Killer Bunnies - my first own cards!

As if we couldn't get enough of Killer Bunnies, getting 55 new cards with every booster pack, I started designing some of my own on blank cards.

A cat in bunny costume! It doesn't go onto the bunny pile after discarding and it can't be used to win the game, because when getting examined closer it reveals to be a fake bunny. It can be harmed by weapons and has to be fed because as part of the disguise it will hide cabbage and water behind its back.

A Play Immediately card that kills nearly all of the bunnies in the Bunny Circle. Really nasty one!

And a nice Play Immediately card. :)

Killer Bunnies!

A new game aera has started! We discovered Killer Bunnies! This is a fun card game with a starter deck and several booster packs. As being able to expand the game slowly it was one of the reasons why we bought it. And we never regreted it!


The starter deck comes in blue including the first booster which is yellow. Goal of the game: get the winning Magic Carrot! Unfortunatly you can only win if you have a bunny alive. So actually the game is about getting carrots and killing your opponents (or sometimes your own) bunnies!

There are a lot of ways how to kill bunnies. You can starve them, attack them with a Kitchen Whisk, Crow Bars, Quite Irascible Diffractable Cheese Balls, Boomerangs, Chocolate Covered Anti-Matter Raisins, Cyber Bunny and so on...

To protect your bunnies you may use Lucky Clover, Heavenly Halo, The Magic Spatula or similar good cards.In this game we played the blue, yellow, purple, red and orange booster. In the middle of the table are the carrots (you can buy, choose or steal), the shops (for cabbage, water, defense or pawns) and the draw pile.
You always (!) have 5 cards on your hands and two cards down. Playing requires thinking ahead. Normal run cards have to go through the bottom run and top run card position until you can play it. Then there are special cards, very special cards, money and play immidietly cards (where you normally have to kill your own bunny).
The dice are for use when you get attacked or you want to gamble or get something nice out of supply cards.

All in all, it looks complicated, but it is not. You slowly get towards more complicated game play but you learn along.

As still not even close to getting the highest stack of game cards (there are still the green, twilight white, stainless steel, perfectly pink, wacky khaki and ominous onyx boosters to go!) so far it already takes us about 2 hours to go through a game of three people! But it is fun in every minute!

Thats why I give it 10 out of 10 points!

Check it out: KillerBunnies

The Settlers of Catan: Traders and Barbarians

This scenario is a really awsome way to play the settlers! The idea behind it is that the barbarians have destroyed Catan. The Catanian traders now have to set off to carry tools to the marble pit, sand to the glass factory and both back to the ruined castle.
The carriages move along paths either wild or paved. It is always an advantage to move along your own streets.
Coins are recieved if you successfully bring your item to the goal, you need them to pay foreign street owners or in exchange for raw materials.

Playing this game we noticed that we hardly gave a damn on expanding our settlements or moving to other places and build new settlements. The roads had our full attention. We carried the items to and fro.

But it was jolly good fun! A totally new experience playing the Settlers of Catan!


For me it's a 10 out of 10 points! Hope to play it again soon!

Bohnanza!

Do you like beans? Baked beans, soy beans, kidney beans, black-eyed beans, coffee beans and many more...

Bohnanza is a German-styled card game about trading and farming beans. Author is Uwe Rosenberg and the game was first published in 1997.

I remember I first played it 2000 with a group of five people. It is great fun! The more people play the more movement the game has.
The idea is simple. You get bean cards on your hand and can farm 2-3 types of them at the same time. Tricky: you have more bean types on your hands and are not allowed to change the order. So either you have to harvest unprofitably or trade your cards with the other players.


There are also a lot of add-ons. Al Cabohne for example is for 1-2 players. High Bohn can be played with Al Cabohne or Bohnanza, Bohnaparte and La Isla Bohnita can only be played with Bohnanza.

It's a great game but unfortunatly I always lack in people playing with me. So I hardly know the add-ons. Maybe one day I will find someone eager in playing beans! ;-)

My score:
9 out of 10 points! (for Bohnanza)
7 out of 10 points for Al Cabohne (it lacks in the fast moving of Bohnanza)

The Settlers of Catan: Caravan in Catan!

The caravan in Catan is a quite small scenario. You can buy it in a box with several other new scenarios.
Instead of the desert there is an oasis placed in the middle of the island. From here will be the caravans starting. You can continue their route with paying a card of hay and wool. The camels take influence on the points a road or village count. These are the camels of the new version waiting for being placed on the game.


And this is the scenario of the old edition. (Unplayed yet)

Learning to play the Settlers of Catan

Thanks to my curious koala I found a great help for learning how to play the Settlers of Catan! :-)

Here is Prof. Easy giving a lifelike tutorial:

The Settlers of Catan


Hope you enjoy it!

The Game of Life

The Game of Life is a huge board game full of stations in your life. You start moving as a single person in a car, you can choose to go to university, you get a job, an income and you marry. If you get children is luck and if you win or loose money is also a good part luck. Buying life insurances is a very good idea because after you retire you usually have to pay a lot of things.
Instead of dices this game is played with a colourful wheel. Sometimes there are moments in your life where you have to stop. And sometimes you have to decide to go the right way.

This is my car on its way through life. I married a woman and we adopted twins, a girl and a boy.

The game has a lot of charme, maybe because I played it a lot when I was young (I used to marry men, so it really is ages away!).

I give it 8 out of 10 points.

The Settlers of Catan II and III

I already introduced my all-time-favorite board game: The Settlers of Catan.
The first two expansions showed up soon afterwards.


The Seafarers:
With the settlers setting off to sea there came the era of the seafarers. Finally they could go further than the borders of their island and set off in little ships towards unknown islands and wicked seas. Even the robber became a companion in form of a black pirate ship.
New was also an island hexagon called the gold plate. There is no gold in the game but when you built a village next to it you can choose whatever raw material you like.
For being able to set up ships there had to be a village at the coast. A street can't simply change into ships. I think the settlers are in need of a harbor to arrange their journey in the open seas. A ship costs wood and sheepskin. Well I could imagine something more effective for the sails but they have to use whatever they got.

I love playing freestyle most. This is in simply laying the home island and then building up sea and islands just as you like. The "board" can sometimes reach funny formes.

Here are the ships of the wooden version and the new version:

Cities and Knights:
The next expansion was a sort of conquest. Story is that the vikings are arriving in Catan. There is a small countdown for them (here in the up left corner), and everytime one of the additional dices lands on the black ship it comes closer.
When they arrive Catan you have to check how many cities there are and how many knights to defend them.
Through the game you can activate your knights as protection. There have to be more knights than cities for the Catanians to win. If so the player with the most knights gets a winner point.
If the Catanians are too weaks the vikings win with downgrading a city of the weakest player to a village.
Also there are additional materials you can get earn and trade. They are for building universities, kathedrals and convents. With each upgrade of these three buildings you get bonus features.

Here the red city has achieved the highest upgrade for convents and so is marked as a metropolos. Also the player has set up a city wall, resembled by the plate underneath. This allowes him to have two more raw materials on the hand when the robber comes with dicing the 7.

Result:

The Seafarers are easy to learn and nearly compatible with every other expansion of the settlers. It is very nice to not have to stick to your island.
I give them 10 of 10 points!

The Cities and Knights needs more concentration. It is better for being played seperatly. Playing with 4 dices and having to check knights, special features and the vikings is enough for a game!
I give them 8 out of 10!

The Settlers of Catan

This is my all-time-favourite-game! The Settlers of Catan from Klaus Teuber.

One of its best things is the variable board that consits out of a lot of hexagons, here in the standard version there are 19. In every game they are ordered differently and have different numbers so they never give the same amount of raw materials. Of course there are numbers that are played more often than others. Check them out to place your first two villages on good regions.

The raw materials are the basics of everything. You need them to build streets (wood and clay), villages (wood, clay, hay and sheepskin), cities (stone and hay) or to buy some special feature cards.
The game has a lot of trading charm. And if your fellow players don't want to trade with you, you can still trade with the bank. To worse conditions, but sometimes it is necessary.
There are not only your fellow players and the bank involved in the game! Everytime somebody throws the dices to a seven there is a gang of robbers who steal your materials if you have more than seven in the hand. If you dice the seven you can chose the part of land where the robbers steal even more. But that will be for your own good. But beware! The next time somebody else throws the seven and the robbers may come to steal from you!
The pictures above are from the new version. I still own the old one with wooden streets, villages and cities. Also the water frame is in hexagons too, not in prefixed parts. Both versions have their own charm. Only the wooden one is no longer sold in the stores. I will keep mine safe!

Next time I will show you the different expansions. They promise even more fun playing with a lot more possible variations.

This game is definitly 10 out of 10 points for me!

Elfenland

For the first time today I played the game Elfenland from the british game author Alan R. Moon.

The story is about young elves who have to go out on quests to become grown-ups. They can use different kinds of transportation (e.g. elfcycles, unicorns, dragons) for diffent roads (e.g. desert, forest, mountain). To prove their visit in a town they take a small roll of evidence. After four attempts the game is over and the one with the most tokens wins.

Pros: 

• It really needs a lot of thinking to plan your route! And even then your opponent can destroy the whole plan with one small chip defining the transportation for a road!
  
• The board is really nice and I loved the pictures on the cards.
  

Cons:

• The tokens are round! They love rolling away! I wouldn't be sad about square ones!
  
• The game is for 2-6 people. But for 2 people it is too boring, because you may plan your route far away from the other and there goes the challenge!
  

From me it is 8 of 10 points!