Image title: 05-29-05_1524
From: jcarreiro’s Flickr album.

So, in celebration of my good friend Remy making a trip up North, we decided it would be a good idea to do some gaming at Jay’s place. Video games would certainly be involved (which meant Super Monkeyball Deluxe), but we also wanted to play some board games. Since Remy was the guest of honor, so to speak, we let his suggestion of “Let’s play Civ” be the deciding vote.

I have played Civilization once before, and I thought it was a pretty good time. Even though I had only played it once, you got the idea that the way the game ends would be virtually identical each time. That is, after about 6 or 7 hours of playing, someone decides to play the U.N. card and instantly end the game.

This time, the game wasn’t quite as fun. It began with one player, Dan, stating that he didn’t think there should be any first-round battles. Shortly thereafter, Seth attacked Dan and Dan quit. Luckily Ken (the game’s owner) was there to sit in his place. I say luckily, but now that I think of it we would have been truly lucky if the game ended there.

From that point on, the game sorta just moved along. It was fairly uninteresting. The occasional battle. The occasional trade. But, rather uninteresting as a whole. There are quite a few gripes about the game mechanics and how they are flawed. I tend to agree that the game should be more fun and that the mechanics probably play a major role in the lack of fun. But, I also think we just weren’t that in to playing Civ that day. And the only reason we did play was because we had very few games that could accomodate 7 players.

In the end, we ended up quitting shortly after leaving the Ancient Era, fired up the Xbox and partook in some Monkeyball goodness.