Seems this was a week of birthdays. Wednesday, I attended a friend’s birthday party at The CG Realm, where I got to play a couple of games. Then this past weekend I had my birthday party.

I played so many games for my birthday that I’m going to talk about that in a separate post.

In addition to that we got in our weekly Gloomhaven game on Friday.

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The Bellhop’s Boardgaming Birthday Bash

This past weekend my wife put on a big birthday bash for me.

I played a ton of games at this event. So many that I decided it was probably better to separate them out from our regular week in review. So similar to what I did for New Year’s, I’ve created a separate blog post all about Saturday’s Event.

You can check it out here:
The Bellhop’s Boardgaming Birthday Bash!

Tuzey’s Birthday

This past Wednesday, local gamer Tuzey had her birthday party at The CG Realm. I’ve know Tuzey for quite a while now, she was part of my 4th Edition D&D group and has been around the local gaming scene for years. We don’t game together very often anymore, so it was cool to be able to meet up on Wednesday.

Some of Tuzey’s friends from school attended the party and the group was mostly non-gamers. The first game the group played was Dragon Ball-Z Yahtzee. I turned this one down, instead using the time to get some dinner from The Windsor Sandwich Shop. I even mixed it up and got a French Dip instead of Coney dogs.

While I had my French Dip, they seemed to be having a good enough time playing the dice game. There didn’t seem to be any special Dragon Ball rules, just pictures of characters on the dice.

Up next, Tuzey broke out a copy of Monty Python Fluxx. I’m not much of a Fluxx fan. I’ve had some really bad experiences with Fluxx. Both with games ending too quickly and going on for far too long. Thankfully we didn’t have either problem this game.

Fluxx is still far too silly and random for me overall but I have to admit I did like the Monty Python theme. This particular version seemed to have a lot more creepers in it and cards for moving those around.

After Fluxx, I convinced the group to play a game of Bandu. I got a copy of this dexterity game for my birthday earlier in the month and was looking forward to getting it played. This was my first time teaching the game, but I had played a friends copy many years ago when it was under the Bausack name. As usual, we did screw up one rule but that didn’t really ruin the game.

Bandu is a dexterity game that is a lot like Junk Art. It has a bunch of wooden pieces, some of which are in very interesting shapes. It’s the actual shapes that really make this game stick out from other dexterity games. These are not simple and easy to stack in any way. There are a few different ways to play the game and we stuck with the original rules.

These rules have you pick a piece and either auction it off for players to keep, or auction it for the right of refusal, where players bid to not take a piece. This adds a very interesting level of tactics that I really enjoyed. A player is eliminated if any part of their structure touches the table (other than the base) and the winner is the last person with a standing structure.

Bandu proved popular enough that we played a second time, this time using one of the other sets of rules where each piece you add to your structure has to make it taller. That game also went well but I think I prefer the other rule set.

Overall I like it but I think I may like Junk Art more. I love the variety in Junk Art, how each time you sit down and play you are going to be playing three very different games with the same set of blocks. The four different ways to play Bandu aren’t as varied as the play modes in Junk Art.  Though I do have to say the wooden pieces are cooler in Bandu.

Gloomhaven

Wow was that ever a close game!

Besides the fact that we almost started the wrong scenario, Friday night’s Gloomhaven game went really well. For some reason we had written down the wrong scenario number and when I started setting things up for the stream I had all the wrong tiles and monsters out. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, I’m just glad I noticed before we actually started playing.

This time around we were headed back to the Elemental Plane to raid the Infernal Throne Room. This was a boss fight mission and a really neat and hard one.

While it took us a while to actually find the boss, I really liked the mechanics of that fight. I don’t want to spoil anything here, but it wasn’t just “kill all the things.” That was a nice break, since I think our last three scenarios were all about killing all of the baddies on the board.

This particular fight really felt like we needed teamwork to pull off and I did not think we were going to make it. I was exhausted shortly after the boss showed up due to getting surrounded, but thankfully managed to do a bunch of damage before going down. If it weren’t for my sacrifice there’s no way the team would have made it through to the end. At least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Next session we’re following up a loose thread from this last mission that should prove interesting. Trying to recover an artifact that this boss wanted to hire us to find. Remember you can watch us play that scenario live Friday night at 8:30pm EST at twitch.tv/tabletopbellhop.

So that was my #WhatDidYouPlayMondays wrap up. What games hit your table this week?