Ulysses and Auweier

The final two new-to-me games I played on Friday were Ulysses and
Auweier.

Auweier was a game
Steffan strongly recommended. The theme is one of birds mating,
and the mechanic is one plays worms to seduce the female birds, and at
some point a "mating round" gets called, and you see who gets who's
eggs. The theme was amusing and the mechanics seemed good, but the
game didn't click with me. With more plays, another aspect of the
game might add a lot of interest: you can stack your draw deck. It
has some potential.

Bob was interested in playing Ulysses, as was I. The theme here is
great: Each player is a God trying to push Ulysses' boat around the
Mediterranean in accordance with their own goals. The core mechanic
is when each player proposes pushing the boat somewhere, and there is
a "council of gods" in which card play determines if the boat goes to
the originally proposed location or some other. I really liked many
aspects of the game, though the artistic design of the board meant it
was sometimes distracting to identifying routes, and therefore it was
easy to miss a shorter route between two points. Further, two of the
players seemed to be severely hindered by bad card draws, which may
hurt the balance of the game excessively. Despite this, it was fun
and I look forward to playing it again some time.