I played two rounds of Caverna last week with Adam, Tina, and Erik in the first round, then just Adam and I in the second. The first round went decently well, with me losing by a single point to Erik. The second round didn’t go well, as Adam was able to get lots of people, and I wasn’t. The two player version doesn’t work nearly as well for the military strategy. In total scores Adam and I pretty much tied over the two games.
Andrew, Kevin, Adam, and I had a great time doing two drafts of the new set, Khans of Tarkir. I really enjoyed the set, more than I thought I would. The set was slow and allowed large forces to be built up. I was able to make a few trick sets and got them to work a few times. I also got a couple really bad draws. The second draft was better and more fun for me, as I was able to do a full 5 color set, as well as getting many of the really good versatile cards, the charms. I look forward to doing another draft soon, I’ll have to drive and host this one.
Tina, Erik, Chris, and I played a game of pets. Chris and blocked Tina and Erik out of the pets in the middle. Even though it was looking like I would win I lost one point on poop making Chris the winner by a half point.
Riley came over and we tried out the Oculus on Steph’s computer. We first tried it on my PC laptop, but it wouldn’t work there. Each time we tried to start it there would be a blue screen of death. So on steph’s desktop we got it working, tried a few of the example situations, and then we got it to work with Halflife 2. This didn’t go as well as expected, as many of the aspects of the game caused a sick feeling. We couldn’t really go more than 5 minutes at a stretch without getting a little sick, and after a total of maybe 15 minutes we couldn’t take any more of it. I really liked the experience, but I just couldn’t handle it. The parts where you sit in one place and look around were really nice, and didn’t cause a sick feeling, but so many parts of the expected game experience didn’t work. These include turning, jumping, crouching, falling, sitting, strafing, stairs, and just moving in general. It will take a lot to get something like this to be mass market feasible.
We went out to eat with Andrew, Lindsay, and Jeremy at Zeni. It was delicious, but not the best idea for a dinner before the dancing games. We then went back to Jeremy’s place to play the game Just Dance, which was the knock off version of Dance Central. We had a great time, and it was much more tiring than expected. Steph and I called it a night early, since we had an early morning from the diving. Many of the dances were hilarious to watch people do.
I had a great time playing trucker with Iliya, Adam, Tina, and Eva. I did really well on the first two rounds, with a gunboat on the first round, a rolling cargo sphere for the second, and another gunboat for the third. The gunboats worked pretty well, but the lasers got be a good bit. I ended up giving up the last round, but did better than the others since I mainly gave up instead of getting shot down. I won out of the people doing the same level of difficulty, Eva had more, but did an easier route.
I did very poorly at Caverna last night, even though I got third. I went super military, but didn’t get the military point buildings. There were also too many people going military that game, and since I was so specialized it took a toll. I managed to get 3 level 14 weapons pretty early on, but that wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t able to place the 14 level weapon people since all the adventure spaces had been taken. It was a very low scoring game, and nobody took the office. Adam and Tina were decently far ahead, and I had Erik and Cynthia at about my score level.
We had a six person game of seven wonders that I did really badly in. I wasn’t able to get enough resources to do any of the good buildings or any of my wonders. I was beaten on military by Jeff, and didn’t make any science. The only thing that got me some points was the yellow buildings.
I did ok in acquire, but wasn’t a major role in the largest liquidation (a size 41 company) so the people who were part of that ended up winning. I was close, but the stock sold out before I could get a larger interest.
I had the most fun playing a double game of Factory Fun, where Tina and I set two factories up next to each other and played with 20 machines. It was great fun, we had Eric join us for half the game, and we scored midway through. Tina ended up winning since I had 5 blue unused. I did have an impressive orange corridor of 10 out to 10 in, all interconnected. I’d be up for playing that again, or in some spare time making it an app. This would probably be a single player app for simplicity, maybe becoming multiplayer at some point in the future.
We had a nice draft of Conspiracy, and I got an especially good deck. I got the crazy good dragon, and another Grenzo. Grenzo is the main card that won me the game, but the loot the graveyard cards, and the doppleganger was also helpful. We had a lot of grilled cheese with bacon and tomatoes. These were delicious. I am looking forward to playing again.
It's an Exciting World 