What I Played Today: December 19

Rattus, Panic Station, Carcassonne

Game night with some game guys. Game game.

To start, a quick game of Rattus, which an interesting area control game. Each player is trying to get all their cubes onto the board, but the plague is also rampaging through Europe, which can remove cubes from the board. You can take roles to gain special powers to better protect your cubes, but the more roles you have, the more dangerous the plague is for you. It's an interesting give and take game, and it's got a few interesting expansions out already, odd for a new game.

A new person showed up, someone fairly inexperienced with games, and we made the mistake of trying Panic Station, which is hard to learn how to play. I tried my best to explain it, but it was still overwhelming, and a player had to help her out. To make it worse, she was the Infected, and ended up wasting all three attempts on the same person and getting blocked every time. She did snag three gas cans though, and completely killed one player, but I did see a human victory, that was pretty great.

Then a game of Carcassonne. I have nothing to say about this game!

What I Played Today: December 3

Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Scrabble, Time's Up, Panic Station

Did a little bit of Assassin's Creed, tried the single player. It was frustrating, because the tower defense levels suck, and all of the stupid templar bases have these little rooms on the outside in which they put a couple of assholes with guns, who are hard to kill and usually see you pretty much instantly, and shoot you to death. I don't like that. Also saw the first Altair level, which takes place before Assassin's Creed proper, and for some reason the Assassin's base is being attacked. Which doesn't make any goddamn sense, because the driving action of the first Assassin's Creed is that Altair messes up and reveals the location of the Assassin's base, for which he is punished, but if the Templars knew where it was the entire time... I don't know, it just seems tacked on, and I am sick and tired of bases always being attacked.

At a party, I played Scrabble on the iPad, which was pretty neat. You have your own personal tile rack on your iPhone, and when it's your turn, you fling the tiles upward on your phone screen, and they show up on the iPad, and it's pretty awesome. Hurray technology.

Two-thirds of a game of Time's Up, which went alright. It went pretty fast, considering. I got to do the dance from Pulp Fiction, which was pretty fun.

After dinner, Panic Station was played, and then, after making a dozen mistakes, started over and replayed. This game has a lot of rules, lot more than it should have, and I didn't explain them well enough so we just hit the reset button and tried again. One interesting thing about both games is that the original infected was not I thought it was. Maybe I was just kinda stupid.

Anyway, once we got to the real game, not the practice game, it was going well, we revealed the hive, and then things started sliding downhill. After avoiding it for a while, eventually an infection slipped through the crack, and then in quick succession everyone but me was a bad guy and I was boned. One interesting thing that happens is after the fourth infection, the two humans, who knew they were in trouble, figured they could totally do it if they could just dodge one more infection. And then, when a trade was forced, the other player completely whiffed it and got herself infected without thinking, because she forgot she needed to trade a gas can to avoid getting stung. So instead she just rolled up to me and shot my character in the face. It was not awesome.

What I Played Today: November 14

Panic Station

I recently purchased a game in which some of the people are traitors. I love these games. Panic Station has one traitor who is trying to infect his friends, who themselves are trying to burn down some hive in which a bunch of little jerks are popping out of. At the game store I quickly assembled a full crew and got going. Apparently the rules in the box are the wrong rules, and it took someone who had played it correctly to tell us where we were going, which, frankly, would have improved the game considerably. After a lot of starts and stutters, we finally got moving, was able to just kinda guess who the badguy was, and after an hour of play, he managed to start to infect everyone. I was the third to go down, but working together, we managed to turn nearly everyone.

I went home after and read the real rules, and was kinda mad that these aren't the rules that are in the box. For example, the original virus giver discovered a work around in the trading rule that makes it very very easy to figure out who the infected is. Everyone has a gascan, and if you trade someone a gas can, you can't become infected. So...it makes sense for all humans to always trade a gas can amongst each other when required, so you are never in danger, and you can point out the infected the second you get the wrong thing from him or her. The new rules vary it so that no one is guaranteed to have a gas can at the start, and that someone can start as infected, so you won't immediately assume the guy who just pulled three cards from the stack just became infected. That's a lot better, and I'd like to try it again playing right, because I was kinda bummed how slowly the game moved and how little suspicion was traveling around the table.