Yesterday we were supposed to play Cavum, which I’ve had for quite a while now, but that plan failed: there were five of us. The curse of a small game group… I don’t mind a smaller group, as it makes it more likely that you get to play the same games again with same people, but I think a good size would be about 8-10 active members, so you’d get two games going every time. That would allow adjusting for optimal player amounts. It would also make it easier to play games that some folks don’t enjoy (like train games, as some people shun them for some unfathomable reason).

So, there were five of us and I hadn’t really prepared for that. Well, we played Bohnanza. I’ve had Bohnanza for years, and played couple of games back in 2002 and 2003. After that I’ve played one game back in 2007, but that’s it — it has fallen out of favour. For no good reason, I’d say, as it is quite the entertaining little game. I have the original German version with the pleasant small box and no extra beans to keep the game short and fun.

I should probably keep this with me more often. At least this game was fun wrangling of bean deals, and moved reasonably swiftly.

Tuomo left after the Bohnanza, allowing us to play the current favourite, Rattus. We used random sets from all role cards, so in the second game we had all three royalty cards… that was interesting (the Emperor, the wall-builder, got no love whatsoever). Also interesting was a stockpile of 25 cubes in Turkey. With three rats, of course!

Lovely games. Too bad my play was miserable, and I didn’t win either (nor the Bohnanza, nor the quick game of Le Truc with Hannu).

I did a Top 20 outside top 200 geeklist at the Geek, since that’s the trendy thing to do. See them all. Nate’s 20 Games I think you should try is also interesting to read. I thought about doing a top 20 outside top 2000 list, but looks like that’s mostly a) bland games b) childrens games c) traditional card games, and not a very interesting list would result of such effort (a list of good kids games would make a sense, though).