Amy, David, Angelo, and I played Munchkin on Thursday. It was a really slow start, but once we got rolling, everyone got rolling together. I was so close to winning, but Angelo was able to take down a potted plant for the victory, with no one able to buff the potted plant enough to stop him.
This was a cute game, but the mechanics were too random for my liking. The random goals and random abilities made planning more than half a turn out very difficult. This is what is referred to as bad random; where the randomness determines what you do instead of determining the results of your actions. I don’t think I’ll be playing it again. The rules book was also very vague on many of the edge cases.
We played two games of it with Nick, Steph, Brian, and myself. Nick won the first game and I won the second.
Tina put on a lovely brunch for the people recovering from the new year’s eve parties. I wasn’t one of them, but I was still recovering from the flight back from Atlanta. We had a lot of food and lots of people came by. Of course there were Amit, Tina, Candice, David, and Nick, but we also got Lee there. I was able to meet the new Beachhead roommate, Kevin. He seems like a pretty cool guy. We broke out 7 wonders and played two games. Ilia won them with some super military and great guilds right at the end. I did pretty well with the no resource strategy, but couldn’t quite pull off the win.
Nick, Kim, and I drove up to Jekyl Brewery in Alpharetta to meet up with Chris and Chelsea. We had some beer at the brewery and had a good tour of it. They had a large Jenga set made of 2×4’s set up. We got it on some really precarious base, and Nick ended up knocking it over.
After that we went to the closeby La Parilla for dinner. During dinner I got a call from Steph about Leopold missing since the plumber came into the apartment. She ended up finding Leopold, but he was really upset by the incident.
Jeff and Leslie came over around 11:15 Christmas morning and we started opening presents. There were lots of great presents to go around, and I got some really nice ones. Jeff game me a really nice messenger bag that has a battery in it for charging devices. I got lots of the things I had asked for as well. Kim got me a really nice fedora. Mom and dad got me some books, socks, gloves, shoes, and other useful things. We had a big dinner and the food was delicious. Like any good holiday dinner there was way too much food and a good bit of leftovers for eating over the following days. We played some Cards Against Humanity, since I had gotten the rest of the set for Jeff. As expected Dad really liked the game, and Mom was appalled at some of the answers. Mom still liked it more than expected. After that, Jeff and Leslie left. I then got my parents and Kim to play some of the games I had made. They had some good feedback.
I played Acquire with Chris, Chris, and Jeff. It started out a little slow for me, but mid-game I was able to get a few really good mergers in my favor. I barely beat out Chris on a few of them. The biggest thing was that I was first, second, and second in the companies that survived. From that I was able to come out on top by not quite 10k. I took the strategy of getting second in a good number of mergers early on, since I wasn’t able to found. Once I could found I made sure I had the majority share in that company. I generally like to be involved in 4 of 7 companies and ignoring the rest.
We played a mix of the expansions for the game Flash Point. I started out as the hazmat guy, and got all the flammables out. Tina was the dog and as such was useful and moving around and getting into hard to reach places to find the people. The 12 move with the dog is amazing. We did really well at controlling the fire and getting the people out quickly. We didn’t focus too much on either, and with that nice balance were able to save everyone but the dog. It was fun, but the play style isn’t something that can keep me interested for more than one game.
This game was a lot of fun at the start, but at the end it got incredibly frustrating. It got especially frustrating when you realized that there was no way for you to win. I did a very predictable play, but Tina wasn’t ready for it and that made it impossible for her to be even close to first. She then did a play out of spite to make it so that I couldn’t win. I would have tied Brian exactly had she not done that one play. Steph and Chris did moderately well, but Chris had taken too many pieces to be a contender.
I played this three times and did moderately well all of them. I got second, third, third. The first game had Jeff, Chris, Tina, Steph, and Nick. Jeff and Chris left after the first game to play something else, but the others played two more rounds. I tried a few different strategies, and they all turned out moderately. I wasn’t able to get a win in any of the circumstances, mainly due to over-planning and not being able to come through on the original plan. That left me out in the original plan working. I would very much like to try again with a non-traditional play of trying to get lots of free buildings and a few other things. This would mean not getting many resources early and relying on other stuff to come through. The winners were Chris, Nick, and Steph. Tina got frustrated when she relied on others to do things and we didn’t come through on them.
It's an Exciting World 