Arizona Board Game Society

I went to the Arizona Board Game Society meeting yesterday evening at Gamer's Inn in Mesa, AZ. Five or six people, mostly IT. Good times.

We played Dominion with the Intrique expansion. I misjudged when to switch modes to grabbing up victory points, and so was soundly beaten. I've played Dominion a few times now; it's pretty good. I tried to buy a copy of Dominion at Gamer's Inn but they were out of stock and didn't give me any confidence on when they would be back in stock, so I'll have to get it from Amazon.com instead. Convenient thing, that Amazon.com.

Then we played Power Grid using the France map. That game is great fun but as one of the other players pointed out, the end-game is disappointing in that there's way too much opportunity for players who cannot win to play kingmaker and take actions that choose a winner. Still, the gameplay of the game prior to the final round is compelling and I'll look to play this again.

The evening closed with a quick game of Family Business. It's a quick-playing card game with some depth. It reminded me a little bit of Gloom, but not a lot. I liked it. It's quick, simple, not too hard, but still has some redeeming value with some depth, especially if you try to pay attention to the social aspect and steer the balance and momentum to encourage the other players to eliminate one another.