Last week was something else, now was the time to get Black Friday on the table. I decided — on a whim — to buy the game. It’s been on and off my shopping list, but I wanted something new (and the silver collector badge in Geek), so I got it.

After the first game I’d call it a good purchase. It’s fun. The idea is simple: buy shares, watch their value soar, sell when the price peaks and then buy silver with the profits. Whoever has the most silver in the end wins.

There’s a neat mechanism where buying shares increases their value and selling shares makes it go down. It’s a bit indirect, though, and armed with a delay and a good dose of chance. You can predict, but can’t say for sure. One thing is sure, though: the price of silver will go up and eventually the shares will crash.

The game seems more complicated than it is, there’s lots of shuffling little briefcase markers around. It’s quite simple, though, and looks like fun. The five-player game had a tad too much waiting for my tastes, so I’m interested in trying the game with three or four.

Our game was slow at start, folks buying shares, starting to invest a bit in silver. Money didn’t move around in large blasts until I decided to cash in and sold a bunch of shares for ~450, in a game where largest sums had been ~50 or so. That bought me a nice bunch of silver bars. Petri topped me later, and eventually won the game as I totally ran out of steam. I did manage a second place, since money is a tie-breaker and I had 1 more than Ville.

Brian Bankler commented he’s almost done with Black Friday after a dozen games. If I get dozen fun games out of this, I’m happy.

We also played Geschenkt. This was actually a H-index motivated choice of game, as Geschenkt has been hovering on the edge of 25 games played and needed a bit of a boost. Well, three games more, it’s at 28 and now there’s other 25-play games to take care of…

I’ve found H-index a fun driver of game selection, anything to give me some direction of choosing what to play from my way too vast collection is fine… So now I have H-index, Project 750 (get 750 ratings in Geek) and some sort of project to play the unplayed games in my collection.

Geschenkt is fun game that should see more play, really. I’ll have to start carrying it around, as it seems there’s always need for something fun that plays in 5-10 minutes.