I spent most of today doing two things: playing board games with people at least a decade older than me and watching anime with people either a decade older or several years younger than me. Gaming went rather well, I managed to win the first two games we played: Dominion and Kingsburg. I then lost at Puerto Rico and won a single game out of the three games of Shadow Hunters we played.

Dominion is a card game in which you are trying to build a deck out of a set of communal cards. Each turn, you draw a new hand, and using the action card and money cards available you try to either build a better deck or to buy cards that provide victory points. It is made more interesting by having 25 types of cards available to purchase, of which, only 10 are actually used in any given game. It even provides a special random choice deck for deciding which ones are availble.

Kingsburg was also rather interesting. It is fundamentally about kingdom building and resource management with an element of die rolling to provide some random generation. It is further made tricky by having explicit catch-up mechanisms (you get bonus actions and dice when you're behind on building) as well as having periodic events which upset your standing (attacks from enemy hordes).

We then played Puerto Rico which is (essentially) another kingdom building game, only the kingdom is the plantation kind in South America. It may have too many moving parts for my taste and it is very easy to get very far behind. Add that to its long play time and I'm a bit unimpressed with it.

The last game that we played was Shadow Hunters. The premise of the game is that each player is either a "Shadow" (some sort of nasty World of Darkness type thing), a "Hunter" (the kind that kills Shadows), or a Neutral. At the beginning of the game, players are assigned types randomly and those types are kept hidden. When they're assigned a type, they are also given an objective: Shadows and Hunters want to wipe out the other side; Neutral have their own unique objectives like wanting to be the first to die or collect a pile of artifacts. Players move around a board by rolling two dice (1d6+1d4) and get cards black and white cards tend to give items, weapons or instantaneous effects. Green card, however, contain questions which help to reveal the nature of the people around you on the board. The drawing player reads the card, which forces actions on certain types of characters, and then gives them to another character who then must carry out the action. Of course, all of this is done without revealing anything to any other players, including even what card was given. I think this was my favorite game of the day.

After I got home, I ended up ordering Dominion and Shadow Hunters to have at work for our board game lunches. The former will make a good addition to our set of games that can be played with three because we have very few that fall into that category. The last will make a good alternative for large groups (5+) since the game's probably only interesting with at least 5 people (I think 4 is technically playable).

As for anime, we screened a whole bunch of single episodes of things. Nothing we watched really jumped out at me as necessary, except perhaps Project Blue Earth SOS which is retro-futurism set in the far off future of the year 2000 (I'd note that the original run of the series was in 2006). It is sort of what Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow would be if done in anime form in the FUTURE! rather than the past. Of course, we'd already watched the first episode previously, so it hardly seems fair to list it tonight, but I feel compelled nonetheless.

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