Gathering of Friends April 10-16, 2001
by Dave Bernazzani
In Pictures (page 2 of 5)
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Alison, Scott Tullis, Mark, David and I (off camera) playing Dragon's Gold. The new game by Bruno Faidutti was a big hit for me - light and fun negotiation game of slaying dragons.
David, Mike Fitzgerald (teaching) and Alison playing Mystery Rummy #3. Mike is the designer of the MR series of games and was great fun to talk with throughout the week.
Pat, Jonathan, Craig, Aaron B (observing), Mark (off camera) and I (off camera) playing Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum's new game of Das Amulett. I enjoyed my two plays of this throughout the week although I'm not usually a huge fan of bidding games and since this game has bidding in spades it ranks a little lower than other recent AM/AW releases. But the card-power-decay mechanism is really neat. Capitol is still my clear favorite of new AM/AW games (there were only 3 or so copies of Capitol available for play at the GoF and so I'm glad I brought my copy which saw lots of play-time throughout the week). Jenn played Das Amulett later in the week and while she normally doesn't like games with special powers (the cards you bid for each have a power), she really liked it.
Stephen Glenn, Clark King, Jenn and I (off camera) playing Settlers of Catan (basic, 4 player!). None of us had played in many months so it was like learning Settlers fun all over again!
Alison, David, myself, Jenn and Greg Aleknevicus playing What's on my Head? Looks stupid but it's a good deduction game. Except I'm horrible at deduction games and so didn't fare well. I saw this played at least 3 times during the week by various groups of people.
Greg, Ted Cheatam and Mik in Drakon (James and I also played and are off-camera). I liked this little group-think dungeon crawl game.
Walter, Sheila, James and I (off camera) playing King's Cribbage. Sheila and I are big Cribbage fans and so I thought this might go over well (and I think it did). Sheila and I played a game of regular 2P cribbage just after this (and she crushed me).
Joe McSweeney, Mark Edwards and friends playing Quack Shot. I got another chance to play this later - really neat game!
Alison, Aaron B, Craig, Jenn, Jonathan, myself, Joe and David bumping cars in AutoScooter. One of my favorite games from UG2 and I think many people enjoyed it at the Gathering this year.
Peter Sarett ran "The Blender" team game. Lots of fun and interesting questions. Our team was called "Mix Bag" and although we lost (came in 2nd to last) we temporarily got our names up top since they scored our 3rd round first - and so I snapped this photo of the scoreboard just before we started to drop in the rankings!
Here is the scoreboard as we would like to remember it!
