twomeeplesandadog

[twomeeplesandadog]

Bears vs Babies: A Game Review

We're three games into our challenge to play all games in our collection three times. After playing Yahtzee, I needed a palette cleanse.

It'd be easy to just select a game we enjoy, but to keep things interesting, we used the randomizer in BG Stats to select Bears vs Babies as our next play. I'll admit it's a nice feature if you want to break out of your habit of selecting the game favorite games over and over.

Bears vs Babies is a new game to our collection. We've played it once before with a group during a game night. In the moment, we really enjoyed it and put it on our wish list.

Who wouldn't like trying to build ridiculous monsters like a velociraptor in business attire who sucks at dancing to battle nacho babies and fake babies and lots of other weird looking babies?

As a group game we definitely enjoyed it, however as a two player game it didn't pack the same punch. My husband and I typically don't pull any punches when we play each other. We were so focused on messing the other person up or making sure the other didn't have an advantage that we didn't really collect many babies.

It's fun to build the monsters. I did find the power drill cards a little useless. and wished there were more poke the babies cards. Having more players to split the babies up, makes the game less of a runaway if someone is drawing the right cards at the right time.

This was another wipe out. I dominated all three games. The first two rounds had the widest margins at 21 to 7 and 25 to 14. By the final round, my husband mostly caught up at 15 to 14.

Up next? Sagrada.

The Wife

[twomeeplesandadog]

Yahtzee: A Classic with Too Much Chance

Sitting at the very top of one of our bookcases sits some of our “classic games.” (Monopoly sits in another room, far away from view). These American classics are rarely touched in our household. They require little strategy, include far too much chance, and therefore, are mainstains in homes with young children as they are easy to play for those of all ages. Being encouraged to yell out “Yahtzee!” when you hit five of a kind is also an exciting way to get everyone involved.

Yahtzee does indeed include a large amount of chance. After all, you are rolling five dice up to three times hoping to make specific combinations for points. Yahtzee, of all the classics we own, has a special place in my heart, as a favorite from childhood when my family would play games during winter vacation ski trips. My mother has never really enjoyed playing games, but Yahtzee, for whatever reason, was one she was occasionally willing to spend time playing.

Our version of Yahtzee is almost as old as the game itself, and doesn’t even include a prominent Hasbro logo on it. But the game hasn’t changed at all in the almost 70 years of its existence. That said, I’m not sure when the last time was that my wife played the game, and before starting, I needed to explain the rules to her. The lack of strategy inherent in the game led her to be baffled at the game's existence, after one play of the game even exclaiming, “That’s a dumb game.”

And she’s right, to a point. If you are able to get behind Yahtzee, there is strategy as to how you choose to score your points. Should your four 1s go down as a four of a kind or as your 1s? Since four of a kind is a total of all dice, that's a poor option for that. Whereas the 1s is simply a total of your 1s. Save those four 5s for your four of a kind.

And while you may think my wife’s issues with this game led to her losing all three plays, you’d be mistaken. The results indicated otherwise:

Game 1: Husband - 273, Wife - 228

Game 2: Husband - 174, Wife - 245

Game 3: Husband - 184, Wife - 153

By the end of our third game, wife has certainly begun to pick up on some of the strategies for the game, but still felt Yahtzee to be lacking. “I don’t feel intellectually challenged,” she remarked after we finished the games, and insisted we play something else immediately. She promptly kicked my butt in Wingspan.

[twomeeplesandadog]

Let the games begin: Ticket To Ride

Ticket to Ride is a special game in this house, which is why we decided to use this as the first game in our challenge to play all our games three times over the next two years.

My husband and I met volunteering for a youth organization in Knoxville, TN. For the next five years, we saw each once a year for a week. You see, we lived in different states.

Then in year six, we started playing the Ticket to Ride app on our phones. Mix in more time and life events, we started a long distance relationship with Ticket as one of our main connection points. More life stuff and we were living together. One night playing games, he proposed after I won a round of Takenoko. The rest, you could say, is history.

Did I mention our wedding theme was board games? We even had board game themed wedding invitations.

Anyways, we figured it was appropriate to start the challenge with the game that kept us together.

Ticket to Ride is a classic game. It's a great gateway game that can still end friendships. It's approachable for those unsure of the vast color cardboard world out there. Ticket was the first game in my collection outside of the traditional kids games everyone has.

My favorite version is the 10th Anniversary Edition of the US map. The trains, metal storage tins and full sized cards make it special. We'll be revisiting Ticket to Ride with several of our other boards as we work our way through the challenge.

We're pretty evenly matched when we play. However, it didn't seem that way.

I crushed it. Won two of the three rounds.

Round 1: 246 to 145

Round 2: 265 to 103

Round 3: 159 to 188

After 11 years with Ticket to Ride in my life, I can say it still has great replay value. We play this game and the other boards several times a year. There's no sore losers when we play this.

The ticket cards keep the game fresh as you never know what your starting routes are going to be. There's also nothing better than being an agent of chaos when you claim the essential route someone else needs. It's a lovely little moment of glee.

I also get a great amount of satisfaction when completing one of those 20+ point cards and then drawing a series of new tickets that I've serendipitously completed finishing other routes.

This was an easy game to knock off three rounds. Definitely a keeper in our collection.

Up next? Yahtzee!

Sincerely, The Wife

[twomeeplesandadog]

A new year, a new challenge

I'm not sure when playing a board game turned into a hobby, but it did. I went from playing maybe a couple board games a year to playing over a hundred times per year.

And I know over a decade, that my husband and I've spent hundreds of dollars slowing building a collection of games. This past year, we backed our first Kickstarter game: Blueprints: Castles of Mad King Ludwig by Bezier.

When that game arrived and we tried to find a space for it, that we'd accumulated a fair number of games. Many of those games, we haven't played in years.

So for one of our 2024 New Year resolutions, my husband and I have decided to play every game in our collection (including expansions) over the next two years at least three times. That's 97 base games and 25 expansions. That represents 352 plays in two years.

We'll also add new games we acquire to the challenge.

I'm not sure what will come of it or what we'll learn about games, ourselves or our relationship, but it seems like something fun and challenging to do. Although, our dog Laika may not think it's fun since our attention won't be on her.

We'll be tracking our game play with Board Game Stats: Challenge expansion and with our Board Game Geek apps.

And to keep us honest and on track, we decided to document our efforts.

Hopefully we won't want a divorce after we play Monopoly three times.