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 22

Trenched

Another DoubleFine game has arrived. After waiting over an hour for it to finish downloading, I loaded it up, and it’s about what I thought it would be, in which you are on the ground taking care of waves of monsters. The customization and such all seem great, and being able to combine actual action with tower defense makes it pretty interesting, if not something I have definitely seen before. This is the first DoubleFine game that feels like it could have been designed by anyone, which is weird.

The thing that definitely feels weird is the story, in which the inventor of the television actually goes completely insane when he creates his invention because of some weird thing that happened to him while in the navy and he begins to create these super bizarre tube creatures that begin to wage war on the entire world, and the only hope is mechs. It is super weird, and I especially didn’t expect the enemies to be so out there.