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games day
This is a cooperative game for up to four players (all of our games had four so I can't speak to the experience with fewer players). Each player has a specialization; more about those in a bit. The team is trying to find cures for four diseases before they spread out of control. You win by finding the cures; you lose by having too many outbreaks, by having any disease run so rampant that you run out of its markers, or by exhausting the deck of cards without winning. The game starts with several infected cities; at the end of each player's turn two more cities will be drawn from the "infections" deck and infected as well. Every now and then an epidemic breaks out; a new city (from the bottom of the deck) gets a disease and then all the discarded infection cards get shuffled and put on top. That means that cities that have been infected once are more likely to be infected again, which has the right feel to it.
Players can spend actions (four per turn) to move, cure a single disease token (in the city they're in), build research centers (help with travel and required for finding a cure), or work on finding a cure. Finding a cure requires accumulating sets of cards, which are drawn each turn; there is a limited mechanism for passing cards, and one of the player roles (the researcher) can pass cards more freely (that's its special ability). The other roles are the scientist (requires fewer cards to cure), the dispatcher (can move other people on his turn and can bring people together without the normal constraints), the operations expert (can build research centers for free), and the medic (can heal cities more effectively). I played three games, playing researcher, the medic, and the dispatcher. I enjoyed all the games, and while it had appeared in the first two games that playing the dispatcher would be boring, it was not.
The calibration of the game (we played at the first two levels of difficulty) felt pretty good, neither too easy nor too hard. In the last game we were prepared to win on the very last turn, until the single card that would have caused us to lose came up in the infections deck. Oops.
Other games I played, all of which I think I've written about before, were Trans America (filler), Rum & Pirates, Puerto Rico (three players, four-point spread among scores), and Carcassonne. Other games that were played (this might not be a complete list) were Imperial, Dominion, El Grande, and Hermagore. Pandemic and Dominion got played multiple times by different groups. Belatedly I realized I could have given up a Pandemic slot to let a new person play; I jumped into Pandemic when the choices were that and Arkham Horror (decent game but too visually-challenging for me late in the day), but then the other group decided to play something else instead and I didn't think to move. Oh well; didn't mean to be greedy with the new game.
We had some cancellations and were down five people (from planned) for dinner. Non-sandwich suggestions for leftover lunch meats would be welcome. (No combining with cheese or milk, though, so pizza, lasagna, etc are out.) We'll eat sandwiches too, but I'd like some variety. I think scrambling the pastrami in eggs would be good; I don't have good instincts for the roast beef (would stir-frying it with veggies work?) and turkey breast.
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Pesto Without Cheese (http://www.recipezaar.com/Pesto-Sauce-Without-the-Cheese-132222)
Since I haven't actually made pesto before, I didn't realize that it contained cheese.
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