Game night was a combination of mummies and murderers! Our first game was the 20th Anniversary Edition of Amun-Re. This is the second Reiner Knizia-designed, Egyptian auction game that has been given a modern Kickstarter overhaul (the first one being Ra). One difference in this new version is that players get to draw two starting action cards and keep one of them. As a result, you start the game with a goal card that guides your bidding.
I kept the goal card of having seven stone tablets (card buying potential) across three provinces I acquired in a single epoch. As a result, I bid heavily for Memphis and its three tablets on my opening turn! Then I purchased all the action cards I could (three). I didn’t get any financial help, and I struggled to recover for the rest of the game. David on the other hand did a good job understanding who would be making contributions and who would be stealing. He turned that into a financial windfall that carried him into the second epoch and the ultimate win.
Game Two
Greg brought a new-to-us deduction game, Awkward Guests: The Walton Case. To call it Clue on steroids does a disservice to steroids. We’re talking Bruce Banner-level gamma radiation here. There is a novel bidding mechanism to exchange information. When it’s your turn, you get to specify two things that you would like to get information about: two suspects, two rooms, or one of each. Then each other player makes a bid that represents the value of the information they have to share. If you accept a bid then you have to trade information of equal value. You can make multiple trades during your turn so long as you can cover all the bids.
Collecting information allows you to solve the deduction puzzle. One of the suspects is lying, and will have moved through the house, collecting the murder weapon en route to the Study where the body was found. The cards do a good job of showing you how to annotate these details.
I started out tracking every card I saw, the player who gave it to me, and what I gave them in return. The solution eluded all of us. By the end of the game, I was wheeling and dealing as much information as I could. I applied a meta analysis: most everyone was asking about the Berwick Sisters, so I assumed they were the killers. People were also asking about the Vestibule, which contained a weapon I hadn’t eliminated. At the end of the round I signaled that I was ready to solve the case and won!
