Trenched, Star Trek, Dixit, Nightfall, Battlestar Galactica
I invited everyone in town over for a game day, and we played some games. While everyone walked in, I was in the middle of a mission in Trenched, which is getting harder, as I had to defend two bases and had some jerks show up every few minutes to blow up my turrets. I had made an error in turret placement, and because I needed to bring a particular type of turret, I was in the tiny mech, making combat difficult. I managed to pass with 21% health on the bases, but I am going to need some more experience to acquaint myself on how this game actually works.
We played a game of Star Trek with a full crew, which has the noticeable advantage of often allowing you to get bonuses in skill checks for having multiple helpers, but your turn also comes around a lot less often, meaning you might have to swing the check with Uhura when it would be more useful to have Spock do it, but you just can’t wait two more turns to try it. But we did pretty well, getting the silver palm, and if we had concentrated in space more, we could have gotten the highest honor. Now I think it’s time to try it on moderate difficulty.
We also played a game of Dixit, which went pretty well, everyone had fun. I never have anything to saw about Dixit, it’s a pretty abstract game.
There was a mild attempt to get some people to try out Nightfall, but then the pizza showed up and somebody was playing Portal 2 and everyone stopped to watch him play that for a good hour and so we didn’t even make it thorough the first round. It was alright, my feelings aren’t hurt, but it was weird to have a game abort itself like that.
After much waiting, Battlestar Galactica made it onto the table again. We had tried to get everyone to play, but some people just started getting tired, so we had five players and a few onlookers. I finally got the Ionion Nebula expansion on the table how I wanted, so we started playing with that. Someone was the Cylon leader, and he immediately started the game trying to get a Super Crisis, so I assumed that he wanted us dead and now. We had no problem in space, which was weird, and after the first jump, it looked pretty stable.
Then, it became clear that people wanted to leave soon, and we would not be able to complete a game, so I made the executive decision to fast forward the game. I gave everyone their second loyalty card, destroyed a bunch of ships, knocked down the dials down by half and said, okay, let’s go from here. The cylon revealed immediately because he realized the game was afoot, and started to tear us apart. Two of our crew were sent to sickbay, but we had no trouble making the jump to the nebula. There the final decisions were made, and I really like this part of the game. I like how the decisions really impacted the game and who got screwed or helped. It turned out that we all ended up with few enough trauma tokens that nobody got expelled from the game, and we raced towards the last jump, with our morale and population in the tank and the decision points constantly trying to tick away our last strength.
Suddenly it was the Cylon leader’s turn, and after I reminded him that his once-per-game is super awesome, giving him three actions in a single turn, he jumped onto the Battlestar and immediately slammed on the FTL button, with our bar half-way done. He played the +2 to any die roll card, which confused me, but I quickly activated my once-per-game to force the die roll to be an 8, winning the game for the humans. It turns out the cylon leader wanted the humans to win, but had to play a supercrisis card, which was why he did what he did. Although he still left the game to a 50-50 chance, which seemed a bit cavalier. If only he had revealed what he was up to better, so I could have announced the die result sooner.
But I had fun! Hurray fun!
Showing posts with label Nightfall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nightfall. Show all posts
What I Played Today: March 28
Puzzle Strike, Nightfall, The Resistance
Game night that was dominated by Dominion clones, first Puzzle Strike, which went well enough. I got knocked out first and then walked away from the table, so I could not tell you who won, but I do notice that the ticking clock of the game ending makes the game a lot harder to build an effective deck. You are constantly adding things to your bag and given no real or useful options to get rid of them, and spending time with Self Improvement or other similar chips just waste your time. It make fighting important, but it’s also not nearly aggressive enough, because you do not get enough chances to actually attack.
A game that does offer a lot of opportunity for attacking is Nightfall, which I played with a full table for the first time. The players who have been in this situation before have pointed out that in this environment, you don’t want to dogpile on a single player, because while that person will definitely lose, there’s a higher chance that someone else will win. They also talked up cards that dealt damage to all opponents, so of course the player to my left got one of these in his private stash, putting the impetus on me to make sure he didn’t get a chance to chain it. I think this was a little unfair, so I let it happen as much as possible and tried to field as many minions as I could, to make me less of a target for attacks. The strategy worked, as I avoided a lot of aggro and only soaked the occasional stray hit and won with 7 wounds.
Then a couple of games of The Resistance, which is a game lot like Werewolf, except everyone is involved the entire time. Each turn, the leader (who constantly rotates) nominates a set number of people to go on a mission, and everyone votes on the choice. If a majority agree, those people go on the mission, and they determine if the mission succeeds or fails. The spies want it to fail, but they can only force a failure if they are on a mission. So it’s a game where you’re trying to figure out everyone’s motives, who’s lying, who’s not, and trying to make three missions succeed or fail.
Both games went about the same way, back and forth failures and successes, followed by the spies lying their way into the last mission and winning the game. I think the game isn’t very well suited for five players, because if you aren’t sure who the spies are for the last mission, it’s going to fail, and during the missions with only two players going, there’s no incentive for the spies to force it to fail, leading to a sense of false complacency. I got confused by this in the first game, assuming the player who was on the team both times a mission failed was the spy without even considering the guy who was sent on every mission. The second game went about the same way, with the law of probability confusing us and making us assume the same people couldn’t possibly both be the spies again. I definitely want to play this with more people, if only so the game feels less cloistered, and because I like playing games where I get to lie.
Game night that was dominated by Dominion clones, first Puzzle Strike, which went well enough. I got knocked out first and then walked away from the table, so I could not tell you who won, but I do notice that the ticking clock of the game ending makes the game a lot harder to build an effective deck. You are constantly adding things to your bag and given no real or useful options to get rid of them, and spending time with Self Improvement or other similar chips just waste your time. It make fighting important, but it’s also not nearly aggressive enough, because you do not get enough chances to actually attack.
A game that does offer a lot of opportunity for attacking is Nightfall, which I played with a full table for the first time. The players who have been in this situation before have pointed out that in this environment, you don’t want to dogpile on a single player, because while that person will definitely lose, there’s a higher chance that someone else will win. They also talked up cards that dealt damage to all opponents, so of course the player to my left got one of these in his private stash, putting the impetus on me to make sure he didn’t get a chance to chain it. I think this was a little unfair, so I let it happen as much as possible and tried to field as many minions as I could, to make me less of a target for attacks. The strategy worked, as I avoided a lot of aggro and only soaked the occasional stray hit and won with 7 wounds.
Then a couple of games of The Resistance, which is a game lot like Werewolf, except everyone is involved the entire time. Each turn, the leader (who constantly rotates) nominates a set number of people to go on a mission, and everyone votes on the choice. If a majority agree, those people go on the mission, and they determine if the mission succeeds or fails. The spies want it to fail, but they can only force a failure if they are on a mission. So it’s a game where you’re trying to figure out everyone’s motives, who’s lying, who’s not, and trying to make three missions succeed or fail.
Both games went about the same way, back and forth failures and successes, followed by the spies lying their way into the last mission and winning the game. I think the game isn’t very well suited for five players, because if you aren’t sure who the spies are for the last mission, it’s going to fail, and during the missions with only two players going, there’s no incentive for the spies to force it to fail, leading to a sense of false complacency. I got confused by this in the first game, assuming the player who was on the team both times a mission failed was the spy without even considering the guy who was sent on every mission. The second game went about the same way, with the law of probability confusing us and making us assume the same people couldn’t possibly both be the spies again. I definitely want to play this with more people, if only so the game feels less cloistered, and because I like playing games where I get to lie.
What I Played Today: March 25
Nightfall, 51st State, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
I cannot win that one game about vampires. The dynamic give and take of the game is still interesting, although you really do need to pay a lot of attention to what is going on. I got really excited to play all five cards in my hand in one chain, but only when I started to resolve it did I realize that I didn’t want to do that, as I had to target my own minions with direct damage attacks. So, after a couple of dumb moves, I lose, unable to keep up. We also keep tossing Vulko out of the running. He’s just such a priority, so we often decide that nobody gets to play him.
Stumbling through a game of 51st State, I think I finally understand how to play. You get some resources each turn, you spend them to bring cards into play, and you keep having to look up in the book to see exactly what each symbol means. I don’t understand why they thought they needed to make a confusing series of icons on every card. But it eventually came together. There are a lot of cards that aren’t very useful, and because the factions have one type of action they do well and the others they do poorly, it’s tough to get moving. It is ridiculously easy to score victory points though, so it keeps the game short enough.
I’m officially no longer any good at Assassin’s Creed multiplayer. I just don’t have my chops around the peers that I’m getting teamed up against. I’m officially against Assassinate now, because it’s a very constrictive form of gameplay. You make a single mistake, accidentally hold down the right trigger, and you are instantly marked for death, which you can’t really counter. The worst part is the accepted strategy now seems to be everyone acting obvious, and whenever they are marked, running away from crowds as quickly as possible. Your opponent will either give chase, marking them and making it easy to stunlock and counterkill them, or they will give up, keeping you safe. It’s not how I want to play, and I don’t think it’s the intention. At least in Wanted if you act like an idiot, there are plenty of counters, from low point scoring to multiple hunters on podium players. Here, there is no disadvantage to acting like an idiot if you have your smoke bomb prepped, because nobody can sneak up on you without you knowing about it. So I won’t be playing Assassinate again if I can help it, and it’s impossible to get a game of Escort up, which is too bad, I want to try it.
I cannot win that one game about vampires. The dynamic give and take of the game is still interesting, although you really do need to pay a lot of attention to what is going on. I got really excited to play all five cards in my hand in one chain, but only when I started to resolve it did I realize that I didn’t want to do that, as I had to target my own minions with direct damage attacks. So, after a couple of dumb moves, I lose, unable to keep up. We also keep tossing Vulko out of the running. He’s just such a priority, so we often decide that nobody gets to play him.
Stumbling through a game of 51st State, I think I finally understand how to play. You get some resources each turn, you spend them to bring cards into play, and you keep having to look up in the book to see exactly what each symbol means. I don’t understand why they thought they needed to make a confusing series of icons on every card. But it eventually came together. There are a lot of cards that aren’t very useful, and because the factions have one type of action they do well and the others they do poorly, it’s tough to get moving. It is ridiculously easy to score victory points though, so it keeps the game short enough.
I’m officially no longer any good at Assassin’s Creed multiplayer. I just don’t have my chops around the peers that I’m getting teamed up against. I’m officially against Assassinate now, because it’s a very constrictive form of gameplay. You make a single mistake, accidentally hold down the right trigger, and you are instantly marked for death, which you can’t really counter. The worst part is the accepted strategy now seems to be everyone acting obvious, and whenever they are marked, running away from crowds as quickly as possible. Your opponent will either give chase, marking them and making it easy to stunlock and counterkill them, or they will give up, keeping you safe. It’s not how I want to play, and I don’t think it’s the intention. At least in Wanted if you act like an idiot, there are plenty of counters, from low point scoring to multiple hunters on podium players. Here, there is no disadvantage to acting like an idiot if you have your smoke bomb prepped, because nobody can sneak up on you without you knowing about it. So I won’t be playing Assassinate again if I can help it, and it’s impossible to get a game of Escort up, which is too bad, I want to try it.
What I Played Today: March 22
Groo, Nightfall
At game night, I played a light game based on the comic Groo, which I faintly remember playing over a decade ago during high school. It’s a simple game where you draw cards and spend resources on dice to put them into play, with the titular character wandering the board and pretty much destroy everything in the town where he lands. It’s a game where you don’t get very attached to your stuff, because it will just get destroyed anyway. After about half-an-hour, I managed to scrap together a victory, but it became obvious to me that it was one of those light, goofy games without a set ending condition. I hate these games, because they can get really long in the teeth, and I don’t like that I may be stuck at the table until someone gets lucky or everyone stops griefing to let the game end.
I also picked up Nightfall, another deckbuilding game, this one about vampires and having direct attack. It does some things differently, to having troops that you field (although they get tossed right after they attack, which is a bit weird), as well as each player getting a chance to act every turn. It’s a weird dynamic, and it’s a bit tough to read, but I like it. It’s quick and frantic, and gives a lot of opportunities to suddenly switch things around. One thing I wasn’t fond of was the tough learning curve, because it does enough things differently that it’s not pick up and play for Dominion fans, and the cards themselves are pretty boring, with not a lot of difference in their effects.
At game night, I played a light game based on the comic Groo, which I faintly remember playing over a decade ago during high school. It’s a simple game where you draw cards and spend resources on dice to put them into play, with the titular character wandering the board and pretty much destroy everything in the town where he lands. It’s a game where you don’t get very attached to your stuff, because it will just get destroyed anyway. After about half-an-hour, I managed to scrap together a victory, but it became obvious to me that it was one of those light, goofy games without a set ending condition. I hate these games, because they can get really long in the teeth, and I don’t like that I may be stuck at the table until someone gets lucky or everyone stops griefing to let the game end.
I also picked up Nightfall, another deckbuilding game, this one about vampires and having direct attack. It does some things differently, to having troops that you field (although they get tossed right after they attack, which is a bit weird), as well as each player getting a chance to act every turn. It’s a weird dynamic, and it’s a bit tough to read, but I like it. It’s quick and frantic, and gives a lot of opportunities to suddenly switch things around. One thing I wasn’t fond of was the tough learning curve, because it does enough things differently that it’s not pick up and play for Dominion fans, and the cards themselves are pretty boring, with not a lot of difference in their effects.
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