Niagara arrives!

Our latest family addition, Niagara, arrived today after our surprise win on Ebay! I doubted very much we would find a copy for sale, let alone one for auction, but one was going in Mint condition and we won with one bid! We also had our doubts it would be Mint condition, so we had taken a gamble because parts could be missing, but the owners said it was 100%. We got it today and had a good look through - not only was it 100% complete, but there was also 2 extra gems (instead of one) of each colour!

I've had a scoot through of the rules and it seems very good - although the rules do cover many pages, a fair amount is for Examples and diagrams. The dynamic of how the river flows is brilliant - the board is placed upon the upturned lid and base, so a waterfall hangs over the edge of one box edge. The board has a channel cut into it with plastic discs representing the river water. The canoes used for going up and down the river to get the gems to win the game, float on the discs. At the end of each turn, more discs are pushed into the start of the river, causing the other discs to move along the channel, penny-pusher style, eventually causing one or more to fall off the waterfall edge, taking any hapless canoes with it!! Players use Paddle cards with numbers on them to navigate the rapids, between 1 and 6 and a cloud card to manipulate the weather (for better or worse), thereby increasing or decreasing the speed of the river each turn. It does sound a little complex, but the rules compress into one side of paper in a Summary, so hopefully it'll be pretty cool to play.

We will try it out on Sunday.

Death Angel - space hulk card game ultra cheap!

I saw this one when it was first previewed and I thought Hmm maybe. I found it it had solo play built in and thought again, ok, maybe, but later. I checked out the price and saw Andy had got it in for £20. Again not bad, but I thought I'd wait until Christmas. Then I noticed someone selling it on Amazon for £10 + p&p brand new! One left in stock! I grabbed it straight away as I knew it was going out of stock all over and I thought I could have it put away for Christmas.

Weekend play

Just played one game this weekend - Nordic Ticket to Ride; and I won by a staggering 148points to 114! Tried to introduce Roshni to Back to the Future but a lot of the aspects of the incidents from the films, not the game play, were lost on her as she'd not seen the film in ages! So we stopped and said we'd watch the films and give it a go again.

Also took a stroll to stretch the legs which just happened to pass Battlequestgames :) Popped in for a look around and got talking to Andy about Back to the Future. He mentioned it was based on Fluxx and loaned a shop copy to try out. Turns out it's a pretty cool game after a quick rules check and solo play. Try and squeeze a game in with the family before it has to go back. Also the Disaster at Dieppe add on for Memoir is due in next week, so I hope to collect on Thursday.

Managed to also secure a second hand copy of Niagara - Anita found a second hand copy on Ebay going cheap and because we were not 100% if it was for us, we got that instead of a brand new one. Hopefully with us in a few days.