Saturday was our twice a month large meetup. Went with the kids for the first couple of hours, and we played:

• Dodo. The kids love this. It’s really simple, just be fast and remember position of the tokens, and that’s it. But it’s a lot of fun watching that ball roll slowly towards disaster.
• Team3. Interesting communication game, we discovered that if the 8 year old gives spoken instructions to the 5 year old tempers can get a little hot. All other combinations worked well, it was just that one that didn’t.
• Stella. My 8 year old loves it, but the 5 year old still isn’t fully ready. She has issues with mapping the cards to her pad. Still, by the fourth round things went much smoother.

Then the kids went home with mom and I got to play a couple of heavier titles:

• Pax Pamir 2nd Edition. First time playing. I expected this to be good, but it was still much more fun than I expected. The rules seem a little dry, like you’re just moving stuff around, and all the theme will be all condensed in the card text. But then you play it and everything feels very thematic. I’m pretty sure we played it extremely wrong (in the strategy sense, I think rules were fine), but still had a blast. And I think it would probably work better with at least one more player (we played a three player game)
• Beyond the Sun with expansion. I love this game. First time playing with the expansion (the other two players were also first timers, one was also a first time BTS player). I really liked the leaders cards. Also, it was a weird game, in that there was no achievement token in either Empire or Trascendence. One player had the leader that gives you a private achievement, and he completed that, plus the other two achievements that were drawn (4 strength in three locations, fully empty a single disc track), that meant three and triggered game end. He was the second player, and I was the third player, so I maneuvered to be able to colonize a fourth system, while at the same time denying player 2 the ability to do so in two of the systems he had a majority in. Player 1 had nothing to earn him more points than maneuvering over the map, so he did that, and he couldn’t prevent me from colonizing (I had two possible targets and he didn’t have enough ships/jumps), so he prevented player 2 from doing so, since that was a 9 point difference (5 from the planet, 4 from the achievement). Player 2 had his turn busted, so he instead prevented me from colonizing. My last turn was also maneuvering on the map, so nobody got their fourth system, and the achievement stayed empty. And for techs, there wasn’t even a single level three tech researched. The leaders do push you to play more on the map board, plus only a single guild came up, and I chose the terraforming one because others were better prepared to take advantage of the research action. And only a single level 2 tech that could research level three was drawn, but again, it was discarded. So that was it, no level three techs, so of course no level four either. Scores were quite lower than we’ve seen other times, too: 36/32/31. Anyway, definitely the highlight of the night, and as usual after playing BTS I’m left wanting to play more.