I played a game of Mage Knight with Adam, Tina, Iliya, and Chris. I was the green dragon character, and was able to build up lots of crystals. The map was a little small for five players. We had a great time playing. Tina got upset a good bit with the way things turned out. At the end of the game I tried to leave some of the final areas to her, but Adam ended upcoming in and taking many of them. That made it a very close game, but I came out on top a little bit.
I had a great time drafting conspiracy with Adam, Andrew, and Kevin. The first round I got a really good mana engine of a free 1/1 defender that gave mana of any color. This allowed me to ramp very quickly, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to follow through due to a bad card draw. I had a lot of things based on forests, but mostly my plains came out. The second round I took a 5 color deck with a little bit of mana fixing and made it really work. The deck had a ton of great heavy hitting cards and was able to hold its own against some pretty strong attacks from the other players at times.
For games night I played Agricola with Adam, Nick, Erik, and Erik’s guest. I ended up winning, but wasn’t able to use most of the advantages I had for most of the game. The best thing I got was that every time I took a wheat I got to plow a field. I used this five times, but didn’t get to sow until round 10 or so. I was still able to get a lot of points off of the crops, and at the last minute got a fence around the empty land to stay off the major negative from having open land. I really enjoyed it, but would prefer to have 3 people, for speed and placement’s sake.
Tina, Amit, Steph, Iliya, and I played some poker last night. With no money on the line I played it extremely risky, and not much of that payed off. I really wanted to get into “Fantasy Land,” but that didn’t turn out as hoped. Iliya was getting incredibly lucky and playing it safe, so he turned out way on top. I really like the game, and might make it into an app.
On Tuesday Steph and I went over to Jeremy’s to play some Rock Band. Brian and Chris also joined us. It was a fun evening, and I was able to do some expert mode for the first time. I am still really bad at it, but it is to the point where I can have fun doing it. Jeremy had his dip out, and as usual we ate way too much of it. It is hard to resist.
We played a seven person game of Seven Wonders. It was a game with Steph, Chris, Erik, Jeff, Cynthia, Iliya, and me. I really like how this game is highly parallelized, but you still have interactions with other players. The game went well for me, but not well enough. I was going science and was able to get a lot of points there, but many of the science cards were in the same hands, so I wasn’t able to fill out as much as I would have liked.
Steph, Iliya, and I then broke off to do a three person game of Lords of Waterdeep. We had a good time of it, and I was able to build 10 buildings. Since I was the builder this made me win on the bonus points. I did well even without that since I had so many buildings generating revenue for me via the other players using them. I was able to complete a good many quests.
Steph and I have been playing some board games in the evenings this week, outside of games night. We played a couple games of Race for the Galaxy, where we are about equally skilled. We also played one game of New Era, but I am much better at that game than her, and she gets upset when I continue to pull ahead. I got some of the best card draws I’ve gotten in that game, which also helped. I was able to get three cooperate from hand card draws each turn. We also played a game of Fish Cook with Candice, where Steph won by one dollar over me; Candice took a close third.
We had a good 6 player game of Wealth of Nations with Nick, Adam, Chris, Tina, and Jeff. Nick ended up winning with Jeff in a close second. I made a huge mistake where I wasn’t able to produce for a turn. Tina had the worst start, since she was in two economies that were dominated by others. I enjoyed it but would appreciate it being a bit faster.
Steph and I slept in and walked the kitties Sunday morning. They were super cute.
We got to Kublacon a little after noon, and caught the end of James’ lecture on Kickstarter. We then got to play both of the games that were from the Suburbia group, and I liked them both(Subdivision and Castles of mad king ludwig). We also attended James’ talk on randomness in games, and it was quite good. It made me think about how agency relates to games.
It's an Exciting World 