by A.J. Coltrane
GNOIF #13 Recap — Sticks And Stones And GNOIF (Building Themes)
Games That Got Played: Castle Panic, Catan – Starship, Citadels, Dominion, Galaxy Trucker, Gardens of Alhambra, Magic the Gathering, Rampage, Seven Wonders.
Games That Didn’t Get Played: Agricola, Carcassonne, Catan – Settlers, Infernal Contraption, Power Grid, Stone Age, Ticket to Ride – Europe.
Three of the games that got “big play” were brought by guests. I especially liked the idea of Castle Panic — it’s a fairly simple board game implementation of a cooperative tower defense-style game. We narrowly won once, and narrowly lost once. I’m of the suspicion that repeated plays may show that luck is too much of a factor, but we had fun with it.
I think that Galaxy Trucker could be addictive. We’ve played it on non-GNOIF nights and I really enjoy the ship-building element to the game. Last night I was otherwise occupied with Castle Panic. Ideally I could have played both at the same time.
For a night of building themes it wound up featuring plenty of chaos and destruction. Good times!
FlatbreadGarden 
Re: Galaxy Truckers
I was surprised at how much better we got at building ships in just 3 rounds. You quickly learn techniques for building clean(er) and more robust ships in just a few iterations.
I appreciate more the included rule suggestion for bringing in new players, where an experienced player teams up with a newbie and they swap ships after the ship-building phase.
Re: Castle Panic
I’ve only played in co-op mode. I’d like to give it a try with one of the variants, esp. the Overlord variant.
Re: Dominion
I love this game, and just finished sleeving my own “big box” edition. My Significant Other has given it a try, too, and gave it a thumbs up.
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Galaxy Truckers: I’d be up for an evening of just ship building. I think that *maybe* we’re supposed to be good enough to potentially fight off pirates and such — we’re just not good enough yet at the building element of the game.
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