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Yesterday I got an email from Shane thanking Laura and I for coming over and bringing Bananagrams. They liked it so much that they had to make a trip out to get their own copy.
We talked a bit about how many plays Bananagrams has seen in the last 14 months (52). We talked about how everyone seems to like it. Then I mentioned that for a very long time Blokus was actually our most played game but it stood at 24 plays,less than half of Bananagrams. Laura pointed out that at one point I had grown tired of Blokus so we stopped playing.
She's right, of course, I had grown tired of the game. The issue really was that we probably really have more than 100 plays of Blokus in but I didn' start keeping records of plays until New Years Eve 2009. The majority of the plays preceded that date. We had been playing Blokus two or more times per week for probably something like a year. It was also not too long after I made that statement that we got Quoridor which changed our personal abstract gaming landscape. We now have enough abstracts to keep us both happy but they seem to have enough replay value that we don't desire more right now.
One of the most interesting thing about our abstracts (and possibly abstracts in general) is that they can be real brain benders. In Blokus you play pieces off the corners of your previous pieces. It's a straight-forward rule but it can be hard to think of more than just the board as it stands in front of you because of the nature of that rule and of the pieces. I've got enough familiarity with the game that I can think one step beyond the board now but no more. Quarto is another great one. You're trying to not match pieces and in doing so a player picks the piece being played, the other player picks locale. If the second player puts the piece into a set, the first player wins. That's the whole game, yet you'd be amazed how screwy it can make your brain feel to try and do that.
I guess that's why we play abstracts. First, Laura's not a real themey gamer and that's ok. More than that though, we find that in five or ten minutes we can bend and stretch our thinking capacity in new and interesting ways. More than a couple plays and you feel done. It's a sprint to the Le Havre marathon. I enjoy Le Havre but I can break it out at 8:30 and get a handful of games in and still have to to read and go to sleep at a normal hour.
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