Thursday Board Gaming
Mar. 12th, 2004 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aLast night was board game night at my house, running about 7pm to midnight, which is fairly typical when we have a smaller group. (When we have a larger group, there's inevitably someone who needs to go home at 10 or 10.30 when we finish a first game, and that creates a sort of domino effect; conversely when there's just three or four people they're more likely to be the hardcore folks who would keep playing till they dropped dead if they could.) There were just three of us last night: myself, MB, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
michaelarick. And MB was delayed by a good half an hour due to a police action surrounding his house. (20 police cars cordoning off his blocks, he said, with the police officers telling everyone to stay inside. Not the first time I've seen such over where MB lives, not too far from the edge of Oakland.)
I've really been enjoying the board gaming nights for the last couple of months, more than I've been enjoying roleplaying, truth to tell. And that makes me feel obscurely guilty. Disloyal, or something. Part of it is the fact that the folks who I usually roleplay with haven't tended to attend my board games, with the exception ofangrybuffalo, but part of it's that I should like roleplaying games better, because I've been playing them since I was 10. Yeah, I've played board games that long too, but it's always been a casual thing, before or after "real" gaming. And most of the good memories I have of gaming years past are of specific roleplaying incidents, not a masterful die roll in Settlers of Carcassonne. Despite that, I've been looking forward to the board games more. Thursday has become my favorite day of the week, with an absolutely jammed-packed evening, board gaming followed by my new guiltiest pleasure TV shows, Survivor and The Apprentice.
And last night we got in a record-setting 4 different games.
Michael A. and I were sitting around, twiddling our thumbs because there was no MB present, and so he asked if I had any Magic: The Gathering decks around. He's apparently been playing for the last year. I indeed did, though I had to search mightily to hunt them up, and I'm still not sure where most of my decks are. I think they got moved into various storage spaces when I moved my office back in 2001, whenkimberly_a moved back into the house, and have just been further muddled by additional office moves since. In any case, I managed to find some cards and decks and played my first game of Magic in, probably, 5 years. (The last time I can remember playing was with my brothers, back at my old apartment that I moved out of in 1999(!)).
The game was fun. It's a fast-paced, easy-to-understand game. I was also struck by how entirely random it was. I won, and it was entirely obvious to me that it was purely based on the luck of the draw. There was some strategy, but it was very minimal ("attack with my 3/2 critter, to force him to block with his 2/3? Or stay back? Definitely attack, because I'm ahead on life.") From my memories of Magic past, the vast majority of the fun comes in building the decks, and team play was the only type of game that I felt rose up above that largely luck-based draw. Still, I guess if you come up with crack-as-cardgame, it doesn't need to play great.
In any case, I had enough fun that I'm going to figure out where all my CCGs are, and consolidate them, and dump any that look useless at this point. (I found at least one deck of Babylon 5 cards while digging, and was surprised I even owned such things.)
The first real game of the evening, played when MB arrived, was Golden Deuce, which is a card game in the same "climbing" family of card games as Gang of Four, Tichu, and The Great Dalmutti. Golden Deuce has clearly been positioned toward the family market, and I was very sad to see that they managed to thus suck almost all of the strategy out of the game. Most annoying was a mechanism whereby you drew a card whenever you couldn't play. Someone had been playing too much Uno, I thought. It made it impossible to develop a gameplan to play through an entire hand as you can in just about any other climbing game. Very disappointing, but when I review it I need to muddle out if their improvements might make it more family-oriented, since that's their clear audience.
The second game was Anathema, which is another card game, this one based on "Casino". Also, oddly enough, another card game of Oriental parentage which you don't see a lot here in the US. It's a game wherein you play cards to take cards from a common pot on the table. I found it quite enjoyable. There was clear strategy, though not at as high of a level as the Climbing games tend to be. It was also really nicely produced by APE Games with lots of beautiful and disturbing Drew Tucker artwork.
MB seemed a bit tired of the card games by this point, so I took the opportunity to try out Ticket to Ride, which was a pre-release copy of a brand new train game by Alan R. Moon. It's primarily about building nodal connections on a tightly constrained board. It was simple, but tense and quite enjoyable. I lost due to a bad move on my very last turn. But, hey, it was the only game I lost all evening, so who can complain. Oh, and just so that I can claim that this was indeed an all-card night, Ticket to Ride is a sort of Rummy. You collect matched color cards in order to build the tracks.
I think I'm probably going to follow up this week's card-themed night with a train-themed night next week. A return of Ticket to Ride and maybe Union Pacific and Transamerica. I hate to "waste" UP since it's a six-player game and we'll only have four, tops, but the call of all train games is just very tempting.
michaelarick. And MB was delayed by a good half an hour due to a police action surrounding his house. (20 police cars cordoning off his blocks, he said, with the police officers telling everyone to stay inside. Not the first time I've seen such over where MB lives, not too far from the edge of Oakland.)I've really been enjoying the board gaming nights for the last couple of months, more than I've been enjoying roleplaying, truth to tell. And that makes me feel obscurely guilty. Disloyal, or something. Part of it is the fact that the folks who I usually roleplay with haven't tended to attend my board games, with the exception of
angrybuffalo, but part of it's that I should like roleplaying games better, because I've been playing them since I was 10. Yeah, I've played board games that long too, but it's always been a casual thing, before or after "real" gaming. And most of the good memories I have of gaming years past are of specific roleplaying incidents, not a masterful die roll in Settlers of Carcassonne. Despite that, I've been looking forward to the board games more. Thursday has become my favorite day of the week, with an absolutely jammed-packed evening, board gaming followed by my new guiltiest pleasure TV shows, Survivor and The Apprentice.And last night we got in a record-setting 4 different games.
Michael A. and I were sitting around, twiddling our thumbs because there was no MB present, and so he asked if I had any Magic: The Gathering decks around. He's apparently been playing for the last year. I indeed did, though I had to search mightily to hunt them up, and I'm still not sure where most of my decks are. I think they got moved into various storage spaces when I moved my office back in 2001, when
kimberly_a moved back into the house, and have just been further muddled by additional office moves since. In any case, I managed to find some cards and decks and played my first game of Magic in, probably, 5 years. (The last time I can remember playing was with my brothers, back at my old apartment that I moved out of in 1999(!)).The game was fun. It's a fast-paced, easy-to-understand game. I was also struck by how entirely random it was. I won, and it was entirely obvious to me that it was purely based on the luck of the draw. There was some strategy, but it was very minimal ("attack with my 3/2 critter, to force him to block with his 2/3? Or stay back? Definitely attack, because I'm ahead on life.") From my memories of Magic past, the vast majority of the fun comes in building the decks, and team play was the only type of game that I felt rose up above that largely luck-based draw. Still, I guess if you come up with crack-as-cardgame, it doesn't need to play great.
In any case, I had enough fun that I'm going to figure out where all my CCGs are, and consolidate them, and dump any that look useless at this point. (I found at least one deck of Babylon 5 cards while digging, and was surprised I even owned such things.)
The first real game of the evening, played when MB arrived, was Golden Deuce, which is a card game in the same "climbing" family of card games as Gang of Four, Tichu, and The Great Dalmutti. Golden Deuce has clearly been positioned toward the family market, and I was very sad to see that they managed to thus suck almost all of the strategy out of the game. Most annoying was a mechanism whereby you drew a card whenever you couldn't play. Someone had been playing too much Uno, I thought. It made it impossible to develop a gameplan to play through an entire hand as you can in just about any other climbing game. Very disappointing, but when I review it I need to muddle out if their improvements might make it more family-oriented, since that's their clear audience.
The second game was Anathema, which is another card game, this one based on "Casino". Also, oddly enough, another card game of Oriental parentage which you don't see a lot here in the US. It's a game wherein you play cards to take cards from a common pot on the table. I found it quite enjoyable. There was clear strategy, though not at as high of a level as the Climbing games tend to be. It was also really nicely produced by APE Games with lots of beautiful and disturbing Drew Tucker artwork.
MB seemed a bit tired of the card games by this point, so I took the opportunity to try out Ticket to Ride, which was a pre-release copy of a brand new train game by Alan R. Moon. It's primarily about building nodal connections on a tightly constrained board. It was simple, but tense and quite enjoyable. I lost due to a bad move on my very last turn. But, hey, it was the only game I lost all evening, so who can complain. Oh, and just so that I can claim that this was indeed an all-card night, Ticket to Ride is a sort of Rummy. You collect matched color cards in order to build the tracks.
I think I'm probably going to follow up this week's card-themed night with a train-themed night next week. A return of Ticket to Ride and maybe Union Pacific and Transamerica. I hate to "waste" UP since it's a six-player game and we'll only have four, tops, but the call of all train games is just very tempting.