What I Played Today: March 15

Sentinels of the Multiverse, City of Horror, Grimoire Shuffle

The latest expansion to Sentinels of the Multiverse is out, and we sat down for a couple of games. We first tried to fight the Dreamer, who has this weird twist in which you do not want to hit the main villain, which makes cleaning up the minions extremely difficult, because you can't use the abilities that hit all villains without putting the Dreamer in danger. So...there are a ton of minions that we have to kill one at a time. It was not ideal, and after the environment dumped a couple of huge hitters on us, there was just no way we could survive.

So a second game after a villain that gave out jinxes, which...aren't that big of deal. The minion-less villains are always problematic, because they always go down really quickly, since there is nothing else to focus on. But I continue to like the new stuff, and wait patiently for the next expansion that I have apparently already paid for.

Then City of Horror with some people that hadn't played yet, a lot of bargaining, a lot of backbiting. There was a really fun power play in the second round, in which I decided to heel turn on the guy I was working with turn one because I thought it was getting too powerful where he was, so I flipped to get a vote I normally wouldn't have, only for him to steal it with an action card and kill me instead. Things got a bit bitter in the late game though, when the decision I made of who dies in a given area apparently didn't go over well. But...I got one last trickster moment, when I somehow quicktalked a guy into losing two points to make sure no one died, even though it was really more advantageous for him to just vote for my character to die. I felt pretty slick about that.

Also tried to get people to play and like Grimoire Shuffle, and they didn't! Oh man did they really not like it. I don't know what the problem was. I still like the game, damn it!

What I Played Today: March 13

City of Horror, Pixel Tactics, Avalon

New backstabby game, oh boy. This one you play a group of survivors who are trying to survive a few hours from the zombie horde, which are zombie hordeing. Each building has a special ability and a limited capacity as well as a threshold for zombies, and if there are too many zombies, everyone there needs to vote to see who dies, basically throwing them to the zombies. All the survivors have a special ability, and each player has a hand of action cards to do special stuff, and of course everything is tradable, so there's a lot of brokering for favors and such.

We played the first few turns as a coop, in which everyone was helping keep everyone else alive to garner favors and such. And then, in the third turn, there was a lot of damage to the water tower, which can collapse and kill everyone, and a threat on the table that it might need to collapse if a certain character didn't get where he needed to go. The people on the water tower wanted to bail, and there was so negotiation on how to get them off and into safe places. Now, I knew where my character wanted to go, and I could get there easily, so I kinda just didn't feel like telling the table where I was going. So, we flip our moves, one player prioritizes getting his guy off the water tower instead of the suggested move which would have prevented the water tower from collapsing, and there are a number of deaths, except for my people, who were doing fine. Then the last turn I have everything I need in my hand to both keep my people alive as well as return them to their unused higher-point value side. So...while everyone has dead folk or exhausted people, I am sitting very pretty and win easily. And now people will never trust me again.

Then a quick game of Pixel Tactics. I like the changes made, I like the interesting decisions you have to make, but I wasn't paying attention and set up the game so that my leader got murdered. That one leader who gets three actions a wave instead of two is bullshit.

And a couple of games of Avalon, both won by evil, because the Merlin was too obvious in the first one, and I was not being very good at understanding someone's logic. I think I'm going to stop bringing this to bars, as my game usually collapses when I got a drink in my hand. Please, it's just too loud. Too many mistakes made.