7 Wonders - Cities

Our latest expansion (there is a newer one out there we haven't purchased yet) for the most played games in our collection arrived a couple of weeks ago; 7 Wonders - Cities.

I was so excited about this expansion that I spent time ahead of our first game going through the components, sleeving the cards and reading the rules (again as I had read them online prior to buying it).  One odd thing I found is that I received two less -1 debt tokens than it stated in the rules, and instead got two -1 conflict tokens it didn't mention; maybe just an edition thing?  Anyways, in all the games I have played so far we have never come close to needing all the debt tokens it comes with.  Every thing fit perfectly into the organizer (see post on it here), with still lots of room left.

My wife and I played a game not long after that, with just the base game + cities, with the two new wonders, just to get a feel for it.  I ended up with Petra, while my wife played with Byzantium.  One of the first things I noticed is that my focus on the coins grew very quickly; many of the black cards cost coins, my second wonder stage cost 9 coins, and I was paranoid about the debt cards.  It also didn't help that before we started playing with cities I often found myself with very few coins (something about my playing style, still haven't exactly pinpointed why).  I enjoyed the new flavor that the black cards added, and I appreciated the fact that they added without really changing the game too much.

Our first Cities game (from my wife's side of the board)

New Games (to me) - Power Grid, Avalon and Camel Up

Games I recently tried

Recently I had a couple of chances to try Power Grid.  We had another family over for dinner and games last weekend, and after the kids were in bed we played a game. This was the first time that my wife and I had played it, and it really helped that our friend has some skill in explaining games, as the concept is different from a lot of the games we have.  It turns out in the end that we had missed a few little rules that may have changed the outcome, but we still got the hang of the game.  We played the US map that night, and then yesterday evening at a guys game night I had a chance to play a 5-player game on the Germany map.