I started today with a haircut and a trip to the bank. After a shower, I was ready to game. Liz had celebrations to join in so I called Darrin over to pass the time and to join up for a later group activity. When he got to my place we went to the nearby pub to get some eats and I taught him Isle of Trains. He liked it, but he got a bit locked up when he couldn't get the right weight of cards to add to his train. He still seemed to like it. After eating we headed back to my place to really chow down.
Guts of Glory 2-4 players
I forget where I heard about this game first. I got it through the
designer's website and had a bit of back and forth through e-mail with the
designer since my first delivery got stolen from my doorstep. He was
pretty nice about it. He rushed the shipment of a second one and cut
his profits to be fair. Good guy.
The game is set in a post-apocalyptic future where the mutated survivors
engage in a supreme eating contest. The more food you eat, the more
glory you get. Condiments can make the chewing easier or harder. If you
run out of room in your mouth before you can shallow something, you have to spit it
out. Your competitors can choose to put that in their mouth for even
more glory. First to 7 glory wins.
The first few times I've played this, it was a little confusing. The timing can be a bit odd with some of the powers the condiments have. This game, everything just seemed to breeze by, no confusion at all. Darrin had the lead for half the game, but he got hampered by latent psychic energy which made him chew one fewer each turn. Had he spit that out rather than all the other things, he may have had a comeback. I was able to leap past him while he was stalled and fed on everything he spat at me. I ate a victory cupcake after the game.
Small World 2-5 players
Darrin had gotten this game a while ago, but had only learned and played it recently so we never played until now. There had been a number of times while I roamed game stores that I eyed this game up and down, but I always put it back with the others. It just seemed like it would be a mess to organize. When Darrin popped it open, the the game came with premolded organizers. Smart.
In this game you each play different races of fantasy creatures. You sprawl your creature tokens across the map trying to cover as much area as possible, and when necessary, the right areas for your race. You have a limited number of tokens and you need to have enough for each area to claim it or conquer it. As each player takes their turn, they will start bumping you out and taking over. Eventually you run out of good moves with your race. You can then put them in decline and start a new race with different powers. At the end of each player's turn, they score points for any areas they conquered and for the areas they control (this includes areas controlled by their previous declined race). After 10 rounds, the most points win.
In the beginning of our game, I took over the East side with skeletons and Darrin moved in on the North with ratmen. We had a little back and forth before we each went into decline. Darrin then started in on the south with goblins. I saw and opportunity to squash him and started paving over his goblins with my newly acquired giants. With little tokens left, Darrin declined and started up with Elves. I again saw another strong move to make and I switched to hobbits. This allowed me to burrow into his elves and essentially make a long wall blocking his elves in. With little time left, Darrin made a push south, but he had to take out some of his own declined race in the process. It was pretty fun. Even though he lost, Darrin pointed out it was his highest score yet.
Gold Mine 2-6 players
Liz and I picked this game up on clearance from
Cloud Cap.
I'm pretty sure this is the last game I've ever purchased where I knew
nothing about the game. It's a tile laying game where you are trying to
find enough gold nuggets and get out before your neighbors rob your
pockets or scare you with bats. The first few times we played wrong in
different ways. Once we got the rules right it turned out to be a pretty
decent game. We also tend to yell out in a
Strong Bad 20X6
style when issuing a gold or bat challenge. I got some cool bags later on to
throw the components into to make setup and clean up
faster
This was probably the weirdest most lopsided game ever. When setting up, the tiles forced us to create two separate tunnel systems. So when the game started, we kind of went our own ways. As Darrin mined, he kept striking it rich while I came up dry. Normally, you can try to nab the gold the other player finds if you can beat them there, but because of the initial set up, we were too far apart to do that. He beat me handily.
We had some time before the meet-up, so we took a trip to
Red Castle. Darrin had never been. It was pretty hopping in there, but I didn't see anything I was willing to buy yet. Darrin got
Blood Bowl: Team Manager.
My iPhone decided to die when we got back, so I had to do some detective work to find where we were headed. We figured things out, headed off, got some burgers at Five Guys, and got ready to plunge deep.
Descent: Journeys in the Dark (2nd Edition) 2-5 players
After
the Wednesday work lunch game time started up again, my coworker
invited me to play this game with him. He had just gotten it and wanted
to test it out. This is the guy who re-introduced me to games while in Portland. I was happy to join in on the fun. He invited others from an
online forum. Most couldn't make the time work. It ended up being me,
him, and one other online dude. We had fun and decided to make this a
regular thing. This was the second meet up.
It's your basic
dungeon crawler. Shooting and slashing your way though baddies
controlled by the Overlord player. It's very pretty and the rules aren't
crazy weird. I do like that it gives the Overlord a goal rather than
"Kill everyone!" I mean, you can still do that, but it's a bit harder.
It makes the heroes play more defensively rather than just going for the
goal. You have to make moves with a back up plan in mind.
I played as the same mage as last time,Widow Tarha. Darrin went as the warrior dwarf, Grisban the Thirsty. The other two played as a healer and an archer. The intro mission was a push over. I don't think it's possible for the Overlord to win it. We had a choice of where to head after. Somehow we all decided on The Masquerade Ball. That was a bad decision. The Overlord just took over and blocked us the entire way. We looked it up online and found that it's nearly impossible for the heroes to win. Even though we knew it was fruitless, we powered through and hoped to get lucky. We ended up doing better than I thought we would. Next time we get together for this, we
will make the Overlord pay.
Tally: 25/150 Bonus: 6/50
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