This was interesting with 9 people, and I’d say much less fun. There was less each person could do, and it was easy to just sit back and not do anything of use. The people who were werewolves also happened to be the new people. That made it very easy to tell in some cases what was going on. We got lucky a good bit, which made the villagers win, but just barely. I was on the villager team.
This was a really nice place for dinner on Wednesday. Michael and I had a philosophical conversation while the sun set over Menlo Park. He is a lot of fun to talk to about philosophical things, as he is very logical and consistent. The food there was also delicious.
I went to Google last night for dinner with Adam. It was really nice to sit down and talk about his plans with planes and trips. He is an adventurer and cares much more about life than work. I admire him in that respect, and hope to learn from him about it. I also hope to learn from him when he starts to build his plane in February. I’ll help him out no matter what else I’m doing, but the degree to which I can help is questionable. After having dinner we went back to my place and played a few rounds of Gauntlet of Fools. We each won a few and had a good time doing it. We messed up a little bit of the iconography, but it didn’t matter too much in the end. With just the two of us it tended to be that the gimped adventurer would be the one to lose, but it was still very enjoyable.
This is a really fun game, but it has a few sticking points. The main mechanic is to snipe the last hit on a boss. This is made harder when people are constantly stepping in and tripping you as you try to land that final blow. That makes the game a little bit like the munchkin leader killing that can easily happen in that game, but a bit more subtle. Each character has a slightly different special ability, and if you actually help someone out you can get extra points for it. These extra points are what won me the game, as I had 5 points for healing others and 2 points for taking damage for someone else. I also was able to snipe 2 of the monsters giving me 19 points total. Brian and Nick each had 12, Andrew had 10, and I don’t remember Adam’s total. I really like the building up the characters, and the attacking. The sniping and randomness from the cards is frustrating at times, and something that I don’t like as part of games in general. When your amazing turn can be countered by a single card it isn’t fun anymore.
This is a combination of worker placement, mafia, and voting mechanics. I think this is what all mafia/werewolf/avalon style games should strive to be like. Instead of the players being the people that are on trial there is a group of villagers that the players are overseeing as inquisitors. Some of the inquisitors are werewolves, but they are immune to being persecuted as inquisitors. Each turn the players can get help from one of the surviving villagers and try to further their goal. For the werewolf inquisitors it is to have more werewolves than other villagers at any point. For the normal inquisitors it is to kill off the werewolf villagers, and you can worry about the werewolf inquisitors later I suppose. The way it plays out is really nice, because even after you know who the werewolves are the hidden information of the villagers keeps the game interesting and alive. Only when you get down to the last few places does the action become mostly deterministic, but that is supposing you already know who the werewolf inquisitors are. This is a must play for anyone who likes mafia/werewolf/avalon style games.
This game was a lot of fun for me since I was able to munchin a lot before the event happened, and when it did I was in a really good position to do most of the work beating it. I managed to get the exact items that were needed in order to complete the mission, and some items that made it really hard for Steph to try to stop me from doing things. Steph became the spider queen, and was doing a decent job at it. She didn’t realize that she could try to steal things, so she was fighting us off without much of a chance of winning. She also let us heal a lot, and that made all the difference in the end. There were a few times that she had the chance to do some killing blows, but passed on them to hit someone who wasn’t too badly damaged yet. The game went relatively smoothly with only the kid characters dying( Chris and Brian). Nick was the one who got caught in the web, and I was able to do most of the cutting to get him out, cured him of the eggs, and unlocked the front door. After that Nick, Andrew, and myself made it out of the house. I like the game and would play it again, but we should really go about it a bit quicker, and have some turn timers so that people can’t get too involved in the analysis of their position.
While waiting for the others to show up we played a quick game of Glory to Rome. I was trying to get a merchant build going, but could never get the one building I needed for it finished. Steph got the wall and was able to stockpile a ton of resources. Brian and Nick both did well with Nick getting tons of resource bonus and Brian getting tons of buildings built.
We met up with Nick this morning for some Dim Sum at Tai Wu Mr. Fong’s. He invited some of the games group and people from his work. A lot of people ended up bailing at the last minute, so it was only 5 of us, but still very enjoyable. I had way too much to eat, but it was all delicious. After eating I rode to Brian’s for games with Nick.
Michael had a fun idea for a Halloween costume, and I went over to his place to help him out with it. We set up in his front yard since it was such a nice day out and we didn’t want to get any paint on the inside of the house he is renting a room in. I made a makeshift easel out of a cardboard box, and we used the middles of the folding science fair boards to make the pieces of the costume.
His idea was to be a Magic the Gathering card. I did the layout for the back end and he started working on the front. I was able to complete all the tricky layout parts before I needed to get going for meeting up with Steph and Candice. He is going to be wearing the card parts like a sandwich board that one would see an end-of-the-world evangelist wearing on a street corner. He will have a cutout in the front card that he can then slip up to his face. I look forward to seeing the completed project.
It's an Exciting World 