And It Comes To A Trickle

Ah, the last day of Gamestorm. I dropped Liz off at work and went straight to the convention center. I looked around for a while and didn't see anything I wanted to play. I also wasn't up for sitting alone with my games waiting for someone to join. I was hungry so I jumped out for a bit to pick up a sandwich. On my way back in, I was roped into a game of...

Riftwalker: A Storm Hollow Card Game 2-4 players
This is a Kickstarter game (that as of now has met it's goal) that the designers were trying to get buzz going for. You play as riftwalkers that use the elements of the land to their will to... make stuff. I didn't pay too much attention to the theme in order to understand how to play. In the game, there are two things to pay attention to: a 3 by 3 array of element cards and a hand of three cards that use the elements. On a turn, a player flips one of the element cards over (this always reveals a new element since the cards are double sided) or replaces and element. Then they use that element to play or "shift" one of the cards they have. In doing so, they get to use that cards special power which could do many different things. Things like adjusting the array, or adding more cards to your collection, or shifting other cards you have. It should be noted that when the cards you have get shifted they start to be worth points (3 point after the first shift and 7 for a second shift). The points aren't scored yet though. After playing or shifting, the array is checked. If the array has three in a row of one element and the player has a shifted card in play of that color, then they can burst that card to put it into their scored pile. The first player to have 5 scored cards triggers the end of the game. Everyone else gets one last turn and the player with the most points wins.

I was playing with 3 other newbies to the game. The person who taught us wasn't playing but was keeping a watchful eye on us. I was doing okay, but not as good as the guy to my left. I was continually getting frustrated with the other two players who didn't seem to understand that the element they flipped needed to match the card they played or shifted. My annoyance may have been due to the fact that I hadn't actually eaten the sandwich yet. I finally figured out a good strategy near the end, but didn't get to use it. I'm pretty sure I ended in third place.

This is a cool game with lots of interesting combos, but I think it's a bit much for me. To play it well you need to be able to order your moves very precisely. At one time you might be keeping track of powers on 5 to 10 different cards. That's not even considering keeping track of your opponents cards. I don't really want to keep track of that many things.

I took a little time to eat my sandwich before gaming again. As I was getting up to look for games to play, I saw my friends from yesterday (Isle of Skye people (yeah, I suck at names)) playing a game on my wishlist. They weren't too far in so they started over and let me join in on...

Burgle Bros. 1-4 players
A.K.A Oceans 11 in a box. Well not exactly Ocean 11. There were only 3 of us, none of whom was called Ocean, and we were stealing from a 2 story office building, not a casino. You each play as specialized robbers infiltrating a building. You must find the safe on a floor, determine the combination to the safe, find the stairs to the next floor, repeat, and eventually get out from the roof. And you must do all of this while avoiding guards, alarms, and random events.

We started pretty good. We found the stairs to the 2nd floor and the roof right away. The first safe was found pretty quick too. The camera placements in the building got a bit annoying at times, but we were able to manage. I scoured the 2nd floor while the other two worked on cracking the safe on the 1st. Pretty soon we had cracked that safe and they had caused two explosion already. One to distract the guard, giving us time to evade him, and the other to give easy access to the safe on the 2nd floor. We were running low on stealth tokens near the end. We eventually cracked the second safe and, through some very strange pathing, were able to reach the roof for the win. Again, this was a win with an asterisk. We realized a bit late in the game that we had forgot to raise the guards alarm level after opening each safe. Oh well.

I think I want this game even more than before. I love it when a game lives up to my expectations. I love the theme and mechanics. I also love the 1950's cartoon/architecture magazine art style. The Kickstarter had an add-on which allowed you to actually stack the pieces in a tower. I'm not sure I'd go that far. I'd hate to store it and it may make the game a bit to intimidating for a tepid gamer.

At this point I had to make my way over to the PAW (Play And Win) giveaway. Liz had won a game and I had to proxy for her. I showed up just in time. As I entered the room, they were calling out her name. She had won Dimension, the game we played Friday. Pretty cool.
After getting my games reorganized in my bag, I found a table trying to get a game started. I sat down to learn...

Space Cadets: Dice Duel 4-8 players
This is a team based dice rolling dog fight game in space. Each team of players is controlling a ship in space in an attempt to destroy the other teams ship. Like on the Starship Enterprise, each player only controls parts of the ship: flight, shields, missiles, and guidance/jamming. Each player is rolling dice to try and get the right symbols to build or earn the necessary things. Now, players can't just roll whenever ever they want. They need to be given an order die from the captain. He can't just give it to you either. He needs to roll the proper number that matches your job to be able to give it to you. A single order die only lets a player roll one die. Once the job is completed, the order die needs to be returned so that more orders can be given. The captain starts with 6 order dice. If the other team successfully hits you with a missile, your team loses an order die. The first team to lose 4 order dice loses the game.

I was assigned guidance and jamming. I didn't think I could handle the responsibility of flight. I had to keep in constant communication with the team to know if we were going on the offensive or defensive. I also had to keep a watchful eye on the other teams guidance officer to see if she was already ready to jam my guidance or visa versa. We took the first hit, but they started to make poor firing commands and lost a lot of missiles to our front shield. We were able to hit them 3 times with them only getting us once more. We just needed one more hit. Every time we fired, their guidance officer was able to get just the right roll as the command was called. It happened 3 times in a row. She was getting really lucky and driving me insane. The few times we did get locked and fire, their shields blocked us. Eventually the tables turned back. I was able to pull off a last minute jamming myself once, but they did catch us off guard soon, evening the score. After two more attempts and some insane flying, we were able to break their shields and reign triumphant.

This is a pretty cool game. I'd never own it myself since I don't think I could ever get enough people together to play it properly, but it is easily and experience I'm glad I didn't miss. I know there are other similar games that involve team management, but are cooperative. They might be a better fit for my collection if I wanted something like this.

Things at the convention were dying down so I headed home a little earlier than I expected. I was able to pick Liz up from work and after she got settled, she decided on Bollywood Theater for dinner. I brought a game to play...

Caligula 2-5 players
This was another game I got from a co-worker who was trying to reduce his game collection. I had never heard of it, but looked up a review and saw that it wasn't complete shit. You are all secretly playing tokens with different values to take actions indicated by Civitas cards. Each Civitas card indicates the value needed to pass the action. Each Civitas card is resolved in an order determined by 6 Sequentia cards. The Civitas cards do a number of different things like gain you cards, gain you tokens, permit you to move tokens, permit you to move Sequentia or Civitas cards, etc. In between Sequentia cards players have the opportunity to mess with who is the emperor (once per round that is). This is where the gained cards come into play. This is also how the majority of points are earned. If you back the current emperor and they stay, you'll earn points each round for as long as they say in place. If you back a new candidate and can assassinate the old emperor, you get points for the assassination and points for each round they stay in that position. They game ends as soon as the Civitas cards or Emperor cards run out.

I started out with some sneaky moves which immediately made Liz hate the game. She plodded through the game anyway while becoming ever cross with me. After a lot of rules double checking, the game became much smoother. I ended up winning the game, but our memories disagree on how much I won by.

This game has a lot of good things going for it, but almost none of them are things that interest Liz. It's "too mean" as she would put it. I'm on the fence with the game. The random order of all the cards is cool, but can lead to some boring rounds if the cards come out in certain sequences. It's also really irritating to have Liz correct my pronunciation of Latin words. I'm sure the irritation is mutual.

Tally: 186/188  Bonus: 59/50