Board Game Night

Yesterday, my wife and were invited to our friends’ house where we ate dinner and played a couple of board games: Yellowstone and Acquire.

We played Yellowstone before dinner, while their rambunctious two-year old played with her large floor puzzle. Yellowstone is a fun, non taxing, game. In the game you have to control a herd (bison, big-horned sheep, mule deer, or elk) from the edge of the board to the centre. In some ways it resembles a complex version of Chinese Checkers, only with predators stalking your marbles/members of the herd. Overall, it is fun, and quite entertaining when you send a mountain lion to kill a rival herd’s unaccompanied young.

After dinner, we played Aquire. Now this is quite the interesting game. My friend has one of the old versions when it was produced by 3M. The parts are rather simple: a game board with co-ordinates (A-I and 1-12), tiles with printed co-ordinates, 7 hotel chains, paper money, and stock for each company. Each turn is rather simple but the strategy overall is complex and subtle. It is hard to know who is winning until all the money is counted at the end. Each turn consists of playing one of six tiles in your hand, buying stock, and replacing the tile in your hand. For founding a company, the player is awarded a free share of stock. The challenge comes in when companies merge. The smaller company is absorbed into the larger, bonuses are paid to the two largest shareholders of the small company, and all holders can trade shares for the new company, sell the shares, or keep, hoping the company will be restarted. The strategy is to buy stock in companies in the beginning that’ll be bought out, but to end up as a majority shareholder in couple of the larger surviving companies. Of course, it’s often hard to predict which company will perform. A lot of what makes the game enjoyable is that each player is kept in the game until the end. Much to her delight, my wife won. Amazingly, we left at 10:30 pm and I had to be work the next day at 6:45 am, but it was well worth it.

Perhaps next I can comment on one of my favourite games, Settlers of Catan (of which we have 2 expansion packs).