Ultimate Werewolf, Agricola, Race for the Galaxy, Guild Wars
I took a risk and drove to Pleasanton to hang out with a new game group today! It went alright, although the meeting place was a bit worrisome. The group met at the library, and had reserved a single table in a room that could fit, at most, 10 people. It was not ideal. But the games were fun, even though I played exceptionally poorly.
First a game of Werewolf, which I had not realized I would really like! The game is super simple, and is not at all good with a bunch of people who do not know each other at all, but I quite liked it. The set we were using was Ultimate Werewolf, which comes with dozens of different roles, and the game is balanced by each role having a different numerical value. The moderator adds up all the cards you to equal about zero, and the game is supposedly balanced. Very neat idea, which convinced me to buy this game that I will probably never play again.
But anyway, the games of Werewolf. I lost both times. Me personally, because it was my actions alone that led to the villagers getting eaten alive. Both times because I was mildly prejudice against a guy who was making magic missile jokes. The first time, I singled him out because he looked shifty, but he was just a villager just making small talk, and it basically boiled down to having no chance. The second time, we managed to snare a werewolf immediately, the vote going four to three, with myself, the werewolf, and a third guy voting not to execute. Now, I'm playing a Diseased, which will cripple the Werewolf if I get eaten, so I decide being as agressive as possible will draw the remaining wolf's ire if anything. So, with some ironclad logic, I saw that we should totally hang the other guy who voted to keep the known werewolf alive. Everyone agrees! But it turns out he wasn't a werewolf, he was a secondary bad guy. Well, at least he's out of the way, and hopefully I get eaten so the villagers have a chance. NOPE. Some random other guy gets eaten, and so know its down to me and two others, one who is a werewolf, one who is a seer, and it's my vote. And...I'm a dick and don't trust the bigger nerd, even though both of their arguments were equally weak. So, we lose again. Meh, I'm over it, but I want to read the crap out of this booklet.
Then I played Agricola, and I lost pretty badly! It's been a while since I played with four people, and I just always seemed to have one resource too few to really charge ahead. It also didn't help that I wasted time playing a card that gave me no benefit and instead helped everyone else on the table. Plus I just spent a lot of time not bothering to get a food engine up, so I was just always struggling. It also probably didn't help that my minor improvements were crap, so I had no reason to take start player, and therefore was always going last.
Then in Race for the Galaxy, I was all set to charge straight ahead with a military strategy, only for an opponent to get all the cards I needed to make it really succeed. I didn't have enough to swing it back around, and always seemed to trash a card I could have really used a turn before I realized I could use it. The fact that I also wasted my last two turns hoping someone would perform a specific action when there was no reason for them to...yeah, I was just the worst today.
So I went home and screwed around on Guild Wars. It went pretty well, actually. Played some random arenas, and in the first time in my entire six years of owning this game, I finally got my first gladiator point. Oh, I only got the one, and I can't believe it really took me this long to finally get that, considering how easy it should have been to get (you just have to win two fights in a row. Just two.), but hey, I got it! I also joined a guild, the Evenfeather Family, and found a team that seems to work pretty well in six-member areas, so I'll be tackling that goddamn final Kryta war mission once more.
