With summer upon us and our teacher friends scattering for the summer, we had a super small ‘pray and play’ last week. But that’s ok; it gave us the opportunity to play some four player games! With my celiac friend attending and a busy afternoon, I needed a quick, gluten free treat. Read on for all the details!

At a Glance…

Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

These Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars from Minimalist Baker are sooo easy and tasty. They’re similar to the Cranberry Orange Cookie Bars I’ve made and talked about before, but with the traditional taste of simple chocolate chip cookies. I love how they call for gluten free flour, so I know they’re going to work well with that and I’m not hoping a substitution works as well as the original. I’m not sure if it’s the difference of a minute or two in the oven, but the first time I made these they were quite solid and bar like, and the second time a little softer and gooier. My friends were considerate enough to ask for spoons to eat them with to not grease up our game components, but these could easily be a finger food. Their taste is rich and sweet, their prep is quick and simple!

Next Station: Paris

This was an unexpected delight in a couple of ways! Our friend brought this for us to play, and I was excited to give it a try after hearing good things about the series for a while now. I was also a little nervous, because I’ve recently discovered that I’m fantastic at tile laying games (Planet Unknown, The Magnificent, Saltfjord, Patchwork, etc.) and terrible at line drawing games (Railroad Ink, Hobbit, etc.) lol. I don’t know what it is about lines, you’d think they’d be simple enough, but for some reason my mind just doesn’t work well that way. But! To my pleasant surprise, this game actually clicked pretty well for me and wasn’t nearly as much of a struggle as I thought it’d be and I actually enjoyed it!

In it, you’re building metro lines of Paris by using your one colored pencil for that round, and drawing from one end of your route or the other, connecting to the symbol on the card that was flipped. Once five blue cards have been flipped, you score that round, pass your colored pencil, and do it again till you’ve used each of the four colors. You can’t cross yourself, double back, or fork off from your tracks (with one exception). You get points for getting to more districts, and getting more stops within a district (I love multiplier scoring like that!). You also get points for getting to points of interest, having multiple colors go to the same location and using the tracks. And that’s just the base game! I’ll be curious to see what the advanced mode offers. I’ll get to do that soon, because my other surprise for the night was that our friend gifted it to us at the end of the evening! So nice of him! It’ll be a great travel game for Jon and I, or an end of the night game, or a chill weeknight game. I look forward to improving my line drawing skills (haha) in one of my favorite cities. Thanks buddy!

Life of the Amazonia was the main event for the night actually, which I’ve previously talked about here. Since it’s still fairly new for us, I wanted to give it another go before I forgot the rules. I love the adorable components and it’s definitely one of those ‘look what I built!’ kinda games. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s the tactile nature, or the fact that our two bag builders have a lot going on, but I definitely enjoy bag building games more than deck building games. Many deck builders rely on building crazy combos to make it interesting, since the actual mechanisms are simple and you just have ‘fight’ or ‘buy’ powers. In LotA and Orleans (our other great bag builder that will soon be talked about…stay tuned…), there are so many things to do and think about! Building that animal ecosystem and maximizing your scoring and purchasing power is not easy. But it is fun!

Want to buy these games? Check out your friendly local game store (FLGS), Amazon [here], or get a first-order discount at Board Game bliss [here].