Day 10 - Mystery of the Abbey and Amazonas

The first wave of the day I played Mystery of the Abbey which is kind of a cross between Clue and Guess Who? except that it's in an Abbey for...some reason. Everyone is a monk trying to figure out which monk from the Abbey committed a murder. The strategy for this game is pretty simple, you ask other players as many questions as possible to try and narrow down who the killer is and pay attention to the information being exchanged by other players. Overall I enjoyed playing it, even with all its strange mechanics like having to go the mass every four turns. It was also interesting how you could earn points by making correct "revelations" about the murder (such as "the murderer has a beard" or "the murderer is a novice monk") to the point that it was possible to win the game by making correct statements even if you couldn't actually predict the exact person who was the murderer. I think the only thing I didn't like was more of a social aspect in that one of our players kept falling asleep during the rules explanation so they constantly kept getting confused during the game while taking a while to take their turn which was a little frustrating for everyone. I think that just goes to show that even if it's a well designed game, who you play it with can make a huge difference in your experience playing it.

For the second wave I played Amazonas which is a pretty simple game to learn. You have to build connecting research stations in the Amazon jungle in a fashion very similar to Ticket to Ride. But for each station you built you also collected a piece of the wildlife found at that station. Part of how you earned points aside from building along the correct route was to collect at least three or more of a type of wildlife and/or collect one specimen of each available type of wildlife. Part of the strategy of this game, which I didn't realize until late game, is that you should build as many stations with different wildlife as you can early in the game because the first station built in an area only cost two gold but each additional station built there increases in price. This will also result in more wildlife for wildlife points as well as bonuses for some of the income cards, allowing you to later buy the stations you need to complete your route. I don't think I disliked the game but I probably wouldn't play it again. It had almost no interaction with other players so it kind of feels like you're all sitting there and happen to be playing the same game while playing your own individual game. It was also hard to sabotage or block other players because each location had tons our connecting paths to other stations.