Last night Adam, Nick, and I played through the game Caribbean, which is all about bidding on ships, ordering, and spacial management. I was able to barely win over Adam, but I was taking a lot more time to think through the possible things that the others were going to do, how I could thwart them, and how I could use their misses to my advantage. I did really well at this in a few places and that won me the game.
Steve made a very open RPG system, and we went over to his house to play through it. It was very fun to play an open RPG, as I hadn’t really played through one before. Every time I’ve played some kind of RPG it has been a campaign style, where you go through a story that the dungeon master has laid out. We weren’t quite sure how to handle things at the start, but it worked out fine. We also didn’t get very far in the gameplay, as the character setup took us about 3 hours. The main conflict had only just been introduced, and we hadn’t even decided how we were going to handle it. We’ll be finishing up the game some time soon, and I’m looking forward to it.
Friday night Jeff made a fantastic pizza. It was have pesto with mushroom and broccoli, and half pimento cheese with bacon. It was amazingly tasty. We played games until about midnight, then I stayed up working for a while on getting up the Beta to CloudBurst. The next day we didn’t do much besides watch the GT game and play video games. He introduced me to DOTA 2 and we lost pretty badly. I was absolutely terrible. We also played a lot more GTA V. We stayed up until about 2am playing the GTA V. Jeff made a delicious cauliflower casserole with bacon. I ate far to much of it. Sunday morning we did pretty much the same, playing GTA V and watching the Falcons game. We are planning to go to Taco Bell for dinner to get all sorts of Doritos tacos.
I got up early, packed up, and headed out to the airport this morning. I nearly forgot my keys, but luckily grabbed them right before leaving. Once I got to Atlanta, I hopped on Marta with the card Mom gave me and went up to Lindbergh station to wait for Jeff. He came to get me, and we went on some errands. We first went by The Dump, which is a place that sells furniture that other places couldn’t sell. Then we went by GameStop and Jimmy John’s. I got a sandwich and Jeff got Grand Theft Auto V. The game is interesting and we are taking turns playing it.
Adam and I decided to play a round of New Era Sunday night because we could. The game went really slow and he was able to pull out the victory in the end. Had I min-maxed a bit more I could have destroyed his point engines, but I was more focused on getting my game going. I didn’t get a good engine up for anything except attacking, and Adam had his built around rebuilding and reincorporating. That made the attack strategy not so great.
Steph and I spent Saturday night playing Cards Against Humanity with Nima, Caryn, Michael, Jessica, and Kate. It got a little ridiculous, but all was good fun. We stopped by Back-A-Yard before going to Nima and Caryn’s for some really tasty jerk food. It was something that we really needed. There was a lot of tasty food and beer while we were there, and we all had a great relaxing time after a long day of sailing.
I played a round of New Era today and it was decent. Nobody got going quickly, and even though I had a lot of point potential, I didn’t have an engine to utilize that potential. The game was slow for the other people as well with Chris winning and myself getting second. Adam had an amazing engine running, but no point generation to speak of.
I finally won a round of Tzolk’in, but I really didn’t enjoy it. I decided that I’d finally try the skull strategy and it paid off greatly. I made the gods happy and got lots of points, but didn’t really have any buildings or much else going on. I think I’m going to do a hybrid strategy in the future, even though it is less likely to pay off with as many points. Adam of course got second, with Dan and Jeff doing much worse than the two of us who had played so many times.
This was a fantastic game for the first few hours, then it got obsessive, then I realized how the game would play out and decided not to finish. Once I understood how the puzzles worked and what I’d need to do to complete it, I just called it off. I really like the way the gameplay and the sound go great together, and I’ll have to try to get that into whatever games I’m working on in the future. It is really hard to do in a short time period, but I think I can get it mostly together.
It's an Exciting World 