What I Played Today: June 22

Race for the Galaxy, Cosmic Encounter, Bohnanza

WELL we were supposed to have a party today with drinking and video games and all sorts of fun but there was a monsoon somehow so we were without power all day. I was so excited about the party, you guys...

Anyway, instead I went to a place where I knew there was power and played some board games. I lost a game of Race for the Galaxy by a jillion points. Okay, not so drastic, but I wasn't paying attention to what someone on the other side of the table was up to and he was taking all the cards I needed, and as his last action, he decided to steal one of my planets and deny me a fifth of my points. I wasn't happy. But it didn't matter, because I would have been clearly in last even if he hadn't done that.

Then a game of Cosmic Encounter which I guess I won, but I got bored with it quickly, as I do with most games of Cosmic Encounter, because it starts to just stagger on after mid-game. Someone was playing the Parasite, which meant they could get points whenever they wanted to, and another was playing the Will, which broke the way the game happened, and meh, screw this game.

Then another damn game of Bohnanza, went about as well as last time. I did buy a third field this time, but it didn't help.

What I Played Today: June 21

Guild Wars 2, Claustrophobia, Bohnanza, Star Wars Card Game

Brother you know that I was playing Guild Wars 2! I might one day say something interesting about it!

Also, at the game store, finally tried out Claustrophobia, which is a dungeon crawler with one person playing the bad guy, etc. etc. It's alright, pretty simple, the way that you select character actions is alright, I guess. I managed to win by manipulating my beefy guys so that they couldn't be hit, and won easily.

Then a game of Bohnanza, which I lost quite easily! Apparently everyone else believes in buying the 3rd bean field, which I found insane, but it turns out that is in fact what you need to do. Having the extra space means you can do a lot more, and I just couldn't get the right deals. Oh well.

Then I played the Star Wars Card Game because I haven't in literally months and I supposedly like this game. I managed to lose because the Empire player managed to get the Executor out, which can rip objectives to shreds. And did it! I did manage to get Leia out, and she's actually a super powerful card, because she gets captured when she dies, and when she gets captures, you get to refresh literally everything! That's cool!

What I Played Today: June 29

Bohnanza, Samarkand

At game night, I got another opportunity to play Bohnanza, and it’s hard to imagine that this simple game about planting beans was designed by the same guy who created Agricola and Le Havre. I didn’t win, because the game requires me to be two things that I’m typically not; lucky and aggressively social. I just didn’t have the enthusiasm to make sure that I bartered off all the beans that I didn’t need, and really I didn’t feel up to trying.

I also played Samarkand, which is an interesting take on the concepts behind railroad games. It’s a game set in the mid-sixth century, in which you are a trading family just establishing itself in the Fertile Crescent, in which you marry into various trading families and expand outward to create relationships with other families, while trying to get ahold of some rare resources in the region. On your turn you either marry into the family by paying a dowry, or use the trading families resources to start a caravan into adjacent regions. You get points when you establish trade agreements, find rare minerals, and generally get rich. The game has a short fuse, with an end condition that can come pretty quickly if people try to rush it, and the majority of your points are going to come from mostly luck, as the best points come from having the right cards in your hand. I won mainly because I got a few cards that were focused on a specific area and nobody ended the game before I could set up the trade routes between the Chinese and the Huns. It was an interesting game though, and it’s good to see a game of this type that isn’t about trains.

What I Played Today: May 4

Metal Gear Acid, Bohnanza, Dominion, The Bridges of Shangri-La

I started Metal Gear Acid today, which I thought was an interesting idea when I heard about it (a card game. Pretty much anytime the concept is a card game, I’m in). I sat through about 25 minutes of just watching the game do whatever it wanted to do, show me a bunch of scenes of people I don’t care about walking around in narrow hallways, and trying to teach me how to play and failing. (Shrug)

I also went to board game night to play a couple of games. I got a chance to play Bohnanza again, the bean planting game that I hadn’t played in years. You try to collect a lot of the same card, either from your hand or through trading. You’re not allowed to change the order of cards in your hand, and must play the first card on your turn, so you have to trade away any cards you don’t want or you’ll be stuck with them. I did alright, but didn’t quite get the cards I needed. Interesting, but simple.

Then a couple of games of Dominion, this time with someone I didn’t play with before. His style was similar to mine, concentrating on getting rid of cards from the deck to keep only good stuff, but didn’t know the cards as well as I did, and I’ve got a solid strategy: no more than 5 actions if you can help it, and avoid attacks. It worked pretty well. The second game had a lot of attacks flying around, but I stayed neutral and got REALLY lucky for which cards in my deck got zapped. Hilariously, I had one baron in my deck, and it became the target of the swindler four times. What a coincidence. I joked that this has the most gullible baron ever. “Oh my, a million dollars from a prince in Nigeria? My lucky break!”

Finally, I played an abstract game called the Bridges of Shangri-La, an area control game in which you have seven different symbols that you’re trying to spread to a number of villages. The key different is that whenever you spread your symbols, the path you use is closed off the rest of the game, and the game ends when there’s only one path left. I was doing alright, but got soundly beat by the owner of the game, who knew the strategies better. It’s clever, if a bit odd that such a wargame concept has such a peaceful veneer.