What I Played Today: December 3

Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Scrabble, Time's Up, Panic Station

Did a little bit of Assassin's Creed, tried the single player. It was frustrating, because the tower defense levels suck, and all of the stupid templar bases have these little rooms on the outside in which they put a couple of assholes with guns, who are hard to kill and usually see you pretty much instantly, and shoot you to death. I don't like that. Also saw the first Altair level, which takes place before Assassin's Creed proper, and for some reason the Assassin's base is being attacked. Which doesn't make any goddamn sense, because the driving action of the first Assassin's Creed is that Altair messes up and reveals the location of the Assassin's base, for which he is punished, but if the Templars knew where it was the entire time... I don't know, it just seems tacked on, and I am sick and tired of bases always being attacked.

At a party, I played Scrabble on the iPad, which was pretty neat. You have your own personal tile rack on your iPhone, and when it's your turn, you fling the tiles upward on your phone screen, and they show up on the iPad, and it's pretty awesome. Hurray technology.

Two-thirds of a game of Time's Up, which went alright. It went pretty fast, considering. I got to do the dance from Pulp Fiction, which was pretty fun.

After dinner, Panic Station was played, and then, after making a dozen mistakes, started over and replayed. This game has a lot of rules, lot more than it should have, and I didn't explain them well enough so we just hit the reset button and tried again. One interesting thing about both games is that the original infected was not I thought it was. Maybe I was just kinda stupid.

Anyway, once we got to the real game, not the practice game, it was going well, we revealed the hive, and then things started sliding downhill. After avoiding it for a while, eventually an infection slipped through the crack, and then in quick succession everyone but me was a bad guy and I was boned. One interesting thing that happens is after the fourth infection, the two humans, who knew they were in trouble, figured they could totally do it if they could just dodge one more infection. And then, when a trade was forced, the other player completely whiffed it and got herself infected without thinking, because she forgot she needed to trade a gas can to avoid getting stung. So instead she just rolled up to me and shot my character in the face. It was not awesome.

What I Played Today: March 20

Time’s Up, Rock Band, You Don’t Know Jack, Dance Central

Party night, with a lot of times playing games, switching around from one to the other. We started with Time’s Up, an old classic at this point, although we constantly seem to pull two different things whenever we play. A) Really obscure albums and movies that dart around the table with nobody getting them (this time it was Zorbo the Greek) B) Ava Maria, a clue card that seems to come up every single game. I really don’t know why so many cards have those two words printed on them. In a weird case of synchronicity, there was a clue that was the name of someone in the room, and once again, the person whose job it was to guess the name didn’t pick up on this, and guessed “Mama Mia.” Not as bad as yesterday, but still very weird that it happened twice in one weekend.

Two quick dance battles on Dance Central, although I did find out that a couple of new songs that are really good were released as DLC, “Weapon of Choice” and “Straight Up” by Paula Abdul, which I need to pick up as soon as possible. Then we went into the usual marathon Rock Band session, which was pretty fun. We tackled “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which I think went really well, but otherwise the play eventually fizzled.

Then we moved on to You Don’t Know Jack, which I continue to like, despite the fact that it seems people do not know useless trivia as much as I do, because in a large group, it came down to a two man competition. But I like sharing the humor of the game with people, it’s probably the only trivia game that can play to a crowd, because if you aren’t playing, at least you’re being entertained.

What I Played Today: July 30

Time’s Up

Long day, and then barbeque, so we pulled out a classic party game, which was a bit of a flop, considering. There were a lot of hard guesses, include Bad Bad Leroy Brown (what is that?), and a few others that were just hard to guess. The team set-up was also a bit wonky, with the groups not really hitting on the same frequencies, so it went a bit long, but each team managed to dominate a round each, and we weren’t really keep score, so it went alright.

What I Played Today: May 15

Descent, Jenga, Time’s Up

It was back to the Descent campaign after a month off. Luckily it was easy to get back in the groove, and the adventurers started to really kick the Overlord around. We quickly ran through the dungeon we were currently in, although I ran into a bit of trouble when the Overlord kept dropping traps on me. I managed to survive though, and once we back outside the dungeon, we were prepped to beat the crap out of a lieutenant, only to realize that the Overlord really wasn’t going to let us. All the lieutenants ran away from a fair fight, breaking all the sieges that could potentially happen. Realizing we couldn’t just chase after the lieutenants all day, we entered another dungeon to kick around a Manticore, and called it quits for the day. It still seems to feel like curtains for the Overlord, as he can’t get a leg up. He even upgraded one set of monsters, only for us to tear them like paper as well. Kinda sad.

Then I went to a party and played some party games. We played Time’s Up, my favorite “guess the thing” party game, and Jenga, which was about as fun as it always is. I didn’t lose though, so I guess that’s something. One note though: organized gameplay around drunk people is pretty tough. At one point the Jenga tower went flying.