Tag: games

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.

Played a couple games of Mystic Vale at the board game meetup. Lost both, but it was still fun.

My campaign-games group finished our campaign of Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall with a pair of victories on the final two quests (14 and 15). We defeated the guardian of the holy vault, recovered the tome containing the secrets of kinfire, then climbed the enemy colossus and struck it down before it could destroy the Great Lighthouse of Din’Lux. It was fun. The game is definitely easier with four players than with two and we had some really good complementary decks giving us some nice, high-damage combos.

We’ll be playing Earthborne Rangers next.

The group completed quests 12 and 13 of our Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall story. Both completed victoriously. Quest 13 was clearly set up as a major battle, but with fortune on our side and complementary decks we were able to deal out 80 damage across the enemy team with just 3 attacks and then mop up the remnants from there.

At a board game meetup I jumped into the tail end of the silly game Hot Streak. The players are compulsive gamblers betting on the outcome of a race of sports team mascots as well as various propositional bets along the way. I lost.

After Hot Streak, we played a game of 7 Wonders. I lost that too.

And closing out that night was a game of the rather odd Frenemy Pastry Party. In this game the only way to earn points is to either bake a cake or help someone else bake a cake. Baking a cake alone is suboptimal as it uses up your own ingredients. Contribute ingredients to someone else’s cake earns you points, but they will earn more points for the cake than you will for the ingredients. So the goal is to try to get all the other players to evenly contribute to your own cakes so the points for ingredients are diffused across the other players and cake points are concentrated on yourself. But once every figures this out cooperation is likely to deteriorate. I lost by a point once another player realized what I was doing and rallied the rest of the table to prevent me from winning.

My campaign group continued our Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall adventure with quests 21, 20, and 11. Victory on all three. Quests 21 and 20 were side jobs which earned us some money and weapons. 11 was a story-line quest. Our group has some good synergies set up and the battles were fun, but not trivial.

Played a game of Hardback with a friend. Close all the way and it came down the final hand of cards. I was leading and pushed my points over the end-of-game threshold giving my friend one last turn. He put together a great word and overtook my score by a few points.

Won a game of 7 Wonders at a dinner-and-games get together.

Completed quests 9 and 10 of Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall with my campaign group. We were victorious on quest 9, but on quest 10 a giant moth creature got the drop on us and wiped out half the group’s health on the first blow. From there it was an agonizing struggle to stay on our feet until, ultimately, the moth creature pummeled my character into the ground ending our suffering in defeat.

Played a round each of Azul and Hardback at the board-game meetup. I lost Azul pretty badly, but I won Hardback.

Played Wondrous Creatures at another board-game meetup. This one was new to me. It’s a bit like Everdell, but more complicated. I focused too much on engine building and lost badly. But, in my defense, the person I was playing with had recently been obsessed with the game and had played it 5+ times in the prior 6 days. And he didn’t exceed my score by more than 50%. Definitely a game that one needs to play several times to get a feel for the pacing and strategic options.