What I Played Today: February 6

Netrunner, Noir, Blades of Legend, Nanuk, Avalon

I played a game of Netrunner with my awful criminal deck. This deck is not good! For one thing, it's too expensive, and my icebreakers are garbage. The corporation was able to hide all his good stuff behind this one server that was just way too difficult to crack, and my last ditch run to get back there just...didn't work. I don't know, I need to start over, try again. Might just skip that tournament, because I am not ready.

Then I got to crack that Minigame Library. We played a game of Noir, which is a deduction game. There's a 5x5 grid of characters, one player is an killer, who can murder people, and the other is a sleuth, trying to find the killer and not get killed. The player can slide a row or column as well, it's just a matter of trying to figure out where the other person is. The killer won each time, because while the killer can change identities if he gets in a pinch, the sleuth cannot, so if he is found out, he is pretty screwed. But fun! I want to try some of the other modes.

Also Blades of Legend, which is weird hidden role game. There are two teams, each lead by a master, and everyone else is a wielder, who have special swords. Everyone is trying to break the seals in front of the master, either their own, so they have a more powerful weapon, or the seals that belong to the master, to defeat the master. It was slow going at first, because nobody really understood what they needed to do. But once we started understand, the teams became extremely obvious, and it was just a matter of burning things down. The weapons didn't really get used, which was kinda sad. But people ended up liking it regardless, so I have a chance to get it to the table again.

Nanuk is a push-your-luck game where people get eaten by a bear! I did pretty well, able to call when the hunt would go well or not, and some poor player guessed wrong every single time and did not collect any cards. But there was a tie for first, and it was not me.

We had a game of Avalon at a bar that went well until some poor knight put in the wrong card and we had to crash it. It was funny that the new player didn't quite understand how things worked, and didn't put herself on the mission as a leader because she thought she couldn't, and when she was on a mission, she immediately threw down her card and shouted "Success!" Of course, she was the only spy on the mission and it was the last mission for good, so I don't know WHY she threw down a pass. But yeah, at least we stopped the game immediately when a mistake was made, because getting to the end when the game is broken is frustrating.

What I Played Today: October 17

Nanuk, Smash Up, Dixit, Netrunner, BattleCON, Avalon, Dungeons of Dredmor

Lot of games today! First Nanuk, which is a bit of liar's dice. I've talked about it before, I'm sure. I didn't win, although I did pretty okay. I don't know, middling.

Then a game of Smash-Up. It took forever for the game to actually get going, because everyone was playing minions, but was spreading them out. Come on guys, break those bases. The game ended pretty quickly when the robot pirate player managed to dump a full 10 points onto a base into a turn, so that was cool.

A quick game of Dixit, that I somehow ran away with. Well, whatever.

Then a couple of two-player games while a full ton of people were learning Battlestar Galactica. I lost in Netrunner because man on man, there has got to be a better way with slowing down card snatching from the HQ. I have no control over what's there! I also lost BattleCON, because I chose the doppleganger character, which I hate, and my opponent was not easily copyable. We managed to go to time, probably past, in fact, because we weren't paying a lot of attention.

Then we went to a bar and tried to play Avalon, which was a bad idea! Some people missed the rules, some spies didn't see each other, some spies didn't even open their eyes, it was a disaster. Don't play games in bars if all players aren't within five feet of each other, everyone.

Then I was at home, and thought to myself, "Dungeons of Dredmor. That's a thing, right?" So I played that for a bit, looked around online, apparently a lot of people have made their own skill mods for it, that sounds cool. So I might play it again!

What I Played Today: October 24

Nanuk, Innovation, Battlestar Galactica (the RPG)

It was the 6th anniversary of my local gaming store, and circumstances caused me to not show up until about two (had to do laundry), so when I showed up all the food was gone and only the regulars were still hanging around. So I played some games with them, why not?

First was Nanuk, which is a bluffing game similar to Liar’s Dice, but with a larger crowd. Everyone makes bets based on how many of a given animal you think you can catch. Once someone is convinced the bet is too risky, they can say they think the party is doomed, and then everyone around the table divides into two teams…those who think it can be done, and those who don’t. Everyone on the go team plays cards from their hand to try to get the total, and then cards are drawn from the deck. If a bear comes up or there aren’t enough of the animal in the draw, the party is doomed, and all those not stupid enough to go along split the pot. Otherwise, the party wins the pot. It’s a nice twist, moves quickly, and easy to learn, as well as pretty good with lots of people. I had fun, and I also won, so.

Then a game of Innovation, which went alright, although it was a bit slow. Some of the higher level cards are intense, and there was a bit of a problem earlier, where a player went all tower cards and made demands that drained everyone’s field, which was a bit of problem early on. There was also an odd case where two players got to share a dogma that went on forever, and it was really hard to track. So…it’s tough with all new players and four people, this may be better with two players.

Then it was on to RPG night, and this time we played Battlestar Galactica! …the roleplaying game. This worked off the Cortex system, which is nice and simple. We played a small team of survivors of the events that kicked off the Battlestar Galactica pilot. I played an engineer who suddenly got pulled onto a project to investigate an odd corpse that was discovered flirting with cylons, while my brother was a security officer who happened to get assigned to the same secret bunker. The bombs go off, the third character, a Marine, falls out of the sky, and it becomes a case of trying to survive. I was really excited to play a character who knew the secret before everyone else, but couldn’t reveal it and slowly unraveled his mind. He spent a good amount of time clutching his head afraid that every NPC was a cylon. It was fun.

The only issue I took was that without the Battlestar Galactica dressing, this was exactly the same setup as the zombie RPG we played three weeks ago under the same DM. It’s odd that he gave us the exact same build to work off of…I hope he has some other ideas.