Small World

06.30.2014

Last night was a semi-impromptu game night at Keith's as he celebrated his wife and youngest daughter vamoosing for a week. I joined Lord Ford and Squire Brady for a game of Small World, which none of us had played against other people. iPads, sure. In fact, I've never come close to winning on the iPad. Against the AI. On easy. I wasn't holding out much hope against people. Real people.

The best thing about playing a real board game vs an electronic version is that although the electronic version will keep up and enforce the rules, there are tangible parts that I, as a player, tend to overlook when playing the electronic version. While playing the physical game Sunday night, I learned that the most important part of Small World I had been overlooking was the special attributes of the race(s) played during the game. There's no [easily found] reference for the race traits on the iPad, while the game we played had nice little reference sheets. Perhaps even more important, I would study those sheets while Keith and Brady were taking their turns.

At game's end, I managed to come out ahead:

• Russ - 99 points
• Keith - 96 points
• Brady - 94 points

After the game, I was re-strategizing my final turn since the final scores were so close. On my final turn I picked a race that came with a 1 point bonus, which was donated by Keith the previous turn in order to skip that race and pick the next. When randomly picking evil forces to overthrow on my last turn, I attacked one of Keith's which gave me 1 point and took away 1 from Keith.

If the above 2 actions hadn't happened, I would have scored 2 less points and Keith would have score 2 more points. Hence:

• Russ - 97 points (-2 points from above)
• Keith - 98 points (+2 points from above)

We were all learning how to play for real, but the game was almost decided by a couple of options on the last turn. I'm not sure if that's good - players don't know each other's scores until the end of the game, so you can only guess how you're scoring relative to each other. Then again, a close game is more fun to play than one where someone runs away with the win. As it was, I think it was a fun little game, though.

Of course, had those 2 points between me and Keith played out differently, Brady probably would have scored an extra 10 somewhere.

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DealNews Game Night

02.18.2014

This past Saturday I got together with the crew from DealNews for a night of gaming. It wasn't proper Widgey gaming, but I got to learn how to play some new games. It's not often I get to go off and play games without taking a stack myself so I was excited to take advantage.

The first game for the night was Boss Monster. This is a card game that's similar to an old Nintendo side-scrolling video game. Each player has a boss monster (hence the name) and uses 5 cards to build a dungeon that will entice adventurers to enter and, hopefully, die. The first player to kill 10 adventurers without dying (letting 5 adventurers successfully get through the dungeon) wins. It's a fun, quick little game that looks to have a good depth of strategy. The cards really convey the old Nintendo flavor, too.

The second game was 7 Wonders. I'm not sure how to best categorize 7 Wonders. It's a card game, but each round you keep 1 card out of your hand and then pass the remaining cards to the next player - so there's strategy not only in what you keep but in what you're passing. There's a variety of ways to get Victory Points, and mine was not the best method. Score wise, mine was the worse method. This is a game that I think I would like if I spent more time with it and figuring out the rules and how to score.

The big game for the night was Eclipse. Eclipse is a 4X space game (eXplore, eXpand, eXterminate, eXploit) that is massive. Lots of parts, and although the rulebook is only 32 pages long, those rules are deep. Normally a game of Eclipse will take experienced players around 4 hours. This night there were 6 inexperienced players, and after 4 hours we were halfway through the games 9 turns. There's no easy way to learn this game and there's a steep learning curve. As such, the first game is pretty much just learning how to play and figuring out how the game works. We stopped halfway through the game and I was started to get a good feel of how the game worked. Of course, the way I had played up until that point had steered me into a losing path, but I think that's part of learning.

Part of the learning curve for Eclipse is that there doesn't seem to be a good route to explain how the game works. You can show and explain the components, but you're wondering what those components are used for. You can explain how the components are used, and you wonder how you get more components (to build your empire). This leads to combat, and how exploring works, and how you maintain the areas you've explored and conquered... all at the same time!

Eventually it starts to coalesce. It's not smooth, but it does come together. After we stopped playing, I went and looked up answers to a couple of questions I had for some of the mechanics. Along the way, I found at least 3 things that I had done wrong through the whole game. Now, I'd like to play the game again and see how it plays now that I think I have an idea of how to properly play.

Plus, I know of 3 things to print out for reference during play that would may the game a lot smoother at this stage.

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Carcassonne & Qwirkle

01.25.2014

The first game of the 2014 Widgey Season was a double header of Carcassonne and Qwirkle, both of which have been featured on Wil Wheaton's TableTop YouTube show (or is it a channel?). While Carcassonne has been sitting in the gaming closet for a year or two, Qwirkle was a purchase due solely to how much fun is looked when Wil Wheaton played, along with how simple it looked to learn and speed of playing a game. As such, I picked up a copy before Christmas and have played it a couple of times.

Qwirkle

Carcassonne has been popular for the majority of the last 10 years and is one of those "games every board gamer should play", so it was only fitting that if nothing else we should play it so as to mark it off the gaming bucket list. There's a lot of strategy involved for what seems like a simlpe game on the surface - lots of ways to score, play offensively and defensivley. Not as fast a game to play (or learn) as Qwirkle, but variety is part of what makes gaming fun.

Carcassonne

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Game Count

12.15.2013

Yesterday I mentioned trying to focus more on playing the unplayed games I have in my collection over the next year and how I doubted that we had played 20% of the games I own. Thanks to my anal meticulous bookkeeping I actually know all of the boardgames I've played since 1984. They are:

1. 1st & Goal
2. Battleball
3. Car Wars
4. Cards Against Humanity
5. Catan Dice Game
6. Cosmic Encounter
7. Dungeon Run
8. Dungeons & Dragons: The Legend of Drizzt Board Game
9. Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon Board Game
10. Flame War
11. Fluxx
12. Formula D
13. Frag
14. Galaxy Trucker
15. GOLO
16. Heroscape Master Set: Rise of the Valkyrie
17. King of Tokyo
18. King of Tokyo: Power Up!
19. Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game
20. Leviathans
21. Lost Cities
22. Munchkin
23. Pirate Fluxx
24. Risk (Revised Edition)
25. RoboRally
26. Scrabble
27. Sentinels of the Multiverse
28. Shadows over Camelot
29. Skirmish Tactics Apocalypse
30. Space Cadets
31. Star Fleet Battles: Captain's Edition Basic Set
32. Star Wars Miniatures
33. Star Wars Miniatures Starship Battles
34. Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game
35. The Settlers of Catan
36. Ticket to Ride
37. Zombicide
38. Zombie Fluxx
39. Zombies!!!

Games listed above in italics I have played but do not own. Of the 39 games above, I possess 36 of them. According to my current collection tally on BoardGameGeek, I currently have 234 games. Math-wise, that comes to roughly 15% of my games have been played.

So it looks like I was right to doubt 20% have been played.

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