Toybox 28 Sept
Games - Samurai, Elfenlands and Blokus
Samurai
When I reach the shop after dinner, there are tables already up and running with other games. Seeing Jeff Goh, we started the game night with my current favourite, Samurai. A great game with three player, we roped in a newly met friend - Wilson Wang - to play together. It’s both their first game, so I sapu them with my ‘ninja’ tricks :P. Sorry guys, no breaks for newbies. Although they lost, they still have lots of fun. I’m enjoying it while my luck at Samurai holds.
Next, we move on to Elfenlands. Edwin explained this to us and as I realised later on the Eurogames Retreat, his explanation was very good and hard to emulate. Respect, man.
This is Edwin, sharing a joke with us
Basically, in this game, the players are Elves going on a journey through the Elfen Lands as their coming-of-age test. Players draw cards and markers every turn in order to play them to travel to the different Elven cities.
This game is actually marketed as a children’s game in Germany but I still find it to be a challenging game. You have to think to arrange your cards and markers for the most efficient travel. I guess the children aspect in this game comes from the fantasy setting and the players’ Elves travel through Elfenland on unicorns, dragons, gnome carts, magic pigs(!), etc.
We actually got a few laughs from the rest of the group, including Marcus, who took picture of us and couldn’t believe that a few grown ups are playing a children’s game. But I think it’s requires some brain power, ok, and I like it (I’m young at heart!).
Next we move to Manila. Now this game, the person who taught us the rules got an important rule wrong which messed up the whole game. We stopped the game and it was only later which we found out the correct rule. No matter, looking forward to try this game next time with the correct rule. Hope the crew from Toybox teaches this game correctly next time as it was a shame that no one can play it with the wrong rules!
We end the night with a game of Blokus.
A really, really simple game with only two lines of rules, all the players need to remember was that the pieces of the same colour played must touch each other at the corners ONLY. And off we go playing two games of Blokus.
Some one later commented that the game we played was very vicious, cut-throat with lots of blocking and undermining. This is probably due to everyone at the games table being experienced gamers!
We end up getting owned by a Toybox veteran, who managed to put all his pieces onto the board. Fun game, nice pieces, and fast playing time.
A word about Toybox, it’s only 2.50 per day to game here and although their games collection is not as good as Settlerscafe, they do sell drinks and tidbits. not a bad place.
