There's been a lot of work lately but yesterday we took time to play games. This is something that's very, very important to do when you spend most of your time working on publishing games. What did we play?

Tannhäuser was first. With seven players, it drags a little. Still, for a first game it was a good learning experience. I look forward to giving this a shot with four players.

AT-43 was next. Paul brought along a Therian army and Gina and I split a Red Blok army and went up against him. The game played as fast as ever and was definitely fun. Paul's objective was to kill the Red Blok leader so the first thing we did was send the leader's unit into a container where he hid for the duration of the game. Two Kossaks held back Paul's Therian force and the Soviet-inspired Red Blok forces won the day.

Last was a playtest of a dice game I recently designed. Our final conclusion was that it's both too simple and too complex all at the same time. Still, it was valuable playtest time and I know what I need to do to drop the complexity and some of the simplicity. This should work fairly well as a family/party game once I make the changes we discussed after playing.

The Chris and I played a game of Carcassonne on the XBox and I showed him what Catan is like. Next up on the XBox? Alhambra. (Though I still haven't seen a release date.)