Octopus Overlords

Lets see, we played:

1. tichu, which I started out not knowing the rules, and only partly understand them now. The other side called tichu, but the two other people on my team got out first and second so the other team lost 100 points. I was out last, because I had both of the doggy cards which you can't ever play except in one certain situation. I'm kind of suprised it's rated so highly on board game geek. It seemed similar to other trick taking games where you have to follow the patterns others put down, but not that much better then them (especially given that I got into an unplayable state with cards that couldnt be played).

2. Another game of Acquire. This time, I only managed to have a ton of stock in the last hotel that was built up (and it wassmaller than the other two, but it had size 11 instead of 20 and 30, so it was only worth 100 and 200 less then them per stock). I also managed to have a lot of money on hand because my hotels were taken over with my having majority and minority stock in them. I got second place. The first place winner was someone who had minorities in two of the three hotel chains, plus lots of money onhand. The person who had the majority of the two largest hotels ended up spending all of his money early and we made sure to prevent him from getting more money by buying out the other hotel he had money in.

3. A couple of games of Sumeria. I got fourth place in the first game, but I managed to be king maker, which was fun. And in the second game I got second place. It's an interesting quick game.

4. We played Betrayal on the House on the Hill. We explored a lot of the house (almost al the ground floor and some other the others), when the haunt finally happened. We had haunt 42 ("Comes the hero")

Remus brought Defenders of the Realm over, and we played until dawn. Didn't win a single game... that was wicked!

Chaosfaerie made a disapproving face at the light in my eyes which denotes a Future Purchase.

With all the kids home, we are going to play Bang! All day saturday. Woo hoo! Time to dig out my cap guns and litter the table with poker chips!

Chaosraven wrote:Remus brought Defenders of the Realm over, and we played until dawn. Didn't win a single game... that was wicked!

Chaosfaerie made a disapproving face at the light in my eyes which denotes a Future Purchase.

Glad to see more converts to the Realms. Also glad to see that I'm not the only one getting my ass kicked all the time in that damn game!

hentzau wrote:

Chaosraven wrote:Remus brought Defenders of the Realm over, and we played until dawn. Didn't win a single game... that was wicked!

Chaosfaerie made a disapproving face at the light in my eyes which denotes a Future Purchase.

Glad to see more converts to the Realms. Also glad to see that I'm not the only one getting my ass kicked all the time in that damn game!

Man, we were so CLOSE! Stupid Sapphire lived and nuked our cards (if we had got her, there would have been just the Black General), couldn't recover enough to stop her from walking in...

the last solo game I played of Defenders of the Realm (just a couple of days ago), I lost by Sapphire walking into Monarch City. At one point, I had Sapphire, the Demon and the Undead general one step away from Monarch City. I took care of the Undead guy (having already killed the Orc). But I burned through both Royal Blessings trying to stop the other two generals from moving into the City.

Played Seven Players in Bang! For eight games. My youngest was on the winning side *every* game he played (six times). No Renegade ever won (though my daughter made it to a final shootout with the Sheriff in the eighth game). We had capguns with caps to use for Bang cards (hee hee hee), which drove Chaosfaerie nuts. Terrible 'we don't neeeed no steeenkin' jokes, lousy western accents, and people whistling clint eastwood themes. Badly. Awesome time. Then Remus stopped by and we won our first game of Defenders of the Realm! My youngest was the Paladin and ended up as Ork and Dragon Slayer, kenetickid was the Sorceress, Remus the Wizard, and my ranger ended the game on a 3d6 against the Demon to win... By rolling 6 6 6... My youngest and I played a couple of games of Magic while they set up BSG, when I realized I forgot to go shopping for my work lunches.

Played Tower of Babel, which was a nice, quick game where you try to build wonders of the world. There are 4 different types of resources that are used to build them. Each is made of 3 random resources (all three cold be the same) which could be anywhere from 3-6 of a resources (eg, 3 rock, 5 rock and 4 camels). each turn everyone gets a new random resource in their hand. they can either then get another card, or choose to attempt to build one of the resource of a wonder. You call for asistance and others can put down a number of cards which may or may not be of assistance. Then everyone flips over. you can then get assistance from any of those who offered (with valid cards) but if you do so, you must use all their cards. They then get a stake in the wonder equal to the number of resources used. if you didnt use a valid card from someone who offered, they get a victory point for each valid card they offered. Additionally, you get the little marker for that resource. if you have 2 of one resource, they count for 5 points together, 3 counts for 10 and 4 or higher counts for 20. However, everyone has a single wild card that can be used for any card. if they shared that card and it was used, they get the marker. If all three resources for a wonder were built, the person who finished it gets an action card (offering things like extra cards or a second turn, etc). The person with the most stake in that wonder gets bunch of points, the second most gets a smaller number and the third gets 3. It ended up being a close game. I tied for second.

nd then we played BSG. Humans survived fairly easily (we were down to 2 food though)

I had numerous folks tell me about how great Glory to Rome was at Gencon. Seppe even picked up a copy. I just found out that they're making a deluxe edition and it's available at kickstarter. Color me intrigued.

hepcat wrote:I had numerous folks tell me about how great Glory to Rome was at Gencon. Seppe even picked up a copy. I just found out that they're making a deluxe edition and it's available at kickstarter. Color me intrigued.

We played that a few weeks ago at a Canton gaming club gathering. I rather liked the game. Thanks for reminding me. There goes more money. Ass. (when I figure out which of us that last refers to I'll let you know)

i'm thinking of ordering myself a copy too, and I just blew around 200 bucks on games at gencon.

Speaking of which, get your ass (two can that game, beeyatch) back to chicago for octocon in september. i have a bunch of new games now to play. we have to play arcana and elder sign, and i really need some more 51st State time.

hepcat wrote:I had numerous folks tell me about how great Glory to Rome was at Gencon. Seppe even picked up a copy. I just found out that they're making a deluxe edition and it's available at kickstarter. Color me intrigued.

Glory to Rome is awesome, and the wife even like playing it. But it IS better with 4-5 people.

And I hate the art on the "deluxe version." YUCK!

Got together with friends yesterday and had a little bit of a Euro resurgance, which was nice. Started off with a game of Innovation, in which I was seriously lagging behind for much of the game. We were already into Age 9 before I managed to use Classification to take all green cards from other players' hands, including one player who had a hand of easily 20 cards. That netted me about a dozen green cards which I was able to immediately meld onto my green stack of 5-6 cards. It just so happened that one of those green cards was Collaboration, which I was able to immediately use with the dogma effect "If you have ten or more green cards on your board, you win." Nice timing, that.

Afterward we played two games of Settlers of Catan, then a game of Vegas Showdown. Fun afternoon.

hepcat wrote:i'm thinking of ordering myself a copy too, and I just blew around 200 bucks on games at gencon.

Speaking of which, get your ass (two can that game, beeyatch) back to chicago for octocon in september. i have a bunch of new games now to play. we have to play arcana and elder sign, and i really need some more 51st State time.

I'm planning on it but as of right now it may just be myself and possibly redrun making the trip down. If it ends up just being me I may skip gaming Friday night to hang with a buddy and his wife as she always introduces me to her available female friends and I need more of that type of person (available and female) in my life right now.
Of course, I am a huge dork and may pass on the meeting of women to play games with a roomful of men. This may be a good reason why I am still single.

Taught some of the kids Cosmic Encounter before work today, and they loved it.

Took my sons out to play EDH late night with Remus West and a friend. With five, we played Star. Remus took the first game with his Mimeoplasm (his opponents were my two sons, playing Sol'kanarr and Animar). Second game went to my Ghave deck (my opponents were Dennis and my younger son). Third game Remus and I won together by leaving my younger son for last. After Remus left, I tried my older sons Animar deck, he used my Ghave, and my younger son used my Sen Triplets deck. Things looked pretty good until Dennis stole our Commanders with Blatant Thievery and beat us up with our own Commanders.

Let's see. I love Board Games, I love history, and I am a practicing lawyer. How could I NOT buy this?.

El Guapo wrote:Let's see. I love Board Games, I love history, and I am a practicing lawyer. How could I NOT buy this?.

Origins the year before last was all abuzz with this one. It was the new hot thing at the time. The two owners of our local game store excitedly told me all about this one (I ran into them at the con...like I do every year) and I tried, to no avail, to get into a game.

The following weekend after that, Seppe and I stopped in at the game store and they were just starting up a game. We sat down and played and I have to say, it's a really great game. I never bought a copy because the theme isn't really up my alley (a little TOO much politics for my taste) but if it's your cup of tea, the mechanics are great. You won't regret it one bit, I can assure you.

Already done. Perhaps I will have to convene a council of law nerds to play this.

I heard that the theme was largely tacked on for Founding Fathers and it really ends up being an area control/placement game more than anything. I was really excited about it, bit the BGG reviews were only mediocre. That being said, Hep seems to have personal experience different from what I read, and I trust him (with game impressions... NOT WITH CHILDREN, ANIMALS, OR RINGS OF POWER).

Anyone get to mess with Quarriors or Rune Age? I'm thinking about getting one or the other, having freed up some money by canceling my Dead Island preorder. The wife loves the deck... building.

baelthazar wrote:I heard that the theme was largely tacked on for Founding Fathers and it really ends up being an area control/placement game more than anything. I was really excited about it, bit the BGG reviews were only mediocre. That being said, Hep seems to have personal experience different from what I read, and I trust him (with game impressions... NOT WITH CHILDREN, ANIMALS, OR RINGS OF POWER).

Anyone get to mess with Quarriors or Rune Age? I'm thinking about getting one or the other, having freed up some money by canceling my Dead Island preorder. The wife loves the deck... building.

I didn't feel that the theme was an afterthought as the areas you're trying to control are all contextually relevant to the cards you use to access/control them. You could probably make a case that all games could be divorced from their themes and the mechanics applied to another, though.

But always take my two cents as worth exactly that. I have a tendency to judge games almost entirely on how much fun I have with them as opposed to others who try to find the weaknesses in a game's mechanics or the holes in its logic. I'm not what you would call a critical reviewer.

Funny you mention Rune Age. I was just about to call my local game store and see if they had a copy. I didn't pick it up at Gencon as I didn't know much about it. I ended up getting Arcana, Elder Sign and Blood Bowl at the FFG booth instead. But after being a little disappointed in Blood Bowl (it just hasn't captured my fancy after reading the rules...perhaps that will change after a game though), I checked out the Rune Age page and it really does seem like something I'd enjoy.

If your wife loves deck...building by the way, definitely grab a copy of the revised edition of Arcana. I love it to pieces. So much fun in such a small box. Almost double the amount of cards from the original version and about a half dozen variants and game options extend this one out way beyond the value of the 35 bones it costs.

Also, Elder Sign is a deceptively fun game in the same cheapy price range. But I don't think that's coming out until later this year at retail.

Elder Sign is preordered. Apparently the FFG reps told everyone it should hit the public before the end of August. Hopefully that is true, because I love Lovecraft, dice, and Arkham Horror.

I checked out Arcana, so but not deeply. I was under the impression it wasn't coming out for a while.

It may be one of those games just about to ship. sorry about that. but definitely check it out. Methinks your wife will love it. plus, how can you NOT love a game with a character that's basically just a pumpkin wielding a knife!?

For some reason I always seem to be against the grain. I played Founding Fathers maybe a half year ago... It was cold just trying to get warm. IIRC bb2112 threw Remus into a snow bank that day for kicking snow into his shoe or some such thing... Anyhoo, I thought the game was fantastic. I like the historically accurate flavor and thought it fit the theme perfect. I love that it was a political game that was actually a political game. I hate king makery games and how do you gang up on people games but this game was designed to be a king makery game and a gang up on people game. It is also designed balances and counter balances. It was great fun with the big drawback being that it would be much less fun with less than four players. If you can't get four than the body politic would break down IMO.

At $65 I just couldn't warrant a game that I don't think I could get four people playing more than once but at $35, I'm going to have to think about it.

As to theme, if it was tacked on afterward then they totally chose the right theme for the right game. It does a great job of showing how a lot of diametrically opposed ideas got tied together and how they could have been different in American history. The only add on feely thing was the special powers you could use each representative for but that's OK for me. It's a game, not a historical demonstration, even if I think it would be a really cool game to play in high school history class.

I give the game 3.5/4 stars as long as you get a four player game going. I'd give it 4 if I thought for a second it would be a gamer's favorite.

hepcat wrote:Funny you mention Rune Age. I was just about to call my local game store and see if they had a copy. I didn't pick it up at Gencon as I didn't know much about it. I ended up getting Arcana, Elder Sign and Blood Bowl at the FFG booth instead. But after being a little disappointed in Blood Bowl (it just hasn't captured my fancy after reading the rules...perhaps that will change after a game though), I checked out the Rune Age page and it really does seem like something I'd enjoy.

If you're going to play Blood Bowl right, you really need to set up a league. It's an entertaining enough game in its own right, but most of the fun comes with developing your players, getting attached to them, seeing which ones become stars (i.e. get significant stat bumps from development rolls), and rivalries between teams/players.

If it's just a "break it out every once in awhile" game it'll be fun enough, but as a league it's a total blast.

El Guapo wrote:

hepcat wrote:Funny you mention Rune Age. I was just about to call my local game store and see if they had a copy. I didn't pick it up at Gencon as I didn't know much about it. I ended up getting Arcana, Elder Sign and Blood Bowl at the FFG booth instead. But after being a little disappointed in Blood Bowl (it just hasn't captured my fancy after reading the rules...perhaps that will change after a game though), I checked out the Rune Age page and it really does seem like something I'd enjoy.

If you're going to play Blood Bowl right, you really need to set up a league. It's an entertaining enough game in its own right, but most of the fun comes with developing your players, getting attached to them, seeing which ones become stars (i.e. get significant stat bumps from development rolls), and rivalries between teams/players.

If it's just a "break it out every once in awhile" game it'll be fun enough, but as a league it's a total blast.

Blood Bowl Team Manager (the FFG card game I'm talking about in that post) doesn't quite play like that, though. It's not really a game in which you develop your players to any extent.

Ah. Never mind, then.

Our local shop got some copies of Quarriors in today and I just wrapped up my first 2 player game with my son. We had a lot of fun with it. First game with rules explanation took about 45 minutes or so but I can easily see it being a < 30minute game once everyone knows what to do and is familiar with the various dice powers. Our game had a lot of back and forth right up until the end. I was losing 15 to 17 when I managed to score with 2 dragons for 8 points, getting me to 20 first.

For those who are curious... I'd say the game is like a die-based Dominion "deck" builder with Magic: the Gathering style creature combat... sort of. Each player starts out with an identical bag of 12 dice and on each turn draws out 6 dice, rolls them, and depending on what you get you have opportunities to activate creatures and/or purchase a new die from a pool of randomly determined other dice or varying types and powers. Activated creatures attack whatever creatures the other players have activated from their previous turn. If you start your turn with any creatures still in play, you score points for them.

Since it's all dice driven there's a fair amount of luck involved. There's plenty of powerful creature dice to be had, but all of them have at least 1 (or as many as 3) sides that simply provide "quiddity" (the games resource that's used to activate creatures and buy new die) rather than a creature to attack with. My son and I each had a couple turns where we managed to draw several powerful creatures out of the bag... but when rolled got nothing but quiddity.

I almost made Quarriors my sole game purchase at the con (for myself, I bought some stuff for the kids) but I watched a demo of it and determined that it wasn't going to be a game for me or my crew. Seemed like everyone else really enjoyed it though.

Played several games of Rune Age tonight and goodness, that's a fun game. There are actually four different game "modes" you can play, from outright PvP to a semi-PvP race to defeat an enemy (much like Runebound) to a straight-on co-op version. The interesting thing is there are common card sets you can purchase from, much like Dominion, but also your own "private" card sets you can purchase from as well, and these are unique amongst the four races/decks.

We started with the co-op mode to get a feel for the game, and were completely crushed both times. We ended with the semi-PvP race to defeat one of the Dragonlords, which sees players trying to build their deck while occasionally taking shots at each other. The interesting thing is that you can win either by defeating the enemy, OR by defeating your opponents. In this 2-player game, an event occurred that dealt a lot of damage to my opponent. My next hand was chock full of heavy combat units, and I was able to crush him with an all-out attack. Total come from behind victory, as he'd been outpacing me for most of the game.

It was good enough for me to pick up my own copy from the game shop where we played. Ton of gameplay there for only being $35 MSRP.

Great guys... you tell me that both Quarriors and Rune Age are fun. That doesn't help me decide!

I like the dice idea of Quarriors, but wonder if it has legs (and if Elder Sign will be enough dice for the time being). Rune Age is getting good buzz, but people are already crying about needing an expansion (the game just came out, can they have played it that much?).

Well, with only one game in it's a little hard to know for sure, but I'd say Quarriors is a great little game for what it's supposed to be... a light 30 minute game that can hinge a fair amount on the luck of the dice. I'd put it above filler but a good distance from medium weight

In every good way it felt like Dominion to me, and as the box jokes "without all the shuffling". While there is some hand management and deck cycling present in Quarriors, it doesn't appear to get to the extent there can be in Dominion (seemingly endless chains of drawing more cards that in turn let you draw/play more cards, etc.) While Dominion is won by figuring out how to best stuff your deck with victory point cards, Quarriors comes down to some light-hearted creature battling. It's not very detailed but it feels much more adversarial and engaging to me.

Essentially each turn you draw your dice, roll them and see how many creatures you have to activate, and how much quiddity you have to spend. You then decide how much you're going to spend on activating creatures, and how much to buy a new die with, and what new die you're going to buy, if applicable. A common situation for us early in our game last night was to roll a total of 5 quiddity and 2 creatures (1 quiddity each to activate). Do you summon both and buy a cheap 3 quiddity die, summon none and buy a 5 quiddity die, etc. As the game progressed we might have rolled more quiddity, but also had creatures that cost 2-3 to activate... the cheap dice might have been bought out, and so on.

There seems to be a good amount of replay value too. There's a small deck of cards, similar to the Dominion cards used to randomly select which Kingdom cards will be used each game. There are also I believe 5 sets of spell dice and 10 sets of creature dice. For each different set of dice there's 3 corresponding reference cards. For example, the Deathdealer dice (black with red lettering) have 3 cards, Deathdealer, Mighty Deathdealer and Powerful Deathdealer or something like that. When you start the game you randomly draw 3 spell cards and 7 creature cards. So in one game you might get the Powerful Deathdealer, in another just the plain old Deathdealer, or no Deathdealers at all and so on. Each card has different abilities so the dice will vary a lot from game to game.

You, sir, are an enabler. I must make a note to avoid your posts until payday!

hepcat wrote:You, sir, are an enabler. I must make a note to avoid your posts until payday!

I'll have my copy on Monday, come to Dallas and we can give it a play.

I will definitely take you Texas boys up on your offer one of these days. Issie still owes me a beer.

Until then, you should get up to Chicago next month for the next Octocon.

coopasonic wrote:

hepcat wrote:You, sir, are an enabler. I must make a note to avoid your posts until payday!

I'll have my copy on Monday, come to Dallas and we can give it a play.

You going to make it to the game group this weekend?

hepcat wrote:I will definitely take you Texas boys up on your offer one of these days. Issie still owes me a beer.

Until then, you should get up to Chicago next month for the next Octocon.

I do owe you a beer. And I know a few good places to get one.

Isgrimnur wrote:

coopasonic wrote:

hepcat wrote:You, sir, are an enabler. I must make a note to avoid your posts until payday!

I'll have my copy on Monday, come to Dallas and we can give it a play.

You going to make it to the game group this weekend?

Next meetup is 8/20, so no.

This business trip has me all thrown off.

0 for 4 in edh last night, thanks to Remus for Kingmakering. My partners seemed unclear on the concept of ALLIES. (not remus, he handed the win to his ally to keep me from killing him). 2 star games and 2 four player free for alls. Kenetickid had a sick Infect/Proliferate deck.