Some friends and I were recently in a restaurant waiting at the bar for our table to be ready. We pulled out a single six-sided die and had a great time while the staff prepared the table -- we played the game Pig (complete rules). It's best with just a few players, but it can work with as many as are available. Pig is a press-your-luck game where the goal is to be the first player to reach 100 points... but every single roll is a risk. Give it a try!

The 2013 Mensa Select Award winners have been announced:

• Forbidden Desert (designed by Matt Leacock)
• Ghooost! (designed by Richard Garfield)
• KerFlip!
• Kulami
• Suburbia (designed by Ted Alspach)

The semi-cooperative board game Battlestar Galactica, one of my favorites, will soon have a new expansion: Daybreak. Game publisher Fantasy Flight Games has announced that the Daybreak expansion will include "12 new character sheets, 30 new Crisis cards, 25 new Skill cards, and much more" -- with "much more" including sweet-looking new plastic Centurion figures to replace the cardboard tokens that came with the original game.

Daybreak is scheduled to be available in the fall of 2013.

At this year's Gathering of Friends, an event organized by game designer Alan R. Moon, I was only able to be there for three days -- but I managed to play 32 games a total of 38 times in that short span. Among those were some favorites, like the auction games Ra and Traumfabrik, along with plenty of new games which I really enjoy, including Coup, Clubs and the cooperative game Star Wars: Angriff der Klonkrieger. (Sadly, the Star Wars game is very unlikely to have an English edition printed due to the licensing issues.) I'll be writing more about many of the games I played soon!