A new game: Village

Last week I decided to act on an impulse and buy a new boardgame. I checked a list of nicely rated new-ish games and compared it to the offers of several e-shops that have their stone branches here in Prague.

Village or Kronika Panství (The Chronicle of a Domain as it could be translated) is German this year's Game of the Year. It looks like a standard  worker placement game but in fact it is not.

Each player has a family and each round chooses what actions to take from a selection of places around the eponymous village. Some actions need a member put on them, some don't. Players collect little cubes standing for different kinds of influence that need to be spent for performing certain actions. Most of the actions need also "time" spent on them which eventually makes one of the family members die of old age.

Ultimately, each player strives to make their family be remembered the most - place their deceased members in the village's chronicle and the younger ones to attain importance for the village in a church (as monks) or a town hall (as local politicians or something).

I've played it once so far. I will write a proper post once I get to enjoy it more.

Berry Pie

Although I've already made pies (one of them not so long ago), until last Friday I never made one of the two crust variety. You know, those that are usually baked in all those American TV shows.

I have been watching a really good TV series called Pushing Daisies. It is about a man who can bring dead back to life by touching them, however if he touches them for the second time, they become dead again but forever this time. The story follows him as he develops a romantic relationship with his childhood sweetheart... that he resurrected after she was killed during mysterious circumstances which means they cannot touch each other or she will die for the second time. Although the plot might seem a bit morbid, the show is actually lighthearted, bright and full of brilliant humor. Also, the main character owns a pie restaurant.

Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Recently when I was hanging out with a friend of mine, he showed me this one TV show about really really expensive cakes. It was part documentary, part reality TV, the producers always tried to create tension with the bakers not having the cakes ready minutes before the deadline and since cakes aren't exactly exciting, there were three teams making crazy cakes for their clients, all edited so the deliveries happened at the end of the show with success music playing in the background.

Anyway, I noticed that the show wasn't really that much about baking cakes as about decorating them. They used little variety of the cake corpuses and focused on what was sitting on them. They used Red Velvet a lot and it reminded me that I haven't baked Red Velvet cake yet even though I had come across it couple times in the past.

It's more popular in the English speaking countries while in the Czech Republic it is practically unknown. No wonder, it's traditionally an American dessert. It has a chocolate flavour due to cocoa powder being used but the batter is coloured red. I imagine it being a gimmick as to differentiate one cake from other chocolate cakes.

Elder Sign

It was not so long ago that I ranted about how I dislike the high amount of luck that decides the outcome (and enjoyment) of Settlers of Catan. I still prefer strategy over luck in my games but at the same time I enjoyed playing Elder Sign quite a lot. Why? Are really the tentacles of eldricht horrors powerful enough to make rolling dice transcend the unavoidable legacy of Yatzhee?

Let's start with the basics. Elder Sign is another take on H. P. Lovecraft's beloved tentacly mythos by the same people who brought us the immensely popular Arkham Horror with all its expansions. Elder Sign is a standalone game that reuses some of the graphics from AH but its gameplay is different. At the beginning of the game, each player chooses/draws a character that he will play as. Also the Great Old One is drawn, an evil creature that wants to break out to our world from its horrible dimension. Okay, so far it's all the same but here comes the twist. The game itself takes place in a museum and its surroundings where something uncanny is going on. Weird shapes move from a room to room, mad people serve dark evil gods, portals to other worlds open and not even dreams are safe anymore.