Skyward Bound!

Of the "Forbidden" series of cooperative tile-based board games -- including the original, Forbidden Island, and its sequel, Forbidden Desert -- we find Forbidden Sky to be the most challenging. There are a lot of ways to lose, and the game feels more luck-driven than its two predecessors. In our house, only Nathaniel, playing solo, had ever beaten it -- and that was just once.

Today, with Matthew in San Francisco at a Pacific Swim all-star meet, Nathaniel and I sat down for a session of Sky, with he as the medic and I as the surveyor. Despite near-constant lightning strikes, we managed to get the components on the board quickly and into as tight a configuration as possible. We both made it to the landing pad with one tick left on the storm tracker. Laying the last piece of wire to complete the circuit and thereby trigger the lights and sounds of the rocket was, honestly, a lot more satisfying than I expected it to be!

New Year, New Games!

We've had tons of fun over winter break trying out new games like Forbidden Sky and logging lots of time on the Xbox. One of the top experiences has been Betrayal at House on the Hill, which provides a memorable story with each and every game session. Betrayal has thematic elements that make it similar to Mansions of Madness, but it's far simpler and faster to set up and play. In our first game of Betrayal, Nathaniel played a plucky twelve-year-old boy who ended up alone in a house full of zombies. Unable to overcome them in physical combat, he had to rely on an eerie music box to lure the undead into rooms where he could trap them. After each play-through, I'm eager to try it again to see what new stories we'll discover -- that's the hallmark of a great game!

Merry Merry!

Hope you all have a great holiday season with your families! Here at our house, we'll have the most gaming-filled Christmas ever, as the boys are getting a long-overdue modern video game system (an Xbox One) along with a handful of games.

I'm still not a big-time video game fan, however, so I'm even more excited about some of the other gifts. They've got one of the Zombicide sequels coming, along with the highly acclaimed Betrayal at House on the Hill and an additional expansion box. Best of all, perhaps, is Forbidden Sky, the newest entry in the "Forbidden" series (following Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, which may be the two most frequently played board games in the Sutton household). The boys will also find their stockings stuffed with the new Space Marine Heroes line of individual randomized models for Warhammer 40k. Perhaps we'll paint them up as Blood Angels in honor of the upcoming 40k animated series, Angels of Death.

Christmas can't come soon enough!