Games at Snoozefest's: Ligretto, Snapchen Jagd (I'm pretty sure I spelled them both wrong, but I'm too late, and too lazy, to check)

Saturday, January 13th

After a long day of coaching wrestling at the DSA Duals, I managed to keep myself from logging on to World of Warcraft, and made my way through the woods to Snoozefest's house. Note - If I can, I'm going to start trying to refer to people by their BGG screenname, just to keep things sort of private.

Gaming was well underway by the time I got there, with the six players present involved in Havoc: The Hundred Years War. I haven't played this, so I took a look at the rules and tried to absorb a bit of the game.

This game involves card selection and set building, picking blind from a deck and choosing from a set of face-up cards. Basically, you are trying to build a six card poker hand, with six poker suits numbered 1-18 (I think). There are also a few "dogs", which are zero value cards that act as a wild card for the purpose of suiting. There are a series of battles of the Hundred Years war to be fought (8,iirc). Each battle commences when a player decides to start it, on their turn. Players elect to withdraw from the battle or start a hand. In the end, the player with the best hand wins, and gets the victory points. In most cases, there are points for people who finish in some of the other places. Once all the battles have been fought, the war is over and vps are calculated. This was actually a fairly fun game to watch. I think Sarah won, and I'm not sure of the placings after that.

We took a bit of a break for people to get food and drink, and divide into a couple of groups. Mary had some games she was hoping to play and review, so one table sat down with her new copy of Drive. Ravindra and Sarah and I broke out the Ligretto decks for some frenetic card-slapping.

I've played this a couple times before, and its really the kind of game I'm not that good at - requires constant attention and good memory, combined with lightning reflexes. It's also the kind of game that Sarah, someone who seems constantly focused and full of energy, should be dominant in, and that she was. The game ended Sarah-Ravindra-me, with me being pretty far behind. Although I don't feel I'm going to be really competitive at this game, I actually like it a lot as a sort of warm-up, or maybe something to get you going after a long heavy game - gets the mental juices and the blood flowing, so to speak.

After Ligretto, we were looking for another not so heavy or lengthy game, to keep us on time with the other group. Ravindra pulled out Snapchen Jagd, a trick taking game with six suits. Maybe playing Havoc reminded him of this. I've played several interesting variants on trick taking games over the last year, and this is another that I've enjoyed quite a bit. In SJ, you pick an initial number to be your "good number". Each card you take that matches goes in the good pile, which scores you positive points. All other cards you take go in the negative pile, counting against your score at the end. After each round, you are allowed to discard one number of which you have at least 3 cards. If you have more than 3, you can put the excess in your good pile, and that number becomes your new good number. After the final round, you can do this twice. It was fun trying to get my head around a strategy for taking cards - at first I just tried to avoid every trick, but you can't win without taking something! Finally I got a mental list of the numbers I was trying to build, and started acquiring tricks to work on scoring. In the last round, I got very lucky, taking several tricks with aces, scoring me a lot of points. In the end it was Me-Ravindra-Sarah.

It was fairly late, and I was a little tired, so I decided to call it a night and head home. It was a nice, relaxing evening of gaming, and reminded me that I have to start trying to pick up some of these unique trick-taking games.

GG, GL
JW