Level Up! Blogfest: Citadels

I am a gamer in every sense of the word--I love everything from Zelda, Mass Effect, League of Legends and Mario Kart, to Dutch Blitz and Poker, to Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan, to Mafia and Dictionary, to Kick the Can and Capture the Flag. So you can understand how hard it was to pick only one game for this blogfest!

Since I talk about video games a lot, I decided to go with a "real" game (as my non-video gamer friends like to call them). But have no fear, this game is plenty geeky and plenty awesome.

Citadels is a card game, which I love because it doesn't take long to set up (and it's not expensive). You can also play with 2-8 players, and I find games are so hard to find that are for more than 4, so this is even more of a bonus.

The goal of the game is to build 8 district cards and make a citadel. The district cards cost gold to build, and at the end of the game are worth that amount of gold in points. Bonus points are given to those who have built the maximum 8 districts, the one who built 8 first, and to those who have a district of each possible colour.

The fun of the game is the characters. There are eight character cards that you shuffle, and every person selects one at the beginning of each round. Every character has different abilities--for example, the assassin can kill another player, the thief can steal from another player, the magician can take new cards or switch cards with someone, the king gets to go first the next round and gets bonus gold if he has a yellow district, etc.

Oh, the things you can do to make each other mad in this game. There's nothing like waiting until your neighbor has stockpiles of gold and then stealing it all from him as the thief. Of course, you have to guess his character correctly in order to do so.

I find Citadels requires the perfect amount of strategy and wiliness, as all games should. You have to think about what characters other people are going to choose, and be careful about who you choose in case they mean you harm, which they probably do. So much fun.

Thanks to all who have joined in the blogfest, and to Jamie for co-hosting this shindig with me! I'm excited to visit everyone and read about all your favourite games. Play on!