Like crack. . . .
. . . for your coffee table.
This past weekend Oana and I discovered the tile-laying city-building people-putting game Carcassonne.
Our decision to check it out was based on the combination of one of her best friends recommending it as her favourite game, and me watching a father and his two sons playing it at Vancouver's local Mecca of all things board game, Drexoll Games (they keep an open copy of about 40 of their best selling games so that you can have a seat at one of their tables and try the games out out before you buy them — they even have a public board games night every Friday until 11pm).
At any rate, looking for something to do on a flu-infested and rainy Saturday afternoon, we stopped by Port Moody's Hourglass Comics to see if they had a copy in stock, and to our great fortune they did indeed.
Comic Dude 1: You want to buy Carcassonne? Aw man, we're not going to have any games left for tomorrow's Open Games Day.
Comic Dude 2: Yeah, no doubt, dude. It, like, sucks and stuff that we're actually selling things.
Comic Dude 1: I know, man, like, how are we supposed to make any money if we sell out of everything?
Comic Dude 2: Hey, we could be like one of those really snobby comic stores where nothing is actually for sale. "Hey dude, you got any vintage DC stuff?" "Yeah." "How much?" "It's not for sale."
Comic Dude 1: No lie, I actually went to a place like that. He charges five bucks to browse in the back room where he keeps all his silver age stuff, but then if you get back there, it's all his private collection and none of it's for sale.
Comic Dude 2: So he's basically charging you a five dollar entry fee for his private comic museum.
Comic Dude 1: Yup.
Comic Dude 2: Harsh.
Comic Dude 1: Yup. [to me] So yeah, I'll sell you the game. It's a great game.
At any rate, you can read about the game on the Wikipedia article so I won't go into the details of the rules, but suffice it to say, it's easy to learn (we were playing within 10 minutes), beautifully designed, and fun to play over and over again.
The downside is that the game producers, as they always seem to, already know this, so they also offer a ton of different expansion sets to feed the addiction. I already bought two of them (from Drexoll, partially to ease my guilt about not having bought the original game from them, but then I would have missed out on that lovely bit of board game geek dialogue), so now we can add inns and cathedrals and more rivers to our city-building competition, in case we weren't hooked enough already.