T-Day Specials

Thanksgiving Day was a good gaming day for the old boy.  The Eldest and I started it out with a few learning games of Castle Ravenloft Board Game.  It is basically 4e D&D streamed down to the bare essentials for an elemental board game.  Despite me failing to catch one very significant rule, we came very close to winning once and got throttled the others.   As with most role play experiences, it is a cooperative game that seems to do a fairly decent job of managing the 'bad guys' against the players.

Later that day we played a few hands of Dominion.  We split the games 2 and 2.  After six Eric made it over and we tried our hand at Ravenloft again, still having not won a game.  When Paul showed we threw him into the mix and that is when we found that we should have been taking treasure cards on every monster kill...  Oops!  That made it a much more balanced game and we got our first win!

Afterwards The Eldest went to crash and the Eric, Paul, and I tried a go at Space Hulk: Blood Angel from Fantasy Flight Games.  It was late and since I had been up since about 3am, I was a bit tired.  The mechanics took a few rounds to figure out, and I would like to try again when I am more focused and we can try three or so games back to back in order to figure out the best way to conduct the cooperative aspects of the game.

On Friday when the Eldest got off work we tried Ravenloft again as a two player and were very close to winning the next adventure.  Just one stinkin' gargoyle away from a win!  Later we went to the theater and caught RED.  I have been wanting to see it as it looked alike a great action flick.  It was perfect summer fare at the very tail end of fall.  I give it 3 1/2 out of 4 ex-CIA operatives.  John Malkovich was a hoot.

jp

Gaming? What gaming?

So I have a few minor updates on the gaming front, but not much since I've been traveling again for work and such.

I picked up Blood Bowl Legends and have started playing a campaign of that.  Also picked up a discount bin casino game and have been doing a bit of Texas Hold'em and such to pass short periods of time.

The Eldest and I played three rounds of Dominion the other night.  I went 3-0 and felt bad.  She likes the game, but her strategies didn't pan out or took too long to develop.

Tonight headed to Steve's to do what I hope is the last play test before we clean up the rules and ship them out for the next review cycle.

jp

Dominion Play

The eldest and I got to play some Dominion after dinner tonight.

We did three games with me taking two and her stomping me on the third.  Just took her a while to get warmed up I guess!

I'm going to try and sign up for the FoW tournament at the Game Shoppe on the the 30th.  I haven't played in about 6 months so it is about time to get stomped there too. I'll have to dust off the Italians.

Not much new going on.  Hope to go see RED this weekend and looking forward to The Walking Dead on Halloween.

jp
What me game?

Saturday Game Day

The local convention, Nuke Con, hosted a Games Day at a local high school on Saturday.  I ran several events and had a pretty good, solid day of gaming.

Dominion - Had two games with three different students.  They caught on to the game quickly and we had a good time as I hadn't seen a few of the cards we used in play.  Namely the Witch, whom I have been cursed now several times, and the Gardens, which is what helped me to win the first round.

Pandemic - Again, two games with a set of three students.  We played the base set plus expanded roles on round one and had know issues containing the viruses, having won with a good round or two of cards left to be drawn.  Second game we used the Virulent Epidemics, which made it a bit harder.  We did win, but had to do it on the last draw.

Formula D - Only had two kids on this one.  First race was Monnoco.  One of the kids got over aggressive early and had to sneak around the rest of the track.  Second race was Race City on  the back with me crashing into the wall, leaving one of the kids to finish in first.

Song of Blades and Heroes - Steve and Paul showed up around 430ish and we played two games of three way battles of SBH.  It worked out pretty well as a whole.  The first game was to capture the 'Ring of Power' in the center of the table.  Eric and I met in the center early and bashed heads, with my leader grabbing the coin and falling back.  Following the gruesome kill on Bobbie the Ogrun, Victor did some fleeing, dropping the ring.  Paul's Paladin leader steps up and snags the ring and heads towards the deployment safe zone.   Solid win for Paul.  Game two was a king of the hill type scenario.  I switched to a dwarf list and Paul made a small adjustment to his leader.  Paul jumped to a big lead holding the hill due to bad activation roles by both Eric and I.  It was a big bloody mess, with Eric whittled down to Zarzathor, his Dragonborn Leader, left on the table, a few of Paul's Paladin friends, but the leader being gone, and I was down to my Dwarf Lord and a Thunder Gunner.  Some how, the Dwarf Lord stood the longest on the hill, but Paul's force took the day with the most victory points.

Good times.

Really looking forward to the SBH league on our alternating Thursday.  Bill and Bob may be joining in too, which would be cool as they have been playing for some time.

jp
Play!

Nuke Con Game Day

I've signed up to run a few games at Nuke Con's Game Day, Aftershock on 1 May.

1000 - Dominion
1200 - Pandemic
1400 - Formula D
1800 - Song of Blade and Heroes Mini Campaign.

If you are board, feel free to swing by!  It is held at Papillion South High School.

jp

Monday Night Gaming

Greetings,

Steve and Susan came over and we had burgers & asparagus for dinner.  The three of us went to the basement and played three games.

- Ticket to Ride – Susan hadn’t played in a year and she likes train games.  Her and I were pretty close, but she completed two extra tickets which got her the ‘most traveled’ and the extra routes.  Poor Steve misjudged his train lengths and ended up losing most of his tickets because he couldn’t connect the far distant ends.

- Dominion x2 – We next played two games of Dominion.  We hadn’t played in a few months, so we quickly reviewed and found that we had been making a mistake from the first time, namely not dumping the remainder of your hand after each turn.  That made a huge difference in circulating cards and getting more cards/gold to do stuff with.  The first game was pretty standard but had no ‘attack’ actions except the witch, but she really didn’t come out to play.  The main players were Festivals and Villages giving lots of multiple actions in the game.   I took a pretty aggressive approach to collecting Provinces and it paid off in the end.  The second game we ended up with all the ‘attack’ actions as well as the moat, which was pretty interesting.  Steve took a Thief route, Susan took a Spy route, while I cornered the Laboratory market.  The Spy/Lab combo worked well for Susan as she slowly cleaned out the Provinces and Duchy cards.   For me the highlight was having five of my six Laboratories in a single turn.  +2 cards, +1 action, followed with a woodcutter for +2 gold and an extra buy.  J

We wrapped up around 830, which was good timing and I got my food and gym stuff packed up before bed.

jp

Gaming?  Yes, gaming…

Dominion Unboxing

The second Game I got myself for Christmas was Dominion from Rio Grande Games... Here is the unboxing video I did for the game.

Two things I found in error... First, I turned the background music down too much and it is almost completly lost, second, I state one of the cards shown is the Thief, when in fact it is a Spy, but I'm to lazy to re-record the whole thing again and I don't have the know-how to cut and splice the audio track. Live and learn!

jp

Master of his Dominion

Tuesday Night Triple Play

I was able to sneak out for some gaming on Tuesday night and had a real good time playing a wide variety of games.

First up The Other Half and I ran some arrends to the doctors and the kitchen counter stores and got some samples. About three or so I made it to Steve/Rob's and started cooking up some chili.

Once that was started, Steve, Susanne, and I played the new expansion for Agricola, Farmers on the Moors. Moors added in some really nice items, taking an already pleasantly complex board game and cranking it up a notch. I really liked the concept of the fuel and how the executed. It provided motivation for conversion from a wood house early, to help pay for future fuel expenditures. Steve took an early lead using his wood hoarding techniques to build a five room house early, but fell into trouble with his massive birthing campaign and had to take a begging card. In the second to last round, I took both birth tiles that allowed me to push ahead of Steve and the actions needed to replace my wood house directly to stone with the conservator. I give the expansion a pretty high rating for the new stuff it adds to the game.

Second game was the next race in the Grand Prix League. We had three new teams show and a return of three teams for a total of six racers on the field. We raced on the Zhuai track that really limited the 6th gear action. I'll post a complete update in a new posting with all the action an current standings in a blatant attempt to get my blog post count up for the month.

The last game was again Steve, Susanne, and myself. I had opened up Dominion as it will be my next unboxing, but I wanted to at least play the game once so I could talk to it more intelligently during the video. I really liked the game and I can see that it will have a high degree of replayability. The player interaction is not high, in fact it can be pretty random given the cards that come up for the kingdom cards, which are chosen at random prior to the game. Once everyone knows the rules, it actually moves along very quickly. Each game will have a slightly different strategy, based upon the cards that are chosen again, but some key things we noticed was that concentrating solely on victory points (VP), which you need to win, diluted your ability to conduct actions, which you need to get VP. Also, concentrating to much on money development at the experience of actions or VP, and not making the switch to a VP build soon enough, put you in a hole when end game was approaching.

Solid night of gaming, with three very different game styles, all good stuff. Thanks for Steve for hosting on such an odd night and for Suzanne for the corn bread muffins.

jp

Games x3 & yummy, yummy chili

Triple Header

On Saturday I got a full day of gaming... It was enough to make any gamer jealous! The day started off with me at the Gym working on the Cross Fit Total. Max weights for back squat, shoulder press, and dead lift. My total was still pretty low and it put me in the beginner category, but that makes since given I just started about a month ago.

Afterwards I met Phillip, Adam, and Dan for our minor little farewell to MkI game. We played a 2K point game with Phillip and I playing against Dan and Adam. Phil had Epic Feorra and Kreoss and I ran Epic Caine and Halley. Not very fluff, but that is OK. Adam had Epic Magnus w/ Bart and Dan had Epic Butcher with Irusk. I got very lucky. By all rights I should have been dead with Haley on turn two from a Obliterator and eCaine on turn three from a supped up Mariner, but Adam's damage dice just couldn't pull it off, leaving each of my casters with ~5 points each. I ended up gatecrashing Bart with eCaine and having a bunch of stuff pick on Magnus. Phillip put alot of effort on eButch and needed eFerrora in the front to finish the brute off. We called the game with Team Adam/Dan only having Irusk left but us needing to wrap up the game. It was a hoot to play, just felt bad that Adam couldn't capitalize on my bad play! Farewell MkI!

Afterwards I purchased a few items. A set of the Italian P40 tanks for the mid war monster tournament for Flames of War in January. I also got the girls their Christmas presents and picked up a pair of board games for myself. I 'hope' to do an unboxing, after my business trip, of Factory Manager and Dominion as well as a detailed review of the game when Steve and I can give the game a go.

I headed over to the 'Man Cave' afterwards and Eric, Mark, Steve, Rob, Kyle, and I played that EPIC board game that had been itching at us. We chose Conquest of the Empire and had a pretty good time. Some really interesting mechanics in the game that I really liked and some that were a bit old... The premise of the game was Caesar had died and each player was attempting to take control of the empire. I really liked the alliance format. The real interesting mechanic that I really thought gave the game a twist was the alliance bidding. You had to form an alliance with half the players on one side and half on the other. You could not attack members in your alliance, but you could choose to lend support to attacks. This would not stop you from stealing influence from your alliance members, but you couldn't go all commando on them. Additionally although the game had huge armies, it wasn't about combat capability, but winning influence and victory points. I was able to gain control of Italia early which allowed be three scoring rounds at the max value, that allowed me to 'recycle' senate votes giving me a prime position to win more votes, especially the ones or additional victory points and chaos reduction. Once I got the solid lead, it was too late for the others to counter to any affect. Here is were the alliances become interesting as I was trying set up players to be on my side that were the biggest threat. The troop and combat roles were a little uninspiring, but like I said, it really wasn't the focus of the game.

Afterwards we introduced Kyle to Agricola on the family setting. It was another good game with each player being within 6 points of each other. I won in the end, but only because I stopped Steve from grabbing enough foods and forcing him to slaughter all his sheep to feed his family.

A great, fun filled day of gaming by any measure.

On Sunday The Other Half and I took the Dog to meet a co-workers dog that will be visiting over Christmas. It was a good encounter with dogs and people all getting along.

Icy as snot out today, and cold, with more cold to follow. I suppose you got to love winter, but I'm not sure why. :)

jp
Game on!