More family games, with family
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Backstories: Alone Under the Ice, first played in February cooperatively with Stuart. I didn't quite get the hang of how the game worked at that time, so I decided to take it for a solitaire spin.
The game works more or less like Buffalo Castle, where the story is presented on multiple cards, with a choice of stencils to satisfy specific objectives. Your role is a woman looking for her brother who disappeared while hunting Nazi treasure buried in a glacier-based laboratory.
It works ok. The ordered cards are a little clunky to manage, but managing story branches is a challenge in any system. I didn't quite figure out how to manage the objectives correctly, and got a couple of things out of order. Towards the end of the character had accummulated a fair bit of damage, and when the timer mechanic started I just fast-forwarded to a loss.
While the story is only marginally interesting to me, the way it is presented is interesting enough that I can see myself playing it at least one more time to get a better grip on the mechanics. I might want to apply the system to a different game.
Here's the situation around the mid-point of the game, down in the lab under the ice:
Jump Drive 85
Teaching game for Jonaven. I won this one with a couple of high value combo cards, but he did pretty well with a little coaching. He picked up the rules pretty fast.
6 Nimmt!
Fambly game, 4 us at the table. As usual, I didn't come close to winning. I'm not very good at this game! I rarely win it, and in multi-player, usually land in the bottom half for scoring. Fun game anyway, nice to have everyone at the table for a game.