Weekend of games

Laura invited me over on Saturday and I haven't seen her in ages so jumped at the chance to hang out. Normally she comes over mine so she suggested I came over hers instead because then her housemates Emma and Leah would be there too which sounded pretty cool to me. When I got there Laura was playing the new Final Fantasy XIII game and to say I was impressed was putting it lightly. It wasn't the game that I was impressed with, but rather this called "HD" :) Yes it's probably hard to believe, but despite all the gadgets I buy, I've never seen an HD TV/signal and I was shocked at how "crisp" it was - Awesome! I wasn't too interested in the game itself though, I'm waiting for Final Fantasy XIV Online (the "sequel" to FFXI which I played for years!). We were debating on what to play and I was shocked by their "console cupboard":


Okay so there's actually more consoles in my living room, but it was the whole cupboard full of them that I found rather impressive :) Notice that Laura also has the Yuna figure (top right) that I do (she liked mine so much she bought her own). I was told that I had to finish Special Cup on Mario Kart 150CC as she needed that unlocked and I wasn't going to be fed until I had done it so I sat down and did that. Thankfully I was able to do it on the second go (which surprised me as I haven't played in a few months!)

Laura's girlfriend Leah came home from work and we all ordered chinese food and I had a yummy chicken chow mein (it's my favourite meal) and then we all decided to play "Mexican Trains". I'd never heard of it, but it's a game using a set of dominoes that go up to 12 (and blanks) and you have to make "trains" to get rid of your dominoes as fast as you can:


I can't be bothered to explain the rules, but it's a very simple (yet enjoyable) game, but it tooks HOURS. Like... 3 or 4 lol. Eventually we finished and I headed home and got back about midnight. :)

The next day it was Mothering Sunday here in the UK so as every year I went over my parents house. My brother and I had bought mum a Slanket (because she's always saying she's cold and if you don't know what one of those is, where have you been?), some execessively expensive chocolates (that we refused to let her share) and a new Cliff Richard DVD. I've lost track of how many Cliff DVDs we've bought her... he just seems to keep generating them!!!

After eating we sat down to play some games, all of which we hadn't yet played starting with Pirate code which Lucy bought me for Xmas:


It's a Lego game (which you already worked out!) and it's essentially Mastermind where you have a 4 colour code and the other people have to try and work it out. The games don't last very long, but it was fun having to build it all and we played twice. The next game we played was "Ticket to Ride":


You get a load of destination cards (one of mine was Edinburth to Athens) and the idea is to build a "route" with your trains between the two destinations. It sounds easy, but there's only so many "paths" so once someone else has already taken it then it gets REALLY complicated trying to get around it and you end up having to build stations and take long tunnels and ferry crossings... (neither of which are simple) and yeh... it sounded really complicated to start with, but we soon got the hang of it. The picture above was taken at the end and I was blue if you wondered, but my mother (red) won though :)


We only had a little time to kill now before it would be time to eat again so we played this short game call "The Kids are all right" which apparently is based on a TV show with John Barrowman (he's all over the box). The game is largely electronical with voices directing you to question cards although no voice of John himself. Boo. I didn't really like this one, but it wasn't THAT bad. Finally after eating we moved onto the last game... Monopoly City:


It's the latest incarnation of Monopoly and I have to say I love it! The biggest changes are that you don't build houses/hotels anymore, but rather residential, industrial, skyscrapers all on the inside of the board (there's areas marked out for each property - now called a district). It also has hazards where you can build prisons or sewage works on other peoples area and nullify their residential earnings, but the biggest thing is that you no longer need to have all three to build. As such things start moving MUCH faster.

There's an electronic "thing" which tells you how many things you can build (you can't just build unlimited) and you can even build stations (not buy them anymore) to hop around the board - although we hardly used that feature.

I was doing really really well and had all these skyscrapers and it was all going fantastically and I was miles ahead of everyone else until I landed on one of my dad's districts which he just happened to expand and needed to give him something like £19million. I was just expecting to sell a "house" or two from my spare properties and then we realised that you can't sell buildings anymore, yep... you mortgage the property with the buildings intact... except the rent price was about 1/10 of the base property rate. It didn't make any sense, but in literally seconds my huge empire suddenly was made bankrupt because I didn't have tons of spare cash as it was all tied up in property (which I assumed I could sell like in normal Monopoly...) so I was forced to hand over all my properties/cash (about £12 million!) to dad and I was out of the game.

Then 10 minutes later I realised that we'd misunderstood the rules and that where it said the the mortgage value was the rent price, it didn't mean the rent price of the land, it meant the price WITH buildings. So in my case I could have just mortgaged *ONE* district to get the money I needed and would still have had more than enough to have a serious shot at winning the game. Urgh! Of course by this point it was much too late to do anything, but at least it makes sense now! :(

Other than that though I did enjoy the game and can't wait to play it again and it's now my favourite version of Monopoly, yes even more than classic and I didn't think I'd ever say that!!!