Medina

Last night we all played a game that had been sitting on my shelf unplayed: Medina. This is a very nice looking game with a bunch of wooden pieces.

Sorry Julie - I should have taken a few more shots so that you could have your eyes open. No, WAIT - Julie plays games with her eyes closed as a handicap as she generally crushes us under her big toe of advanced game playing skills.

Medina is a simple game to learn but the strategies were far from obvious at the start. On each turn players place two wooden pieces from their private collection. The primary objective is to claim the palaces worth the most points, with the challenge being that players collectively contribute to the different palaces until someone claims / completes them. If you claim palaces too early you likely give other players the opportunity to score more points with larger palaces. If you wait too long, you may run out of space to build a sizable palace. We played our first game incorrectly, missing the rule that each player may only claim one palace of a given color. We only violated the rule once or twice, so no big deal.

Matthew often has more fun playing with the bits in his personal space than playing the game.

The game was close with Julie coming out on top with 37 points. Matthew and I tied with 32, Jacob scored 30.