What I Played Today: August 27

Elder Sign, Word Fighter, Legend of the Five Rings, Spy Party, Assassin's Creed Revelations, Wildstar, Penny Arcade: Gamers vs. Evil, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Gears of War: The Board Game, Burger Time

Another day, started this one a bit slowly. After I got started, I moved directly to the Fantasy Flight booth, because I couldn't quite believe they were actually there. I played a game of Elder Sign, which I don't think we were playing right, but I enjoyed it, it's a nice, crunchy dice game. Lot of options.

I played a quick game of this new thing I've heard about, Word Fighter. It's a word find game with a few good twists, chief among them that each player uses the same board, so it really is based on how quickly and effectively you find words. Also got roped into trying Legends of the Five Rings, which is pretty much exactly how I remember it, confusing and overly complex without explaining why. But hey, I won and I got free cards.

I got to play a couple of rounds of Spy Party, and it was awesome except for the part where I lost. I had trouble finding the guy while I was the sniper, and I was super obvious when I was the spy, but I like this game a lot, so I hope that there is something resembling an actual release or beta here in the future.

A short line for Assassin's Creed: Revelations, so I stepped in and soaked in the new details. Chief among them is that the radar is gone, so you'll have to find your target your own dang self. You still get light-ups if they are visible, so that helps, and it looks like players and NPCs have actual different costumes? Anyway, the fact that you have no radar makes a lot of elements in the game different, but I think I like it. I look forward to playing it.

Also took a look at Wildstar. It's a MMO, sure, but the look is pretty clean, and I like the dodge mechanic and I like the path system they are crafting, where you decide what type of quests you want to do a lot of. That's neat. I signed up for the beta, we'll see.

Pretty sure we played Penny Arcade at some point. That game got so much play, which makes the right amount of sense, but I don't remember this particular game. That evening after a panel, we sat back down and played a couple of games of Betrayal at House on the Hill, which went fine. I was the traitor in the last game, and my job was to just wait it out and let the bomb explode, and there were no rules saying that I couldn't interfere with the mission, so I just parked my avatar in places where there would be a lot of traffic and activated the music box I got at one point, which requires players to pass a sanity check or lose their turn. With this shutting down the majority of the players, I managed to win, but it felt like cheating. There is so much weirdness to the basic structure of this game, with the haphazard mansion exploration first half the game, and the goal oriented but really uncertain second half. I don't know.

We also grabbled a copy of the Gears of War board game demo box, and gave it a try, and everyone hated it but me. The mission required us to close up these holes on the map, which we could only do with a die roll. Now, the math says that it's about a 60% chance that we'll get what we need with a die roll, but the actual game saw us throwing six grenades and not once getting the result we needed to close a single hole, and there were five of them! So, after a few people fell down, and we played a bit defensively, we managed to kill all the enemies (having kinda forgotten to full read cards that would have spawned more enemies), we just said we were done and packed up. I still want to play more, it seems both simple and crunchy, but it does have a few problems, and it just isn't in the wheelhouse of my usual group of players. Looks like it's sold out at the con itself, so I guess buying it now isn't an option anyway.

And then we went to get omelets as large as a dog's head, and there I played a game of Burger Time really poorly. I forgot I had salt.