We've had a great relaxing weekend here at the coast. The weather was sunny, warm, and calm on Friday and we met some Sherwood friends for some tide pool action at Devil's Punchbowl near low tide in the early evening. Not a very "low" low tide, but still we saw plenty of sea stars, fish, crabs, and anemones.

We also had a marathon session of the Czech game Prophecy that I traded for last year. Matthew and Jacob stomped us (Matthew won by collecting 4 artifacts) but we need to try the short game version next time. Jacob and I also played a game of Manoeuvre and had a blast - it was nice to get back to some 2P wargaming with the two of us, something that has been missing in our lives lately. We played the fixed setup with the French and British and I squeezed out an end-of-day victory in a close match. I'm looking forward to exploring this game more - should have nice replayability with the various countries and different card mixes.

Some quick thoughts on two games I got to play tonight - Notre Dame (finally!) and Hanging Gardens.

KC, Rita, Ian, Mike and I first played a five player game of Notre Dame, a game I "won" in a secret Santa trade last December but hadn't managed to play yet. I had heard mixed but mostly positive reviews on the game as well as varying reports on play length. We played in a little over an hour after learning and I quite like it. There seem to be multiple paths to victory and enough competition / interaction to keep you on your toes. Balancing the rat and plague problem was a quandary - I think sometimes you just have to take your medicine. The cycling of the cards ensures that you'll have a wide range of options so you can actually strategize a bit, though the timing can interfere with those plans. I think this is a 7-8 rating for me, especially if I can play it in 45 minutes with 3 players.

Hanging Gardens is an interesting puzzle and set collection game where you draft cards with symbols that overlay on your garden. The goal is to get contiguous orthogonal sets of like symbols together that then allow you to claim the tiles you are collecting. Very easy to learn and decent fun, but I have a problem with how many tiles were left at the end of the game when the cards were exhausted. This makes planning very difficult as there are limited sets and for some (like the tiles where there are only 4), the odds seem pretty good that you will only see 2 of the 4 in the game. Not a bad game, but there plenty of other games of this weight that I would play ahead of it.