Saturday after we saw Dungeons & Dragons we ate at Giovanni's. Then we went to Shannon's place to play a couple of board games while we waited for Donald to show up. Both are German games, the first called Samurai and being about controlling medieval Japan. Like all good German games, it's not about attacking and taking things, which are things I like in a game so most German games are not as fun to me as to other people.

In any case, you have four players, a hex map of the Japanese islands with each town having one (sometimes two or three) artifacts: either people, food, or a temple. Each player has a set of tokens to use as combat factors (identical sets, you draw five randomly and after your turn refill to five, so you all have the exact same strength). Each token has a combat factor for people, food, or temples or a mercenary, boat, or cavalry. Basically each turn you place a token down on the board.

Once tokens sorround a city by land the item(s) in the town are taken based on the combat strengths of the adjacent tokens. So if I have a four people token and a two mercenary token that's six points for taking a people artifact, but only two points for taking other artifacts (merc, boat, and cavalry have smaller values but can be used everywhere). Boats and cavalry can be placed down in addition to another token, good for surprise attacks. There are also two special tokens, a reuse token and a switch artifacts token.

The object is to have the most artifacts. Ideally you want the most of two types of artifacts, but if no one has that then there is a semi-complex tie-breaking system (it takes up a whole page in the rules). Basically the players that control an artifact type go to the second round, and then it's based on how many other artifacts you took (besides the controlling artifact that you got you to the second round). In any case, Chris won by controlling one artifact while I tied with Eric on another artifact and Eric tied with Chris on the third, so only Chris made it to the second round and won by default. It was a fun game.

The second game, also fun, is Durch die WŸste (both games were designed by Reiner Knizia). In this one you have a desert with oases and water holes. Four players again, each controlling five caravan types (denoted by differently colored camel pieces, there are a couple hundred camels). First you set down the starting camels, then each turn you can place two camels. A caravan has to remain continuous with the same colored camels, you can't have two camels on the same hexagonal space, and two different caravans of the same color can't go next to each other.

The object is to connect caravans to an oasis (5 points each caravan/oasis combination), have caravans run over watering holes (1-3 points each), have caravans block out a section of desert (you can use the board edge or a mountain in the middle of the board to help block other caravans and the caravan has to be of one color, this scores 1 point per open space blocked off), or have the longest caravan of a particular color (10 points). A relatively fun game as Woo and Chris battled each other while Eric and I were able to block off large sections of land. The game ends once any color camel runs out and this time Eric won while I came in a close second.

Both were fun board games, although not extremely satisfying. They each run about an hour so they are good family games. My tastes run to longer games where you can build an empire and fight off other players. Still, I realize that's not the kind of group that I belong to. Other than Chris and Eric I don't think anyone else would play a six-month long game of Federation and Empire, as an example. Oh well, you take what you can get.