Octopus Overlords

My daughter had an all day play date today so I did too.

Went over to one of my gaming group buddy's (Terry) house and we snuck in the next mythos pack for ARKHAM HORROR LCG: PATH TO CARCOSA. Some complaints from others that this scenario was too easy, and it's true we breezed through it pretty handily. Still had a lot of fun though.

Next up was teaching AEON'S END: WAR ETERNAL. We chose random mages, random market, first boss (Umbra Titan). We were at a slight disadvantage in the market with a lot of high cost cards and no heals. However, Terry could heal himself and also had a mechanism that helped me destroy cards. So we focused on getting my deck slimmed down into a really high offense while he chipped in when he could. By the end of Tier 2 I was nuking the crap out of things and minions posed no issue. We cut it a little close towards the end when we drew four Power cards in a row for the nemesis with not enough mana between us to discard them, but we managed to soak up the damage and finish him off.

Had a blast, and Terry really enjoyed the game. It's almost unheard of to get a full 5-6 hour block for nothing but game time, so it was great to be able to come away with two big wins.

And PANDEMIC LEGACY: SEASON 2 is in the books!

We lost the first half of December, but somewhat purposefully. We decided our best chance at winning was to use early December to lay the groundwork for a victory push in the second half.

It was no gimme, and we were sweating bullets for a bit there. But we did manage to pull out the victory and wound up with a final score of 792. That put us in the second to best tier which matched our performance in Season 1. Very happy with that and it was nice to wrap it up on a positive note.

Next up is Black Orchestra as we plow through some one-offs in our backlog pile.

Congratulations!

Is there somewhere on line I can get a tutorial on the original basic Pandemic? I've played with my kids a handful of times and we've never even come close to winning. It's fairly discouraging and I can't figure out what we are doing wrong.

stessier wrote: Fri Apr 27, 2018 9:29 am Congratulations!

Is there somewhere on line I can get a tutorial on the original basic Pandemic? I've played with my kids a handful of times and we've never even come close to winning. It's fairly discouraging and I can't figure out what we are doing wrong.

Watch It Played finally did a pandemic video:


There are approximately seventy three dozen how to play videos for pandemic. Look carefully at the special abilities, always include the medic (it was the medic right?) until you are ready to lose.

The most important thing that we found about Pandemic and it's ilk is to not try and completely clear a city/location unless you have an ability that allows you to do that with a single action. Going more than that seems to be a waste of actions. Manage to control the outbreaks, not to completely clear the city every time.

stessier wrote:It's fairly discouraging and I can't figure out what we are doing wrong.

Don't get discouraged. I was in the same boat when I first bought the game. After awhile we were winning every game we played.

One of the most common mistakes is focusing so much on containment that you ignore the cures and run out of time. (There's also the other extreme of focusing on cures to the exclusion of outbreaks, which is also a losing strategy).

The trick is finding that balance point, but once you do base Pandemic isn't that difficult. As pointed out, character selection is also very important. Look for synergies between characters that you can take advantage of. Make sure characters are playing to their strengths. Often the best set of moves isn't necessarily the most fun set of moves, so you have to learn to recognize when to essentially sacrifice a turn doing something boring (like shoring up an out of the way city) for the sake of the long term victory.

Keep practicing and it will start to click. That said, the game has enough of a luck element that sometimes it's just going to flat out and kick you in the nuts.

hentzau is correct in that Pandemic is very much an action management game. Anything you can do to save actions is critical.

On Saturday, I played a two player game of Pandemic with my 11yo. It was his first time playing and my first time in a thousand years. we actually did pretty well, but lost on outbreaks with 3 of 4 diseases cured and 4 of 5 cards for the final cure. We were playing on Easy mode with the Researcher and Operations Expert.

On Sunday, X11 and I played the first scenario in Gloomhaven with the Cragheart and the Spellweaver. It was pretty close but we won (again playing on easy). It was a asterisk victory because we were discarding to prevent wounds instead of losing cards. It's a toss up if that would have ended it for us. We won with two turns to spare and think we only blocked two wounds before I saw the error of my ways. We ended the scenario with ELEVEN loot tokens on the ground. That's 22 bucks we'll never see again! He completed his two check battle goal and I failed my one checker, but grabbed 15xp to his 7 (which was low specifically because of his battle goal... the layabout).

It took us a while, but I could definitely see it going faster on future scenarios.

Picked up Lost Cities and played it for the first time yesterday with Little B 9.2. We really enjoyed it, although a full three round game was a bit too long for her attention span. She tapped out after two rounds (it was time for dinner anyways) after utterly destroying me in the second round.

Went to Little Wars this weekend and ended up hanging around the Knuckleduster booth for a couple of hours running demo games of Gunfighter's Ball for the owner of the company, Forrest. Had a great time doing it, I really love this set of western minis rules. The greenhorn edition of the rules are available for free...that's all you need to be able to play the game (well, that and some minis.) Link to the rules. And a link to his minis, which are some of the best I have ever had the pleasure of painting. I ended up picking up some of his new stuff, and got some stuff to plug the holes in my collection...he gave me one of the faction packs for free for helping him out. He was there by himself, and was trying to run demos and answer questions and sell stuff at the same time. Was happy to step in and help him out, especially for a discount.

Also picked up some additional Gangs of Rome figures, and got my head scanned to be placed on a mini in the future.

Skinypupy wrote: Mon Apr 30, 2018 10:41 am Picked up Lost Cities and played it for the first time yesterday with Little B 9.2. We really enjoyed it, although a full three round game was a bit too long for her attention span. She tapped out after two rounds (it was time for dinner anyways) after utterly destroying me in the second round.

When you get bored of that one, Battle Line takes it to the next level.

Another round of Gloomhaven with X11 last night. We're definitely getting faster and having to check the manual less often. It was a pretty short scenario because my son's Cragheart went beast mode on the boss with a 10 point hit (2 players, level 0 scenario, boss had 16 health). The boss had four doors to open, he never got to the second door. After two scenarios the kid has already completed two 2 checkmark battle goals so he already has a perk. I've just gotten my first checkmark.

Ran through three games of BLACK ORCHESTRA last night and were really excited to blow up Hitler three times. Twice on Easy, once on Standard.

However, I had a nagging feeling we were playing something wrong. The game just seemed too easy from what I had read, and browsing through BGG forums seemed to confirm that we were beating it far quicker than other people.

I started going back through rules one by one, and that's when I made the depressing discovery that we had totally botched the Conspire action rules.

We were rolling 3 dice as ONE action. When in fact, each die you choose to roll for Conspire counts as an action. End result is that each of us was getting at LEAST 2 extra actions per turn. For the entire game. For three games. No wonder Hitler was screwed.

So we'll try it again next week playing the "real" rules and proceed to get our asses kicked (probably). Between three players who watched video playthroughs, we all missed that basic rule. Just goes to show that it's easy to miss the forest for the trees sometimes.

I do love the game and the way the theme ties to the mechanics though. At one point last night we pulled the Kristallnacht card and were cheering as our motivation went up by 1. Then Duane says, "Did we just cheer the destruction of Jewish property?" We all cringed as we realized we were playing Nazis. Nazis who want to kill Hitler, but Nazis nonetheless. Oops. Makes for a fascinating study on how the game penalizes and rewards based on historical events.

YellowKing wrote: Wed May 02, 2018 10:16 am I do love the game and the way the theme ties to the mechanics though. At one point last night we pulled the Kristallnacht card and were cheering as our motivation went up by 1. Then Duane says, "Did we just cheer the destruction of Jewish property?" We all cringed as we realized we were playing Nazis. Nazis who want to kill Hitler, but Nazis nonetheless. Oops. Makes for a fascinating study on how the game penalizes and rewards based on historical events.

Your motivation is up because you were appalled by Kristallnacht, not that you were cheering it. It strengthened your resolve to kill Hitler. It's similar to how travelling to Auschwitz or Treblinka increases your motivation -- you're disgusted by what you're witnessing Hitler do.

wonderpug wrote:Your motivation is up because you were appalled by Kristallnacht, not that you were cheering it. It strengthened your resolve to kill Hitler. It's similar to how travelling to Auschwitz or Treblinka increases your motivation -- you're disgusted by what you're witnessing Hitler do.

Ahhh OK that makes much more sense. Thanks for the clarification.

I played a shocking number of games this weekend.

Three scenarios of Gloomhaven with X11, we both hit second level and I got my first checkmark perk. Yay combat deck improvements. We also unlocked Enhancements and wow, the price on those.

One game of Powerships with Z8, he beat me yet again. I have no idea how he _always_ wins that game.

One game of Chess with Z8, his first time playing without the "No Stress Chess" cards. He had fun, which is important, and I got to play chess, which is nice. I think I have mentioned this here before but if you have someone that wants to learn how to play Chess, I think No Stress Chess is a really good way to get started. It can also be used to handicap the game using asymmetrical hand sizes.

One game of Checkers with Z8. Did you know that in official checkers rules, jumps are mandatory? If you have a jump available you MUST jump. He beat me and I am pretty proud of that.

Two games of Khet with Z8. They were both pretty one-sided. He likes playing with the laser and doesn't really get the strategy of the game yet.

One game of Cardline: Animals with Z8. He usually does pretty good at this, but it wasn't his day. We played 4 cards each and I was perfect. He went 1 for 4.

Also got in a bunch of Gloomhaven. Tackled the first scenario (starting a campaign) on Friday night. 3 people new to the game and the concepts. It did... not... go well. So we'll be retrying it again. Then finished up the first TTS KS campaign scenario with some OO'ers. Breezed through it. Finally, started a TTS campaign with a couple remote friends. We squeaked* a win. We actually had tons of cards left, but ran out of turns. Lesson learned... don't hoard the 1-shot cards as much. Sadly I had to give up my battle goal on the final turn in order to enable the win.

*We are putting an asterisk next to the win. We opted to call a mulligan on one of the AI cards after the same card was drawn 4 out of 5 turns in a row.

Lunchtime game of Pandemic to warm up for Legacy Season 1. 4 player standard game. We ran out of cards needing two more turns to win. So damn close...

We played another Gloomhaven scenario last night. I became exhausted just before we finished off the last enemy. The Spellweaver is such a glass cannon. I laughed when I leveled up and my HP went from 6 to 7. We need to do better job of keeping the Cragheart out in front.

Played a really epic game of BLACK ORCHESTRA tonight - took about 3 hours (this time playing the rules correctly!)

Four players. We started off really well, and by Phase 4 had all the components in place to pull off a masterful Lone Gunman plot against Hitler. Terry was in place with his rifle and with some card effects would be rolling 6 dice against Hitler's paltry 2 military strength. We had it in the bag. Then Hitler moved.

This put Terry one action away from being able to attempt the plot on his turn. With little choice in the matter, he Conspired to try to gain more actions. Alas, he came up empty.

Through a series of horrible mishaps, his plot disintegrated. As the war dragged on, we had several other plots in the works but none could ever quite get to fruition. At one point three conspirators were in jail and we were lobbing Hail Mary attempts to no avail.

We were deep into Phase 7, clinging desperately to the slimmest of chances, before the Gestapo finally closed in and threw the last of us in jail.

Great fun, but we were disappointed that we only had time for the one game. So close on so many occasions. However, the best games are the ones that even when you lose, you feel like you *almost* had it and can't wait to try again.

Playing lots of Red Dragon Inn this past week, as kenetickid has made it a mission to collect the whole thing.

Better his wallet than mine. Wow.

But lots of fun!

I only played Red Dragon Inn at a convention and enjoyed it quite a bit. However, it struck me as a game you'd want 4+ people to play with.

I would agree, we have played it 2, 3, and 4.

Not so much fun 2 player.

I also prefer the characters that have some kind of extra deck.

Not so much the Pookie mood or Erin druid Form, more of the Lizwick the Collector Bag of Holding, the Kaylin Wulfric, and the Nitril and Keet characters

I am thinking it would bog down like Munchkin does past 4 players.

I think we played it with 6 or and it felt fine to me; I think we finished it under 3 hours, maybe closer to 2. We had someone acting as a GM because we were at a convention, so that helped, but I think only two people had prior experience.

I think living in the same city as the only B&M Miniature Market store is going to be the death of my wallet. Went this weekend to pick up Dead of Winter Long Night for $20 (in-store only sale!) and ended up also buying Roll Player and a ding & dent 50% off copy of Summoner Wars Alliance Master Set. Haven't played DoW yet (though have played the original many times) or Summoner Wars, but got in a game of Roll Player. Definitely seems like one I'll be bringing out regularly.

Some friends also brought over Kemet which I played for the first time. It was fine but I don't think area control games are my thing; I never could get much into Blood Rage and that, I now realize, was more or a less a Vikings themed Kemet with a bit of drafting.

We finally took down Hitler in BLACK ORCHESTRA, albeit on Easy difficulty. The way the rolls went we would have beat it on Normal as well, so we count it as a legit victory.

Great, tense game. We avoided the mistakes we made last week where we were all working on our own separate plots and spreading ourselves too thin. This time we went all in on one main plot and one backup, which left two conspirators to focus completely on helping the other two achieve those plots.

All in all we made 5 attempts at him over the course of the game, succeeding only on the 6th try. We had multiple excellent shots at him, but the dice just wouldn't fall our way.

It's a fun game and I love the theme, but I'm still a little on the fence about the randomness of the win. While it's thematic that the best laid plans could suddenly go awry despite best efforts, it's still pinning your win to the whims of chance. I found myself kind of ready to move on now that we've beaten it.

For "dessert" we broke out HOTSHOTS, since one of our group had never played and the other two had only played it once. Had a good time with that, even though we won quite handily both games. I love the game, but it doesn't scale well out of the box for 4 without adjusting the difficulty up. Just gets way too easy when you have that much support and that many special abilities in play. My sweet spot for that one is 2-3, and I prefer 2 for the greater challenge.

So we played Red Dragon Inn with 5 players and it wasn't bad for those still in the game after the first two players were eliminated, but I doubt very much I would want to sit and wait for the time it took to finish the game.

We also tried the SLUGFEST GAMES RDI BATTLE FOR GREYPORT.

Holy crap is that game hard.

Sunday was a feast of abstract boardgaming, which was a nice change of pace from our usual fare. First was Concept, which is charades but with pictures. There's a good SU&SD review of it here. We didn't play competitively, we just went around the table taking turns as the clue-giver. Some very twisty and satisfying solutions were found.

Then good old Othello. My son got this for his birthday a few months ago and finally decided to take off the shrink wrap. I've never played it before. It feels like the kind of game you play to pass the time while enjoying some conversation with your opponent. Sort of like Connect 4 (the game is very different, but I get a similar vibe).

And finally an even older oldie, chess. I blundered my queen (I am not good at chess) and then helped my son figure out how to capitalize on his enormous advantage.

Taught a couple of new players Aeon's End: War Eternal. My first time playing a 3-player game, and I actually really enjoyed the "wild card" that is thrown in that allows only one player to take an extra turn per round. Some people hate it, but I thought it added an extra layer of strategy and flexibility.

First up was the Umbra Titan. I've beaten UT several times solo now so I thought I had him pretty down pat. With 3, however, it was touch and go. The game literally came down to one card. If a player turn order card was drawn, we would win. If Nemesis, we'd lose. Player card came up, we won, and there was much rejoicing.

Then it was time to take on the Gate Witch, whom I had never defeated in my solo plays. She lived up to her reputation, and our lack of healing power didn't help any. However, we managed to emerge victorious after heavily focusing on offensive firepower and burning her at the stake. It still came down to a card or two, because Gravehold was at 10 life and we probably wouldn't have lasted another round.

We did screw up early on by mistakenly adding Nemesis tokens to her when she hadn't unleashed, but we corrected it within a round or two. Since it actually made the game harder on us, not easier, we still deemed the victory legit.

Had a three man game of Black Orchestra, a game I'd only previously played solo. Tremendous fun (well, as much fun as this game can be), but I'm blown away at not only how well the theme works but also how the actual emergent story unfolds. We lost in the 7th stage after 8 (!) failed attempts to kill Hitler. Our best chance came with the rolling of eight dice - all we needed was three targets but only two were rolled. The game ended with all conspirators jailed, so /sad tuba. Definitely believe the hype. Great, great game.

A lot of games were played, particularly considering Isgrimnur wasn't there to protect me from all the strangers.

Friday
Heaven & Ale - One of the SdJ nominees, Euro engine builder, did absolutely terrible, but would play again
Azul - Another Spiel nominee that I played a few rounds of last fall and own a copy of that has never been played
Tash-Kalar - An old standby. talked to the guys at the CGE booth and there is another expansion coming
Trajan - very interesting mancala action selection mechanism, but otherwise uninspired Euro stuff

Saturday - I feel in with the same 4 guys for the first two game and one of them for the third. Had to leave early to celebrate my son's birthday.
Evolution: Climate - *finally* played my copy and had a lot of fun with it. Two of the other three players said they need to buy it. A nice enhancement from Evolution.
Gravwell - One of my favorite racing game, everyone enjoyed this one
Tash-Kalar - Yay, again.

Sunday - All the games after the first one were played with Red51ve and his crew. Thanks for putting up with me for pretty much the entire day.
Funkelschatz - One of the SdJ kids game noimnees. A cute game that is hard to describe. It's like the opposite of animal upon animal
7 Wonders Duel - I finally got to play it and it was quick, but good fun. It's like Splendor grew up.
Terraforming Mars - This was very cool, but way too much to wrap my head around on the first play and the game took a LOOONG time
Photosynthesis - very neat mechanic, but screwed myself early... need to play again
The Quest for El Dorado - pretty much a simplified clank with a customizable map. Cool, but I think I'd rather play Clank!

Thanks for meeting us Coop, had a great time.

My wife and I broke out KINGDOMINO since I had picked it up for the kids on clearance at Toys 'R Us. (The kids weren't interested)

Fun little game. I won (barely) and would have to play a few more times to get down the strategy of not screwing myself out of a full 5x5 grid. I think my daughter will really like it if she ever sits down long enough to play.

YellowKing wrote: Tue May 29, 2018 11:17 am Fun little game. I won (barely) and would have to play a few more times to get down the strategy of not screwing myself out of a full 5x5 grid. I think my daughter will really like it if she ever sits down long enough to play.

I've played at least a dozen times and I still screw up and fail to fill the 5x5 sometimes.

If you like Kingdomino but wish there was more meat on the bones, then give Queendomino a try. The scoring gets more complicated (scorepad included) but the game is also more interesting.

Aeon's End: War Eternal has started to get its hooks into our gaming group. Took on the Magus of Cloaks with three players this time, and got our asses soundly handed to us. I was having to bite my tongue because our one guy whose ability was healing Gravehold did everything BUT heal Gravehold until it was too late. He sheepishly came to me metaphorical-hat-in-hand this morning and apologized for his suckitude.

I wasn't too hard on him because I had to learn that lesson the hard way too. Ignore your mage's special ability at your own peril. The genius of the game is that you never have enough mana to do everything you want to do, and it's much more fun to get new cards than it is to just dump it into charges. But sometimes HEALERS GOTTA HEAL.

No over the weekend gaming for me, but there's a local bar here that hosts boardgame night on Mondays. Got to play a couple of games of King of Tokyo. As long as you aren't playing it constantly, this is a game that's always fun and pretty easy to teach.

After that our little group pulled out something called Between Two Cities. It's a tile placement game with a couple of interesting mechanics. I didn't do well, but the scoring system is rather complex, so I don't feel bad about it.

As I was on my way home, I realized that I'd left my credit card there for my bar tab, so I went back again last night to retrieve it. Ran into a bunch of guys playing Android: Netrunner. I hadn't played in about two years, and pretty much only with the base set, but they guys were friendly and invited me to play with one of their modded decks. Despite barely remembering the rules and never having seen half the cards in the deck, I walked away with a Corp win. I think the runner's deck just really either wasn't very good or he just drew very badly. But anyhow that was lots of fun.

On a side note, there's a terrifically hot woman who consistently comes to the Monday night group. I really don't think she's my type, but I always feel that chatting with a beautiful woman is like finding money. Just makes the day a little nicer.

Also wanted to mention I picked up the Steam version of ONE DECK DUNGEON. Fantastic adaptation, and they even thought to include the head-pounding difficulty.

My only complaint is that the tutorial didn't do a thorough enough job (in my opinion) of explaining everything for new players. I was able to pick it up pretty easily since I own the actual game, but I could see where someone who had never played before may get a little lost.

One feature I'm really enjoying is the character progression, which I never bothered with in the real game. I'm actually motivated to play through all the classes now.

Handelabra seems to do a nice job. They stay faithful to the physical game. I really like their Sentinels implementation.

Obsidian, on the other hand, can go suck balls. Their implementation of Pathfinder is debatable.

I won a boardgaming trophy this weekend.

My FLGS has been holding free family gaming sessions every weekend, and we've been going pretty religiously. Saturday was the "season finale," and they had the top five families -- those who had attended the most -- face off in a game of Jamaica (with the Crew expansion) for all the marbles (the marbles being a small trophy and a stack of free games). Every couple of rounds, the staff would take the kids away to play a mini-game (Skull, etc.) for resources that they could bring back to the main game. It was a nice way to keep the younger ones from getting bored.

We were in the middle of the pack for pretty much the whole game. One family was the clear front-runner -- they were likely to reach the finish line first, and had the incredibly valuable diamond in their hold. Until the second-place family, already laden with treasure, attacked them and took the diamond. We were in third place, and now within striking distance of that diamond, which just might be enough to push us to the top. So we attacked.

The odds were stacked against us. We had already thrown our gunpowder overboard to make room for more gold. And the opposing ship had a crewmember that gave them a combat bonus. Our only hope was to roll a critical hit - a one in six chance - to end the battle before they could shoot back. And we did!

It was very satisfying, although it reminded me that I don't especially like Jamaica, since a couple of die rolls can make or break your game. Our haul of booty for winning included:

• An actual trophy (a small globe on a stand)

• Jamaica + Crew expansion

• Istanbul

• Traders of Osaka

• Skull

• Incan Gold

It's definitely time to clear out some space on the board game shelves.

Skull is a great game. Poker reduced to 4 coasters. That hepcat can't bluff against people who know him even to save his life is a major bonus.

It's actually quite astounding how awful I am at Skulls against anyone who's even met me once. I am not destined for greatness in poker.