What I Played Today: October 31

Star Trek: The Deck Building Game, Hex Hex

I went to a Halloween party, which had the usual hysterics, but also had games and stuff! I played a game of Star Trek, in which I did a lot better, able to field a lot of cool characters quickly and got a nice little boost from a random explore card to allow me to catapult to the lead. The game does take a long time with the full compliment of people though.

Also played Hex Hex, which is a stupid fun take that game, in which you are flinging a curse around the table, and the person it's handed to must play a card to move it or lose points. There are a lot of cards that increase the number of hexes and spiral things wildly out of control, and I got screwed when I sent a hex to my neighbor, only for him to fling it back and me and trade hands with him, and the only card that he had in his hand increased the amount of damage you took if you got hexed. It was nasty and awful, but it's a lot of fun when nonsense like that comes together. Naturally, I lost the worst.

What I Played Today: October 24

Star Trek Deckbuilding Game

I went to the new game night, and it wasn't so bad! There were some guys that I'd never seen before playing Doom, and that was weird, but otherwise there seemed to be just enough space for everyone, and there were less people acting like lunatics, so that was nice.

There I played the Star Trek Deckbuilding Game, and it's...okay. It does a weird thing with its deckbuilding mechanic, having only a couple of common cards and having everything else come out of a common deck, a la Ascension, but makes cycling through that deck ridiculously easy, and purchasing from it pretty hard, since no card that comes from the common deck actually provides you with currency. Instead they provide you with statistics and special powers that you use to take on exploration effects. These are missions and space fights that are worth points, and you need these points to win. Of course, it's completely random whether you get a mission, a space ship that is always trying to kill you, or a declaration of war, in which case all players get to shoot at each other. If your ship gets blown up (which seems to happen a lot), you get a cooper and reset your deck.

I just don't like how unfocused the game can be. We played with a rules adjustment that allows us to start with a slightly stronger ship than the starting ship so that we could hit the ground running, but our decks were still pretty weak, and it took a lot of turns around the table to get even slightly powerful enough to win against some of the challenges in the deck. If you get a bad hand, then you can't get any points (not uncommon, to be fair), but if war is declared, you could lose your entire hand in a fight, and be weakened to the point where you can't try again next turn. The fact that half the cards seem useless in most situations anyway make things worse. Why would I ever buy Warp Speed, which gives me a 5 speed boost for one turn, when all speed does is determine who goes first in a battle? If I can't win the battle with my other four cards, then it's pointless. I'm just not sure.

What I Played Today: July 9

Chaos in the Old World, Smart Ass, Funglish, The Resistance, (Star Trek)

Gaming and parties, bros! Gaming and parties. I started my morning off with a five-player game of Chaos in the Old World, with the new Horned Rat expansion. I like the new content, the Horned Rat has an interesting playstyle, dropping tons of dudes on the map and trying to rack in the points, but can’t actually force the huge scoring opportunities to occur, only allowed to scavenge off someone else’s hard work.

I was playing Khorne for what I think was the first time, and I knew the best strategy for Khorne, which was to try and kill everyone. The new cards didn’t really help with this strategy, as they are balanced to allow Khorne to have a chance winning with points. I used a quick opportunistic play to score a ruined region and leapt on the point count, and was spinning that dial as fast as expected, so that by the start of turn five, it was assumed a foregone conclusion that I was going to win. But it was not so, while I spent the last turn using my new bloodletter ability to pull in two points for every kill (holy moley), I wasn’t watching the board and Slannesh was able to use some tricker to score over 25 points and beat me to 50, winning the game. It was an out of nowhere win, very impressive.

Then I went to a party and played party games! The first was Smart Ass, a trivia game in which clues are slowly revealed for a person, place, or thing, and the first to guess it gets to move ahead. It’s competent, and there are a lot of clues, but for some reason there was a house rule saying that in order to win the game, you have to answer two difficult questions in a row. The only effect this had was extending the game an extra half hour, especially when the winner was a “team,” meaning we forced them to answer twice as many questions.

Funglish was next, a word guessing game in which you have a set number of adjectives you can use, and you place them on a board saying the object is definitely X, or kinda Y. You try to get all the other players to guess the six words on your card within the time limit. It’s pretty fun, especially having to work in teams and guess what’s going on. I’m amazed at the number of times the clue “Asian” ended up on the board. My only concern is that there are only 50 clue cards, and the materials are a mess to work with.

I kinda played the Star Trek board game, as I didn’t feel very gamey, so I just sat by and told them the rules. It eventually broke up after everyone was finished eating and they wanted to play a game everyone could participate in.

Then people were starving for a game that everyone could play, and with an odd number of players and a refusal on my own silent part not to bring out “Time’s Up” again, I gerryrigged a game of The Resistance with a deck of cards. I couldn’t find an English copy of the rules, so I stole the information I didn’t know from a Polish translation and I think I did alright. I ended up being a traitor both games, although I completely blew it the first game when I had started making decisions before I knew who my fellow traitors were, so I did the eyes closed eyes open routine, and then instead of just sticking with my first decision, passed the leadership to the next player while fumbling over my words so that it was obvious I was a bad guy. The villains still won both games, however; the second game with all failed missions. It was interesting, although I imagine it was a lot harder to figure out who was what, because of the small amount of time discussing things and the possible traitors about. I think it was okay, although I want to check out a real copy of the rules to make sure I didn’t misremember the game, because as someone commented, the traitors have a real easy job, because they know exactly what to do.

What I Played Today: June 26

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!

What I Played Today: June 18

Star Trek, Dominion

We won another game of Star Trek, figuring out what was required and how to really game the system. One thing we were doing wrong the first time was adding too much to each challenge when multiple players were at the same location, but we fixed that and still didn’t have a problem completing the challenges, mainly because there are so many modifiers that you can grab. The fact that some things are transferable without any effort at all makes it a little easy. One thing that has not gotten any easier, however, is the space combat, because the warbird is just so much stronger than the Enterprise, so actually destroying it is just such a difficult task. Especially since we kept getting the missions that shut down the weapons and shields on the Enterprise.

I also finally won a game which included Cornucopia cards, but it was close. The first game we played I lost soundly, because I was on the wrong end of the stick where Young Witch was concerned, and my attempt to get rid of the curses with Ambassador wasn’t working. When I gained three curses in one turn, I knew that my odds were just blown. Then the next game we had Tournament and Fairgrounds, which is a weird dynamic because it introduces a chance to get some huge hidden points. I finally won a tournament and took my bounty, and was stringing together all the funny money from Prosperity to buy a lot of big cards. The game came down to a single purchase, as I had 20 different cards, making my Fairgrounds worth 8 points each, while my opponent had 19 different cards, making his Fairgrounds worth 6 points each. With four Fairgrounds and 5 points behind, he could have won if he made sure to purchase a card he assumed he had. But he didn’t, so I won. Hurray.

What I Played Today: June 15

Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Rez


Game night with a couple of easy going new players. Before they showed up, a quick exhibition game of the new Star Trek cooperative game, which is pretty good, if a little brutal at times. You have to manage three different missions on the surface while worrying about the encroaching klingon warbird that’s bearing down on you above, all before you run out of time. It manages most of its challenges with die rolls, but the dice are unique by being labeled 1-5 and then 7, with the 7 forcing you to take damage when you roll them. It’s a bit of a mess, and we kept getting waylaid by non-essential missions that prevented us from leaving, but after we realized we were stronger together than alone, we started tearing through the missions, and won the game with a commendation.

Battlestar Galactica was on the table again. We played the most basic game, only adding the new 0 and 6 cards from the newest expansion (mostly by accident), and teaching them the ropes. There was a lot of space battle in this game, and while I spent the first turn getting the presidency (because I want power), we mostly struggled to tamp down crises in the beginning, while our population dropped to 4 before the sleeper agent phase. Then, when this flipped, two of us were sent to the brig. I managed to escape easily, but the other player spent about six rounds there, first because I refused to help him, then because the card flops just weren’t working. I figured that the cylon was one of two new players, but just could not tell because they were both helpful, so at the fourth player’s suggestion, I helped get both of them in the brig, because either way, at least they couldn’t hurt us. The true cylon used a special card to leap out, but didn’t reveal right away, and further attempts to get her in were unsuccessful, while our poor ally spent the entire time just sitting in prison. The cylon FINALLY revealed, but it was too late, we were already on the winning trajectory, and we finally busted the last human out of jail and jumped to Kobol. I apologized profusely to the new player, hoping that he was, in fact, having fun, despite the fact that he had done nothing important for the last half of the game. Both players had a good time though, which was good to see, because this game can be such a friend blender, and these people were only acquaintances. But I won again!

Somehow I also ended up playing a few minutes of Rez, which was fine.