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Category Archives: Gaming

I love board and card games, and this may be a mini-review of the newest game, or maybe it’ll be a neat setup we played in Dominion, or discussion of RPG techniques.
I am also expanding this to review Video Games as well!

Get Bit

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So I got in several new games this week: Get Bit, Legendary (a cooperative Deck Building game set in the Marvel Universe), and 7 Wonders: Leaders, but we ended up only playing Get Bit of my new games. We had several people who hadn’t played 7 Wonders at all, and I didn’t want to toss them into the middle of a big expansion w/out them knowing how to play. We did get a game of 7 Wonders in, and a little bit of Dominion as well, but the highlight was probably the game we spent the least amount of time playing, namely Get Bit.

So here’s the deal, each person takes control of a brightly colored robot, and you’re all out for a leisurely swim when a shark, excited by the electrical signals in your metal bodies decides to try and eat you. Each player gets a hand of 7 cards numbered 1-7.  Each turn everyone plays one card face down, and then all the cards are revealed at the same time. The objective is to pick a card no one else picks. Everyone who plays a unique card moves to the front of the line (low numbers first, so high numbers are generally better) and everyone who ties, stays were they are … effectively falling behind due to all the people who move forward.

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Cards you play stay visible, so if you can tell that everyone else has already played their 4, then you know it’s a safe play. On the other hand, if you can tie with someone who is behind you, they’re more likely to get bit … so that can be a strategy as well. Each round (excepting the first) whoever is in last place gets bit and loses a limb. They then go to the front of the line and pick up all the cards they’ve played. I haven’t won a game yet, but I’ve enjoyed all of the games of it I’ve played. Plus it’s exceptionally quick. Expect it to be 20 minutes if people haven’t played before, but more like 10 if everyone knows how to play and stays “on task”. I could certainly see playing this to see who gets to go first when we play some other game where turn order might be important.

I’m also pretty sure that younger kids could have fun with this game, even if they don’t understand the exact strategy of the game. If you can find a copy, I highly recommend you pick it up!

We also played Shadows over Camelot, but that really deserves it’s own post, so I’ll cover it next week!

 

Pathfinder Society

No, this has nothing to do with the Orson Scott Card book Pathfinder, rather my local game store hosts Pathfinder Society on Tuesday nights (Saturday too, but I work and so can’t play) and I’m going to try hard to get into some of them.

I need to actually make a character though, and so rarely do I start out at level 1, I’m not sure what’ll be fun to jump in with. Though it’ll practically be level 2, as I have played in two PFS events so far, and after the third one you can level a character up.

On the one hand, with all of the Apocalypse World I’ve played recently, I’d kind of like to design a character with “character” as a driving force. On the other hand, since D&D in general, but especially module based play like in PFS is less RP driven I feel like such a character could make for a less entertaining experience for the other participants. I suppose I could go with a Charisma based class and try and be a Face character and still be a contributor.

Or I could do ye olde “Thick as a brick” Fighter/Barbarian type. I’d love to hear suggestions… I really don’t have a character in mind that I want to create, and I kind of think it would be more fun to learn about my character as I go.

Is Apocalypse World the best RPG ever?

Or are you wrong, that is the question. For serious, I continue to be amazed by how awesome this game consistently is. I’ve been gaming for two and half decades. I cut my teeth on the Red Box and 2nd editions. Toon, Shadowrun, Paranoia, and Call of Cthulhu were all played with great abandon. In college White Wolf’s storyteller games promised Story based games and totes failed to deliver; I even larped for a few years, because the first few times were completely sweet and awesome. Disillusioned I ran GURPS with almost no rules, played D&D because that was all there was.

Still I do love a good board game, tactical strategy, miniatures. And really to a much larger extent than most people are willing to admit, that is what D&D is. A series of battles loosely (sometimes more or less, depending on the DM) tied together by story. There’s nothing wrong with that. I enjoy it. Love it even.

AW has won my heart over completely. I can’t wait to try my hand at it (albeit Monsterhearts, and AW Hack). I can barely stand the wait to play the game again next week (especially when we have to skip a week or more). Part of it is surely that we’ve got a rocking MC. No offense to Dave though, a huge part of it is just how the game itself is set up. I don’t worry so much about what my characters can do, or how I can make them better. No, I worry about how Eliza is going to fix everything. I worry about how Twice is going to keep all the promises that have been made. I empathize with my characters and then I do my best to be them for a few hours. That’s not to say I don’t think about how I can make the other players’ characters’ lives more interesting and entertaining for them, but I trust the players to play the characters, and I’ve gotten to know most of the characters.

It’s like watching a great ensemble cast TV show, but you get to be one of the characters. And maybe some episodes not everyone gets screen time, and usually even when someone gets what they want there are strings attached. And even though it seems like things just keep getting worse, hope is always there.

If you play table top RPGs of any stripe, you owe it to yourself to check this game out. There are tons of APs out there. I recommend checking out The Walking Eye* and Jank Cast, and of course our play group is posting our APs too (though we started a bit late.

*As I write this The Walking Eye is having some server troubles. You’ll just have to check back later and find the APs yourself.

Are you ready for Frog Fractions?

Probably not. I hesitate to explain what frog fractions is, for fear that I’ll give it away, but suffice to say you should GO PLAY NOW! If you play for less than 10 minutes you’re doing it wrong. Go back try again. At least get to Bug Mars before you give up.

So I’ve been mostly just grabbing random pictures from my folder of random pictures… but I could try and do themes by day or some such… You know Funny Friday, Surreal Sunday… This picture would probably be a good candidate for the latter. But of course, I’d also need names and themes for the other five days of the week. Suggestions?

Situational Bias

So today we had Magic Game Day … a little 13 person tournament. 4 rounds, and in the final round there arose some discussion of having a cut to top 8. Some of the people wanted this badly. Some did not. Of course the interested parties where those who would have made the top cut, and those against where those who had first place already.

I ended up declining to have a cut, since we hadn’t planned for it … and also I wanted to leave at something approaching a reasonable hour. Of course the Pathfinder game pretty much prevented that, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

For tomorrow, I am inclined to offer to do a cut to top 8, but in exchange reduce the number of rounds. That is to say if we have a dozen people tomorrow, do 3 rounds, and then a cut to top 8. That’s a total of six rounds, but the last three will be much quicker (and single elimination). 

Mercs is pretty okay I guess

Finally got my first full game of Mercs in, thanks to the fact that less than half of my ostensible D&D players showed up. Actually, no, exactly half of my players showed up. You might think that’s hard since I now number them at seven, but one of them showed up 3 hours late. Now, he did warn me he would be a few minutes late, and I quote: 

I may be a few minutes late…

That too me does not suggest 3 hours late. No, in my mind that means maybe 20 minutes, maybe even half an hour. Ahh well.

So back to Mercs, I think the game does have potential. I really do like the quick nature of the game, and the lack of having to spend half an hour building an army list. I’ve still got some reservations about the rules, however most of that is I think that the design is too obvious. For example there are several units that have -1 speed from what they should and the Speedy Ability (which gives them +1 speed). The reason for this apparently is so that when the one faction that can take units from other factions (the mercenary faction if you will) takes these guys their movement is reduced. Of course this means that if you take the Goliath the only way he can move at all is by bounding.

I forgot how awesome Dominion was

So Thursdays happens to be my only completely “off” day. I work at neither of my jobs, so end up spending it hanging out down at FNG when I can playing board and card games. Tonight we warmed up with a little Tsuro of the Seas … which is kind of fun, but decidedly random … way more so than Tsuro. 

Then we cracked out Dominion. Since most of the folks hadn’t played before we started w/ the First Game setup … and I managed to get some fun/annoying Village/Moat combos, going … playing my entire deck at least 3 times during the course of the game but I ended up not being quite fast enough and I was a few points behind at the end of the game.

Next we played an almost entirely random set … I use the app to set a minimum of 3 cards from Dark Ages (because I haven’t played that much)  and no cards costing potions. The next few games we modified the setup slightly by removing several cards and then putting new ones in… so we changed the setup a little but not too much.

For the most part I didn’t fare too well over the course of the night … but I did manage a pretty fantastic victory in the last game. We had Goons and Urchin/Mercs out, so most of the game was played w/ 3 or 4 card hands … frustrating… but I went urchin heavy, pared my deck way down, got some farming villages for actions, some cultists for cards, and then right near the end of the game managed to get a bevy of Cities. On my penultimate turn I picked up 2 Goons and some more cultists. We were 2 piles down, and Cities and Goons both only had 1 card left so anyone could have bought it … except that everyone (except my) deck was filled with ruins from all the Cultists running around. I’d been mercenarying pretty mercilessly and so had a fairly well tuned deck at this point. Final turn was 3 Cities, 2 Goons, 2 Quarry, 1 Silver and a Mercenary for 13 dollars. I bought a Colony, the last City (ending the game) and 4 copper for a total of 22 points. Which coincidentally was my final score. And won me the game. 

Risky, but very satisfying.

As always, random picture is random:

The anticipation is killing me.

So turns out my case DID come today, and I have all the parts for my new computer (sans OS) sitting on my living room table. I won’t actually be able to put it together until tomorrow though. *Le Sigh*.

On the bright side, I did finally get to play a full game of Disaster Looms. I like it so far, but it does seem to me, at least in a 3 player game that there is too much tech duplication. Also there are a few rules questions I have (if you draw a second copy of a tech you already have, do you just have a second useless copy? Do you get paid twice when you sell it to the public domain?)