My family and I enjoy playing tabletop games (think Settlers of Catan type games), and luckily there is a game center near us that has a large library of games that we can check out and play. We’ve tried out a few different games recently and wanted to share my thoughts on a few of them.

Ingenious – This is a simple game played with double hexagon tiles that you lay out on a board made up of hexagons. The tiles all have different colors on them, and you score points by matching colors to the tiles already on the board. Because the tiles have two linked hexagons on them it becomes a careful strategy game, balancing each side of the tile to best match the surrounding tiles so that you can get the most points. The whole thing is complicated by the fact that your points are in specific colors so you’re advancing multiple scoring markers at the same time. The winner is the person with the highest, lowest color score. This forces you to manage scoring all your colors as close to equally as you can.

Jamaica – This is a fun pirate themed racing game that involves rushing around the island of Jamaica, shooting at your friends, collecting treasures, and managing your inventory of gold, food and gunpowder. This game’s unique mechanic is in its action cards. Each action card has a morning action, and an evening action. After the dice are rolled each turn, the Captain picks which dice will affect the morning action, and which one will affect the evening one. There is a careful balance between which actions you want to play depending on what will happen (moving vs collecting resources) with the two dice that were rolled. The combat system is simple and fun, with a nice dose of randomness vs skill to it. We invited another friend along for this one and we all had a great time playing with some very memorable moments.

Versailles – On a whim we randomly grabbed this game off the shelf because we thought it looked interesting. As we dug into it we discovered that it was a bit more complex than we expected, but we decided to give it a try anyway. After a few rounds of learning the game really started to flow, and we started seeing some of the strategies that were emerging. The game is centered around collecting resources and building tiles, and then constructing the palace at Versailles. The method to collect these resources requires planning, as you can only move your meeples around the board in certain ways. You also need to balance how much to invest in developing new technology (that can help you in the long run) vs. all out resource building to get short term benefit. This is a longer game to play, but I think once you get the hang of it, the turns start going quicker and quicker.

Looking forward to trying these again sometime, and even more new games in the future.