The second Christmas update!
We hosted my family Christmas this past Saturday; our best showing since before the Pandemic – we had 8 guests over (out of a theoretical maximum of 12). I got to see my mom for the first time since 2019 – she got to meet our nearly 1-year-old youngest child and see our 3.5 year old for the first time since she visited us at the hospital when she was born. It had been a long time; and sadly I didn’t get to spend a lot of time catching up with her.
My older two daughters each received a game as a gift; the older one got “match puzzle game” which I’m not sure if it’s actually a game or not (it is also not databased on BGG, from what I can tell); my partner got it out to play with her yesterday while I was out running errands, and she said she (an educated adult), couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to work.
The middle daughter received “Eye Found It – Hidden Picture Card Game”, which is on BGG, but is very close to not being a real game either – my oldest enjoyed it but the middle one doesn’t have the attention span yet for “find the thing hidden in the picture” activities.
My partner received Blank Slate, which appears to be a word game hybrid of Apples-to-Apples and Dixit. Each player has a dry-erase slate and marker; a “Word Cue” card is revealed and everyone writes a word to complete the cue, hoping to match an answer with someone else; extra points for matching with exactly 1 other person, but no points for not matching with anyone. Looks interesting enough for a light party game that supports up to 8.
My grandmother usually gets me a game from my wishlist, so I wasn’t too surprised to get one myself; what I wasn’t really expecting was Eriantys, mostly because it was put on my wishlist very late – I was out running errands a few weeks ago (like, mid-December?) and I was catching up on So Very Wrong About Games and in the episode I was listening to (#224), they discussed playing Eriantys, a reimplementation of Carolus Magnus a.k.a Carlos Grande a.k.a. Chucky Big Big a.k.a. Chucky Mags a.k.a. Caruly Maguly a.k.a. The Big Chuckster. I had heard them talk about Carolus Magnus before and thought it would be interesting to check out, but grumpy european dudes are an increasingly difficult thematic setting to pitch; instead of grumpy european dudes, there’s brightly-colored frogs and unicorns on floating islands. I’m very excite, especially by the stated “30 minute” play time.