Games at Mark's, May Edition

My boardgaming life has been a bit spare recently, but one of Mark's regular events (which I've written about before) was last weekend. We showed up a little late, and our timing was just wrong enough that pretty much everyone there was in the middle of a game. Fortunately, someone (whose name I sadly missed) broke out a copy of Mr. Jack (with the expansion), which turned out to be just right given the time we had. We played a pair of games, and it cemented my conclusion that Mr. Jack, like Fury of Dracula, is clearly balanced for a different group of gamers than the ones I normally play with. Jack and Dracula just have too hard a time. Still, it's light and fairly quick, and the expansion does switch things up a bit.

As the other games broke up, I rounded up some players to try the copy of Age of Gods I'd cracked open. I'd only read the rules that morning, but what I'd seen had intrigued me. I'm going to talk about this one at more length on an upcoming episode of Have Games, Will Travel, but suffice it to say that I was pleasantly surprised and I would gladly play it again.

I skipped out on the next round of games to chat with folks, but before Gwen and I headed home we gave Roy's copy of Infernal Contraption a try. I'll admit, I wasn't particularly inclined to like it, and I didn't. I have the same feeling about it that I do about Fluxx: I appreciate the cleverness of the mechanisms and the interesting emergent behavior, but I get the same enjoyment out of watching it that I do out of playing it.

So not a huge number of games played, but two of them were new to me, and with PaulCon VI coming up next month, I'm sure I'll get more in soon.