Hanabi & Love Letter

A very relaxed evening playing a couple of card games.  The first was brought by Stuart and called Hanabi, currently quite popular on the BGG Family Game list.  This is a cooperative game with a unique mechanism - you hold your cards the other way around, so everyone else knows what you have, and tries to give you information during the game to enable the playing of a sequence of cards to set off one of five fireworks.  Really clever and led to some good-natured frustration when ESP failed.  I think we played it about three times in the end.

We finished with a very close game of Love Letter (using James' home-made Dad's Army set of cards).  I think we all got to three cubes each but Kieron got the fourth cube first, winning the game.

Love Letter & Ra - 7 May 2014

Stuart, Kieron and James met up for a last minute convened games night.  We played a couple of light games which allowed plenty of time to catch up.  The first of these was Stuart's excellent Love Letter - a very clever little game involving just 16 cards, some bluffing, some informed guesswork, and a fair bit of luck.  The winner is the first to win five rounds so there is inevitably some levelling as the person out front gets more attention from the other players.  So we all got to four points before James' lucky "Princess protected by a Handmaid" combo won him the last game.  Enormous fun and it plays quite quickly, so definitely one to bring out at the end of games evenings (I've already bought another copy!).

We followed up with the comfortable pair of old slippers that is Ra.  Always fun - James scored big early on with pharoahs and civilizations, Stuart scored late with a huge collection of buildings, Kieron had a more balanced strategy, but the final scores were James 48, Stuart 38 and Kieron 37.