What I Played Today: April 16

Battlestar Galactica, Gosu, Lords of Waterdeep

I got BSG to the table! Everybody start applauding! I did have some help, someone wanted to play, and I really played up the "playable in one and a half hours" part. We did finally get five, and we got into space! I...kinda love the short variant. The game still is reasonably difficult, the intrigue is still there, and it still feels like Battlestar. We had an interesting game, in which one of the Cylons just kinda...forgot he was a Cylon, but the humans still lost because we got slammed with damage at the end of the second jump, and there was a boarding party just walzing up. Even with some serious deck stacking, we couldn't pull it off, and the lone revealed Cylon was able to take up to task. But I enjoyed it, although it might have been better if the two new players didn't pull Cylon. And all it took was lending a game of mine to someone whose last name I don't know! That can't end badly, right?

Then moved to a new location and played Gosu, with all expansion cards, and I just could not keep up. I started with a strong play, but my opponent killed it, and it was downhill from there. I just couldn't handle his card engine, and he kept killing my guys every chance he got. The new tribes do play pretty well, lot of interesting synergies, but most require very specific cards. The dragon clan I don't like, because to really use their specials, you have to do some ridiculously impossible things. Come on, make those dragon tokens easier to get, fellas.

Then played Lords of Waterdeep, which is a pretty alright worker placement. You slowly build up teams of adventurers and send them out of quests, as well as build buildings and play some intrigue cards. It's kinda random, but fairly well balanced besides...nobody can really jump ahead, and they can slowed down if you need them to. I don't know, I like it better than Finca.

What I Played Today: February 24

Gosu, You Don’t Know Jack, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Disc Drivin’

The game about goblins hit the table today. I had kinda forgotten how to play, as did my opponent, and he got frustrated because he burst out of the gate without getting a card drawing engine into play, while I took advantage of some jerk named Kaq, who lets me draw a card whenever a card is flipped, and then used some graveyard combos to flip pretty much every card my opponent owned, easily winning the next two great battles. It was not even fair.

I got floored in You Don’t Know Jack. I am not very good at Jack Attacks, at least against this guy. I am not fast enough, and there was an entire game where I didn’t know the answer to at least half the questions. So, yeah. I should play online so that my feelings aren’t hurt for being awful at this.

Then I stabbed some guys! In an electronic facsimile of the Italian Renaissance, at least (which in story is itself an electronic facsimile of the Italian Renaissance. Oh the layers). Anyway, I had a couple of bad games, followed by a couple of good games, and a lot of waiting. There was this one jerk who did this weird trick where he would lay down a smoke bomb, stand there and watch me cough, and then a moment later I fall down from poison and he nets over 1000 points. He pulled this on me twice, and while my initial instinct was “That can’t be right,” I think I figured how that nets so many points, and now I think that it’s incredibly cheap. So…now I want to try it. I’m not proud.

I also had a great game where I was doing quite well but not perfect, able to evade a lot of my enemies, and in the last seconds, someone tried to kill me and missed, and then my target came running straight towards me and I stabbed him and took 1st. I was excited, because hurray for a comeback, and I knew this was worth points towards a challenge reward. So I checked to see how many more times I had to perform this fairly difficult stunt to get the next chunk of XP, and found out that the next reward comes when you make a comeback in the last 10 seconds 30 times. This sounds impossible. There are so many factors that cause that circumstance, and I can’t imagine replicating it 30 times in a single lifetime. I’ve managed to do it twice, and I am about 20 games from the highest level (at which point XP rewards become pointless). The fact that this is the 2nd tier of three for this particular challenge makes me think they didn’t think this one through.

Oh, and new game on the block, Disc Drivin’, which is a stupid name for a thing, by the way, but it’s fun. It’s the board game Pitch Car with some modifications that are only possible in electronic form, such as power ups and speed strips and neat ramps. It’s fun, although I’m a bit concerned that there are a few sections where you can just get stuck and keep flying off the map every turn while your opponents lap you. There should be a mulligan option, move your disc to somewhere where you can actually do something.

What I Played Today: October 20

Gosu, Innovation, Dominion: Prosperity

Card game day, y’all! I got to show off all the new games that I’d been excited about, and they did not disappoint. First was Gosu, that goblin game. It works much better with two, because you only have to concentrate on a single opponent, and the majority of the cards are better with focused fire than anything else. We went three rounds, the first round going to my much stronger opponent who got two chips off the bat, then a second round where I was one card away from victory because of the full army win condition guy, and then a third round where my opponent couldn’t keep up. But the interactions in this game are great and interesting, and I no longer think that the game should have included more cards. It seems just right; not enough variety so it’s impossible to get the cards you want out.

Then on to Innovation, and I was so right to like this game. It’s a tad random, in which you can only use at most five of the dogmas, but the dogmas do such varying and intense effects that there are a lot of strategies. I went mostly with brains, which allow you to slap down a lot of cards quickly and help you splay (fancy word for adjust your pile of cards so they show more symbols, allowing you to use more actions). But my opponent went on the offensive, taking my cards and scored points faster than I wanted. He also got an early special achievement, quickening his victory. But the fact that the interactions in this game are so complex and yet so limiting is really great. I think with an extra person, the tension would be great.

Then more Dominion, because you know, it’s good. I lost the first game badly, not able to counter the incredible combo that is Goons/Counting House. I bought too many peddlers for full price was my problem…that’s the weird thing about this set, there are a lot of cards that are give-and-take, which seems weird considering their cost. The cards here are more vicious to you than they are to your opponents (well, except Goons). But the second game, which mixed with Seaside, went in my favor somehow. I think because we dropped the high-end cards, and so there wasn’t the pressure to ramp up. I also finally figured out what Warehouse is good for; it’s for decks that stuff to their gills with victory points early and need a way to get them out. Of course, considering that Native Village and Island is from the same set and do it so much better…

What I Played Today: October 12

Gosu, Dominion: Prosperity

At game night, I finally got to get Gosu to the table, and I quite like it. You play cards into your plateau, and they all have special abilities. The factions have distinct abilities, and there are a lot of strategies. It does move a lot slower than I thought, we played for about an hour fifteen, but the machinations work for me. The game seemed to swing away from one particular player, but because he played his cards well and managed to use an alternate victory condition to win the game. That was neat.

Also played some more Dominion. There was a new player at the table, and it went pretty well, as it usually does. Dominion is a great beginner game. Well, a great game, period. We played with the absolute beginner’s set, and it explained the game pretty well. Then we broke out Prosperity, and that was good. I went with the strategy I viewed last time, combining Goons (+1 victory chip for each card you buy), Worker’s Village (plus actions and, importantly, plus buy) and Counting House (return all cooper from your graveyard to your hand), which eventually netted me +10 coin late in the game. This, despite having so much copper in my deck, helped me win. The third game featured some odd give-and-take cards, the trading route (a neat card, but having to trash a card every time it’s used is weird), the Mountebank (love this stupid card), and some other stuff. It was a weird game, with a lot of trashing of cards, where the focus ended up being more about Provinces than the new powerhouse Colonies. Odd. But I managed to win every game, which was neat, I guess. I’ve just played this game so much that it’s become natural what strategy to take.