My brother came by and, of course, we played some games. The first game we played was Memoir ’44. We took the Operation Lüttich scenario; I was the allies, he was the axis. I lost 4-2, as his elite panzers managed to secure the village Axis needed to get and then killed three of my units. It was fun, but he wasn’t ecstatic about it — too much luck, it seems. I thought the game was great fun. It was also very easy and intuitive to teach, that’s always great.
He did enjoy Ta Yü. The tactile pleasure from the tiles was helpful, I suppose. There was more offensive play than ever, but I suppose that has something do with us being brothers…
Edit 2004-07-05: We played three more games on Sunday. Definite hit. You should’ve seen my board side in one of the games… Almost completely blocked! The games were very aggressive, with little mercy given. I think at times his tactic backfired, when he lost scoring opportunities when blocking mine, but most of the time it was quite effective.
Tom Tube was enjoyed quite a bit, we played three games. It’s fun, I really like it. The games always seem to be quite close, usually victory is achieved with a rather small margin, just few points. The pipe-building is certainly tricky enough. All in all, I find Tom Tube really enjoyable.
Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation was even more successful: we played five games. Battle Line is an old staple of ours, and I thought he would like Balloon Cup as well. We played both twice. I think Battle Line is the better game of those two. Balloon Cup is too long, I think, and handling the tiles and cubes is in the long run rather annoying. Kind of makes me wish it was a computer game where it would be automated. That’s not a good sign, I think. For equality’s sake, Battle Line’s width annoys me — it takes such a huge amount of space.