Games and (no) sleep

I'm a little bleary at the moment. After months of life being somewhat calm in regards to R., last night was bad. Not quite head to the ER bad, but certainly far worse than what we have become used to. Yesterday I also noticed a FB memory pop up from last year which was a post in which I moaned about having another totally sleepless night with R. Two years in a row of extreme behavior on the same date screams traumaversary to me. When I get home to my records I'll start digging to see if I can come even close to figuring out what could be the trigger. I may not find it, there is so much we don't know about her life before us, but I do have records of when she had some major surgery and when she switched foster families. Those would be big enough events to warrant the behavior we are seeing. It caught us off guard last night, but we are more prepared tonight. I would like to sleep, though.

With some cooler weather we spend more time inside than out, though some people did go down to the beach to swim in the late morning. One of the best things about being here is the time that is available to play games together. We brought quite a few and there are also a good amount here. Yesterday Scrabble, Rummikub, Uno, and Sushi Go saw some play. Today, we spent some time learning or relearning some slightly more complicated games.

The first of these is Carcassonne. I really like this game, and it has been around for a while. It is a tile laying games, and I love the process of matching up castles and roads as you lay the tiles and score points. I could never figure out why no one else seemed to like it as much as I did. I think it was just that they weren't old enough. Today I played with Y. and L. (after I spent a few minutes reviewing the instructions). The actually enjoyed it, so I'm hopeful that maybe I'll have more opportunities to play it now. It is one of those games which is pretty simple to learn, but to be able to score lots of points, you need to really think about how you lay the tiles and place your people. There is more to it than meets the eye. It is also a game that doesn't last forever, as the games ends as soon as the last tile is played, which is unlike some games that can seem to be endless as you wait for a player to get enough points to end the game. 

After this, Y. and I decided to get out one of the new games I brought and see if we could figure it out. If you have never sat down to learn a Eurostyle game from scratch, you don't really have an appreciation for what an endeavor this can be. Some of the more complicated games and have multi-page instruction books, which must be studied for a bit before any of it makes sense. I always open a new game with a little bit of trepidation. 

The new game is Akrotiri. I bought it because it is based on the idea of you being an archeologist who is excavating Minoan temples on islands in the Aegean. It fit so well with what we are studying that I had to buy it. (Had to!) It's a two-player game, which I usually don't buy, but it sounded pretty intriguing. Like Carcassonne, it is a tile laying game. The tiles each having parts of islands and the sea routes between them. Each player has a boat and you move between islands collecting resources, selling them to make money, buying maps, and then using those maps to excavate Minoan temples. The instructions weren't too overwhelming, but I wish the authors had used a better editor for them. My pet peeve regarding games is when the authors do not take the time to be clear how they describe each aspect of the play. What exactly constitutes a move? Don't just tell me to move without also telling me what that move can look like. How many times do you perform a certain action? Every turn, just once? Please, spell it out; it just makes figuring out the game that much easier. In the end, Y. and I had to resort to watching a video on Board Game Geek to figure out the few but integral questions we had. (If you do not know Board Game Geek, you should take a look. Nearly every game that exists it seems is on their site with reviews and other information. Plus, many games have video reviews which include instructions for playing which I have found invaluable.) In the end, there were just a couple of things we were still unclear on, so we made a decision as to how we would play and moved on. Having played it once, I think we have it figured out. Y. beat me by four points, which made her like the game. I liked it, too. Like Carcassonne, I really liked watching the board be created as we played and seeing what the islands would look like and figuring out how to use the sea routes. My only other beef with it is that it is for two players, but I knew that going in, so I can't complain too much about that. 

And now I'm off to play a game of Rummikub with D. and J. We are a little bit cut throat about that game in our family, so it could become boisterous. We'll try not to wake anyone up. No, I take that back, there is no way that we will do anything that might wake a certain someone up. No game is worth that!