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.
This time I played with the hardest board and only let myself take the pieces everyone else passed up. I wasn’t able to do 10 machines with that, but I did manage to get 7 in. I had so much piping that I was at $2 when the game ended, and only had 50 bonus points from the connections I had made. There were a good number of instances where it was hard to restrain from grabbing the really juicy machines. The new people (Ilia, Derrick, and Ilia’s friend) did surprising well. Tina did mediocre on that round.
This was a very interesting and fun game. Chris taught it and Tina ran the show, with Michael and Derrick joining in. I went for a heavy hitting strategy that turned out to do quite well. I pulled the paladin in the second round and managed to destroy him and most of the hard characters. I was lucky in that I had a lot finer control over what heroes I would be facing, so I avoided the thieves. Without thieves I was able to do mostly full damage, and pull the healers to destroy them. The wizards didn’t do too much against me, so I was able to get away unscathed from them, and the paladin fell the first round against my dragon and troll. I look forward to playing the game again. I ended up winning by a decent margin. I may have lost if I was going with the extra stuff Tina was playing with, but might have been able to take care of it.
Last night Michael and I went over to Andrew’s place to join him and Adam in a small MTG draft. It was a good bit of fun, and I always enjoy learning the new mechanics. I had a really fun little deck based around the heroic ability. Some of the combos I was able to play got pretty out of hand like 2 Phalanx Leaders and a Dauntless Onslaught or Triton Tactics. The outcome of the draft was that I got a close second to Adam. First round was Me vs. Michael (2:0) and Adam vs Andrew (2:1). Second round was Adam vs. Me (2:1) and Andrew vs. Michael (2:?). We did a third round of Me vs. Andrew (2:1) and Michael vs. Adam (2:1). All in I think that means that Adam was the overall winner with me just behind, but it was nice to have a rock/paper/scissors kind of win base. Adam’s removal cards were what really did me in, and I should have had a few counters since I was playing blue/white.
Steph, Tina, and I played some Race for the Galaxy yesterday. We did 2 round with Steph winning both handily. I got some setups going and then just didn’t get any of the cards needed to pull them off. It was a little disappointing, but that tends to happen in Race. I’m not good enough to quickly switch strategies midway through.
It's an Exciting World 
