Le Havre – The Inland Port

Chris and I tried Uwe Rosenberg’s new two-player Le Havre game. The Inland Port combines the purchasing and activating buildings elements of Le Havre with the timing wheel of Ora & Labora and it works very well. It’s a very thinky and dry game and I reckon Guy would enjoy it very much. Our game took us just over an hour and I would expect the time to come down with familiarity but I’m not sure we’d ever get it down to the claimed thirty minutes. Certainly a lot more time to play than Agricola: All Creatures Big & Small. A very good game that has just edged out Equilibrion on my Six Picks for Solo / Two-player games of 2012.

Party Extravaganza

We had a do at our house yesterday with Jan’s sister and family and party games were requested and dutifully delivered by yours truly. We managed to fit in Telestrations, Timeline: Inventions, Pluckin’ Pairs, Say Anything, Tumblin’ Dice, Cash ‘n’ Guns and Riff Raff.

It was the first time I’d tried Pluckin’ Pairs and it worked pretty well. Eleven picture cards are laid out and then everyone has 90 seconds to write down five pairs with one picture left over. You then compare answers and you score a point for every player who gave the same pair as you unless everyone chose that same pair. Very simple with some interesting conversations about why people had chosen the pairs they had.