No Mother-in-law Jokes!

My mother-in-law Joan is a truly marvelous person. She lives up in Oregon and comes to visit us once or twice a year. Helen infected her with the boardgame virus, and she is an enthusiastic gamer building her own collection of games. Whenever we visit, down here or up there, games come along and are played daily.

Over on the right you can see my list of Recently Played Games, supplied courtesy of BoardGameGeek. This week, most of them were played with Joan and Helen, and often with our kids and our gaming friends. It's been a good week. Joan also likes to make these visits an occasion to acquire a few new games. She has purchased Silverton for herself, a game we're all interested in trying; in part it attracted her attention because it can be played solitaire as well as multi-player, so she can play with it when her gaming friends aren't available.

Not content with that, she has put a copy of Brass on pre-order for us: this is a fine new game by Martin Wallace that I've played once and am eager to play again. And still not content, she dropped a copy of Wings of War: Burning Drachens on me, having learned that I like the base game and that I've been eyeballing the Burning Drachens expansion for some time. Thank you, Joan!

In addition to these new items, we're on the pre-order list for Agricola, which is the hottest new game to come out for several years. Today we got the good news that the English-language edition has finally arrived in America, and we should have it in hand within a couple of weeks. Joan has also ordered Agricola for herself, and it's another game that's reputed to be an excellent solitaire as well as a multi-player game.

All in all, July was a good month for gaming and visiting, and August is getting off to a great start.