The Kickstarter for the first Everdell expansion, Pearlbrook, arrived Saturday and we managed to get it to the table the next day!

It had been nearly a year since we last played Everdell, and I had forgotten what a nice game it is. The tableau building mechanics would put in on the same shelf as Terraforming Mars, but it also adds a pleasant amount of worker placement.

On your turn you can do one of three things: place a worker to get resources and/or cards, spend resources to play cards, or retrieve all your workers and move to the next round. There are four rounds (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) and each one gets you an additional worker, with two new workers in the last round. The first two rounds are pretty quick, but then the game slows down as your tableau grows and you have more workers to place.

The Pearlbrook expansion adds a “frog ambassador” worker, who's restricted to the five spaces on the expansion board, but will only be placed 4 times over the course of the game. Four of the five locations are hidden until a player reveals them, with a bonus resource for being first. It also adds a bunch of new cards to the main deck, and some additional forest and event cards. Pearlbook replaces the basic event tiles with new 3-D cardboard wonders, which are significantly harder to achieve, but give a large point bonus. Basically if someone gets one of the wonders, you have to get one or more too or it’s going to be hard to win.

Our game lasted about 2.5 hours, including the teach and getting up between turns to make some food. I want to get this to the table again, hopefully well before another year goes by.

The heatwave sapped our energy for anything too taxing tonight, so we brought out Istanbul, one of our favorite lighter games. But to add a little spice we added our un-played Mocha & Baksheesh expansion. It adds a new resource (coffee), four new locations, and event cards you can use instead of moving your piece. The extra locations makes the play area feel much larger, making efficient movement significantly harder, at least until you’re able to get some of the new expansion powers, especially the one that allows you to move unlimited spaces in one direction.

We enjoyed the expansion enough that we’ll probably always use it in the future, unless we're teaching new players.

Finally got London (2nd Edition) off the shelf last night. Two-player game with Amy. It was pretty brutal, and by the end of the 2+ hour game (much like our last visit to the actual London) neither one of us were sure we liked it.

It felt more like work than play and the stack of cards took too long to get through. We're not fast players, but going more than twice the recommended time seemed a bit much to us. I totally appreciate what the poverty mechanic is trying to model, but it wasn't much fun concentrating on managing poverty instead of scoring points. We also agreed to ignore the take-that cards, since we were already having a hard enough time fighting the game itself.

Bottom line: I admire what the game is trying to do, and can understand why some folks like it, but I don't think it's for us. Anyone want to buy our copy?

Played Underwater Cities for the first time yesterday with Amy. We both liked it and will play again. I had heard reports that it was an overly-long game, but it wasn’t for the two of us. Turns go quickly, and the gameplay is easy to learn. Amy trounced me on the first play (as usual) since she is much better with strategy-planning than I am. Now that I better know how the game plays, I should be able to make it a closer game next time, though she’ll probably still win. But it’ll be a respectable loss rather the 30-point deficit of the first game.