Hosted my parents for Christmas, and played a few games:
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Forks several times (and putting my theory of how to teach the game to the test, very successfully). My dad scored a ludicrous 69 points in the first proper game, having ended up with no negative points. I think I was about -20 :). I managed positive scores of 2 and 5 in the last couple of games. I’m continuing to enjoy this a lot – it’s chaotic, but the brief duration of each game is packed with decisions, and the agony/ecstasy of the final reveal of the positive/negative suits is real. Also, each game is always 4 rounds, and every game I announced “this is the final round” when dealing the 4th round, and every game people responded “what, already?!”
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Spots with 4p, and there really aren’t a lot of rules to this, but I still managed to muck them up in the worst way. The way I taught it, the “Howl” action was the only way of acquiring a new dog card, but in fact you’re supposed to draw a new dog card every time you score a dog card. Gah, I’m an idiot. This led to people effectively missing turns repeatedly, which absolutely wasn’t fun. The worst part is that I then remembered making that same mistake and noticing the error when I was teaching myself the game a couple of months ago… and then I go and make the exact same mistake in a game with other people.
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Half of Thebes – another blunder on my part, simply because it was too late in the evening. In the end we just played one year of the game, which is ending the game in the middle, which is just unsatisfying. We all attempted the biggest excavations that we could, and some remarkably good treasures were found, but still… I’d needed to either start it much earlier, or forego it in favour of a quicker game.
Not really the games evening I’d had in mind, then; but we still had a nice day, beautiful weather, good food, and everyone enjoyed themselves.