Tag: gaming

Late update for Friday, as I was hosting our fortnightly board games night last night, and didn’t have time to write up this entry.

I spent most of the day running chores. I did the weekly grocery shop, and then I had to go out again twice more, once to get some yummy Italian baked goods for dessert, and once to pick up Scully from doggie day care and also buy some beers to share with the guys. In between I did a thorough vacuum cleaning and dusting of the house and then tidying up various clutter to make space for us to sit around and play games. And then just before everyone arrived I had a shower and cleaned the bathroom.

There were seven of us for games. Four of us started a game of Azul before the others arrived, and once they had arrived they played Abandon All Artichokes until we’d finished. After those, we all played another section of our ongoing game of Legacy of Dragonholt. And finally, we resplit into two groups, three people playing Lost Ruins of Arnak, and the other four playing Parks.

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! #4520
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #4385
• Comments on a Postcard #4513

I didn’t have time to post on Friday evening as I went through a string of other stuff to do. I had my online ethics class at 4pm, after which I made sourdough and spent time kneading and getting it ready for baking (which I’ll be doing in the morning after letting it rise overnight). Straight after that I went out with my wife and Scully to our favourite local pizza place for dinner.

When we got home, virtual games night was well underway, and the guys had just finished playing a game, so I leapt straight in to a new game of Nidavellir. It’s an interesting bidding game with some cool mechanics – you’re bidding coins to recruit dwarves to your army, and score points for various combinations of dwarves. You can also increase the values of your coins through various means to improve your bidding in later rounds.

After that we played Gartic Phone, which is a web implementation of Telestrations, essentially a cross between Telephone and Pictionary.

Then we played a couple of games of good old 7 Wonders. And ended with a couple of rounds of a Discord implementation of Scattergories.

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! #4515
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #4378
• Comments on a Postcard #4506

Late Friday update, because last night was fortnightly board games night!

To warm up while waiting for latecomers to arrive, we played a new game: Abandon All Artichokes. It’s a quick and light deck-building game, like Dominion on whatever the opposite of steroids is. You start with a deck of 10 artichoke cards, and you draw from a choice of other vegetables which have various ways to modify your deck, either by adding more vegetables or composting artichokes (removing them from your deck). At the end of every turn you discard your hand and draw 5 new cards from your deck (shuffling your discard pile if you need more cards to draw). As soon as you draw 5 non-artichokes, you win! I was primed to win on my next turn, but the guy ahead of me in the turn order got there first, alas. So I wuz robbed!

After this, we launched into our ongoing game of Legacy of Dragonholt (described earlier here and a little bit here and here). Here’s a shot of the game in action:

There’s not actually a lot to show. The map of the village of Dragonholt is at the top. My character sheet is at the bottom. The only mechanically relevant things are the list of Skills, the Stamina score, and the Items. All of the character personality and background stuff I made up to give me some idea how to roleplay my character.

In this episode we explored the village a bit more, reconnected two old lovers, and explored a creepy crypt just outside the edge of town, where we encountered some scary monsters and prevailed by the skin of our teeth to retrieve what we hope is a significant item. We’re now back at the village and taking a break until next time we play.

Following this we broke into two groups and I joined the group playing Wingspan. This is early in the game, with my board on the bottom right:

Later on I’d assembled a good collection of birds (and we’d eaten more of the chocolate):

At the end of the game, I managed to win with a score of 93 points, over the second place of 87 points. So I was pretty happy with that!

Earlier in the day… I mostly spent it running errands and doing housework. I had a morning tea at a cafe near the school where I teach Ethics, to meet our new Ethics Coordinator who will be taking over from the outgoing one. After that I did the weekly grocery shop, and then when I got home I did a round of vacuum cleaning, folding laundry, cleaning the shower and bathroom, and then a long overdue washing of the car. There was pretty much no time for anything else.

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! #4500
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #4357
• Comments on a Postcard #4485

Late Friday post because last night was Games Night. I arrived last this time, and everyone else was in the middle of a game of Starbase Jeff. I played this game a lot back when it was newer and really like it – it’s very strategic. But while the others finished their game, I did some Italian lessons on my iPad.

Then we got stuck into a new game (for us, but released in 2015), Istanbul.

In this game you lay out a randomised board made of 16 large tiles, representing the bazaar district of old Istanbul. Your goal is to be the first to purchase 5 gemstones. To do this, you need to move around the market, visiting various tiles. Each tile allows you to do a specific action, ranging from collecting goods (jewellery, fabric, spices, and fruit), collecting small amounts of money, selling goods to get larger amounts of money, using money to buy gemstones. Some tiles do other things to make all of this easier: the Wainwright allows you to buy larger wheelbarrows to carry your goods around in, the two mosques let you pick up small tiles that give you bonus actions to do more things, the Caravansery lets you draw special action cards which give you a one-off bonus action.

The thing that ties it all together and makes it tricky is how you move around the board. You have a large counter representing your agent, and a stack of four smaller counters as your assistants. You start in a stacked group at the Fountain. You can move up to 2 tiles, and the whole stack moves as one. To perform the action on the tile you land one, you have to remove one assistant from the stack and leave them there. So as you travel around the board on your turns, you leave a trail of assistants behind. If you land on a tile that already has one of your assistants on it, you pick them back up into your stack to perform the tile’s action. And you need to do this, because if you run out of assistants, then you don’t get to perform the action on a tile you land on, which is a wasted turn. So you’re constantly having to plan ahead, then backtrack or do little loops around the board to pick up your assistants again.

There are a few other details that add strategy and some more things you can do, but that’s the gist of the game. It was a lot of fun, and ended fairly tightly, with two people achieving the five gems and the game being decided on a tie-breaker.

After that we played Mysterium. We’ve played this several times. One player is a ghost and trying to give the other payers clues about who murdered them, so they can solve the mystery. But the ghost is very restricted, and can only give clues by handing the players cards which contain cryptic images of dream-like scenes. The players have to interpret what the ghost meant by them – and it’s very easy to go astray because each card contains many items on it.

I’ve never played this game as the ghost before, so I was keen to give it a try. It’s very challenging, but in the end I managed to clue the others to the correct conclusion, so we shared a victory.

In this photo, for example, I used the card with deep sea diver and Anubis statues to clue the racing car driver (top left on the screen) – because the wheel with spokes evoked the image of the spoked wheels on the driver’s car.

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! #4490
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #4343
• Comments on a Postcard #4471

A late daily update, because last night was fortnightly games night. We’re well and truly back to in-person board games with COVID restrictions pretty much entirely lifted here now due to the zero level of transmission.

We played Devil Bunny Needs a Ham as a light starter while waiting for everyone to arrive. Then we moved into a game of Parks, a new game which the owner was very keen to play. This was followed by the next chapter of Legacy of Dragonholt, the choose-your-own-adventure-ish roleplaying style game we started a fortnight ago. And after that we ended with a few rounds of No Thanks.

Parks was really interesting and fun. The theme is visiting the various National Parks of the USA, and each one is represented by a card with absolutely gorgeous artwork. I am seriously tempted to buy this game just because of the art. As the owner explained the rules to the rest of us:

We each have two hikers. They move along this randomly configured track – each turn you can move one of them as many spaces as you like, but they have to land on an unoccupied space. Unless you use your campfire, in which case you can land on an occupied space, but your campfire goes out and can’t be used again. Each space gives you one or more resources of various types: suns, water, forests, mountains, or animals (he shows us the little wooden tokens representing the resources). Notice the animals tokens are all different animals (he shows us: there’s a moose, a bison, a mountain lion, a bear, etc. The tokens are very nice). The animals are wild. On some of the spaces you get the opportunity to spend your resources to buy equipment, which provides various benefits, and on other spaces you can spend your resources to buy one of the displayed National Park cards, which are worth points. And at the ending space of the movement track you can choose to either buy equipment, a park, or to go first in the next round. We play four rounds and add up our points.

There are a few other details and ways to score points which I’ve omitted for brevity, but they’re not important to understanding the flavour of the game. The important thing is that although you can move your hikers as far as you want, you actually want to move as slowly as possible in order to pick up as many resources as you can, balanced with desiring certain types of resources and wanting to get to that space before anyone else, so you don’t need to spend your one and only campfire. This mechanic is very similar to the movement mechanic used in Tokaido, which is a glorious game.

Anyway, we started playing, and collecting various resources, and buying the National Parks. Three parks are displayed for purchase and replenished as people buy them. We noticed they required various amounts of sunshine, water, forests, or mountains to buy, but after a few more parks were revealed, I said, “Hmm, none of the parks so far require animals.”

The owner said, “No, the animals are wild.”

I said, “Yeah, we know they’re wild, you told us… but why aren’t there any on the parks cards?”

He said, “They’re wild. You can use them as any resource.”

And everybody else around the table simultaneously went, “Oohhhhhh!!! You meant they’re wild!!”

Followed by a hubbub of hilarity in which we all said things like, “Yeah, we remember you told us they were wild and we just thought sure, they’re wild animals, obviously, duh…”

After we’d all stopped laughing for five minutes we resumed playing. It was great.

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! #4480
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #4329
• Comments on a Postcard #4457