Home Game Night

On Sunday night we invited a few friends over to play board games.

Star Trek Catan is a Star Trek-themed version of The Settlers of Catan. There are starships (little Enterprises) instead of roads and starbases instead of settlements. With those it runs like Settlers...with one twist. There are cards for 8 of the original series characters. Each player gets one card to use at a time. Each card has a special ability, for instance Uhura lets you name one resource and ask up to 2 players to each give you one of that resource from their hand.

It was a fun game. We had one player who had never played any version of Catan before, but another one of the guests showed up late and helped teach him as we played. Between the new player and the new special character cards, the game played out a little longer than we would have liked. However, it was definitely a fun twist on a foundation new-wave boardgame.

The Lost World is a Jurassic Park boardgame with one side playing the escaping humans and the other side playing the dinosaurs. On one turn the dinosaurs will roll dice and move until one of their dice tells them to stop. Then the humans do the same. The goal for the humans is to get 3 people through the dinosaur fields and into the helicopter at the end. That's regular Lost World. The game we played was two boards put together with twice the humans and twice the dinosaurs. It becomes epic and looks pretty hopeless from the human point of view.

The game owner "ran" the game and pitted the men vs the women, with the women choosing to be the dinosaurs. From the men's point of view, the board looks extremely long. We were a bit stressed right out of the gate, knowing we had a lot of humans to try to get out into and then through dino territory. We had fun alternating who rolled the dice and moved the figures. We were able to get 6-7/24 humans through the first board. The second board was just as brutal. We ended up with only two humans surviving to the helicopter. The dinosaurs won the day.

There was a lot of conspiring among ourselves, trying to hear each other while not allowing the other team to hear us. The dinosaur team was more laid-back, munching crunchy humans on the way up the board. It makes for a great game of teamwork, forced from the first dice roll. I'd suggest giving it a try if you can.

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