Going to change up my format to try and create something I can maintain. I will make mini-posts about games as I play them using my phone, usually just a picture and scores, then once a week I will blather on about what I played and what I thought of it. Hopefully that will let me hew more closely to the "Everything I Played" concept, rather than "some things I played when I got around to blogging about them, maybe months later".
Moving onto what I, in fact, played. This week I got in 5 games over 4 different gaming sessions. On Thursday I went to Just Awesome Games adult game night, which has way less nudity than the title would lead you to expect (but occasionally about as much alcohol). I ran into Yeh, who I'd previously helped to break in his new copy of Galaxy Trucker. This week, I had brought my copy, complete with The Big Expansion, and we started setting up to play a game, and by the time we finished setting up, we had 5 players, all new except for Yeh and myself.
With 5 players we had no choice but to use the expansion pieces, which made it a bit of a bear for the new players, but Shane, Lauren, and Richard were all good sports as theirpiles of junk finely tuned intergalatic machines got the stuffing beaten out of them, though Richard took exception when the very last die roll on the very last card blew up half of his ship in a way that "I couldn't have forseen or planned for". So crumbles the cookie. And by cookie, I mean spaceship.
Moving on, I finally managed to get Thunderstone to the table, playing 2 games of it with Hilary. Thunderstone is the first in what will probably be many games that borrow Dominion's deck building mechanic. But rather than just acquire victory points with vaguely tacked on land holding names like "Duchy" and "Estate", you are assembling and equipping a group of adventurers to go into a dungeon and kill monsters, which is to say victory points with vaguely tacked on monster names. Totally different.
The mechanical innovation here is that the way in which you acquire victory points uses a completely separate metric from how you acquire everything else. In Dominion, you use money to acquire more money and other cards that will let you eventually be able to afford the big victory point cards. In Thunderstone, you still buy cards that give you more money, but you are *also* accumulating attack power, which is how you kill the monsters, which is what translates into victory points.
Thunderstone very much has the appearance of a game that was pushed out the door one or two development cycles early: the locations and icons for the numbers on the cards seems a bit haphazard and random, the rulebook had fairly severe problems both with organization and with clarity, and some of the cards feel way out of balance. That said, none of the problems are deal breakers, and publisher AEG has taken responsibility for the rulebook, having already revised it 4 times (even if one of their clarifications made an already overpowered card even more indisputably overpowered). Dominion has added new mechanics with every expansion to keep it fresh. I will be interested to see what Thunderstone does with its upcoming expansion; frankly I feel like they have plenty of room for interesting variations without even adding any rules at all.
My sister and her husband came to stay with us on Saturday night, and they invited a couple friends of theirs over to have dinner and play games. Their friend Dave is the co-founder of a startup that is working on some very exciting technology to folks on the techier end of the board game spectrum, and he and his wife were excited to learn some new games.
I pulled out Dixit, which answers the question "what if Salvador Dali had designed Apples to Apples" and Incan Gold, which answers the question "What if Reiner Knizia had directed Raiders of the Lost Arc". They were both big hits, and reminded Hilary and I we need to have people over to play games more often.
Moving onto what I, in fact, played. This week I got in 5 games over 4 different gaming sessions. On Thursday I went to Just Awesome Games adult game night, which has way less nudity than the title would lead you to expect (but occasionally about as much alcohol). I ran into Yeh, who I'd previously helped to break in his new copy of Galaxy Trucker. This week, I had brought my copy, complete with The Big Expansion, and we started setting up to play a game, and by the time we finished setting up, we had 5 players, all new except for Yeh and myself.With 5 players we had no choice but to use the expansion pieces, which made it a bit of a bear for the new players, but Shane, Lauren, and Richard were all good sports as their
Moving on, I finally managed to get Thunderstone to the table, playing 2 games of it with Hilary. Thunderstone is the first in what will probably be many games that borrow Dominion's deck building mechanic. But rather than just acquire victory points with vaguely tacked on land holding names like "Duchy" and "Estate", you are assembling and equipping a group of adventurers to go into a dungeon and kill monsters, which is to say victory points with vaguely tacked on monster names. Totally different.The mechanical innovation here is that the way in which you acquire victory points uses a completely separate metric from how you acquire everything else. In Dominion, you use money to acquire more money and other cards that will let you eventually be able to afford the big victory point cards. In Thunderstone, you still buy cards that give you more money, but you are *also* accumulating attack power, which is how you kill the monsters, which is what translates into victory points.
Thunderstone very much has the appearance of a game that was pushed out the door one or two development cycles early: the locations and icons for the numbers on the cards seems a bit haphazard and random, the rulebook had fairly severe problems both with organization and with clarity, and some of the cards feel way out of balance. That said, none of the problems are deal breakers, and publisher AEG has taken responsibility for the rulebook, having already revised it 4 times (even if one of their clarifications made an already overpowered card even more indisputably overpowered). Dominion has added new mechanics with every expansion to keep it fresh. I will be interested to see what Thunderstone does with its upcoming expansion; frankly I feel like they have plenty of room for interesting variations without even adding any rules at all.
My sister and her husband came to stay with us on Saturday night, and they invited a couple friends of theirs over to have dinner and play games. Their friend Dave is the co-founder of a startup that is working on some very exciting technology to folks on the techier end of the board game spectrum, and he and his wife were excited to learn some new games.I pulled out Dixit, which answers the question "what if Salvador Dali had designed Apples to Apples" and Incan Gold, which answers the question "What if Reiner Knizia had directed Raiders of the Lost Arc". They were both big hits, and reminded Hilary and I we need to have people over to play games more often.
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