Weekend Boardgames

I had high hopes to play many board games this, my birthday weekend. Alas, we played only two, but they were good.

First up was our second game of Chateau Roquefort, a good looking game that combines aspects of memory and collecting (and little to no luck).

You play a team of up to four mice in an old derelict chateau, hunting for the only thing in life that really matters - cheese. The cheese is hidden under two layers: roof tiles of various shapes that must be removed during your turn, and a clever floor tile system that allows players to shift cheese and mouse-traps around underneath their mice.

Remembering previously revealed cheese is key, and tracking those remembered tiles through multiple shifts in different direction will eventually be, I think, what keeps us interested in this game as we get better at it, but for now we are playing with permanently removed floor tiles. While this removes the memory aspect of the game, it is still fun, and has allowed our littlest (4 years old) to win both games we've played.

And keeping (unintentionally) on the same theme, we picked up a used copy of Mousetrap for $4. We didn't actually play the game. I wanted to see if all the pieces were present, and once the Rube Goldberg machine was set up, the kids just kept triggering the marbles and watching the trap come down. Physics is fun!