Board Game Birthday

Been out of town, got some catching up to do!

James' birthday was at the end of August. To celebrate, we invited a few friends over to play board games - we love board games :) Not like Monopoly or Taboo, but modern board games of a slightly different, (geekier?) genre. The kind you'd find on the list at boardgamegeek.com. Some of our favorites include Pandemic, Space Alert, and Steam. Over the summer we bought Kingdom Builder, which had just won the German Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award. This is apparently the most prestigious award for board and card games in, like, the world. So there. And we love it! It's a great game - easy to learn, fun and competitive,  lots of replay-ability because you can change the game elements each time you play.

So for James' board game birthday party I decided to do a Kingdom Builder theme. It started with an idea for some awesome Kingdom Builder cupcakes... The boards for this game are divided into different types of terrain: desert, grassland, forest, canyon, and flowers are the five terrains you can build on. There are also water and mountain spaces which you generally can't build on (unless you have the ship which lets you build on water :). Behold my Kingdom Builder Cupcakes! Representative of the five terrains on which you can bulid your kingdom...

Grassland, Flowers, Desert, Canyon, Forest
(Sugar sprinkles, Raspberry M&M's, Sugar sprinkles, Heath bits, Mint M&M's)

I thought about how to make the little settlement houses, but ultimately decided not to bother.
The cupcakes were prettier on their own anyway!

Fully committed to the Kingdom Builder theme, I also created a spread of party snacks to match: a broccoli forest with dill dip; a grassland of celery and cucumber sticks with edamame; a cheese, crackers, and hummus desert; a very berry fruit salad for the flowers; and a canyon of pretzels, cookies and chocolate!

Sorry for the blurry pic - this is me not knowing how to use James' fancy pants camera!

We played Kingdom Builder (duh) as well as some new games brought over by friends of ours including Glory to Rome (during which James and I proved to be terrible teammates), Seven Wonders (when James and I got the chance to redeem ourselves as a cooperative couple), and a funny and fast paced card game with numbers and cows called Take 6 (also known by its Chinese translation: Who is the King Cow? lol). The birthday boy got some new games to play: the Kingdom Builder expansion set "Nomads" (of course!), a brand new game called Through the Ages (which is a whole 'nother story), and a neat and nerdy set of math-y playing cards from some friends of ours. 

Fun and delicious snacks were had by all.