After work, Liz was off hanging with some friends in town and Darrin came over to do some hanging ourselves. We went to Gladstone Pub and he brought some of his smaller games.
Zombie Dice 2-99 players
This is a pretty simple push your luck game. The cylinder is filled with a number of dice. The sides of the dice have brains, feet, or explosions. There are three colors of dice: green, yellow, and red. The color of the die tells you what is on the faces of each die (the green have more brains than explosions and the red have more explosions than brains). On your turn, you grab three dice out of the tube and roll them. Brains score you a point and are kept. Feet do nothing, but you will reroll them later. Explosions are kept, but are bad. You can continue to roll 3 dice (replacing any brains or explosions from the tube) or stop rolling. If you stop, you permanently score all your brains. If you keep going and end up rolling 3 explosions combined, then you lose any progress made that round. Once you are done, you put the dice back in the cylinder and it's the next players turn. Once a player reaches 13 brains, they win.
We actually played with the
Zombie Dice 2: Double Feature expansion. This adds three special dice with a few new rules. Darrin had a really good turn getting 7 brains in one round. He had a few bad rolls after that, which allowed me to catch up a little. I nearly had him, but I just couldn't stop beginning my rounds with two shotgun blasts. It should be noted that it doesn't help to play dice games on a picnic table.
Rollin' Bones: Pirates of the Caribbean Dice Game 2-4 players
This is more of a kids game than anything. There are no real decisions; you just do what the "dice" tell you after you roll them. I say "dice" because you are more literally rolling bones. The bones are essentially four sided and labeled "bone", saber, shovel, and skull and cross bones. On your turn, you always roll at least one bone. If you roll any skulls, you lose the bones you're rolling and end your turn. If you are clear of skulls, any shovels are added to your collection. Any sabers allow you to take bones that another player has to roll. Any "bones" allow you to add more bones for you to roll from the supply. You continue to roll until you get a skull, roll out on shovels, or roll only sabers and there are no bones to take from a player. Once all the bones have been "shoveled", each player rolls those bones once and the most skulls wins. Pretty stupid, but a time waster.
Again, this is not great on a picnic table. We had each collected 7 of the bones, but he rolled 3 skulls to my 2. Avast!
We finished eating and played the rest back at my place.
Walking Dead: The Board Game players 1-6 players
There are a few different games based off of this property. This one is based off the comic book. I could explain the game in detail, but there isn't much point. The game didn't last as long as a full explanation would. Basically, you are each survivors trying to accomplish three goals at 3 different locations around Atlanta. You move around, leaving a trail of zombies behind you and vie for resources and more followers while trying to survive encounters. The more followers you have, the more dice you have and therefore the better chance you have at overcoming encounters. If you fail too many encounters and take to much fatigue, you die and lose.
I died in 3 turns. Four if you count the turn that got skipped. Darrin had 4 turns and actually wasn't doing too bad. I got a lot of impossible encounters in the start and didn't stand a chance.
I
want to like this game because it seems really interesting and different. It just seems too random. There really isn't anything I can do about bad encounters. To get resources or followers, I have to risk an encounter. There really needs to be more balance factored into this. They added balance to the location cards by making the next location harder than the last. They should have done something like that for the encounters. It would make the cards cramped, but it's better than dying on turn three.
Forbidden Island 1-4 players
This
was the first co-op game I purchased. I was looking for a
non-competitive game for my collection, but didn't want to jump straight
to
Pandemic. This game is by the same designer and seemed much more casual. The art was a selling point too.
You
all play adventurers on a sinking island. You each take turns trying to
shore up floods while getting clues (cards) to the precise location of 4
artifacts. Can you collect all 4 before the island pulls you down with
it? Each randomly assigned character has there own special ability to
make things easier. Some can travel diagonally and others can send
messages (cards) to players on different locations around the island. After
each turn, players draw 2 cards to add to their hand and draw a number
of cards from the island deck to see which locations sink or possibly
get lost forever. There are also a number of "Water Rises" cards in the
player deck which makes you shuffle the island discard pile and places
it back on top of the deck. Not only that, it makes you draw though the
island deck a little faster. Things ramp up pretty quick. I love it and I'm glad I
got it.
We started one level above Novice to make it more of a challenge. Darrin played as the engineer and I as the messenger.
We started out okay, but as usual things got bad quick. We got really
lucky with some of the card draws near the end, but we were able to jump
of the island a turn or two before the whole place went down. Sweet!
Elder Sign 1-8 players
I learned about this game though
Tabletop
and didn't really think about buying it. I picked it up a few months
later when I was dying (no pun intended) for more games to play. It's a
Lovecraft themed game where you try to banish the horrible things that
bump in the night by rolling dice to match symbols on the location cards. You can
use other items and spells you gain to help yourself and others achieve
the requirements. If you get enough Elder Signs in time, then the
Ancient will stay in its slumber. If not, then you can peck away at the
beast and hope you have enough supplies to prevent you from going insane
or straight up being devoured.
Over time I got two expansions. I made an insert
for the first expansion (also my first insert ever) and another better insert
for the second expansion. The image shows just the recent insert.
We avoided the newer
Gates of Arkham expansion. That bastard is hard. We did play with
Unseen Forces. It was pretty much a breeze. We had some close calls, but we were never in too much danger. Getting lots of clue tokens really helps. Darrin also picked up some pretty powerful allies. This is a great game. Hopefully we can crack the right strategy for the Gates expansion soon.
Glen More 2-5 players
This was one of my "grail games" for a while. I learned it through
Rahdo
and knew it would fill a hole in my collection. I loved the mechanic of
last in line moves first and the new take on tile placement seemed
interesting. In this game, you are building your Scottish clan by gaining
fields, markets, castles, and the like. Each new tile placed in your
land activates the adjacent tiles which allows you to generate more
resources. There is also a little "stock" market on the board if you are
low on a resource or have resources to sell. You do not see this game too often in stores. In fact, I had
never seen it. I got this as a belated secret Santa present from Carl.
Had he not felt so bad for being late with it, I'm sure I would have
gotten and easier to find gift, so it was worth the delay.
Darrin picked up on the game pretty quick. The tiles did not like me in this one. My best options for tiles to take were usually ones with rivers or roads, This slowed down most of my resource production. He had the upper hand on scoring for chieftains and I had the upper hand on whiskey. Since he was able to get a better synergy with his tiles, he was able to beat me by 9 points.
Even though I lost, still had fun and learn a few things for next time. Darrin got a kick out of all of it and dug a few of the mechanics.
So in all, I only won two games and they were both cooperative. Not my day. Maybe I'll fair better tomorrow.
Tally: 40/152 Bonus: 12/50
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