Yesterday we had a feeling that might try something completely new. One heavy modifier for this feeling was that I had just finished reading the rules for Cat & Fish - the game my wife bought from Spiel last year because "it had kittens on box cover" and it was on sale. Anyway, the first look at it was that it seems to be a childrens game... and it was left on shelf for over half a year. But after reading the rules I can assure, it's quite a good strategy game. Game lasts 5 years (consisting of 4 seasons each) and the winner is the one with most money at the end. You get money from fishing and then selling the fish - but price depends of the season, so it may be quite common to discover that for getting the best price you have to keep your fish for several seasons. There is also simple technology tree built into the game - by upgrading you can move faster/farther, get better price, have more actions etc etc. At the beginning you have only two action markers, so you can't do everything you'd like, you're also missing money and game end is also too near... so it's similar to the economy games of Martin Wallace :) Anyaway I'm quite eager to play it again, with 4 players, as with 2 it was too quiet, there were free action spaces almost always available.

Another first impression we got yesterday was House of Spirits from Lock'N'Load Publishing. I knew this publisher mainly by their wargames so it was quite interesting to see how they manage to design something else. Rules were quite easy to understand and we got the game flowing soon. Soon after I discovered that marking players' and monsters' HP with pen/pencil is quite painful... you write the name, mark the HP, then cross it when somebody kills it. Rinse and repeat. The gameplay itself left also quite meh-feeling: turn card, roll the dice, killed? no? roll dice again, room empty? yes? new room, roll the dice... and so on. I admit I'm not a good adventure player but this time I even had no desire to read the flavour text on cards. The idea of mechanics was quite good - investigation-themed CDG - but the result felt quite clumsy. I'm not sure if I'd give it another go... anybody up for mildly used copy? :)