Jan 1st - before bed.
(just me and Darcy)
Played Hanabi with Darcy's spiffy new Deluxe set. Got one point short of perfect (base game). Deluxe set allowing using tile placement, orientation or just minor note taking behind tiles makes game much much easier than holding cards on head Indian-poker style.
Pack-o-Game BUS (first time playing) The explanation was a bit rough, and understanding the "progress area: was a bit rough even with the series's wonderful 3-minute Youtube video instructions. Once we figured the game out, it was love. It's is a wonderful microgame that distills the pick-up-and deliver genre down to its purest essectials. Darcy lost handily, by making the mistake of taking her first pickup card from the facedown stack and getting one that had the slowest speed. While in general those are compensated by having the highest point value, getting it first really did not let her make additional pickups or positional moves anywhere near fast enough to catch up with my more midrange early cards.
Jan 1st : New Years Day LONG GAME day
(started with mild hangover, fixed with much much caffeine and a couple aspirin)
Lex and Cynthia and their roomate Jeff hosting. Ted, Kaitlyn and myself attending to play the 1979 Avalon Hill DUNE. :sandwormshouldbeanemote:
![Image](http://chickgeek.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Dune_cat.jpg)
This 70s gamer game design is good-old honest Ameritrash from the age when that's what all games aspired to be. I was thrilled in the way a car enthusiast might be thrilled getting to drive an original model T. This is awesome, but there are so very many reasons why nobody designs games anything like this nowadays.
After slightly more than an hour of rules explanation, the game lasted just under eight hours of actual play. The factions were (Lex) Benegesirit, (Cynthia) Atraides, (Jeff) Fremin, (Ted) Emporor, (Kaitlyn) Spacer's Guild, (Me) Harkonnen, with myself and Lex pulling an allied victory on turn 10.
![Image](https://scontent.fphl2-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/15873585_10107621993565613_2799676379930179806_n.jpg?oh=ec8791c563804c05e557c32e4954030b&oe=58D85730)
The game is really notable in that follows neither the "one player slowly snowballs to an insurmountable advantage" nor the "everyone slowly loses in a war of attrition" paradigms . Each player is very likely to experience majors ups and downs, but at your peak you are going to run up against the game's hard limits to the number of troops you can have, and/or the number of cards you can hold, and/or your movement making it very hard to seal a win. Conversely, even if you loses absolutely everything you will still collect income and regenerate troops each turn - meaning that inside 3 turns of catastrophic losses you are likely to be able to use reinforcements from space to make a grab for one of the victory condition regions that has been weakened due to other players fighting over it. It's not a game with an arc of progress - it's a game of getting the necessary cockblocking done to prevent anyone else from winning until luck or the misplays of others hands you opportunities.
Three of the factions have additional victory conditions. The two which are basically just stalling to drag the game to maximum length are not interesting, but the Bene-gesserit condition of being able to steal a win by having correctly predicted who is going to win and on what turn is pretty interesting and maybe worth using as a seed for more modern designs.