Dude Gaming - Elder Sign and Alhambra

Once upon a time, The Dudes gathered together on a monthly basis to play games.  Sometimes, when we were truly motivated, it happened more frequently than that. But alas, this is no longer a monthly activity, much as I would like to make it so.

Nevertheless, last night we were able to gather the five of us to play two games.  I was the only one who had played them before, so the rest of the Dudes learned Elder Sign and Alhambra.

I sent the link to the TableTop episode featuring Elder Sign to the Dudes, since that is how I learned about the game.  Two of them watched it ahead of the game, and that helped me get the group up to speed pretty quickly.  As in the video, our goal was to prevent "He Who Must Not Be Named" from emerging to destroy us (and the world.)  We started well, accumulating 4 of the 13 necessary Elder Signs in the first five turns.  But then things got real.  Or un-real.  We had a lot of fun, and we forgot a couple of rules along the way, but I don't think it mattered.  We allowed ourselves to open three Other World locations and did not solve them.  So, when a card was revealed which added a Doom Counter for each Other World location, the Ancient One was released.  Game over.  We died.  We had fun.  But we died.


That left us time to play Alhambra.  As I mentioned in my Games of Christmas recap, this was another game I wanted because of TableTop. Without a blow-by-blow description, I will note that Pie won, by just a point or two over Shawn.  Most of us were bunched up on the board with our final scores, but it was clear that those two were buying and building better than the rest of us (OK, well maybe it wasn't obvious they were doing better than Eric, but they were clearly doing better than I was.)  Pie ended up building a completely-walled Alhambra, which I just think is cool.  And he used a clever set of "Rearranging" turns to do it.  Well done, Pie!

If I can remain in Rochester this year more than I did last year, I really want to try to resume the monthly habit.  We enjoyed ourselves too much to not make a habit of this.

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Speaking of "completely-walled Alhambra, the very first game I played, I accomplished it, so I took a photo.  It's gotta appear in this blog at some point, so now is as good a time as any.