Wannabe Wino

I have a bad case of heartburn. And still do this morning. I'm not sure wine would be the best thing for it, so we skipped it with dinner last night. Too bad, since I think a nice big red would have been great with the pulled pork bbq I made. Oh well. Perhaps some tonight with my homemade pizza, we shall see if the heartburn goes away by then.

However, we did play a round of my new wine trivia game. My first impressions are that all the rules are a little confusing. There's a bit too much going on. You have a deck of mixed fact and wild cards and a deck of question cards and then a pile of coins. You get dealt two cards from the mixed deck and you get a coin or two to start. Then the first player chooses the question level (there are 3 levels on each question card), picks a card from the mixed deck and takes a coin.

You are asked your question and if you are correct, you get one coin for level one, two for level 2, etc. In the same turn, you may also use your coins to buy any of the fact cards that are in your hand and/or may use a wild card if you have one, to challenge another player for his fact card, get 3 extra coins, etc., depending on the wild card.

The object is to be the first player with 7 purchased fact cards. Then you call the end of the game and each player adds up the coins his purchased cards are worth, bonus points for certain groupings of cards and any leftover coins he has. Highest total wins.

Fact cards are in 5 different areas and give you info about a region, a specific wine and food pairing, history, etc. At the bottom of each is a challenge question that a person challenging with a challenge wild card has to answer in order to take the card for their own hand. They were pretty informative and the trivia questions were fun. I think I need to play around and devise my own version of the game though, cause I didn't really spend a lot of time reading the actual information (thus not really learning anything), and overall we got very few trivia questions right. Though I did know that Champagne should be served at 45 degrees and Matt knew that wine is usually about 85% water.

More on the game after we've played a few times. And I'm glad we played without drinking because it was hard enough to keep all the rules straight as is!