As mentioned, Friday night Totof and I had a game night. We drove to Belmont. Totof told me Belmont meant "a cute mountain or a beautiful mountain in French". A nice name for a city.
Emily hosted we four guests with homemade dishes. Guests were Wen, Memet, Totof and me. The most impressive one was the potsticker. Emily and Danny made their own potstickers. The bottom of potstickers were all golden brown (yes, another golden brown). You could tell they had good skills at making folds. These potstickers were folded in similar way as dumplings. The folds were in similar depth and laid out nicely. The folding provided a visual pleasure.
These nice looking potstikers were all yelling at me "eat me". I could not refuse this kind temptation. I ate a lot. The visual pleasure got amplified when you had one in your mouth. Emily also cooked some Shanghai vegetable rice. A nice dinner.
We got a new game
You know, when you are into board games. You become excited when your friends tell you they got a new game. Emily and Danny has good collections of board games. That night, they showed us their new toys. One of them is Thebes.
According to Memet, Thebes is the ancient name of Greece (but Wikipedia said Thebes was the ancient name for Egypt capital). Danny said they had not played Thebes yet. It would be good if we tried it together. Done deal. We opened the box. Wow. This game was so unlike all the games that we had played. This game had many gadgets. The gadgets were nicely designed. You saw something like time wheels. You saw bags with different colors. You of course saw some Meeples. No dice involved.
The instruction booklet was another impressive part. The booklet has 5 versions: English, Spanish, German, Italian, and French. Each booklet has 8 pages. We spent some time on understanding the rules and popping out cards. After 30 min "study" time, Danny said time to start the game and we could get familiar with the rules as the game went.
Thebes is an adventure game. Imagine you were Indiana Jones. You were involved in a treasure
hunting. You needed to visit five ancient civilizations - the Greeks, the Cretans, the Egyptians, the Palestinians, and the Macedonians. Before you excavated the sites, you needed to acquire knowledge on the things you were going to discover. The knowledge was all over the places in Europe. You needed to travel to North Europe, West Europe, and Central Europe to acquire knowledge. Some knowledge was civilization specific while other knowledge was general. You could apply the general knowledge to every civilization. But for the civilization specific knowledge, if you do not go there, the value of the knowledge is zero. You may also need to get assistants or tools to help you when you were at sites. Besides, you could get some knowledge from the elders. The elders would pass some info on you. However, the info may be only useful one time.
You could also get zeppelins to shorten your travel time. For our first try, the game setting was two years (104 weeks). Each turn we needed to choose action carefully since each action cost us different weeks. For example, it took a week to travel from Berlin to Wien. It took six weeks to learn knowledge on a general book. It took 4 weeks to exhibit your finding from your adventure.
The excavation part was fun. As you can imagine, not all excavations will return you treasure. Sometimes you will just get dirt. Thebes designer has already thought about that. The game mechanics made the excavations so vivid. Players would either have many exclamations on good findings or depression due to zero return in the middle of an excavation.
We took 2 hours to finish this game. Thebes was quite fun. Totof and I would not mind playing it again.
