by A.J. Coltrane
The Bad News: Gary’s Games and Hobbies is no more. Gary finally decided to retire.
The Good news: Gary’s longtime store manager (Tim) has opened Round The Table Pub in Lynnwood, right on the border with Edmonds — It’s next to Edmonds Community College.
From their website:
‘Round the Table is all about bringing people together … ‘Round the Table.
Sure we serve beer, cider and other drinks. And yes, we sell games and puzzles. But what we’re really about is getting people away from their computers, sitting together around a table doing something: talking, playing, laughing, discussing, bonding … in other words, having fun.
Here’s the extensive beer list.
We stopped in one night and learned to play Amerigo. While we played we enjoyed a couple of beverages.
A bit about Amerigo — The theme is discovering/colonizing islands in South America during the era of sail. Well, here (boardgamegeek description):
In Amerigo, the players help Amerigo Vespucci on his journey to discover new land. The players explore the islands of South America, secure trading routes, and build settlements.
The actions available to players are determined through the use of a specialized cube tower, which has appeared in the Queen titles Im Zeichen des Kreuzes andWallenstein. At the start of the game, this tower is seeded with action cubes, which come in seven colors, with each color matching a particular type of action. During the game players will drop additional action cubes into the tower – but some of these cubes might get stuck in the floors of the tower while other cubes already in the tower are knocked free. Thus, players need to play both tactically – taking advantage of the actions currently available in the best way possible – and strategically – using their knowledge of which actions do what to play well over the course of the game.
The game board is composed of nine, twelve or sixteen tiles, depending on the number of players. Players sail their ships through the landscape created for this game, landing on islands to plan and build settlements, which then supply resources and allow the player to earn victory points. Players might want to invest in cannons to protect themselves from pirates roaming the waters or acquire progress tokens to gain special advantages.
The islands are actually colonized by fitting tetris style pieces into the randomly odd-shaped islands. We had a lot of fun with it. The “cube” tower is an interesting mechanic. Right after we sat down and ordered a beverage I made the faux pas of thinking that my sailing ship meeple was actually a horse or something — I placed it on the table upside down. Fortunately the crowd is not the judging type…
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Back to ‘Round The Table Pub: It’s clean and well lit. There’s plenty of space to stretch out. There are around eight tables for gaming — you can either select a game from the wall or bring your own. Tonight they’re having a Euro game night *and* a Belgian beer tasting. Check the calendar, they run a lot of beer and/or game events.
Also: Tim’s a super nice guy.
Highly recommended place to spend an evening.
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