This is the part of my job I hate the most. Reprinting reprints of reports. They’ve already been proofread twice or three times, and mistakes are still being found. I move towards brain-dead about now. I was working all day Saturday, and until midnight on Monday.

On Sunday, I went to a friend’s place and played a few boardgames; she’s a co-worker at Grammar, and her partner (Riordan) used to play a lot of boardgames back in the day… but he hasn’t seen much of the newer games. So we started with a game of my new Talisman, and then moved onto modern Eurogames.

They were blown away – especially by The Settlers of Catan, which we played three times. It really drove home to me how special the game is. I might not play it that often these days (give me Twilight Struggle or Caylus), but it represents such an important leap in the approachability and fun of board games. They’re now discussing when they’ll be able to get a copy for themselves. 🙂

We also had a game of Caylus, which wouldn’t be my first choice of game to introduce people to, but Riordan looked like he could handle it. They were getting the hang of it by the end of the game – it’s something you need to play more than once, though.

Incidentally, we used the Catan Event Cards for the first time. These replace the dice, and basically flatten out the randomness. We ignored the extra “events” on the cards the first game, just using them as dice substitutes, and then tried the events on the second game. By the third game, we were fleeing back to just the cards-as-dice idea. The events didn’t improve the game IMO, though the cards-as-dice did.