Labor Day Weekend 2016: Saturday

Labor Day Weekend

Saturday: Board games and grilling

Stilson with apricots.

Spam musubi from Ono Hawaiian BBQ. (yeah, it was convenient...)

Porto's guava rolls!

And cheese rolls. I mean crack. NOM.

Salad with noodles. Another Chris special.

Successful escape!

Escape: The Curse of the Temple. It's a crazy real-time dice-rolling-card-placing-fest.

Secret Hitler. Actually decent fun and on the quicker side.

Time to fire up the grill.

USDA prime New York strip steaks and huge portabello mushrooms.

Forbidden Island with 4 players is way easier.

Of course we lucked out on the Waters Rise placement and the tiles we lost-- luck is a huge factor!

Stack of portabello mushrooms.

Half the steaks more medium, the other half rare.

Shiny new copy of Galaxy Trucker.

Modules: engines, special cargo, structure, human crew, regular cargo, batteries, and the center modules.

Modules: shields, life support modules (brown and purple), cannons, engines, shields, structure.

Not enough guns. Oops.

Ready to fly!

Cards Against Humanity: Trump Pack.

Cards Against Humanity: Hillary Pack.

Apparently 4 of the 5 of us are gunning for the same card in Roll For It!

Board games and grilling to start Labor Day weekend. Snacks are fancy cheese and crackers, spam musubi, loads of cheese rolls and guava rolls from Porto's Bakery, and a fancy new noodle salad Chris learned about. Plus some kettle corn and a few other things. Yum!

Board games were the main focus for once. Escape: The Curse of the Temple is an intense real-time dice game as you explore a temple on the fly, collecting gems to aid your escape as you, all driven by a ten minute soundtrack. It's quite different from our usual collection and quite good.

Ophelia picked up Secret Hitler on Kickstarter. It's another game of secret opposing roles (Liberals and Facists, in this case) that is very vaguely like Werewolf/Mafia, but shorter and at least to me, more interesting due to the better pace. Not sure we played it enough to fully understand the game mechanics, maybe it's much more complicated than we realize?

Threw the morning's Costco run on the grill for dinner-- USDA Prime New York steaks and some huge portabello mushrooms! NOMNOMNOM! More salad, add in some macaroni salad (like the spam musubi, also from Ono Hawaiian BBQ), and more Porto's for desert-- the chocolate chip cookies there aren't nearly as awesome as the cheese rolls...

While that happened, our first four-player sessions of Forbidden Island happened. Not sure if we're getting better or if it's easier with 4 players, but it was way easier? I suspect notching the difficulty up even one level would probably make it much harder. We also probably lucked out on the Waters Rise! card placement in the deck. Opened up the Cards Against Humanity Hillary Pack and Trump Pack too, just to take a quick look. (they look awesome and very poignant, but such themed cards definitely have a narrow focus...)

Galaxy Trucker was next. Explaining ship building was a little complicated (didn't help that only Chris and Brian had played before), but as a building/resource management game it's a masterpiece. Tons of fun, but we probably started playing way too late-- blame old age, but we were all starting to fall asleep by then. Ended up wrapping up the night with some Roll For It, a very simple yet deceptively difficult dice game.