I went to a gaming convention so I played quite a few games:

• Bad Company - light, fast, and fun
• Concordia - awesome game
• Amerigo
• At the Gates of Loyang
• Union Stockyards
• Port Royal
• Trekking Through History - excellent game
• Nova Roma - excellent Euro, releasing in one month, was taught by the designer
• Marrakesh
• Gugong - wasn’t a big fan

At Gencon several years back, there was a cookie Catan event. All the tiles were decorated cookies!

I found out that the colored pencils came in the Collector’s Edition.

Interesting! I have a copy of the game; I’ll have to run some experiments.

Oh I had no idea! The person who taught it must have supplemented it with their own pencils.

What color dice did you notice an issue with? I have this game so I may need to try some experiments.

I tried Orleans for the first time. I liked it but lost badly against someone else who had played it before. (And who owned the game.) What I didn’t realize is how important gaining money and adding estates was in terms of point value. I went the route of adding goods for points but it wasn’t nearly enough.

I also played Cartographers for the first time. I really like roll and write games, but this one was more of a “card and write”. It has different colored pencils you can color in the maps with, so that made it more fun.

Framework for sure. It plays 4 Can’t Stop is a good time filler. It also plays up to 4.

Both of these are good even at 2 players.

Eleminis! It’s a deck of cards, very easy to learn, has pictures so no English is required, not social deduction, and supports 7 players.

Distilled - somewhat complicated at first but then I got into it Grand Austria Hotel Can’t Stop - great time filler Bag of Dungeon 2 - didn’t like it Big Dig - this was fun Yak - cute and fun

I love Framework. It’s easy to explain but has a good amount of strategy.

One with dice that’s fun is Alien Frontiers.

Lords of Waterdeep

Raiders of the North Sea

Paladins of the West Kingdom

I have Concordia and have played it a couple times. It’s a good game. My only complaint is the box size.

Vertically. Pieces don’t get jumbled because everything is bagged well. You can buy a box of hundreds of bags on Amazon.