If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

First game of the month was Star Squadron. It’s a 2-player, space-combat, dog-fighting game. I played it at a board game meetup. It launched on Kickstarter this month and the designer is one of the meetup regulars. So I got to do a late-stage play test. While the 2-player, direct-combat style is not my personal preference, the combat mechanics were very well designed. The feel of the dog fight–twisting and turning to line up a shot on passing spacecraft while utilizing asteroids for cover–was spot on. I lost by a hair (against the game designer, so that felt pretty good to me).

Played Bomb Busters during our “decide on next campaign game to play” session with the campaign game group. It’s a cooperative logic game in which you’re, nominally, trying to defuse a bomb based on correctly identifying pairs of numbers across the players tile sets. We did 6 rounds, victory on 3 and defeat on 3. Played it again with another group later in the month for another victory and another defeat.

We completed character creation and the first day in our Earthborne Rangers campaign. It’s a highly-narrative game, so I can’t really say we were victorious or defeated. The day ended peacefully in camp though (rather than anyone getting injured). It was a slow going start as we all tried to figure out the flow, strategies, and tactics that make it work. Hopefully we pick up the pace in future sessions. All we managed to accomplish narratively was to collect biscuits from Hy Pimpot in Lone Tree Station and then leave for White Sky. Doesn’t sound like much, and it wasn’t, but it still took us a few hours to get through.

Fall is the time to swap in my Halloween-adjacent games. Played a session of Mysterium with some friends. I did some on-the-fly adjustments to the rules and flow to keep things moving–it has a fair bit of fiddliness if you’re not fluent in running it. We were victorious in identifying the murderer.

Final game of the month was Through the Desert played at a meetup. Nominally you’re organizing caravans through the desert, but in effect you’re building walls out of camels to claim territory. A competitive game. I felt it suffers from a classic issue of multiplayer, adversarial games: You can either react to someone else’s moves and counter their aims or do your own thing. If you react, it probably harms the other player, but it also harms yourself and leaves other players open to doing whatever they want. But I guess that’s the game. I placed 2nd of 3.