It's an Exciting World

I lost badly in a game of Galaxy Trucker.  I had an amazing ship in the second round, and I was able to see the whole deck had no open space.  We had the summersault rule in effect, so just in case I put in an engine.  There was a card that added 2, 4 level cards.  This card ended up bringing in 2 open space so I had to give up.  I was very unhappy about it since I had a really good ship.  I didn’t do well in the final round either.  Chris of course won, with Tina in second I think.

Adam, Andrew, Chris, and I had a fun draft of MTG Conspiracy.  I did really well on the drafting and got a powerful set of cards that allowed me to bring a lot of creatures into play without paying for them.  Some of them also allowed searching of the library.  The four cards that worked like this were Gamekeeper, Aether Searcher attached to a Scaled Wurm, Deathrender, and Grenzo.  These made for a very powerful deck, and it pasted me as a target in most of the games.  In the last game we got a little silly and I was barely able to pull it off even though I was in a terrible stalemate positioning.

This time I decided to go pure economy engine.  I did end up getting a dwarf to do a little military, but that was only so that I could furnish more rooms.  I ended up doing extremely well with 114 points.  This was primarily due to the other two fighting over the military actions, but also from a lot of long term planning.  I got the office right away and was able to do a lot of setup, with tons of animals and bonuses.  I should have gotten some of the bonuses sooner, so that I could have done better on food.  The pig bonus is definitely one that should be done as early as possible since it is just extra food to go.  The sheep and rooms ones were also great.  I won by a lot over Adam and even more above Cynthia, but it was her first time playing the game.  She was also trying very hard not to go into AP.

We tried a new game called Impulse at games night.  The game was way too slow with 6 people.  With 3 people it was about right.  The first game we called early, and the second and third game we played with three people.  The game has a little too much uncertainty with the draw.  There are good cards and not so good cards, and you might go the entire game without drawing a not so good one.  The difference in some isn’t great, like movement, but others, like drawing more cards, have a large difference.  This means that if you get behind you fall further behind.  The Impulse group of cards is also interesting since you might not be able to use the cards in the impulse, depending on what is in your hand.  I didn’t much care for it.

I played a good number of games over the long weekend, starting with the usual thursday games night.  We played a game of New Era that Tina ran away with.  She had an amazing engine going that no one could catch up with.  She did what I would normally like to do, engine in the first two turns then points after that.

After that we played some Lords of Waterdeep and I got destroyed early by Jeff with three mandatory quests in a row.  Jeff lost the game, but he won in spirit since he was just being his chaotic self.

Another day we played Goblins Inc. with full table talk.  This is much better than the times when we didn’t have any table talk since you don’t have to worry about your partner doing something stupid or missing a good opportunity.  This rule has everyone at the table able to talk about everything, but it must be fully public talk.  This means that you can whisper and plan, but you can reason through some things.  I won this game by a lot, and it was a good bit of fun on top of that.  The strategy really came into account, and choosing cards really mattered in some cases.

We also played Vegas showdown, but a couple of the tiles I was relying on didn’t show up.  That made me fall behind and I wasn’t able to recover.  It was still a pretty good time.

We played another game of Caverna at games night.  This time I went strong fighting, but it didn’t pay off.  I was too limited in space to do much of anything.  I think I’m going to look for a much better engine build next time and use some military as secondary building actions, that combined with lots of people and building off the edge of the board I should be able to get a lot of things done.  I look forward to playing it again.

Adam got a new game, which is incredibly complicated.  Caverna is the big, more complicated brother of Agricola.  This is especially the case since all the upgrades were available at all times.  There were so many options, and it was hard to make any decisions.  On top of that there was a battle mechanic that lets the player choose from a list of options, making more decision points.  This is a good game, but way too complicated.