by Larry Levy and Ben Bruckart

Here’s the second half of Larry and Ben’s amazing adventures at the Gathering of Friends, which they both attended last month. We pick up the action with a joint review. Was it a tasty little trick-taker or a bit of marshmallow fluff?

Marshmallow Test (2020)

Larry: I’ve been wanting to try this game for a while. It’s a trick-taker from Knizia from Gamewright and is a redesign of an earlier Reiner title called Voodoo Prince. The rules for playing the hands in MT are pretty vanilla; the game’s main interest comes from the scoring rules. Once you win a certain number of tricks (3 in a game with at least 4 players), you drop out of the hand and your score is equal to the number of tricks all the other players have taken. So to maximize your score, you want to be the next to last player to go out (since the last remaining player scores zero). This is a quintessential Knizia twist and is strong enough to make for an interesting and challenging game. In fact, Voodoo Prince contains a few tricky rules for some of the cards and while I usually prefer added complexity, I don’t think I’d like that version as much, as it would take away from the principal goal of going out late, but not too late. Good stuff from the Good Doctor and a game that proved to be worth the wait. Rating: I like it.

Ben: This game didn’t really stand out to me. There was some added considerations, but it was very difficult to do. Card game and trick taker enthusiasts probably love it, but it seems slightly more position and luck driven. Rating: Not for me.

Mountain Goats (2020)

Ben: I love Mountain Goats and taught and played it three times to mostly publishers during the convention. I think its accessibility makes it great as a filler and great as a convention game. There’s some luck, but there’s strategy involved too. I hadn’t seen the mini expansion until someone had it in their box. It adds a twist but is wholly unnecessary. Rating: I love it.

Larry: Mountain Goats (first released in 2010 as Level X) is a dice game with simple rules, but reasonably interesting gameplay. On your turn, you roll four dice and divide them into one or more groups. The board shows tracks labelled from 5 to 10 and the sum of the dice in each group lets you move your goat in that track up by one space. If your goat reaches the top space of a track (they’re only 2-4 spaces long), you score points equal to the value of the track. You score those points for every time one of your groups sums to that number, until an opponent reaches that space and knocks you down to the bottom of the track. So you not only want to get to the top of a track, you’d like to stay there as long as possible. It’s a game where I’m fairly sure I’d rather be lucky than good, but there is definitely skill involved and it’s a pretty good filler that should appeal to lots of types of gamers. Rating: I like it.

手札のないトリテ (No Hand) (2018) ***James Nathan Special***

Ben: This was the first game I played out of James Nathan’s bag of fun. It’s a trick taker where the cards aren’t dealt out to the players, but, instead, are dealt face up to the table in an array (one row for each player). Then you get another card that determines some information about how the hands will be scored (who goes first, what trump is, etc). Players bid on how many tricks they think they can win and then, column by column in rotating turn order, each player puts a cube down on which card they will “play” to that trick. Then the information cards are revealed and you see how many tricks each player actually won and how accurate their bids were. It plays fast and is really fun to watch it play out. Rating: I like it

Nokosu Dice (2016)

Larry: Ben said this has become a standard closer for his game group, so I asked him if he would teach it to me. It’s a Japanese trick-taker (surprise!) where your hand consists of both cards you are dealt and colored dice that you draft. A 4 on a Red die can be played to a trick just as if you had a Red 4 in your hand. During a hand, you play all your cards and all but one die. If the number of tricks you won matches the value on your leftover die, you earn bonus points. This twist, combined with the fact that the dice are public knowledge while the cards are not, gives the game a unique feel and trying to earn a bonus for yourself while denying it to the other players was an enjoyable challenge. I love the innovative trick-taking games that have been coming out of Japan recently and this is just another fine example of one. Rating: I like it.

Ben: In a world where I play a lot of games once, this one has racked up quite a few plays as the game we end our nights with. This is a fun game where dice count as cards, Trump is a number, and a color, and has varying levels with a super trump. The real game is guessing how many tricks you will win. There is an added fun where people can try and “shoot the moon” per se by taking no tricks. It’s fun to spoil and even more fun to try it. Honestly, in 2024, it’s hard to think of another game with more plays than this one for us. Rating: I love it.

Noobs in Space (2023)

Larry: This is a frantic, real-time exercise in communication. Each hand represents a new task and cards are randomly dealt to the players, who have to cooperatively use them to solve the task. Cards cannot be shown, so the players must describe what’s on them. And, oh yeah, you have a time limit. The information needed to solve the task is distributed amongst the players, so you’re trying to figure out who has the next key card and that player then has to describe it as thoroughly, but quickly as possible, and so on, until all the steps are carried out. Trying to do this in the most efficient way, and dealing with the inevitable mistakes, is actually a lot of fun. There are 8 different tasks and the cards are cleverly indexed so that the correct subset of them is dealt out for each task. Once you solve all the tasks, the same group won’t want to play the game again, but nothing is destroyed, so you can just give it to another group to enjoy. Actually, the tasks are sufficiently varied and detailed that you could probably retire the game for 6 months or so and enjoy it again—I sure wouldn’t remember the solutions! This was much more enjoyable than I thought it would be and more fun than my description is probably making it sound. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes escape room games or any other real time activity. Rating: I like it.

Pass Pass (2023)

Larry: My first game of the actual Gathering (as opposed to my pre-con games at Ben’s place) was this trick-taker. There’s no compulsion to follow suit; instead, you determine which suit had the largest sum of cards played and the player who played the highest card in that suit adds one card from the trick to their collection, while the player with the second-highest card of that suit adds the two lowest cards. Cards have point values and most points wins, although if you make 3 “Pass Pass” sets (which is one card of each suit in your collection), you win immediately. None of us were terribly enthused with this game. It’s pretty chaotic and getting 3 Pass Pass sets seemed very difficult, making the game more one dimensional. Not terrible, but when it was suggested later in the week, I was happy to pass on Pass Pass. Rating: Neutral.

Path of Civilization (2023)

Larry: It was a funny year at the Gathering. Usually, there are one or two games which take the con by storm and which you see in constant play, but this year, there really wasn’t a hit. Probably the game I saw being played the most was Path of Civilization, which I got to play as a prototype last year and very much enjoyed. The finished product looks and plays just about the same as what I tried last year and it clearly struck a nerve among the attendees this year. And why not—the theme is attractive, it plays extremely quickly (most of the actions are performed simultaneously), and there’s tons of variety. It has the veneer of a Civ game, but honestly, everything is pretty abstract, but that doesn’t bother me at all. I played it twice and enjoyed it both times. So in a down year, I’m comfortable listing this as the hit of the Gathering. Rating: I really like it.

Ben: Path of Civilization is a great gateway civ game. Its easy to learn, intuitive, and I really do recommend it now in the same way that Catan leads one to Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, or Pandemic. Rating: I like it.

Pick a Pen: Gardens (2023)

Larry: The Pick a Pen games are a group of three Roll & Write designs from Knizia where the things you’re rolling are the pencils you write with! Reiner takes advantage of the fact that your average pencil has 6 sides, just like a die does. So each side of every pencil has a number on it and every turn begins with one player “rolling” different colored pencils. The players then take turns choosing them and filling in hexes on their sheet. Sure, it’s a gimmick, but I give points to the Good Doctor for thinking outside the dice…uh, box. The game itself is fine, but once you take away the novelty of pencil-rolling, it’s just another R&W game. I enjoyed my earlier play of House of Cats much more. Still, it was fun to give this a shot. Rating: Neutral.

Prey Another Day (2023)

Larry: This was another game I played at Ben’s prior to our leaving for Niagara. It’s a blind selection game in which you play an animal from your hand in the hopes of munching on some veggies or on an animal played by an opponent. The gimmick is that the animals higher on the food chain are successful more often, but the ones lower down score more points when they chow down. Blind selection games aren’t my favorites and this one works better with more players, but it was nice to see how it plays. Rating: Neutral.

Ben: This is a game from Essen 2023 that has some hidden potential. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and its target is quick family gamers who don’t mind a lot of luck. The best part of the game is talking smack, which I did to Larry plenty. Rating: I like it.

Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to the Ghost Town (2018) ***James Nathan Special***

Ben: This was a competitive game of trying to pick up and deliver pizza to homes on a map that you cannot see. First you learn how big the map is and the things that go onto it. Houses, you, walls, other players, false walls, warps to other spots, pizza shops, and then once you pick up a pizza, ghosts appear in locations around houses and change it up a little more. Unfortunately, one player is sort of the DM and players call out cardinal directions you want to move and the DM gives some limited information back. You have twenty turns to find a pizza, deliver it and win. None of us did but two players were close to doing so. I would love it except since I teach so many games, the DM part means I would always be the DM. Rating: I like it.

Rats of Wistar (2023)

Larry: This was the last game of Luciani Day. It’s a worker placement game with a quirky theme—we play rats with enhanced intelligence that have escaped from a research lab and are now trying to survive on their own. And I have to tell you, there were times during the game when I felt like I might need enhanced intelligence to have much success! It’s definitely hard to get things done. The number of worker spaces is quite limited and the actions you were planning on doing disappear in a hurry. At first, it felt too tight and I’m still not sure if the difficulty might be more frustrating than challenging. But as the game went on, I felt I was playing better, so this might well be a game that rewards experience, which is always a good thing. I’m looking forward to playing this some more to see if I can ramp my game up enough to wind up as the Big Cheese. Rating: I like it.

Ben: I have played this twice and blindly ordered it based on my undying love for Luciani. But I was left with a weird vibe after the first game, and it was certainly confirmed on the second play. The game action selection is very tight and requires planning, skill, and timing but the cards throw the game into chaos. The cards themselves are a resource and there are so many cards that the games tend to wildly swing from one game to another and one player to another. Getting good cards early is a boon and not getting them is a real bust. Also, because card play is by the player, I had this feeling where certain players were just playing by themselves, triggering cards, and earning rewards where we other players couldn’t participate and just watched. I didn’t like how it played with the cards which seemed to be the real variation from game to game and sold my copy to Larry. Rating: Not for me.

Ravnica: Clue Edition (2024)

Ben: Since Larry sleeps till the afternoon most of the days, I was able to play one morning with Tom McCory, Phil, and Talia. In this game, you are still deducing the Character, Place, and Weapon used in a murder (just as in Clue), but you play a magic hand and choose others at the table to battle with your hand to ask deduction questions. You can be eliminated in this game, so a secondary strategy is just to win Magic hands. The decks are two different color decks mixed and of course you have some Clue information to start with. Thank God Talia was there! Everyone at the table had played Magic at some point but her knowledge of Magic helped us speed the game up a lot. As is the case with all my deduction games, my own notes were less than stellar, so I felt no real confidence in my answers. If you made a guess, you could still play, but only the magic part until you were eliminated. As others made unsuccessful guesses, they tried taking others out. I was the last one left without a guess and stayed in it until my health was near zero, then made a final guess and was correct. It’s a neat twist on the game and Magic players will surely like it. Rating: I like it.

Roll & Write for the Galaxy (prototype)

Larry: I always like to check with Tom Lehmann to see what prototypes he’s working on. This time around, he pulled out a Roll & Write version of his Roll for the Galaxy game which, naturally, he’s calling Roll & Write for the Galaxy. He, Ben, and I played it twice and we had a terrific time. Yes, it’s technically a R&W, but if you know anything about Tom’s design style, you won’t be surprised to hear that this is much more involved than your average game of that sort. Actually, even though there was lots of detail and many ways to score points, it never felt close to being overwhelming. It was a lot easier to understand than, say, Hadrian’s Wall, which is a fine game, but takes a while to teach. Of course, it helped that the actions were familiar to any veteran of Race or Roll, but still, it was a clean, yet challenging design that featured depth rather than excessive detail—just like you’d expect from Mr. Lehmann. And the games only took about 45-60 minutes apiece. They were two of the most enjoyable games I played during the week. After it was over, I asked Tom how long he’d been working on it. He said he’d started 5 days ago! Both Ben and I were flabbergasted! You have to understand that even though this was a prototype, it felt complete, with all the actions and tiles fleshed out, and the scoring and activities felt totally balanced. And he’d managed all this in only 5 days! Now he did add that he’d been thinking about doing a R&W based on Roll for quite a while, but he’d only had the key insight in how to make it work less than a week ago. I’ve known Tom for a long time and I am well aware of his talents and how meticulous and detail-oriented his design approach is, but this was still astonishing. Later in the week, Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande gave the thumbs up for the game, so with luck, we’ll see the published version of this in a year or two. You can bet it’ll take me a lot less than 5 days to order it once it becomes available! Rating: I love it!

Ben: Tom Lehmann is a genius! It’s a roll and write in the same universe and with the same gameplay as Race/Roll for the Galaxy. It was excellent and very fun. It didn’t feel as if it was a Roll and Write and had mechanisms for both scoring, pivoting strategy, and preying on your neighbor’s strategy. I was very impressed by the game and by Tom. He continues to be one of my favorite people to meet and play with at the Gathering and his designs are fantastic. I didn’t feel particularly lucky in the first game, so I asked to play it again and did much better with some additional strategy layered it. Rating: I like it.

Interlude #5: Opinionated Eaters—Wallace and Whisky

Ben: A bunch of us met in the board room and did a whisky and scotch tasting exchange. It was fun to get everyone together without games in front of us and I enjoyed drinking with my old and new friends, including Martin Wallace! This was one of the more popular drinks we sampled.

Seas of Strife (aka Texas Showdown) (2015)

Ben: Texas Showdown is one of my favorite trick-takers and the re-theme by Rio Grande is called Seas of Strife. We taught my buddy Scott the game before coming up to the Gathering. In this game you don’t want to take tricks and there are varying suits of cards based on their number range (0-10, 11-19, etc). It remains a fantastic game in a group and plays fast. Rating: I love it.

Sea Salt & Paper (2022)

Ben: This game won a lot of accolades last year, and I think they are well deserved. It’s a tight, lighter card game based around set collection. I like the concept and the presentation. I don’t think there’s much room for expansion and I think different strategies play out for different player counts. It’s got a small footprint and often travels with me to my daughter’s sporting events for quick plays. I really like this game and think with the right people it shines. I played it twice at the Gathering and it gets regular plays at home. Rating: I like it.

Larry: This was the third game I played at Ben’s; it was actually the first game we played and, therefore, my “unofficial” first game of the Gathering. It’s a Cathala/Riviere set collection card game that’s gotten a good deal of acclaim—in fact, it won the a la carte award as Best Card Game of the Year, an award I hold in considerable esteem—so I’ve been wanting to try it for a while. It’s a bit involved, but hardly rocket science: you can meld pairs of cards, most of the melds let you take a special action, and once you have enough points, you can call for the end of the hand, with the option of gambling that you have more points than your opponent, allowing you to earn a bonus if you do (and scoring reduced points if you don’t). It didn’t really float my folded paper boat (the card art is based on origami, which is rather charming). There seemed to be a lot of luck involved and gambling that you have more points than your opponent felt like a fairly big crap shoot, given how many points can be hidden in their hand. However, it does appear to be a game where subtleties reveal themselves with repeated play, so I’d be willing to play this some more, and in a perfect world, I would. However, there aren’t any card game lovers in my game group at present, so it may never happen. We’ll see. Rating: Neutral (for now).

Seers Catalog (2024)

Larry: We got to play a pre-production version of this new climbing game that will be published by Bezier. First of all, I love the name—so clever! The game’s main feature is that once someone goes out, each player scores for the lowest card in their hand. So you want to reduce you hand as much as possible, without actually going out (since your score if you do is zero). This is reasonably interesting, but not too exciting (I prefer the way that Marshmallow Test, which is based on similar concepts, plays out). Bezier has also added a bunch of special ability cards that can dramatically alter how each hand plays out and the chaos they introduce made the whole thing less enjoyable to me. If my group wanted to play this some more, I’d be willing to go along, but there are similar games that I enjoy more out of the box, which I’d be more happy playing. Rating: Neutral.

Ben: I like trick-takers but I don’t know many of them. I am totally spoiled by Scout which is one of my favorite trick-taking climbing games, but it has biased my understanding and love of other trick-takers. I liked parts of this game, especially the action cards but I think I need to play this more than once to enjoy the subtleties of it. Rating: Neutral.

SETI (2024)

Larry: I always try to get together with the CGE guys to play the prototype they plan to release at Essen and this year, it was a particularly interesting sounding one: SETI, which, as most of you know, stands for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. It’s a heavy, detailed game where you can watch for signals from the skies, as well as send out probes to explore the planets and moons of our solar system…and beyond. It’s an action selection game with lots of cards representing abilities and technologies. There’s an awful lot going on and it did occur to me that there might be a shade too much. But unlike the game of Civolution I played earlier, I didn’t feel overwhelmed and it seemed as if we were being provided with multiple paths to pursue, instead of simply gobs of detail. Additional plays will be needed to see which approach winds up working better for me, but as opposed to my experience with Civolution, I very much enjoyed my play of SETI and plan on picking it up when it comes out. Rating: I really liked it.

Slotters: Phantom Seven (2015) ***James Nathan Special***

Ben: This is a memory game where you ask people to reveal their lowest card and you get three pieces of information every turn. You can show your lowest card, take one from the middle or from other players until three matching cards are turned up. If you get a set, you score it. If the player collects three 7s, they win, otherwise highest rewards from previous scored sets win. This was fun to play. There’s a more recent redesign of it called Trio. Rating: I love it.

Spots (2022)

Larry: This is a push-your-luck game with a good concept, but less than perfect execution. You’re trying to complete dog cards by placing specific dice values on them (the “spots” on the dogs). Each turn, you select a “trick” tile from the common pool, which tells you how many dice to roll and what special rules you must follow that turn. You then roll your dice and any which match spaces on any of your dogs can be placed. Any dice which can’t be placed must be put in your “yard”. If the sum of the dice in your yard exceeds 7, you bust and lose all the dice on your unfinished dogs. This does a lot of things right; not to mention, it’s freaking adorable. But it’s too hard to get things done. There was a lot of busting in our game, along with frustratingly incremental progress. It just outstays its welcome by a considerable amount. Too bad, I wanted to like it and it might be a dog that could be rescued by some house rules. But with the rules in the box, I’d have to send it back to the pound. Rating: Neutral.

Startups (2017)

Ben: Oink games have a small table presence, but fun and tricky gameplay. Occasionally, a standout game appears like Deep Sea Adventure, Scout, or A Fake Artist Goes to New York. Startups is in the same conversation now. The game takes about 15 minutes to play. Turns are simple, where you either take a card from the middle to your hand (either from the top of a deck or one left by someone else), and then play a card to your tableau or the middle. The choice to play to the middle doesn’t score you anything and gives other players some information, but it potentially costs them money to ignore the card. Playing cards in front of you will score you points, but it discloses information that other players can used to outscore you, which can prove costly. It’s a simple and fast paced game that my game group enjoys a lot. Rating: I love it.

Larry: This is a simple stock ownership card game from Japan’s Jun Sasaki. The deck consists of shares of 6 companies. Each turn, you either add a share to your holdings or play one to the market, where they can subsequently be drawn prior to a player’s turn. At the end of the game, the majority holder in each company gets paid by the minority holders, for each share that minority holder holds. So you want to have the most shares in a company, but you need to keep it close enough so that others will compete in the shares race. It’s a simple idea that works and can lead to some tough decisions. A nice filler. Rating: I like it.

So Clover (2021)

Ben: I rushed and tried to play this game with some friends I rarely see at the Gathering right before a meal. It remains a good party game and staple for groups. When I play with my kids, we pull the extra clues out but this group wanted to play with them and that made for some memorable guesses. Rating: I like it.

Stephenson’s Rocket (1999)

Larry: I’ve been playing games with Talia Rosen for well over 15 years. We used to play together weekly, but life intervened and now the only time we see each other is at the Gathering. So we made a point to get some games in this year. Our tastes used to be strongly aligned, but, alas, she is no longer Cult of the New. But there’s still some titles we both love and Knizia’s Stephenson’s Rocket is certainly one of them. I’ve always felt this was Reiner’s masterpiece and it contains my favorite mechanic of all time: the Veto rule. The game is about expanding railroads by laying track and when you do so, you earn a share of that railroad’s company. When an opponent tries to expand a railroad in a direction you don’t like, you can veto the move and whoever pays the most shares gets to decide how the track is laid. Being the majority shareholder in a railroad is vital, but so is building the track in the way you want. So virtually every turn, you have to decide if you’d rather have shares or railroads built the way you want. It’s simple as can be, but it gives you constant tough decisions and makes the game incredibly interactive. It’s a fantastic game, although it does have a pretty steep learning curve. Jonathan Franklin was our third player and even though he hasn’t played this as much as we have, he made good use of the advice we gave him, played a sharp game, and won. This was probably my favorite game of the con: a great title, played very well, with two dear friends. Rating: I love it and always will!

Subjective (2023)

Larry: Decent, but fragile party game. The whole table knows the guesser’s word, except for the guesser. The other players grab categories (like Movies or Animals) and then have to write down something related to their category that will let the guesser figure out their word. These are revealed one by one until the guesser gets their word, and then the guesser tries to guess what the other clues are! That last part is the game’s best feature, but deciding if clues are appropriate for the categories can lead to arguments. This could easily work for certain groups, but in our game, some turns were fun and others weren’t. Rating: Neutral.

The Brain (2023)

Larry: The Brain is a cooperative card game with no communication between the players. You play cards to the center of the table, which direct you to remove some cards, swap some cards, or do similar things. Your goal is to deplete the deck, but if there are too many cards in the center at one time, you lose. This was tough, but not impossible, and I can easily see where it could be addictive. A fine, minimalistic co-op, not one I’d like to play every day, but one that would serve as a good opener. Rating: I like it.

The Glade (2023)

Ben: This was my first game at the convention, and I wish it wasn’t. It was a cold teach of a game nobody at the table knew. It was very abstract but difficult to understand the patterns because of the iconography. It also preys on the spatial aspects of a shared board that I struggled with. Rating: Not for me.

Upbid (1991)

Larry: A 30 year old game we tried just to see what it was like. It’s more or less a pure gambling game, with a touch of probabilistic calculation. There are plenty of games that came out prior to 2000 that are worth playing, but this isn’t one of them. Rating: Not for me.

Wilmot’s Warehouse (2024)

Ben: This is a group driven party game that is scheduled to be released this summer that tests your memory and counts on telling a story. A deck of random shapes and icons is shuffled. Each turn, a player flips a card and plays it into a spot on the board. Most of the time everyone sees the card but that’s not always the case (more, in a second). You see the card and place it in the grid, and then turn it over. In our game we built what looks like an elephant with trunk and tail, standing on a platform that had aliens in another part of the picture. You do this for dozens of cards. At the end you try and match a second deck of cards to the cards you placed in the first deck. Easy for those visual memory people! But then there are cards that change the game. Not everyone sees every card. Sometimes the person placing it can’t see it, sometimes the group can’t. At other times the group can’t talk about the cards, and it’s these small deviations that make it more fun. People walking by were enraptured into our game, joining into the story telling and art that were making. It was a lot of fun. Rating: I like it.

Xylotar (2024)

Larry: This is Bezier’s redesign of Chris Wray’s Magic Trick, which I played for the first time last year. Both games combine trick-taking and deduction, since everyone’s hand is face down (the cards show their suit on the back, but not their rank, and your right-hand opponent sorts the cards for you so the ranks are laid out in order). You then play a trick-taking game where the card you play each turn is a surprise to you! Of course, the cards are in order, so you can start to deduce things over the course of the game. At some point, you have to reveal a card which will be the number of tricks you’re predicting you’ll win and you score extra points if you make your bid exactly.

Magic Trick was bewildering (at least, to me), but it was unique and very promising. Bezier did a first-class job with the components in their version (plus, the picture of the polar bear musician on the cover is terrific). They also tweaked some rules, but I think I prefer the way things were in Magic Trick. The suits have different numbers of cards in Xylotar and I felt that the equally long suits in Magic Trick led to more interesting play. A bigger issue is the scoring. In Magic Trick, you had to make your bid in order to get positive points, but in Xylotar, if you take a bunch of tricks, you’ll score well regardless of whether your bid is met or not. This seems to take away from the basic concept of deducing your hand and would seem to add more luck than there was in the original game. But I haven’t played either game enough to be sure about these conclusions and a number of folks whose opinion I trust feel that all the changes Bezier made are improvements. Either way, I’m thrilled for Chris to have one of his games get such a wide distribution. It’s a richly deserved honor and I hope you sell a million of them! (Bezier’s Ted Alspach hopes you do as well!)

Ben: I don’t remember playing the original game, but I thought it was a neat twist on trick-takers. I didn’t love Talia looking at my hand and sorting it for me because it felt like almost too much information was given away in a 3p game. I did like the relatively blind plays of the game but predicting tricks was hard. The one take away I had from Chris Wray’s game was the bio and descriptive text inside the rulebook. It made me laugh a lot and I will now show it off every time the game gets pulled out. Rating: I like it.

Interlude #6: Opinionated Eaters—Tradition!

Ben: As is becoming a tradition, I take Larry for fries-infested sandwiches at Primanti Bros outside Pittsburgh. Larry normally gets the Kiebasa but I think he branched out to the *GASP* Reuben.

Larry: I had the Kielbasa & Cheese on the drive up, so I figured I’d try something different on the return trip. It was pretty good, but I know I’m just kidding myself if I think I can get truly good corned beef and pastrami outside of the New York/New Jersey area. I’ll be sticking to the Kielbasa sandwich from now on.

Larry: Well, what better way to close out this article than a picture of me stuffing my face! It was another amazing week at the Gathering. Thanks to Ben for driving and providing such good fellowship. We’re planning on doing it again next year. I can’t wait!