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.