Adam destroyed me multiple times in all 3 games of Tzolk’in. I wasn’t able to get the resource strategy to generate points. It was strange to have so much resource, so many people, and so little points. I built more than 10 buildings in every game we played, and most of the games I also got a monument. Despite that I was scoring very poorly. I think the next strategy I’m going to try is the skull/god strategy. Nick joined in for the second two games. He got 2nd in the first play, and I got 2nd in the second play of him being at the table.
David showed me a game on his PS3 called Hotline Miami. It was an incredibly violent stealth attacking game. The premise is that you are a hitman who needs to take out a ton of gangsters from the other sides. It is incredibly easy to kill and be killed and each building floor must be completed or you have to start over. I picked up the game decently quickly and was able to complete a level. I died so many times it was a little absurd. The game itself is really tight mechanically, but the theme isn’t something that I’m particularly drawn to.
Steph downloaded Spelunky onto her computer and we played with 2 keyboards on the same computer. It was difficult to control the characters and the controls were not very intuitive. It was clear that the game had been made for the Xbox. This made us not enjoy it as much as we could have. Especially since we were always hitting each other into traps. Steph wasn’t the most observant player and she was particularly bad about jumping into the traps or bottomless pits. With the way the screen works the other players have to follow the leader by jumping down into the pit. It is really difficult to control a character off screen. If we got controllers for it I would want to play it again, but not otherwise.
Tina, Steph, and I played a couple games of Race for the Galaxy after Acquire. The first game I went military and dominated. The game ended before either Steph or Tina could get their engine going well, so I took it away with only a few points. The second game we all went military at the start, but Tina focussed a lot on economy. She didn’t get it going in time and Steph was able to outpace me in the large planets. She overtook me near the end.
Since a lot of people were going to the Thursday motorcycle class we did a Wednesday games night. I ended up playing some Aquire. In the end I just barely won over Tina. I had taken a large share of one of the major companies in the beginning and tied Nick on the largest company. I also was able to found a good number of companies and control when they got acquired. A lot of people were playing for the first time including Candice and Michael. Nick was able to join in and was doing decently well, but stagnated a little in the middle.
Friday was overwhelming at PAX. I’m not a big fan of crowds, and PAX seems to be nothing but crowds. I was able to handle it for a while, and did enjoy the indie mega booth. There are a good number of games that look very interesting. It is amazing to see the influence Clash of Clans and MineCraft have had on the games that indie developers are making. There weren’t too many original projects, but a lot of them did build well on top of well defined mechanics. The originality was certainly there.
I really liked the Pixel Junk Inc. game that Steph tried out, as well as Cannon Brawl.
I competed in the Goldeneye tournament and had a disappointing first round knockout. I’m sure I could have made it to the final 4 match, but the disparity in skill level made it more of a hunt than a match. The settings were also quite strange as the organizer had never played the game before.
Nick, Steph, and I played two pretty good board games. The first was a dice drafting, resource management game called Castle Dice. It was quite good, but not good enough to buy. We didn’t finish the game either, as the guy at the booth was just showing us how to play and implied that he didn’t want us to stick around and play it.
The second game was a very fast paced interactive dice roller. It was the next in the series of Space Cadets, called Space Cadets: Dice Duel. In this version of the game you are going up against another team, and you have to load missiles, get lock, and move to be able to shoot them. Then you must also dampen their lock, build up shields, and make sure they can’t shoot you. Steph, Erin, and myself won handedly both times over Nick and the two other guys there. We destroyed their ship without getting hit both times if I remember correctly.
Steph and I went to a really nice wine bar after that. We had several flights of wine (Sweet, Alsace, and Port) as well as some phenomenal desserts. We were joined later by Andrew and Nick. We were almost done at the wine bar, but we stuck around for a bit longer and had another desert with Nick.
This was quite a nice event. We played two different games while there. Dragon’s Crown and Mario for the Wii U. They were both incredibly chaotic games, and we didn’t do terribly well in either. Luckily they are designed for people who can’t play games that well. One is the hack and slash, and the other is a very forgiving platformer.
Jeremy made his famous dip, and also the elusive pizza dip. They were both quite delicious, and I ate way to much of both of them. He also had a nice selection of beer, and I got some more caps for my collection.
I think I figured out the optimal strategy in this game, finally. It seems that if you push hard for resource tech early, then push hard on the resource wheel, then get some crystal skulls, you can take over the points. I wasn’t able to pull it off this past game, due to time considerations for the others involved. I need to be a lot more awake and ready to do the math for the building costs, especially with the resource strategy.
Last night Steph, Adam, Andrew, Lindsey and I played some open face chinese poker. This was fun, and we had to alternate who wasn’t in. There were a few hands where I had a really amazing hand that would fault by just the tiniest bit. It happened a good number of times, so I should probably be a bit more reserved, or at least have better backups in place.
I ended up 13 down, and steph was 21 up.
It's an Exciting World 