Gaming Session: Protecting Odin's Palace

I think one of the coolest co-op games to arrive in the past few years is Yggdrasil. Of course its cool to me as it centers on Norse mythology and the great tree that connects all of the 9 realms together. In this cooperative you each play one of the Norse gods who collectively are trying to keep the evil forces (Loki, Fenrir, Hel, etc.) from breaking through the walls of Asgard and into Odin's palace. To do so on your turn you have a few actions to visit the various realms to recruit Elves from Niflheim and dead warriors from Valhalla, slay frost giants, move the Valkyrie, enhance your weapons, etc. all in order to push back the individual monsters from advancing. The mechanics utilize the mythology well, and it is a tense game. I played Heimdall (guardian of the bifrost bridge) and wasted my special ability to recruit warriors by making horrible rolls. I really cost my team, and it came down to me trying to slay a frost giant that would complete a rune set that would enable us to push back 3 enemies . . . and I again blew the roll for reinforcements. AAAHHHH! I think I have only defeated this game once, but I must say we did play on a higher difficulty level than usual. Fun.

With more of a group that gathered we played an intense gane of Shadow Hunters that came down to a Shadow & a Hunter facing off in the end. The Hunter won (my team) so it was all good. We followed that with some Danish 21 and then a few good rounds of Werewolf (I moderated them).

Gaming Session

Fall semester now back in swing, it is game night again! There were many in attendance, so some played Shadow Hunters while I taught a group to play Danish 21, one of my favorite card games from my mission in Denmark. Everyone is dealt 7 cards an values are normal, except 8 is considered the highest card above an Ace. You can trade in a few cards if there are some in the remaining deck. In turn you lay a card opn the pile, it has to be equal to or higher than the previous card, or you MUST lay your lowest. The goal is to have the lowest card in the end. Down to the last card everyone reveals, whoever has the highest card "loses" and keeps that card. The deck is reshuffled and the next round you get as many cards as the number of the card the last person lost with. You keep playing rounds until one person has cards that they lost with that totals 21 or more.

From there we then played a similar card game called the Great Dalmuti, another game that works with larger numbers. In that deck there is one 1, two 2s, three 3s, etc. up to the number twelve. In this one you lay down as many of the SAME card that you have, and the next player lays down the same amount of a number lower than the previous or passes. When everyone passes the player with the last cards on top "takes" it and gets to lead out. Who ever goes out first is the new one to take the position of Great Dalmuti and sits in the order of how you went out: Great Dalmuti, Lesser Dalmuti, Merchants (any number), Lesser Peon, Greater Peon. You try to move up out of the lower classes for a higher poisition, and other rules in the game make that hard to do. I have always love that game.





I was also able to teach the game Hawaii that I liked so much from Strategicon. We played with four players and I went for a boat/island strategy to earn points and ended up swamping the others. Of course I was the only one that had played it before. Again I like the variability in playng the game, and there are many pathways for victory points.

My collection of villages

We did have a special visitor tonight, a stupid fly that keep landing on our game boxes and rolling over. We thought it was dead, but everytime we moved the box it would hop up and then fly away only to later come back on the box and roll over. Freaking me out.