Boardgames this week

I've started playing boardgames again, semi-regularly, with a friend or two about once every two or three weeks. We've already tried a bunch of new games.

Last Wednesday we played a session of Red November (Play This Thing! review here). In Red November, you take the roles of up to 8 Gnomes in a Gnomish submarine where everything has gone terribly, horribly, wrong. Your only hope is to stave off complete destruction until help can arrive and you are rescued.

The game claims to be for 3-8 players, but the BGG page says 1-8, and I can see how that would work. It is a cooperative game, so solo you would take control of several Gnomes trying to save the sub. However, this didn't occur to me when we played, so the two of us just each took one Gnome, and the gameplay was stilted and uneven. Next time we'll each take more than one Gnome, or we'll only play with more people. I would dearly love to play an 8-player session! It would be a chaotic, tense (no downtime, due to the cooperative nature of the game), groggy, smokey, wet, noisy, crazy mad scramble!

After one session of Red November, we played an uncounted number of 2-player Dominion games. With two of us very familiar with the cards and mechanics, the sessions went very quickly. We've graduated to "level 2" play of Dominion (according to this thread). Level 3 can't be far off now! The trick is going to be trying to introduce new players into the mix. For those that don't play Dominion, the initial play is very fun and enjoyable. However, there is a strategy that generally works in most games, so once a player hits on that strategy, they become very very hard to beat, and the games become less fun. Once every player adopts that strategy, then the game becomes fun again because you now have to focus on not dropping that strategy (hard to do), and finding the quirks in that session's card mix that will give you the edge.

Very much looking forward to Race for the Galaxy next time!