Good Reef

You may get some deja vu reading this, because yet again I played a game of Kingdomino with my friend Brennan while hanging out with his whole family. It's only because we really like each other and the game is colourful enough that it distracts the children from ruining it for us while we try and play. I won again, but this time it was much closer. Maybe I should stop playing with him so he doesn't beat me.

In the evening, my ex-student teacher (not because I didn't pass him, but because he DID pass and is now a real teacher) came over to play games. At the end of his practicum with me, after my marks were already in, he bought me a copy of Clank! Now, a year and a half later, I have all the expansions and we finally got a chance to play! We tackled the Dwarven Mine together and he beat me good. I'm not sure what went wrong. Maybe he stole some artifacts while I was taking the dog out? That would make the most sense.

What I enjoyed about playing this multiplayer as opposed to solo was the race to get the most gold deposits mined. This is one area that I succeeded at, and so I got a bonus 20 points to Shane's 10. That kept the game a little bit closer. I can see how in a 3 or 4 player game this can really turn into a race to get to the gold deposits before others do.

After Clank!, Shane introduced me to Reef. I'm not a big Euro-gamer (who would've guessed?) but I'm always up to try something new. In Reef, you are building a coral reef. It's sort of a spacial awareness game where you make stacks of different coloured coral and try to match patterns on cards to get the most points. On your turn you either play a card or take a card. Each card has two parts to it. The top part gives you two new coral pieces that you place on your board. The bottom part gives you points for the layout of your reef. For example, you might get 5 points for every 3 blue coral pieces in a row. Or maybe 5 points for every red piece of coral that is at the 4th level of a stack. I found it really hard to balance getting new cards with building my board properly, but I think I did alright. Shane crushed me, but, I had 50 points still. I would definitely give it another go as it only took us about 15 minutes to play. I can commit to 15 minutes of Euro.