After a week of no gaming and adjusting to the work routine again (it’s amazing how having a week off throws you out) Diego and myself met up on Friday to play some games.

There were others invited but they had life going on to prevent them from joining us.

We started off with a learning game of Parks.

Parks had not even been on my radar of games to buy. But over Christmas an opportunity came up to buy a copy so I did.

I have to say production value wise Parks knocks it out of the park! This is Stonemaier level of production quality. A great insert, trays you take out to hold the resources. Wooden pieces. And the cutest animal tokens ever. Each a different animal.

I love the art on the cards. The game looks beautiful on the table.

During setup and our dramatic reading of the rules I was thinking how are we ever going to buy park cards or do anything in the four rounds, or seasons as they are called in the game? The action track or whatever it was called seemed too short. But it does grow by one space at the start of the subsequent rounds.

One of my tactical mistakes of the game was letting Diego keep the camera for a large part of the game. It was basically giving him free points.

We both got a lot more done in the game than I thought we would. It was very quick to learn, and play. We both really liked the game. And yes sooner than later the expansions will be popping through my letter box.

Oh Diego won.

Our second game was a new push your luck dice game called Can’t Stop that I got.

What a fun dice game. It worked at our player count. And I can’t wait to play at the higher player counts. I’ll write a bit more in my research post for my cyberpunk game project, because this game was bought for that.

But the history books will reflect that I won the game.

Our final game of the evening was Terraforming Mars the dice game.

I thought this worked well as a two player game.

It did initially feel like a learning game as I’d only played the game once before.

We soon picked up the iconography on the cards.

It felt like an awful long time in the game from the initial production that I did a production run. I’m not sure if that was a good or bad thing. I’m also undecided if it’s a good thing to do frequent/regular production runs in the game. More plays will help with this tactical decision.

Like Can’t Stop I’ll be talking about Terraforming Mars the dice game in the research post.

Sadly it’s no longer John Carter of Mars, but Diego of Mars as he won.

It was great to be sharing these games with Diego. I had a fun evening.