Tag: Kyle

Played several games of Turing Machine over the course of the month. I won 1 game outright and tied for the win on 4 more. I brought it to work one day for a team activity and it was significantly easier to teach to a team of computer scientists.

Jess and I completed Quest 8 in Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall. It was a fierce battle which came right down the last couple of chit draws. But we prevailed in the end.

I played a new game at the board-game meetup this month: ARCS. It’s been bouncing around the top-5 of the BoardGameGeek Top-50 Hotness chart since it was delivered to crowdfunding backers earlier this month. It’s a game I wasn’t expecting to like very much–direct adversarial play, zero-sum aspects, but without being narrative based to counter some of that pain. But I enjoyed it and the guy who owns it says the campaign mode (which adds narrative) is spectacular.

Something I found very engaging is that because of the randomness of dealt hands you have to have a very adaptable play style to be effective. So it’s not a game where people pick a strategy and play it. If you are an aggressive player, you might be blocked from making aggressive moves due to the circumstances of a round. If you persist in an aggressive play style you’ll just be ineffective. So that aspect of finding an effective path forward for the hand you are dealt keeps things interesting and fresh.

It is a fairly complex game which is somewhat necessary to support the level of flexibility it requires. There have to be enough routes you might pursue to have room for players to shift strategies. But it can be a lot to take in as a new player.

I played twice over two meetups. I lost the first time and won the second time.

The family played a session of Castle Panic with The Wizard’s Tower expansion. The balance on this game is very well done. Our games often come right down to the very end and this was no different.

Our castle was down to a single tower which was on fire. We managed to get to the end of the monster bag and then kill all the monsters on the board, but we couldn’t finish off the last imp before it got into our castle and toppled the final tower. A real nail biter.

I finally finished designing and printing my box organizer for The Guild of Merchant Explorers. I’ll get to the details of that in my 3D-prints post for the month, but here’s a sneak peek:

Jess and I played after I completed the organizer. The organizer is great. The longest part of getting ready to play now is just shuffling the cards. and clean up takes seconds. I’m very pleased with it. Jess won our game. Then I brought it to the board game meetup to show off the organizer and after ooh-ing and aww-ing we played–which I won.

Amazon’s Prime Day has usually been pretty disappointing unless you really want lots of cheap houseware crap or cheap jewelry, but this year actually had some decent deals on things I had on my wishlist. So I picked up a copy of Heat: Pedal to the Metal. It’s a racing board game which I had been hesitant about. But it’s been bouncing around the BoardGameGeek Top 50 Hotness charts for months. So after reading some reviews I decided to put it on my watch list to grab if the price was right. And during Prime Day it had a solid discount well below its lowest previous price so I nabbed it.

While a racing game is nominally adversarial this one’s really not in practice. You don’t attack other players or anything. It’s kind of a sneaky “group solitaire” game. You’re managing your car to perform around the track as best you can with the hands you’re dealt. You can’t block other cars or interfere with their actions. So it ended up being right up my alley.

Jess and I played the basic rules to introduce us to the concepts. I enjoyed the game and am interested in getting into the advanced rules and grand-prix mode (in which you play a series of races and obtain vehicle upgrades in between). I won our game.

With new games for my birthday we had to get to playing!

Made Mom & Dad play Turing Machine, Camel Up, and The Guild of Merchant Explorers while they were here. I lost Turing Machine, won one and lost one of Camel Up, and won The Guild of Merchant Explorers.

Turing Machine is an interesting little game. I received it for my birthday. A set of punch cards is used to define the behavior of each scenario. The coolness of that implementation isn’t really relevant to the actual gameplay mechanics, but it’s a triumph of design. The gameplay is like an advanced form of Mastermind/Wordle/Clue. You propose a hypothesis of the solution and then obtain information about how much of your hypothesis is correct which you then integrate with your existing information using deductive reasoning to arrive at the correct solution first.

There’s no story or narrative behind the game, the theme is “Punch card ‘computer’!”. A straightforward mechanic which also means it plays quickly. For players familiar with the rules the 20-minute play time is accurate–and the rules are not complicated.

Camel Up I’ve covered previously. Still silly fun running camels around the track.

I’m still enjoying The Guild of Merchant Explorers, which is good as I received a copy for my birthday. I’ve been working on designing a 3D-printable organizer. I think it’s done, but I’m letting the design sit a bit before I print it so I can look at it again with fresh eyes. Also it’s 100+F here all week and I’m avoiding adding even more heat to the house that needs to be removed.

Played again with Jess and I won then too.

Went to a board game meet up and played another round of Faraway (previously discussed), then Call to Adventure, and Turing Machine. I won Faraway and lost both Call to Adventure and Turing Machine.

Call to Adventure is a simple and fairly quick story-telling game. I like to call it “short-story generator.” The idea is that you’re developing the narrative of an epic-story character. On your turn you attempt to advance your story in some particular way and to do so you consult the soothsayers and cast the bones in the air and read the result to determine whether you are successful in that endeavor.

The rulebook has one major omission that would ease learning the game, though, which is a simple diagram of card anatomy. Instead you have to read a bunch of text and then attempt to match what it’s talking about to the cards you play with. A picture would resolve all the common questions that come up when learning it. I guess I should just make one and stash it in the box.

The family finally advanced our Mechs vs Minions campaign by successfully completing mission 4 with a flawless victory. Our mechs arrived at the target location without a single minion alive to tell the tale. But boy was it an emotional rollercoaster for some members of the family–I guess that made the victory even sweeter.

And to finish the month Jess and I continued our Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall story by successfully completing Quest 7, “Red Sky at Night”. We escaped the fire, defeated a foe who we thought was a friend, and gained access to the next part of the city. I’m still mostly happy with the organizer I designed. I’m starting to think that were I to do it over I’d just have the cards sit vertically instead of angled. Room is a bit tight. Or maybe go through the effort of making adjustable dividers.