On the weekend I was at Value Village with my girls (letting them get a new plushy or two) and AMAZINGLY* I found "
Twin Cities".
We played it that night starting at 8:00pm, and by about 8:20 had the gameplay fully understood (simple, and easy within just a few dice rolls).
At 10:30 we finally ended the game (I "shortened" it by adjusting a couple of rules, and made a generous "cheat" if a 7 was rolled, to the benefit of both of them so one would win
) and my youngest was all like "can we play again tomorrow Daddy?"
Board Games are not dead, hooray! There is still hope in the new, short-attention-span, electronics-addicted generation having the same fond memories of socializing over something other than blinking-lights-screens as we old-timers cherish.
*Amazingly, cuz it had ALL THE PIECES! For $3.99, what a deal!
The object of the game is to choose two city sites across the river from each other and join them with a minimum of six road pieces and one bridge. The city sites are placed at the intersection of hexagonal pieces which have numbers on them, and each turn dice are rolled and cities adjacent to pieces with the rolled numbers produce resources, just as in Settlers of Catan, The. Also as in Settlers, players trade resources with each other and then use them to build roads and bridges. Unlike Settlers, Twin Cities uses three dice with 1-5 and a question mark on the faces; rolling question marks gives you action cards, and rolling certain combinations has special effects.
Game contents include:
12 city pieces
66 interlocking plastic board pieces
8 board frame pieces
360 resource cards
85 action cards
72 road pieces
24 bridge pieces
3 dice
1 board piece bag
Tokens: Check.
Hex pieces: Check.
Board frame: Check.
"Construction" cards: Check(kinda like the money in Monopoly; I didn't count them, but we never ran out
).
Action cards: Check (kinda like Chance/CommunityChest in Monopoly)
Road pieces, bridge pieces: Check
Dice: all 3 CHECK! (lucky too, because as described above, it's a kinda unique dice
)
Board piece BAG (very handy, check!)
:happy sigh: I'm so glad I don't see myself as "above" second hand stores and thrift stores and the like... My kids would not have been exposed to such a diverse collection of board games otherwise (at times past, have found games from the 1960s and even the 1930s!)
LOL!
