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Friday Night Fights
Oct. 20th, 2004 09:22 pm(well, fighting over the game board, and it was Saturday, but other than that….)
Saturday night was the Monthly Game Depot Invitation-Only Gaming Evening Extravaganza! Well, they probably don’t call it that per se, but you get the idea. I arrived rather early as Magic Rat took me out to dinner at Outback Steakhouse as a thank you for the work I put in getting him into the Golden Age of Wireless, er, Broadband.
My arrival was kind of amusing. I got off the freeway and a car was following me through the turn and then into the parking lot, then parked about two spaces down from me. I got out of my truck and heard “What’s Spare Brains Games?” The people in the car were also going to Game Depot, they didn’t know exactly where it was, and they figured that I would be going there. Right they were! We talked while heading into the store, they used to be regulars at the old location and hadn’t been to the new site yet, even though it’s been three years or so since they moved. I told them what I was doing with Spare Brains Games and went out and got them a business card. I really need to do a demo at Game Depot in November, who knows, maybe Dave & Patty, the owners, would stock Zombie Café for Christmas.
So off to Outback. An excellent dinner, prefaced with some very good coconut shrimp. We discussed the last thing remaining for Jason’s network, implementing security. Well, we talked about a lot of stuff, but this was one of them. Eventually we wandered back to the game store.
We were a bit early, so I asked Jason to teach me Carcassonne: The Castle. This is a two-player version of Carcassonne, a game that I quite enjoy. I picked it up when Game Keeper/Wizards of the Coast closed their retail stores. I’ve been picking up a lot of two-player games for Russet and I as there aren’t a lot, if any, gamers in Cloudcroft. We could probably find some in Alamogordo since they have a two military bases there (or three, if you count the German Air Force separate), plus a college campus.
Regardless, we played the game. Jason popped into an early lead as I fumbled about. I did not expect to win as this was my first time playing. I was building up a pretty good residence and managed to block Jason out from shoeing in and negating the score. I am not an evil, always screw your opponent player, but sometimes it’s in your best interest to cut them short. We did this to each other throughout the game. Jason swept around the board, picking up corner bonus tiles with small scores, while I made three big leaps and several smaller ones, getting two bonus tiles. The first bonus tile doubled the score of my residence, the second one was a +5 bonus at game end. I pulled off the win, 85-81, thanks to that tile. It was an excellent game, I look forward to playing it again.
We then joined Patty and Steph for a game of The Amazing Labyrinth. This is an interesting game where you have a grid, approximately 9x9, of tiles. Every other square of every other row is fixed in place, so the corners are fixed, etc. You push in one tile from one side and a tile drops off the other. Each tile has a path that goes straight through, turns 90 degrees, does a T, or is a four-connector. And on many of the squares is a treasure. You are dealt up to six cards in your hand (four players, 24 total cards). The goal is to work your way through the maze and collect the objects represented by your card by landing on the appropriate square. But since you push the tiles first, then move, you have to live with everyone else, particularly the player on your right, screwing up your perfect plan. And you move as far as you want, but you have to stop and end your turn on an item square if you pick up that item. Oh, and you can’t immediately push back the same row that the previous player pushed, thus undoing their change. So it gets kinda tricky.
This is a fun game, good for 2-4 players, it’s a lightweight, but also somewhat challenging. Patty is preternaturally good at it and claims to have yet to lose a game. We had no reason to doubt it as she won with Steph each and I one card away from winning. I first played this at Steph & Llarry’s many moons ago, and found a copy at the Game Keeper/WotC clearance. Russet also enjoys this game.
For our next game we played Alhambra, an interesting building game with a funky money method for buying things. To Jason, Patty, Steph and myself we added Tracy and a woman whose name eludes me for the moment. You are building a big palace and have to buy the squares that comprise it. There are four different colors of money in different denominations, and a board with the four colors for buying things on which various palace tiles with varying prices are placed. So let’s say there’s a Blue Garden for 10 up. If you pay 10 for it, you get the square and an additional turn. If you pay more for it, you get the square, but you don’t get change and it ends your turn. When you’ve completed your turn, you can place the square on your palace, but it must be placed so that you can walk from your center piece (a fountain, IIRC) to the new square. Some squares have walls on 1-3 sides, walls must match and cannot cut off this path to the center.
Scoring is a bit too complicated to get into here, there are three scoring rounds and you get points based on having the most of a given tile type. You also get points for your longest contiguous outside wall, gotta defend your palace, donchaknow?
I’ve played this game a few times and have mostly enjoyed it every time I’ve played, and I’ve won once or twice before, including the first time I played. Previously I’ve always been in four-player game. The game can handle six, and this was a sixer. It plays very differently, the scoring can come up quite suddenly, and it’s difficult to follow conventional strategies that you might use for smaller games. I decided to use a different strategy that I want to use in a smaller game, and I wasn’t terribly satisfied with my results. I had a decent, not the best, wall, and my scoring was high, but not top or second. So I thought I was doing OK. Then the final scoring came and I won the game. I had the clear majority in one tile, and I split second on an additional tile, with my wall added in I pulled off a decent victory.
Played three, won two. I was happy.
Jason went off to play a new German game imported by Rio Grande with Chuck and others, we settled down and played Finster Flure. We lost the unnamed lady from Alhambra and gained Chris. I had to brow-beat Tracy into playing it, she absolutely loved it and allowed me an “I told you so!” This is a German game that will be released as an American one in the near future, but since none of the game components have any printing on them except Romanized numbers, it’s an easy game to play in English, especially after you download the rules in English off of Board Game Geek. I’d played this once before and fell in love with it. Jason put together an order for a big buy from a German game importer and soon I had a copy of my own, a quick trip to Board Game Geek and I was ready to play.
I’ve played it four or five times now and have yet to win, but I have such a good time playing that I don’t care. The concept is that you’ve been captured and thrown in a dungeon and are trying to escape, but there’s a horrible monster trying to catch you and lock you up again. The movement is simple: you have up to four wooden disks labeled 1/6, 2/5, 3 / 4 and 4/3 on opposite sides. They have distinct colors and stickers of who the person they represent is. There’s a set of greaser cool cats, some sci fi convention geeks, sort of s Scooby Doo group complete with little dog, the Addams family, some policemen & detectives, but I like to take the priests: two or three priests and an altar boy. No, I’m not Catholic, I just find it amusing for unknown reasons.
One really great feature is that the game can handle up to seven players! Not many can. You lose the 4/3 token and run three players. The board is a giant grid, you cannot move diagonally, and you move the number of spaces indicated by your token then you flip it over. Once everyone has moved, you flip the monster movement card and see how far the monster moves. The monster looks forward, then left, then right, then moves. He will move to the closest person, but if two are equidistant, he gets confused and continues moving straight ahead. His movement cards will have either a distance or one or two kills. On the distance cards, he will move up to that distance in squares and eat as many people as he wants, on the one or two kills cards he’ll move up to 20 squares and eat one or two people.
Now there’s a complicating factor. There’s all sorts of things to be placed in the dungeon: teleports for the monster, blood slides to speed your movement, giant rocks to be pushed around that you can hide behind, and giant crystals that the monster can see through but can’t reach you: he ends up pushing and possibly mashing you into the wall. All of the players get to set up these goodies, so you get a totally different dungeon every time you play the game.
You can figure out where the monster SHOULD move, but you won’t know for certain until everyone is done moving their characters. Many times an “oops!” happens! You can also lure the monster towards you in an effort to get it to capture/kill others. In one case my altar boy stepped forward a square shouting “Yoo hoo! Mister Monster! Over here!” (proverbially). A high movement card came out and the monster captured four people, my altar boy not being one of the victims. Late in the game the monster would definitely chomped my altar boy, I was able to move my old priest in such a way as to sacrifice him and save the altar boy. It really wasn’t a smart game move, but I enjoyed it.
The game is won when a player exits half or more of their tokens, Tracy won clean, but we continued on for the heck of it so that ultimately everyone got at least two tokens out. There was a lot of “Rats!” and other epithets when the monster made an unusual turn and ate someone unexpectedly. One case was quite amusing: when I was explaining the game, and as seen during play, normally directly behind the monster is a perfectly safe place to be. In one case someone had a character poised to exit, was directly behind the monster, and the monster managed to loop the board in one turn and ate him! It was quite amusing.
The game is played in two phases. During the first phase, the monster captures you and you start that token again on your next turn. On the next phase, the monster eats you and your token is removed from play, thus it may become impossible for you to win, but you can still lure the monster and harass the remaining players.
The interesting thing was that, with the exception of Alhambra, all the games that I played were my copies, they ride around in the back of my truck and Saturday night they got a workout.
Saturday night was the Monthly Game Depot Invitation-Only Gaming Evening Extravaganza! Well, they probably don’t call it that per se, but you get the idea. I arrived rather early as Magic Rat took me out to dinner at Outback Steakhouse as a thank you for the work I put in getting him into the Golden Age of Wireless, er, Broadband.
My arrival was kind of amusing. I got off the freeway and a car was following me through the turn and then into the parking lot, then parked about two spaces down from me. I got out of my truck and heard “What’s Spare Brains Games?” The people in the car were also going to Game Depot, they didn’t know exactly where it was, and they figured that I would be going there. Right they were! We talked while heading into the store, they used to be regulars at the old location and hadn’t been to the new site yet, even though it’s been three years or so since they moved. I told them what I was doing with Spare Brains Games and went out and got them a business card. I really need to do a demo at Game Depot in November, who knows, maybe Dave & Patty, the owners, would stock Zombie Café for Christmas.
So off to Outback. An excellent dinner, prefaced with some very good coconut shrimp. We discussed the last thing remaining for Jason’s network, implementing security. Well, we talked about a lot of stuff, but this was one of them. Eventually we wandered back to the game store.
We were a bit early, so I asked Jason to teach me Carcassonne: The Castle. This is a two-player version of Carcassonne, a game that I quite enjoy. I picked it up when Game Keeper/Wizards of the Coast closed their retail stores. I’ve been picking up a lot of two-player games for Russet and I as there aren’t a lot, if any, gamers in Cloudcroft. We could probably find some in Alamogordo since they have a two military bases there (or three, if you count the German Air Force separate), plus a college campus.
Regardless, we played the game. Jason popped into an early lead as I fumbled about. I did not expect to win as this was my first time playing. I was building up a pretty good residence and managed to block Jason out from shoeing in and negating the score. I am not an evil, always screw your opponent player, but sometimes it’s in your best interest to cut them short. We did this to each other throughout the game. Jason swept around the board, picking up corner bonus tiles with small scores, while I made three big leaps and several smaller ones, getting two bonus tiles. The first bonus tile doubled the score of my residence, the second one was a +5 bonus at game end. I pulled off the win, 85-81, thanks to that tile. It was an excellent game, I look forward to playing it again.
We then joined Patty and Steph for a game of The Amazing Labyrinth. This is an interesting game where you have a grid, approximately 9x9, of tiles. Every other square of every other row is fixed in place, so the corners are fixed, etc. You push in one tile from one side and a tile drops off the other. Each tile has a path that goes straight through, turns 90 degrees, does a T, or is a four-connector. And on many of the squares is a treasure. You are dealt up to six cards in your hand (four players, 24 total cards). The goal is to work your way through the maze and collect the objects represented by your card by landing on the appropriate square. But since you push the tiles first, then move, you have to live with everyone else, particularly the player on your right, screwing up your perfect plan. And you move as far as you want, but you have to stop and end your turn on an item square if you pick up that item. Oh, and you can’t immediately push back the same row that the previous player pushed, thus undoing their change. So it gets kinda tricky.
This is a fun game, good for 2-4 players, it’s a lightweight, but also somewhat challenging. Patty is preternaturally good at it and claims to have yet to lose a game. We had no reason to doubt it as she won with Steph each and I one card away from winning. I first played this at Steph & Llarry’s many moons ago, and found a copy at the Game Keeper/WotC clearance. Russet also enjoys this game.
For our next game we played Alhambra, an interesting building game with a funky money method for buying things. To Jason, Patty, Steph and myself we added Tracy and a woman whose name eludes me for the moment. You are building a big palace and have to buy the squares that comprise it. There are four different colors of money in different denominations, and a board with the four colors for buying things on which various palace tiles with varying prices are placed. So let’s say there’s a Blue Garden for 10 up. If you pay 10 for it, you get the square and an additional turn. If you pay more for it, you get the square, but you don’t get change and it ends your turn. When you’ve completed your turn, you can place the square on your palace, but it must be placed so that you can walk from your center piece (a fountain, IIRC) to the new square. Some squares have walls on 1-3 sides, walls must match and cannot cut off this path to the center.
Scoring is a bit too complicated to get into here, there are three scoring rounds and you get points based on having the most of a given tile type. You also get points for your longest contiguous outside wall, gotta defend your palace, donchaknow?
I’ve played this game a few times and have mostly enjoyed it every time I’ve played, and I’ve won once or twice before, including the first time I played. Previously I’ve always been in four-player game. The game can handle six, and this was a sixer. It plays very differently, the scoring can come up quite suddenly, and it’s difficult to follow conventional strategies that you might use for smaller games. I decided to use a different strategy that I want to use in a smaller game, and I wasn’t terribly satisfied with my results. I had a decent, not the best, wall, and my scoring was high, but not top or second. So I thought I was doing OK. Then the final scoring came and I won the game. I had the clear majority in one tile, and I split second on an additional tile, with my wall added in I pulled off a decent victory.
Played three, won two. I was happy.
Jason went off to play a new German game imported by Rio Grande with Chuck and others, we settled down and played Finster Flure. We lost the unnamed lady from Alhambra and gained Chris. I had to brow-beat Tracy into playing it, she absolutely loved it and allowed me an “I told you so!” This is a German game that will be released as an American one in the near future, but since none of the game components have any printing on them except Romanized numbers, it’s an easy game to play in English, especially after you download the rules in English off of Board Game Geek. I’d played this once before and fell in love with it. Jason put together an order for a big buy from a German game importer and soon I had a copy of my own, a quick trip to Board Game Geek and I was ready to play.
I’ve played it four or five times now and have yet to win, but I have such a good time playing that I don’t care. The concept is that you’ve been captured and thrown in a dungeon and are trying to escape, but there’s a horrible monster trying to catch you and lock you up again. The movement is simple: you have up to four wooden disks labeled 1/6, 2/5, 3 / 4 and 4/3 on opposite sides. They have distinct colors and stickers of who the person they represent is. There’s a set of greaser cool cats, some sci fi convention geeks, sort of s Scooby Doo group complete with little dog, the Addams family, some policemen & detectives, but I like to take the priests: two or three priests and an altar boy. No, I’m not Catholic, I just find it amusing for unknown reasons.
One really great feature is that the game can handle up to seven players! Not many can. You lose the 4/3 token and run three players. The board is a giant grid, you cannot move diagonally, and you move the number of spaces indicated by your token then you flip it over. Once everyone has moved, you flip the monster movement card and see how far the monster moves. The monster looks forward, then left, then right, then moves. He will move to the closest person, but if two are equidistant, he gets confused and continues moving straight ahead. His movement cards will have either a distance or one or two kills. On the distance cards, he will move up to that distance in squares and eat as many people as he wants, on the one or two kills cards he’ll move up to 20 squares and eat one or two people.
Now there’s a complicating factor. There’s all sorts of things to be placed in the dungeon: teleports for the monster, blood slides to speed your movement, giant rocks to be pushed around that you can hide behind, and giant crystals that the monster can see through but can’t reach you: he ends up pushing and possibly mashing you into the wall. All of the players get to set up these goodies, so you get a totally different dungeon every time you play the game.
You can figure out where the monster SHOULD move, but you won’t know for certain until everyone is done moving their characters. Many times an “oops!” happens! You can also lure the monster towards you in an effort to get it to capture/kill others. In one case my altar boy stepped forward a square shouting “Yoo hoo! Mister Monster! Over here!” (proverbially). A high movement card came out and the monster captured four people, my altar boy not being one of the victims. Late in the game the monster would definitely chomped my altar boy, I was able to move my old priest in such a way as to sacrifice him and save the altar boy. It really wasn’t a smart game move, but I enjoyed it.
The game is won when a player exits half or more of their tokens, Tracy won clean, but we continued on for the heck of it so that ultimately everyone got at least two tokens out. There was a lot of “Rats!” and other epithets when the monster made an unusual turn and ate someone unexpectedly. One case was quite amusing: when I was explaining the game, and as seen during play, normally directly behind the monster is a perfectly safe place to be. In one case someone had a character poised to exit, was directly behind the monster, and the monster managed to loop the board in one turn and ate him! It was quite amusing.
The game is played in two phases. During the first phase, the monster captures you and you start that token again on your next turn. On the next phase, the monster eats you and your token is removed from play, thus it may become impossible for you to win, but you can still lure the monster and harass the remaining players.
The interesting thing was that, with the exception of Alhambra, all the games that I played were my copies, they ride around in the back of my truck and Saturday night they got a workout.
