After getting back from the Elephant Bar, Steph and I played two rounds of Factory Fun. I won both of them, but she did pretty well considering. She has the problem of getting stuck in the line of thinking she was doing before. This shows in factory fun in that once the machines are down she doesn’t want to move them. She is starting to realize that things don’t have to be the way they were before, and she is doing better for it.
Today Steph completely destroyed Jeff and myself in a game of Suburbia. She took a very balanced route and got many of the buildings that were just right for her due to Jeff and I going with very specialized strategies. My strategy was the residential one, but the late game buildings that I was hoping for just didn’t show up, or when they did Jeff decided to discard them. Jeff got last with the industrial strategy, since he didn’t go after people until too late in the game. I had the secret goal of least income, but I paid too much attention to it early game and never got my economy fully off the ground. I got 2 HOA’s which gave me an ok stream of income as long as I kept buying the residential buildings, but it restricted me from getting anything really good.
Nick, Steph, and I finished up the game of Stone Age that we started while in line for Ironman 3. I won, but only by 9 pts, as Steph was really racking up the points for all her huts.
After that we played a couple of games of Factory Fun. The first three I beat Steph one on one. Then Nick joined in and Steph won by a lot, with Nick in a solid second.
While waiting in line and in the movie theater, Nick, Steph, and I played some Stone Age on Nick’s Ipad. I really enjoy this game as it is well balanced, and has several interesting, but not too complex strategies. The randomness is sufficiently limited, but sufficiently random. The best part of the randomness is that you can get items to minimize and optimize the randomness. I really like doing that route, along with the cards. The cards plus tools has seemed to be the winning strategy so far in the games I’ve played, but that is a pretty limited number. We didn’t actually finish the game, but we probably will this weekend.
I played a great game of suburbia last night. The strategy of tentacles is working really well. This involves setting up lines where you can drop the great C buildings that come out and you can get the most benefit from them. I ended getting 99 points and winning against Nick, Tina, and Adam. In a second game Steph took my place. She did really well, and won despite Nick trying to thwart her. Nick didn’t realize it, but spending money early game on blocking someone else is going to completely destroy your economy.
Nick had us over to play board games at where he works, Box. I ended up getting there late and so I didn’t join the first round of games. I played Taluva with Brian and Candice. Candice kept destroying all my settlements and handing the game to Brian. It was Candice’s first game and Brian was nudging her to do things that would help her, but at my expense. Then played a two person game of Hanabi with Brian. Then Steph joined for another game of Hanabi. The games of Hanabi went really well. We didn’t make almost any mistakes, but it was intense. Hanabi is a really amazing cooperative puzzle solving game. The game is best described as coop indian poker where you have to make straight flushes, but you can’t really talk to each other.
I had a good time at the party. Jullian invited us over, along with Nick, Brian, and Candice. We got in the hot tub there and had around 12 people in one of the smallest hot tubs i’ve seen. It was still fun. Nick got in with us, but not Candice or Brian.
We played a game called Contact where someone things of a word. Other people then try to guess the word. The thinker then gives the first letter of the word to the group. People as pointed questions so that others in the group besides the thinker will know of something that fits the letter that the thinker won’t get. The thinker just has to know an answer to the question, even if it isn’t the one that the other person is thinking of. a good example of this is if the letters are CA and someone asks, “Is it in bananas” the thinker can respond “It is not carbon” even if the other person was thinking of calcium. When the thinker can’t think of an answer he says “challenge” and the person must answer what the word he was thinking of was along with at least one other person in the group, who had previously said “contact” to indicate that they knew what the question poser was talking about.
I played two games at Beachhead last night. The games were Blood Bowl, where I got destroyed by going against the people on the games that they decided to push harder than their other matches. I also played gauntlet of fools where I won one of three games. The game I did win it was very close, and I got all the gold quickly, and died first.
Yesterday Stephanie and I went to Brian and Candice’s for a bit of board games and Steph did her toenails. I had a headache yesterday so I didn’t go riding and had to be convinced to join in for board games even. The game Witch of Salem was the one Steph chose to play, and it was an interesting coop game. It was not exactly clear what we should be doing at any given point. There were a lot of really annoying points where we would try to go do something and then there would be a monster that prevented us from doing what we were trying to do. That is part of the game, but it wasn’t a fun part.
It's an Exciting World 