2005-04-27 RussCon Report

Game Results

Letras had not been played since 2002-05-22 when Allen vanquished RussD and Dudley. We found that it took a while for someone to reach 50 points in our 5-player session: the dealer is reluctant to make a small handsize since someone will win before it gets back around to them, and the large handsizes take a long time to win. So we took an hour and a half or so to finish this very light game.

Barbarossa involves everyone making 2 sculptures to represent a word at the start of the game, then some humdrum Trivial Pursuit or Pictionary style moving around on a track, with the goal of gathering clues and guessing what peoples' sculptures are. It's one of those games where the core idea is more fun than the execution, and not enough cluegiving and guessing occurred before Tim won. So we kept on asking questions and making guesses for fun. One of the more amusing bits was my sculpture of what was pretty clearly a coin. William asked the second letter and was told it was 'U'. Meanwhile Tim asked the first letter and learned it was 'E'; he quickly guessed 'Euro' correctly. William guessed 'Quarter', 'Ducat', and others by then figured out the second letter must be 'U' and were trying others like 'Dubloon', 'Rupee', etc. Funny!

Trias is the continental drift game. I enjoyed this session of it more than some others I'd played, although (like many games this evening) it seemed to drag on too long. Not intrinsic to the game... just seemed to be a slow energy night.