board games rock

My older son went to the birthday party of a friend yesterday. This friend and my son play Magic: The Gathering during lunch at school so my easy present solution was a gift card to Legends. Legends has three storefronts: one for comics, one for Magic, and one for board games. So after dropping my son at the party location, I went back to the board game store front of Legends. I came home with the Cities and Knights expansion of Settler’s of Catan which we played today with a friend of mine.

I really enjoy Settler’s even though I feel like I don’t know what I am doing most of the time. As I kept saying today, I feel like I always choose my starting point badly. Maybe everyone does, or maybe I just started off unlucky today. I played a lot of Monopoly, Life, and PayDay as a kid and didn’t start playing complex board games until my mid-20s. Although, I am not sure that these European import games were really available here before then. It has only been the last couple of years that I have learned about many of the games we play right now. It also helps that at least one kid is old enough to really play most of the games. The 8-year-old still has some patience to gain before he can sit through a lot of them.

My current favorite board games are, in no particular order:

• Ticket to Ride
• Power Grid
• Kill Doctor Lucky
• Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small – I need to play the full Agricola more often to get more comfortable with it.
• And, a perennial favorite: RoboRally

What board games do you like? Am I missing out on something great?

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NaBloPoMo Day 11: games and chicken

I might be obsessed with the card game Innovation.

I played it last year with my friend Jen’s deck and immediately bought my own which I have played lots of times, mostly with my friend Jill. Jen brought over her Echoes of the Past expansion pack and got us hooked on that so now I own that one too. I played with Jill yesterday and then Cookie came over and played it again today. What I think I like about it most is that no matter how you play, with expansions or not, changing up the expansion cards from one game to the next or not, each game is different. There are a few cards that are obviously good but none of them guarantee that you will win the game. You really never know which card will be the best card that game.

The other thing that occupied me today was making a chicken in the slow cooker. I have never made a whole chicken in the slow cooker before so I gave this recipe a try. I missed the crispy skin of an oven roasted chicken but part of my goal was to make overnight slow cooker chicken broth and making the chicken in the slow cooker first meant that I could just pull the meat off and leave everything else in the slow cooker and start the broth immediately. I hope it’s tasty. Someone in my house is having stomach troubles and home made chicken broth cures all. I do have Jewish heritage after all. I might also throw some matzo balls in there. It couldn’t hurt.