping to get to that more in the new year, but I did play a bunch of really fun quicker and lighter games with my family over the break.

Birds of a Feather - I'm not really sure how to describe this game, it's not like anything I've ever played before. The premise is that you're a bird watcher trying to find all the different types of birds (represented by symbols) in an environment (represented by colours). Every player starts with a hand of cards and plays one each round face down. When everyone has played, you flip them over. If anyone has played a card from the same environment (colour) as you, you cross off those birds (symbols) on your score card. For the next round, you keep those cards on the table and score again. Except for the first round, there are always two of each players' cards on the table to score from. This was really simple and quick to play. Plus, I won with a score of 40 in one game - that seemed pretty impressive. I would definitely buy this one.

Silver and Gold - this one was the hit of the break, especially for Sharayah who kicked our butts every. single. game. This one is kind of like a roll'n'write, except it's a draw'n'write. You are a pirate searching for treasure. You choose different island cards that you need to fill in. There is a small deck of cards that has different Tetra-esque pieces on it. Whatever piece is drawn from the deck, that's the shape you can fill out on your card. The more cards you fill out (plus a few other bonuses) the better your score. I didn't come close to winning, but I would definitely buy this one too.

My best score of the break - still not enough to win.

Walking in Burano - we played this one with Logan and Jenn a few weeks ago, so it's new, but not new new. You can check out that post here. We played it again over the break and I managed to win again! I feel really good about that because usually I get my butt handed to me when I play with those three. As I mentioned in that post, I already have Dream Home and so I probably wouldn't buy this one.

Ain't she a beaut?

Evolution - ok, this one is not really light, but somehow Logan convinced us to play it anyway. You start off with one species and you help them evolve and adapt to become the strongest species. They might grow horns or gain the ability to climb or become carnivores. All of these have benefits for eating food - which is how you score points: whoever eats the most food over the course of the game, wins. I had built a really cool cooperative engine between my species so they shared food with each other and I milked it the whole game, pulling off another win. This game was ok, but I don't think it's my cup of tea.

My game winning species - so much cooperation happening here!

The Game - I think this one has been re-branded with pretty and bright colours, but we had the original version that has a creepy skull on the front and dark, violent colours. Which is weird, because I have no idea how that plays into the "theme" of the game (spoiler: there is no theme). In essence, this game is about counting. As a team, you need to get rid of all of the cards in the deck in numerical order. Two piles start at 1 and go up. Two piles start at 100 and go down. If you have a 98 card, you might play it on the 100 pile going down. But then someone can't play their 99 card on that same pile. So you need to strategize and work together to get rid of all of your cards. Logan and Jenn say they've never gotten rid of the whole deck, but on our second game the four of us managed it! We rock. I would definitely pick this one, although probably the prettier version.

That was my Christmas break of board gaming! What games did you get to the table? Did you have any great experiences playing the sames one as we did? Please let me know!