I've been hinting that I would have plenty to write about in the near future and that future is now!
I just got back last night from an amazing 7 day cruise through the Alaskan Inside Passage! I actually started writing about the the trip in my journal months in advance of the trip for one specific reason: I had multiple dreams about the trip before the trip even started! After I joked around with some of my friends and family that I should almost write down the dreams so I could blog about them later, they all said I should! So I did! I also made sure to include how I got prepared for the cruise and what sort of things I brought with me so in case you have never been on a cruise, you can read what sort of things you should make sure to do before you go on your own cruise! I of course brought my journal with me on the cruise itself so I'll include those journal entries as well.
I took over 500 pictures during my trip so I have a lot of editing to do, but hopefully I'll be able to get some posts going about my trip here soon. There were also some things I wrote in my journal that I wrote down for posterity sake and may not include here and I know there are spelling and grammatical errors, so I guess there's some journal editing to do as well! Hopefully I can get some journal entries up tonight, otherwise, I'll shoot for tomorrow.
I hope you all will enjoy my Alaskan cruise story! Stay tuned!
Monday, May 23, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
(Games) I Love!
I know, I'm doing so well on this posting once every week thing! I promise, coming very soon, there will be a lot to share!
Anyways, back to my blog post. I've been meaning to talk about this new game a friend of ours introduced us to. We've been thinking about setting up a game night for a while now, and with the addition of this game, we just might be able to get a game night rolling! This wonderful game is called Dominion!
Dominion is basically a card game. Not a card game like hearts or poker or euchre, more a card game like Magic. You start out with 10 cards, 7 copper cards and 3 estate cards. You shuffle your deck of 10 cards and then draw 5 cards. You can then buy different action cards that have been placed on the table before hand (I'll get more into these later). You buy your card, discard your whole hand, and then draw 5 more cards from your deck. Once your whole deck is in the discard pile, you shuffle that and draw again. Since you're buying new cards every round, your deck grows through the game.
So that's the basic setup. A little more about the action cards you can buy. Most of them will have options to add to the amount of money in your hand, or allows you to draw more cards from you deck, or allows you to complete more than one action in your turn. But other cards are attack cards that can hurt the other players. That's where the game can get really fun! You can have the perfect strategy all worked out and then someone puts out an attack card and your perfect strategy goes out the window! There are protection cards that you can buy, but if they're not in your hand when you're attacked, they're no good! There are also curses in this game that cause you to lose points. The curses can also lead to interesting and low scoring games!
So, the big question, how do you win? Remember I told you you start out with 7 copper cards and 3 estate cards? Well, those estate cards are all worth one point. So you start out with 3 points, but the goal is to buy more through out the game. There are three types of point cards: estates, duchies, and provinces. Like I said, estates are worth 1 point, duchies are worth 3 points, and provinces are worth 6 points. So of course you want to buy provinces, but they cost 8 units of currency so they can be hard to get! Another wrench in that plan is that these point cards do nothing for you till the end of the game. So they can hinder you from getting to the good action and attack cards in your deck.
Once the end game conditions are met (they change based on how many people are playing), you count up your point cards and the person with the highest points wins!
I'm sure it sounds pretty confusing written out like this, but it's a very easy game to learn and leads to hours of fun! We've stayed up into the very early morning hours playing this game before! There are so many action cards that each game is different! There are also so many creative options to get more money into your hand each turn depending on what action cards you have.
I don't have the most strategic mind in the world, so I was a little worried about playing this game, but it was so easy to learn and there can be multiple winning strategies depending on what cards are available to buy. Overall, it's a great game and we are totally addicted!
Anyways, back to my blog post. I've been meaning to talk about this new game a friend of ours introduced us to. We've been thinking about setting up a game night for a while now, and with the addition of this game, we just might be able to get a game night rolling! This wonderful game is called Dominion!
Dominion is basically a card game. Not a card game like hearts or poker or euchre, more a card game like Magic. You start out with 10 cards, 7 copper cards and 3 estate cards. You shuffle your deck of 10 cards and then draw 5 cards. You can then buy different action cards that have been placed on the table before hand (I'll get more into these later). You buy your card, discard your whole hand, and then draw 5 more cards from your deck. Once your whole deck is in the discard pile, you shuffle that and draw again. Since you're buying new cards every round, your deck grows through the game.
So that's the basic setup. A little more about the action cards you can buy. Most of them will have options to add to the amount of money in your hand, or allows you to draw more cards from you deck, or allows you to complete more than one action in your turn. But other cards are attack cards that can hurt the other players. That's where the game can get really fun! You can have the perfect strategy all worked out and then someone puts out an attack card and your perfect strategy goes out the window! There are protection cards that you can buy, but if they're not in your hand when you're attacked, they're no good! There are also curses in this game that cause you to lose points. The curses can also lead to interesting and low scoring games!
So, the big question, how do you win? Remember I told you you start out with 7 copper cards and 3 estate cards? Well, those estate cards are all worth one point. So you start out with 3 points, but the goal is to buy more through out the game. There are three types of point cards: estates, duchies, and provinces. Like I said, estates are worth 1 point, duchies are worth 3 points, and provinces are worth 6 points. So of course you want to buy provinces, but they cost 8 units of currency so they can be hard to get! Another wrench in that plan is that these point cards do nothing for you till the end of the game. So they can hinder you from getting to the good action and attack cards in your deck.
Once the end game conditions are met (they change based on how many people are playing), you count up your point cards and the person with the highest points wins!
I'm sure it sounds pretty confusing written out like this, but it's a very easy game to learn and leads to hours of fun! We've stayed up into the very early morning hours playing this game before! There are so many action cards that each game is different! There are also so many creative options to get more money into your hand each turn depending on what action cards you have.
I don't have the most strategic mind in the world, so I was a little worried about playing this game, but it was so easy to learn and there can be multiple winning strategies depending on what cards are available to buy. Overall, it's a great game and we are totally addicted!
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