After Jacob’s Game Maker class two Saturdays ago (January 21) we drove up to northwest Portland to attend the GameStorm game day.  I was pretty amazed at the number of people attending – I counted at least 30 people there by the time we left in the early evening.  There was quite a variety of gaming going on, including Caylus, World of Warcraft, Liberté, and Ticket to Ride.

Eager to knock a game off my burndown list, I brought out Ark of the Covenant and snagged a few players to join me.  This is just another Carcassonne variant, but it combines several aspects of other expansions that I like.  Now I should have read the rules a bit more carefully ahead of time, because there are a few easy-to-miss scoring rules (scrolls in cities, oasis by the road) and you ALWAYS have to check how unfinished roads and cities are scored.  Nonetheless, this is a fun variant and we had fun moving the ark around.  Jacob one handily if I recall.

One of my main reasons for attending (I skipped a Roads and Boats session, after all) was to get in another play of one of KC’s classic prototypes, Isla Nova (aka New Eden 2 aka Edenborough).  Ken and Carey joined Jacob and I and it was as fun as I remember – definitely one of our short-list games to try out in an upcoming playtest day.

This is a tile-laying game and is quite abstract, but it is rooted in a colonization theme where different communities or tribes are establishing competing industries.  The game played in just about an hour and felt very rewarding.

Next, Jacob and I played a 2–player prototype of Carey Grayson’s new game 24/7.  This is a light abstract designed primarily for 2 players and it involves laying down domino-shaped tiles on a 7x7 grid.  You score points when you lay a tile that creates a sequence of tiles (in any direction) that add up to 24, 7, form a sequence, create 3 or more of kind, etc.

The game was quite fun and had Jacob and I captivated – plenty of tension, easy to teach, and great potential.  I hope Carey can get this into mass production.