Lunchtime Gaming: For Sale, Leapfrog, King of the Elves

Here's a quick report on what has been going on at my lunchtime gaming group.

Last week we played two light games: For Sale and Leapfrog. For Sale continues to be my favorite filler and I think it will continue to come out frequently this year. I especially like how easy the game is to teach and how close the scores tend to be at the end.

Eric brought in his copy of Leapfrog, an interesting race game with extremely cool froggy bits. The mechanics are simple - each player has a fixed number of bid tokens that influence how his or her frog moves. In general you are trying to get your frog into the lead but each round has some twists that keep things interesting. Extra frogs (when you play with fewer than 6 players) move randomly. I'm not a big fan of blind bidding / bluffing / out guessing games (some would say For Sale is a blind bidding game but it doesn't feel that way to me) so this wasn't my cup of tea. This would be a good one for kids given the cute little frogs.

Yesterday we gave King of the Elves a try. This Alan Moon game isn't highly regarded but I think it is a decent game. It can play quickly as you can choose to the end game after as few rounds as you like; we played three rounds and I think the responses were favorable. Arron and Tamara both did much better than I, though I'll blame the fact that I never drew a gold bonus card on my poor showing. Playing this reminded me of how much I enjoyed my one and only playing of Elfenland - maybe I can play it again at GenCon this year.