Octopus Overlords

I taught my fiancee to play Netrunner the other night. We played about 1/3 of a game for her to get a feel of it, then restarted. She played corp, and won a close game.

We played again a few nights later. I switched it up and went with a different runner that I hadn't played before, she reviewed the other corps and stuck with Jinteki. She beat me by a fair margin on that one.

Went to Nerdsday (regular wednesday evening gaming) for EDH MtG and King of Tokyo. Won both games of edh, first with Krond the Dawnclad in a four player versus Jarad Golgari Lichlord/Scion of UrDrago/Wort Boggart Auntie, then with Kresh the Bloodbraided (my destruction deck) in a five player versus Wort Boggart Auntie/Jarad Golgari Lichlord/Oona Queen of the Fae/Rith the Awakener. Had my Kresh up to a 64/64 trampler! My buddy Matt won both games of KoT, pretty handily, first by VP, next by Knockout.

Just recently purchased the Exodus expansion for Battlestar Galactica...and I have noticed that my "new" Vipers are the same exact models as the ones that came in the base game. Aren't they supposed to be a different model? I have all the ships, just have the same models as before.

I am looking at the pics of them in the photo section, and the Mark VII's shown there (and in the rule book) are different plastic models. Before I sent FFG an email about it, I wanted to verify that they were indeed supposed to be different models than the regular Vipers from the base game.

Thanks

Chris

They most definitely are different models! This was a big reason for me to buy the expansion

thanks!!

Guess I will need to go ahead and contact them, then.

Chris

Looks like I have an Eclipse game shaping up for tonight. Should be about 5 or 6 players. And some of these guys are blood thirsy jerks, so no economic or tech VP victories with these guys.

I think it will be a bloodbath, and they love to backstab so most likely the traitor card will come out.

I think I am going to roll out the alliance variant with 6 players. Make it so we can have 2 v 2 v 2.

Will let everyone know how the game goes.

My boys and I have been greatly enjoying Battlestar Galactica.

I have also been watching the sci fi series (never watched it before), and am loving it...up to episode 7 of season 2 already.

Good stuff all around.

You were not mistaken, all is spam

That's it, I'm crashing your Eclipse game RMC.

In Battlestar Galactica, can someone explain the Sympathizer Card?

What I am not understanding is...when a player gets it, but they are then made a revealed cylon (per the card), does that mean that they are now working against the Humans? Or are they Cylons working to help the Humans? I am kinda confused about it. Also, if they have to go to the brig (per the card), does that mean that they continue to be human, and can attempt to escape the brig like normal on their turn?

Thanks

Chris

MythicalMino wrote:In Battlestar Galactica, can someone explain the Sympathizer Card?

The card effects depend on where the resource dials are. If one is at half or lower, then the "sympathizer" is a human who gets thrown in the brig. That's it. They continue to play as a human, working against the Cylons. If a dial is not at half or lower (i.e. the humans are doing well), then this player becomes a revealed Cylon, actively working against the humans. Only difference is that they don't get a Super Crisis Card, and can't activate Cylon fleet. Otherwise, they're a Cylon.

It's just a way to make the game a little more challenging for the humans if they're in good shape when they hit the sleeper phase where everyone gets a second Loyalty card.

At least, this is how we've played it.

I bought some plano boxes to organize a couple of games (Dungeonquest and Zombicide), my wife saw I had the games out and asked what I was doing. For some reason I thought she might be interested so I showed her and told her the plano boxes made it a lot quicker to setup a game and they were only $4 or 5, pretty cheap.

Wife: Those are expensive.
Coop: Not really, I mean the game was $100.
Wife:
Coop:

Zarathud wrote:That's it, I'm crashing your Eclipse game RMC.

Come on over to Ohio. I have bed for you as well.

One more for board game night is always welcome. We are playing again on Saturday night, my wife is finishing up school work(Masters in Education, and teaching HS Chem), so I am watching the kids and gaming with the guys.

Well my wife surprised me on our anniversary (which is Valentine's day) with Claustrophobia and the expansion for it. I tried out a game solo just to get the mechanics figured out. I really like it from what I have seen so far, but I don't know if my gaming table is big enough! It seems like it could really take up a lot of space as the tiles get laid down. I'm excited to give it a real try sometime this weekend, perhaps even tonight...

Chrisoc13 wrote:Well my wife surprised me on our anniversary (which is Valentine's day) with Claustrophobia and the expansion for it. I tried out a game solo just to get the mechanics figured out. I really like it from what I have seen so far, but I don't know if my gaming table is big enough! It seems like it could really take up a lot of space as the tiles get laid down. I'm excited to give it a real try sometime this weekend, perhaps even tonight...

...perhaps even Octocon...

hentzau wrote:

Chrisoc13 wrote:Well my wife surprised me on our anniversary (which is Valentine's day) with Claustrophobia and the expansion for it. I tried out a game solo just to get the mechanics figured out. I really like it from what I have seen so far, but I don't know if my gaming table is big enough! It seems like it could really take up a lot of space as the tiles get laid down. I'm excited to give it a real try sometime this weekend, perhaps even tonight...

...perhaps even Octocon...

Great idea!

Just played a round of Last Night On Earth with my 7 year old. She can read, but understanding when and why to use things is still a bit much for her. That being said reading her the cards and then asking her what she wants to do worked out pretty well. She ended up winning. I pulled a couple of punches, but I think she would have won anyway. The base scenario is pretty hard for the heros. (Or I suck at the game. ) Can't wait to play again with the wife so that they can team up against me.

I've pretty much given up on Ravenloft. It just isn't interesting me like I thought it would. I think it would be a lot more fun if I had people playing it that have played D&D. Oh well, guess I could give/trade it with my brother.

we played a 6-player game of Battlestar Galactica...my son and I were the Cylons (from the very beginning), and we won. At least, I hope we did.

I ended up getting the Sympathizer card during the Sleeper Phase, while still UNREVEALED, and at least one of the dials (I think 3 of them) were in the red. I cannot find any solid answers in regards to this on BGG, so hopefully, you guys can help me out here...

What we did, and from what I can tell, this is the way the rules are supposed to be (?): I went to the brig, but continued playing as an unrevealed Cylon. The next turn, I revealed, became a full REVEALED Cylon.

Was this correct?

From what I have read, it is.

This is the most clear instructions I have found about it:

1.Not a cylon, dials in blue --->Become a revealed cylon can't draw super crisis or use cylon fleet

2.Not a cylon, dials in red ---->go to Brig, I'm still a human fighting for humans but have to get out of the brig

3.Revealed Cylon ----> Stay a reveled cylon give the card to someone else

4.Unrevealed cyhlon, dials in blue ---->Become a revealed cylon that can't draw super crisis or use cylon fleet but could later pass the unseen loyalty card (Your a cylon) to another player

5.Unrevealed cylon, dials in red --->Brigged...but still a cylon

#5 is what happened to us (me). Now, if I did not have a Cylon Card, then I would have stayed Human, right? But since I had the Cylon card from the beginning, then I was not.

The Sympathizer card is such a confusing rule, especially when it comes to the player who gets it to be an unrevealed Cylon....

We always played that a "YOU ARE A CYLON" cards overrides anything else, regardless of when you get it. So since you were already an unrevealed Cylon, the Sympathizer card has no effect. Same as if you got a Human card in the Sleeper phase.

The Sleeper phase is just a way for people who thought they were human to suddenly "discover" they are actually Cylons, and is a great source material tie-in mechanic. It doesn't work the other way around though.

My group has always played using the Universal Head Battlestar Galactica Rules Summary & Reference, which describes it as follows:

LOYALTY CARDS

Loyalty cards are kept facedown and secret from other players. A player allowed to look at a single Loyalty card belonging to a player with more than one selects it randomly.

Each Loyalty card specifies whether the controlling player is a Cylon, is not a Cylon, or is a Sympathizer. If a player has at least one You are a Cylon card, he is a Cylon player and ignores all You are not a Cylon cards that he may have.

When the remaining Loyalty cards are dealt, if a player receives a You are a Sympathizer card, he must immediately reveal and resolve it. If he is a revealed Cylon, he may first give the card to another player to immediately reveal and resolve.

If at least 1 resource is half full or lower (red zone), the player is moved to the Brig and the card is then treated as a You Are Not a Cylon card. If every resource is not in the red zone, the player becomes a revealed Cylon player for the remainder of the game and follows steps 1 to 3 of the Revealed Cylon Players sequence. He may never activate the Cylon Fleet location or play Super Crisis cards.

Chrisoc13 wrote:

hentzau wrote:

Chrisoc13 wrote:Well my wife surprised me on our anniversary (which is Valentine's day) with Claustrophobia and the expansion for it. I tried out a game solo just to get the mechanics figured out. I really like it from what I have seen so far, but I don't know if my gaming table is big enough! It seems like it could really take up a lot of space as the tiles get laid down. I'm excited to give it a real try sometime this weekend, perhaps even tonight...

...perhaps even Octocon...

Great idea!

I've always wanted to try claustrophobia. If you need an opponent at octo, let me know.

Played the intro scenario of Mage Knight again this weekend. I really, really wish that I had a spare room so I could play this game over multiple days. Evenings when I have both the time and energy to set up and play a full game are few and far between.

Great time at Ghengis Con 34 this weekend.

I played:

Android Netrunner 3 times
Through the Ages
Le Havre: The Inland Port
Police Precinct

The big hit of the con, however, was my recent obsession: Terra Mystica. Several folks saw I had a copy and begged to play it, so I taught it 3 times. At 3 hours with explanation each time, it took up a good chunk of my weekend. But it's a really great game. All but 1 of the 14-ish people I taught it to liked it, and 3 said it immediately became one of their top 5 games.

And this very day, they've announced an Expansion.



A quick overview:

In Terra Mystica, players are one of 14 races, in 7 colors. Each race can only build on their unique terrain type, see the screenshot below:



Each player has a board:



As in Eclipse/Through the Ages, placing their pieces onto the board reveals more resources: cubes(workers), money, priests, or power points.

Each round, there's a goal tile. For example, one round might give all players 2 points for each dwelling(basic building) that they place on the board. Another might give them points each time they terraform terrain.

Each race has different abilities: The Fakirs do not need shipping to jump to new spaces on the board, they can sacrifice a priest to leapfrog over spaces. The halflings have both cheaper upgrades for upgrading terraforming, and get a VP when they terraform.

Played Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries with my 6 year old yesterday. It was his first game of TtR and my first game of Nordic Countries. He trounced me, completing TEN destination tickets. I was giving him some guidance on what destination tickets to take and also not blocking him where I could, but I still didn't expect him to beat me up. I even got the 27 point route to end the game.

Later on I played Monster Factory with my 3 year old and he beat me too.

Played a 2-player game of D-Day Dice last night, trying to take Gold Beach which had defeated us the last time we tried it. This time we sailed through it pretty easily, with plenty of soldiers left after taking the 2 bunkers.

Then I finally broke out Flash Point and did a 2 player family game. I think the advanced game must be where it's at, because the basic game didn't do much for me. It was OK, and I would play it again, but I didn't see a whole lot of challenge in the game. I'll give the advanced game a try before I pass final judgement though.

hentzau wrote:Then I finally broke out Flash Point and did a 2 player family game. I think the advanced game must be where it's at, because the basic game didn't do much for me. It was OK, and I would play it again, but I didn't see a whole lot of challenge in the game. I'll give the advanced game a try before I pass final judgement though.

If I remember right, in the family game there are no hot spots or hazmat tokens, right? Do you use the firefighter specialists? Definitely play the advanced version, I don't bother with the family game even when teaching new players. There is still some variability based on how things work out, but for the advanced game "easy" is not a word I would use. It gets even trickier when you add the 2nd Story and Urban Structures expansions. Those maps are just cruel.

hentzau wrote: Then I finally broke out Flash Point and did a 2 player family game. I think the advanced game must be where it's at, because the basic game didn't do much for me. It was OK, and I would play it again, but I didn't see a whole lot of challenge in the game. I'll give the advanced game a try before I pass final judgement though.

The advanced game is DEFINITELY where it's at. This game is probably one of the top 5 most played games I own right now. I was at RedWarlords over the weekend and as soon as his wife spotted it, it was in demand. We had played it at Christmas and they had fallen in love with it then.

The expansions are fantastic too. Although I found the two story map we played Saturday night to be a little too easy.

Playing the family based game is like playing a wargame without any conflicts. You don't get hot spots, roles (the REAL meat of the game...rushing out to the engine to grab a structural engineer because the building's about to collapse makes for some really tense moments), vehicles, or anything else that ratches the tension from 2 to 10 in a split second.

woo hoo!! my (kickstarter) copy of Tammany Hall finally arrived today. Looks good. This was actually a game my WIFE told me to get...

Played Talisman with the new City exp with a couple friends and my son. Ended up with a "everybody WIns" secret ending after HOURS of antagonizing and stealing and attacking each other.... TOO FUNNY.

Played two games of Eclipse this past weekend.

It started off bad on Friday, when a friend coming to play had a head on collision less than 200 feet from my driveway. He was slowing down to pull into my driveway, and the roads were snowy, a freak lake effect snow storm dropped like 4 inches of snow all at once, and a 16 yr old tried to pass three cars right into my friend. Anyway, he was fine, but the kid and his aunt were taken away in an ambulance.

But after the two hours of helping out, I live in a rural area, so all volunteer fire fighters most of whom I know, and getting my friend back to my house, he wanted to still play Eclipse. I felt like a tool, when I asked my 41 year old friend if he had called his parents and let them know what happened. He had, and glared at me.

Anyway, that game went well, only a 4 player game because of the snow storm. But we used the developments and ancient home world variant as well as the rare technologies.

Fun game, but I got screwed, and penned in by my fellow players. One guy refuses to engage in combat, so he likes to try to win with technology, so he will almost never build a ship, and just explore so no wormholes connect to him.

But still somehow my three opponents managed to ally against me, so I lost but still came in second.

The one guy got all the free discovery tiles(ones with no ancients on them) with planets, and I got 2 ancients and crappy discoveries. Like get the lowest cost free tech you don't have. Well I didn't have the lowest because I didn't need it. But got it anyway... <sigh>

By the end of the game, I was fighting his dreads that had regeneration and big guns, with my cruisers that had 12 power(rare tech) and the four damage beam weapons. But I just could not make enough ships to keep him down, since his flansk were secure and mine were not.

Still fun, but I hate getting ganged up on.

I'm excited about the first Mage Wars expansion, due in stores this week.

I'm especially looking forward to the Warlord. Here's some sample card captures from The Dice Tower's review video:



This thing's nice against every type of enemy, but it chews through opponent's conjurations. The range is also really high.



Holy crap, 35 life! Not sure what "Tough" means, though.



Thorg is very cool, and a great defense for the Warlord.

The Forcemaster also has a few neat tricks:



The Invisible Stalker essentially cannot be attacked until after he acts, so you want to activate him later in a round. Of course, since the Forcemaster has the fewest creatures, you probably won't be able to act last too often.

SpaceLord wrote:Holy crap, 35 life! Not sure what "Tough" means, though.

This is from memory but isn't it reduced attack dice rolled again the creature? Note I can't actually see the pics from work either.

Mage Wars is the kind of game that makes me wish I had a neighbor that loved the game. OK, all games make me wish I had a neighbor that loved games.

mage wars had the unfortunate distinction of being broken open right as I hit a streak where i was super burned out on heavy games, so aside of one brief play it's sat on my shelf for a while... I assume the expansion just adds more cards?

Jow wrote:mage wars had the unfortunate distinction of being broken open right as I hit a streak where i was super burned out on heavy games, so aside of one brief play it's sat on my shelf for a while... I assume the expansion just adds more cards?

New cards, and two new mage characters. Almost all cards, of course, can be played by each of the mages.

Dawn of the Zeds 2nd edition was just released. I just put in my order. The rules are pretty lengthy for a solitaire zombie game. Looks like there's some real meat in them.

Solitaire Zombie game sounds cool.

• 123 thick, two-sided, multi-shaped, laser-cut game pieces
• One "Wipes-A-Lot" napkin



Never mind.

Yeah, I didn't order Darkest Night because of that, but Dawn of the Zeds is really well reviewed (at least the first edition was) so I'm going to brave it. Hopefully they've refined the process a bit since Darkest Night and it's not as painful.

The rulebook is about 20 pages of small type rules and about 12 pages of fluff and character descriptions. This may rival Mage Knight for deeper solitaire gameplay.

Played a two man game of Lords of Waterdeep last night and once again it was close effort. I believe that I won by 8 victory points, but going into the official tally I was down by 30+ points. After that we started our way through another Memoir'44 map, this time incorporating a beach invasion with mines. I still refuse to believe than anyone actually used the DD tanks to make an amphibious beach landing, but history insists it happened.

After that we muscled through another Descent 2nd ed. campaign scenario (Death on the Wing). It took us a while to get through part one of the encounter and Trent Steel was actually knocked the hell out by a spider and Golem focused beatdown. However, in part two of the encounter we managed to defeat the boss and win on our opening move. It took longer to set up the map and read through the scenario description than to roll the dice and kill Belthir. It was fun and we had a good laugh but the guy playing as the overlord was completely demoralized.

To close out the evening we introduced Trent to DungeonQuest. There were numerous occasions where I seriously thought the table was going to get flipped, but the best was when he pulled a 1 gold piece treasure card from the Dragon's chamber. This was the first time I've ever played DungeonQuest where everyone actually made it to the Dragon's chamber AND two people managed to safely exit the dungeon. Trent was not one of them. We also used the dice rules for combat which I think is a game changer, at least in terms of speed. I don't like the combat cards and I feel they really slow everything down. Rolling a D6 isn't ideal (since it gimps a number of the characters that have combat related special abilities) but it certainly keeps things moving.

coopasonic wrote:Solitaire Zombie game sounds cool.

• 123 thick, two-sided, multi-shaped, laser-cut game pieces
• One "Wipes-A-Lot" napkin



Never mind.

It isn't that bad, the soot comes off with a quick wipe. Think of all the sprue cutting and gluing you have to do for Space Hulk and stuff like that, this is totally no big deal. The payoff is that you get cardboard chits that are so thick and awesome, they seem like they are made out of wood!

Mine is also on the way. I was very pleased with the quality of Zulus on the Ramparts, Second Edition, so this is going to be even more cool!

Beat Defenders of the Realm for the first time last night (2-player game). Random roles - I picked a Sorceress and my buddy was an Eagle Rider. After the first game of the evening we had learned some lessons about the futility of putting out fires with just two people, so we went very aggressive. Took out the Orc general early, then killed the Undead general before Blue (Sapphire) and Red had even moved.

Started building up forces to take on Red. My counterpart had a quest to negate Red's special ability, but he failed it. We had to gamble - go after Red now or play it safe and build up more cards. With Sapphire on the move we knew we had to go big or go home. Took on Red and with some incredible dice rolls managed to defeat him.

After that we did a little mop up and then went to town on Sapphire. It was a little touch and go but the Sorceress' die bonuses proved too much for the forces of evil and we emerged triumphant.

I'm not sure we could have played it any better than how it worked out. It was a lot of luck, an incredible amount of teamwork and strategizing, but most importantly a ton of fun!