Weekend Gaming

Real Life has meant that there's been precious little time for any gaming or hobby stuff (let alone time to blog about it). But over the weekend I did manage to catch up with the guys for some Saturday night gaming.

Due to the weather and a massive blackout, the group was a little different to normal. So we started the night with a game of Ticket to Ride. I started with two routes that took me from LA, across the top of the board and down to Chicago. They weren't huge scoring paths, but I figured they would set me up well for future routes.

However, it was the first game I've played with 5 people in a long time, so I'd forgotten that it takes longer to build up your hand and the board fills up quicker. It took me 3/4 of the game to make my first two routes. I picked up another two routes that both joined onto the ends of my existing track, so I was able to keep to my goal of having one long track.

I caused the game to end, and ended up with a very tight second place (the last route card I picked up that I couldn't do was the difference).

We then broke out a game that I'm calling Beananza, although the real name is in German (I think it's actually the same thing). It was a set-collecting card game were you tried to plant different types of beans. We all picked up the game pretty quickly, and it went really well. In the end there were only two points between the highest and the lowest scores - I finished in the middle of the pack.

We played a couple of extremely quick games of We Didn't Play Test This. Amusingly I didn't get to play a single card in either game.

The boys then had a go of Cutthroat Caverns, which is basically Munchkin without the puns. A bunch of adventures are trying to kill all the monsters, but want to make sure they're the one with the most kills.

It was a good mix of cooperative and backstabbing play. But unlike Munchkin, it wasn't so much a case of the winner being the last person who hadn't lost. We were able to use different tactics and plan to try and position ourselves best.

Partly because I was able to pull out the right cards when I needed them, and partly because W decided to try something foolish, I ended up winning.

We ended the night with a game of Dominion with the Prosperity expansion. I ended up winning quite comfortably. It wasn't until we were scoring at the end that I realised that I had played the entire game with only one action card in my deck (a Vault)! My money-making processes had just fallen into place so I hadn't needed to buy anything more.

As always, it was a great night!

Weekend Gaming: Ticket to Ride

My sister and her husband came to stay with us over the weekend, so on Saturday night we broke out a board game to play. Having been a little bit overdosed on Dominion, my brother-in-law suggested "anything else". I probably would have pushed for SmallWorld, except it (along with most of the other board games) had already been pack.

So we settled pretty quickly on Ticket to Ride.

It had been forever since I last played Ticket to Ride. It used to be the standard game for K and I to play until we got Dominion, but since then I don't think it's come out of the cupboard. So I had to check back to the rule book a few times to get us going (how many track cards do you start with? How many route cards to you have to keep? etc)

We ended up with a bit of drama when K deliberately went for a section that she knew I was about to grab, which meant my best option was to block her off. I was down to four trains, and so decided to gamble by grabbing some more route cards. I got one card that would have given me another 17 points if I'd had ONE more train - if I hadn't had to make the detour, I would have been fine.

I ended up winning thanks to the longest route card (all my trains in one long line), but it was only by a couple of points. It was a great game.

Melbourne Cup Dominion

Yesterday was Melbourne Cup day, which meant everyone had the day off (if you live in Victoria anyway). F came over for lunch, so afterwards we introduced her to Dominion.

F is definitely no gamer. She was initially a little weirded out by not having a board ("I like to see my piece move all around the table!"). But pretty soon she got over that and picked up the game really quickly.

We played the first game with the standard starting deck. Both K and I agreed that for some reason it seemed like it took a long time for things to get up and running - money seemed to be a really tight for a lot longer than normal. But this might have just been because the game was slower while F got her head around it all. I scored a fairly convincing victory - getting 6 Provinces in a 3 player game is always a pretty good sign.

We then played two random decks. In the first game, the cards I was most interested in were the Bureaucrat (I love that card) and the Chapel. I've always struggled to work out the point of the Chapel (aside from getting ride of any Curse cards). But recently I read about a deck minimization tactic. The basic idea is to try and keep your deck as small as possible so your best cards come around more often.

So I decided I would give that a try.

I didn't get off to a very good start - it wasn't until about half way through the game that I started getting rid of cards, and my Chapels had a tendency to clump together in the same hand. I managed to win by 1 point, but that was really much more because of the Bureaucrat than the Chapel.

In the next game we played, the Chapel came out again. So I decided to give my tactic another try. This time I was a lot more aggressive with trashing cards. I also picked up a Money Lender, so when I could I was trashing Coppers for Silvers, or just trashing them outright. I was also pretty ruthless about getting rid of action cards as soon as they outlived their usefulness. So by the end, I was regularly getting hands of 3 or 4 Golds.

Ideally I would have liked to get some extra buys or something like a remodel (turn Gold into a Provence) into my hand, but it ended up being a pretty quick game. I had 5 Provinces, which was enough to beat F by about 5 points.

By the end of the second game, I was pretty happy with the Chapel tactic. It's quite different to how I normally play, and it's certainly not for anyone who doesn't like shuffling. But I liked it a lot.

Weekend Gaming: Shadows After Dinner

K, M and I sat down on Friday night to have another game of Shadows Over Camelot. After our impressive victory last time, we were feeling a little cocky.

We ended up with a strange selection of cards. Everyone - especially me, playing a Gawain who could draw an extra white card - seemed to always have plenty of cards. But they never seemed to be quite the right cards.

We came extremely close to the grail a couple of times, but each time the black deck seemed to surge with Despair cards just at the right time to exhaust the available Grail cards. We managed to get Excalibur and succeed in a couple of minor quests, but we were also losing quests at about the same rate.

We were playing with the traitor deck, but we were pretty sure that no one had drawn the traitor card - if they had, they were doing a very bad job!

When a 7th black sword hit the table, we decided to change the rules slightly to say that to end the game, there must be 12 or more swords, and the majority had to be white. This meant that we still had a chance to win - if only we could get the grail.

Of course, if we lost any other quest, the game was over. And the siege engines were building up pretty quickly. So it was really only a matter of time before we all lost.

I'm still quite happy not working out what the "winning solution" to Shadows Over Camelot is. That, combined with the fact that I try to let K and M drive what we do means that this stays a game we can play without ever quite knowing how it will turn out.

Birthday Gaming Night

As part of my turning 30 celebrations, I organised a gaming night. We got through a reasonable number of games, some new and some old favourites.

Agricola

Despite being considered a modern classic (at least by BoardGameGeek, who rate it #2 of all time), I'd never had even had the chance to look at the rules before. It definitely seemed like one of those games where describing the rules was a lot harder than just playing the game. We seemed to get the hang of it fairly quickly, but it also quickly became apparent to me that some early decisions were going to cost me the game.

A couple of times I just managed to avoid not having enough food at harvest time, and a stupid decision about fence placement ended up costing me a few points. But overall it was a pretty fun game. I'd love to have another go at it, now I know a bit more about what I'm trying to do.

We Didn't Playtest This At All

WDPTAA is a card game. The object is to win - if you lose, you haven't won. Each card does something that either helps you to win or helps someone else to lose. Or sometimes the other way around. It's one of those crazy, extremely random games that goes so well with mates and alcohol. Certainly not something you'd want to spend a night playing, but great for in between games.

Last Night on Earth

Two players control the zombies while everyone else controls a human trying to survive/escape the zombie horde. Pretty straight forward - move around the board, get cards, do stuff with the cards, roll some dice to fight.

We (the humans) got thoroughly owned - despite cheating about the number of characters who could die, we lost less than halfway through the game.

I didn't love it, and I'm not sure if it adds much over something like Zombies!!!, but I'd happily give it another go.

StarCraft

We knew it wasn't the best game to start at 10pm when everyone had been drinking and only one person had even read the rules. But we decided to try it anyway. We made it most of the way through the first turn before we gave up.

There was a lot to take in as a first impression. The sheer number of different pieces, different cards and different turn options had some of us groaning before we'd even got everything out of the box. Personally, I was following enough of what was going on that I would have been happy to keep playing, and I'm very keen to give it a proper go. But we're going to save it for next time we can arrange a morning gaming session.

Munchkin

The classic (at least for us) card game of dungeon crawling and back stabbing. It pretty much always ends the same way - you don't so much win as survive until everyone else has run out of ways to stop you. You always have that same let down feeling at the end, unless you won, in which case you feel awesome.

Somehow I managed to get to level 9 extremely quickly and stayed at around 8-9 for the whole game, despite virtually never having any item cards (I got my first level thanks to a potion, but I think that was it). Naturally I didn't win, but I was impressed never the less.

Weekend Gaming with a New Group

While I was in Canberra over the weekend, R arranged a board game night with some of his friends and kindly invited me along to try a couple of the games I haven't had a chance to play before.

Race for the Galaxy

After playing the solitaire PC version, I finally got a chance to play the actual card game against real humans. It all made a bit more sense, and was a lot easier to follow in real life.

I didn't win, but I was reasonably pleased with how I played. Ultimately I didn't end up with enough production cards (as always), so I wasn't able to get enough victory points happening.

Battlestar Galacitca

I was so excited to finally get a chance to play this! I decided to play as Apollo, mostly because I thought being able to get out in a viper and do something useful would be lots of fun. We had R and Adama, S as Roslin (mostly because S wanted to know what it would be like to play Roslin), E as Chief Tyroll and D as Boomer. My first loyalty card had me as a human.

Things progressed reasonably well. We even managed to go above our starting fuel fairly early on. The only problem was that we weren't jumping very far.

We managed to fend off a couple of cylon attacks - D wiped out a stupid number of raiders, and I even managed to take out a Basestar with my viper. And then slowly things started to get worse and worse. S started to suspect various people as being the cyclon, which made me suspect that it was actually her. We kept jumping very small distances, and the damage to Galactica was starting to build up while our resources were quickly failing.

Eventually R revealed himself to be the cylon, and escaped to the resurrection ship. Soon after, we discovered that D was also a cylon, having changed sides in the sleeper phase. A couple more setbacks, and me ending up in the brigg meant that there really wasn't any hope for us. But we did manage to put up an excelled fight

I really enjoyed the game, and can't wait to try it again. I thought it captured the feel of the show amazingly well, with the impending doom and not knowing who to trust. Lots of fun!

It's a Smallworld After All

A few months ago I got a copy of Smallworld by Days of Wonder. Probably as a result of having wiped the floor with them both in whatever we played that weekend, both K and M forbid me from even reading the rules until we all had a chance to sit down and try it together.

Finally, such a chance came around on Friday night. So after dinner, we cleared the table and lifted the lid. I was a bit amused by K and M asking was each component was for and what we were meant to do while I was still trying to set up the board - if they'd let me read the rules before hand I could have answered all their questions!

It took us a little bit to get started, but we got into the flow of things pretty well. We all agreed that K had the pointiest ears, so she got to start and chose the Heroic Elves. M went for the Skeletons with a power I don't remember, and I started with Wealth Skaven Ratmen. K quickly took one side of the board, and M took the other leaving me to squeeze in between them both.

The skeletons proved to be quite effective at claiming territory - mostly mine. So after about 4 turns I was the first to opt to go into decline and grabbed myself the Spirit Hobbits Halflings. Since the Hobbits can start the game anywhere, I popped up in the middle of the skeleton lands and started to clear out the undead infestation.

Shortly after, M decided to go into decline as well, and grabbed herself some Mounted Giants. Unfortunately, I don't think she quite realised that if you have a civilization in decline you can still get victory points for them, because she came into the board on some skeletons, and in her efforts to attack me wiped out a few more skeleton lands.

Meanwhile, K was mostly leaving us to fight amongst ourselves, but eventually decided she'd expanded as far as she could. So she picked up the Sorcerers (again, I forget their special power). She quickly started stomping all over the giants and my hobbits, so I decided to go into decline again.

I emerged as Commando Dwarves ("so they're not wearing any undies?" quipped K), and in the last two turns frantically tried to claim as many mountains as I could while watching my hobbits continue to be hunted down by K, who ended up winning comfortably.

I really enjoyed the game, and can see there's a fair bit of depth to be explored. I think we all held onto our civilizations too long - I should have gone into decline a lot earlier, especially since I didn't get anywhere near close enough to take advantage of the Spirit part of my hobbits. I'm also looking forward to seeing how the game goes in two-player mode.

More Dominion

K suggested a game on Saturday night, and I wasn't about to turn her down. I tried to convince her to let us crack open SmallWorld, but I think that's going to have to wait until M comes over next. So we settled on a game of Dominion.

It was an interesting setup - all the action cards cost 4 or 5, and the only options for more money were the Market and the Festival.

One idea that played out fairly well was to grab a Remodel early on and turn as many Estates as I could into Gardens. About 2/3s of the way through I considered turning a Gold into a Provence, but I thought there was still a while left in the game so didn't (turned out there wasn't, but it didn't matter).

It was a good game, but I ended up winning 50 to 42 or 45.

ANZAC Day Gaming

The ANZAC weekend was a pretty full-on family weekend, so there wasn't any hobby time. We did have M staying with us from Saturday, which meant I actually did get some gaming in!

Rich kindly left us Settlers of Catan, so I was finally able to show K what it was like. She didn't hate it, but she was underwhelmed.

"Why would you play this when you could play Dominion?"
"Maybe because Dominion won't be invented for another 10 years"

We agreed that it would probably take a few more goes to get the hang of it, and K is willing to try it again. So it wasn't a total loss. Oh, and I won, but that's not surprising. It was a fairly close game, mostly because I carefully missed giving myself access to any wood.

K and I decided that M might enjoy Dominion, so we gave that a go. Much to my surprise M liked it so much that she wanted to play it the next night instead of Shadows Over Camelot. We each managed to win a game, which is good. Since we were playing with the standard beginner decks, I tried out a couple of new strategies, both of which failed totally.

Initial Impressions: Catan - the First Island

Still feeling a strong desire to play Settlers of Catan, on Saturday night decided to buy the iPhone game Catan: The First Island.

The good news is that it definitely scratches the Catan itch. It took me a little bit to figure out how to actually start a game, but once I worked that out, the game play was very intuitive.

The default animation speed for dice rolling and the various comments the other players makes it all quite slow, but fortunately that's easy to turn off.

My biggest complaint is that the AI players are too easy to beat - I lost the first game because I was still getting back up to speed (and even then would have been okay if the rolls in the last two rounds had gone a bit differently), but since then I think I've only lost one game (and I was on 9 points and a win in my hand).

Overall, I'm very pleased with the money I spent. It's never going to replace the actual board game, but it's great for killing 10mins or so. Or if you're a gamer who's all on his own

Easter Gaming

Over the Easter weekend, I actually managed to get some gaming done!

We played Dominion using both the Intrigue and Sea Side expansion packs. It was the first time I'd played with either of the extra cards, so I was a little slower than normal in picking up on some of the card synergies. I also feel into the trap of wanting to try out the exciting new cards and so didn't keep my eyes on the prize, but that's okay. The best result I managed was coming second.

I had been really wanting to play some Settlers of Catan, so I managed to convince everyone else to give that a go. In the first game I seriously messed up my initial placement, needlessly denying myself access to any wood, and never really recovered. The second game ended up being a lot closer. Brick was extremely hard to come by, and several times I was blocked in just before building a new settlement. So I ended up wasting lots of brick with roads to no where. I still managed to rack up 7 or 8 victory points before I stupidly made some trades that resulted in me being tronned in again AND the game ending.

The last game we tried was Space Alert. Most of us hadn't played before (including myself) so it took a bit of time to go through all the rules and explain what was going to happen. Then we jumped straight into the chaos. When the dust settled, surprisingly we almost managed to survive. Actually knowing what to expect next time will probably help us.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Multiplayer, Part II

Shaz and I both managed to find some time this weekend to try and finish off our game from the weekend before. Despite having saved the game before we stopped, I couldn't find it on my list of saved games. Fortunately there was an autosave from moments before I saved the game, so I just loaded that up.

The game progressed pretty much as expected. Since we were still on opposite sides of the map, Shaz and I basically just kept ignoring each other. The remaining PC player had control of galactic south of the map as well as parts of the centre (I was in the east and Shaz in the west), so I decided to push south.

My economy was humming along, so I concentrated on consolidating my planets and maxing out all the research options I wanted. I had another smaller fleet guarding my systems in the galactic centre, and they received a message that my culture spread had turned a colony nearby to neutral. Thinking this was a gift, I jumped on over.

The system had been held by the eliminated PC player, and so all their structures were still in orbit (and still hostile) - including a starbase. I quickly claimed the planet and left the fleet to mop up the structures.

My main focus was on my push south, so it was with a bit of shock when I discovered that the smaller fleet on mop up duty had been almost wiped out. All by the starbase. It took a fair bit of time, resources and micro-management to deal with the rouge base, but eventually it exploded.

I started building some Novalith cannons around the time the second PC player was wiped out (I assume by me, since I took out it's capital, but I'm not sure what Shaz was up to).

I then moved to consolidate my empire and reposition my forces to start targeting Shaz. Unfortunately we had to stop around this time, so we never found out who would actually win. But Shaz did say afterwards that a lot of his planets were uncolonisable now because of radiation (presumably due to my Novalith cannons).

Overall I was pretty pleased with the multiplayer experience, and I'm keen for some more!

Sins of a Solar Empire Multiplayer

I got a chance to play a multiplayer game of Sins with Shaz. It took us a little while to work out how to actually start an online multiplayer game, but once we'd sorted that the setup process was pretty simple.

We played on a random medium-sized map with two computer players. Ultimately it was a bit of a strange multiplayer experience since we went the whole time without really having any contact with each other. But that was just the luck of the map we had - we were both on opposite side with the two computer players in between.

I was really pleased with the multiplayer experience. The game works almost identically to the single player version. If there's lag, then the game acts like it's been paused (which means you can still give orders to ships, queue research and construction and generally look around). Each player has a limited number of pauses they can use, which is a pretty good idea. You can also save multiplayer games (and the game still does it's autosaves periodically), so if something happens you can always pick it back up again.

I was pretty pleased with how the game progressed - I pushed to build up my economy and claim some nearby systems. I stopped expanding once I'd secured a few natural bottlenecks, and concentrated on pushing up my research.

I got a few missions from the computer players, but I tended to target the red computer team. This turned out to be what Shaz was doing too, because ultimately the red team was wiped off the map.

We didn't have time to finish the game, but hopefully we'll be able to pick it up again soon!

Shadows Over Camelot: Adding the Tratior

Over the last year, K and I have been playing the occasional game of Shadows Over Camelot with K's cousin M.

I know SOC has a "solution" - once you work out how to beat the game you can fairly consistently pull off a win. But I've deliberately avoided trying to work it out mainly because I have fun playing it. It's also helped that I don't play it often enough for it to become obvious.

Since there were only three of us playing, and since both K and M were still getting used to the rules, we didn't play with the traitor. But for our most recent games we decided that it was time to add in the loyalty cards.

The game plays with up to 7 knights. At the start of the game, each knight draws a loyalty card from a deck of 8. 1 card in the deck says "traitor", the others say "loyal". If you draw the traitor card then you are actively working against all the other players trying to make them lose. So even by introducing the traitor card, in a 3-player game the odds of there actually being a traitor are pretty slim.

Game 1: At the beginning I thought to myself that on the off chance that there was a traitor in the game, I really hoped it would be me. Sure enough, it was! M has a tendency to put out siege engines rather than draw from the Progression of Evil deck, so I just waited for the little plastic catapults to surround Camelot, and then put out one of my own.

Game 2: I thought to myself that there almost certainly wouldn't be a traitor again. Turned out there was - K! She won pretty much the same way thanks to M pushing the siege engines. But she also managed to make sure she picked up both the grail and lost Excalibur.