Dragons Hobbies Dragons Hobbies - Games, RC, music, movies - What do you horde?

Happy Birthday Chris! I hope you have a good one!

My brother, LaZer, has been telling me all about Mobsters on MySpace. I was never interested in joining the game before, even though the theme is of interest to me. Now I've seen more of the game I'm interested a bit more but I also still realize that it would be a huge time sink.

Since Mobsters has been a big topic around here for the past few days, I thought it might be a good time to break out Bootleggers, a board game about mobsters and bootlegging moonshine. I hadn't been able to play it before, so this was a new experience for me also. We had 4 players, Kevin, Jacob, LaZer, and me, which I had read was a good number of players. After playing it once, I can definitely say that I can see the game being playable but probably wouldn't have much action with only 3 players.

Even though I shuffled up the deck multiple times, we seemed to have some bad luck with the draw initially, not getting many Influence cards for the first half of the game. Since we didn't have enough influence, only O'Malley's was open during the first 3 rounds. This meant that there weren't any choices for where to send the trucks, so it was rather uneventful, but maybe that was good for getting a handle on the game initially.

Unfortunately, I had missed a rule about the Speakeasy Improvements, which came up quite a bit before we were able to get much more Influence in town. Because of that mistake, once we got two more establishments opened up for us we were rolling more dice than we should have. Instead of adding 1 to the die roll I misunderstood the improvement to be 1 additional die. I didn't catch that mistake until I was looking up a rule on a different card during the final round of the game (Round 8 for the Short Game Option, which we decided to use since it was the first game and those are usually longer anyway). 

In the end, Kevin stomped us with over $70G due to his Controlling Influence in a larger establishment. He was raking in the dough, probably partially due to there being a huge amount of whiskey being consumed there due to rolling 6 dice (whoops!). Everyone seemed to enjoy the game and hopefully we'll get a chance to break it out again tonight. Now that everyone is familiar with the rules we plan on playing a full length game.

I've been busy working on the house with my brother, Kevin, and his son, Jacob. We've been having a good time doing the work, talking, and playing board games afterward. Over the past week I've introduced Kevin and Jacob to several new games, including The Settlers of Catan, For Sale, and Rumis; the Iron Man movie, and some music on Fuel Radio. The beginning of next week might be about the same, but hopefully we'll be done with the work before too long... after all, I have to start gearing up for the next semester of college.

Yesterday we went to my parent's place for Father's Day and to pick up Kevin and Jacob. While we were there we played Alhambra again. (It's best to keep familiar games played with my dad so that I don't have to re-teach him too much.) Dad had a good lead for most of the game. I had built a good wall and had first place or tied for first with a few different building types. Beth was also doing very well, especially for her first time playing through an entire game. We had a full table, with Kevin, Jacob, and Lazer also playing. In the end Dad had the lead before the walls were scored, but this time I got ahead with my 12-point wall.

Now that we are home we're back to our home improvement project that we've been wanting to get completed for years now. My step-brother Kevin is visiting again this week, along with his son Jacob, and will be helping us out. Due to this, I probably won't be online much in the next few days.

Sorry I have been so "out of pocket".  The vacation was FANTASTIC!!  I will update this post with a BLOG when I have time.  I need to get some extra rest for work tomorrow.  I will blog in the next week.  It will be a big un!