Game Night! - 22 January 2015

Another game night!  Just two players again but we do have more players scheduled for our next game night.

Aliens: This Time its War
My friend wanted to start off with one of his favourites - a game which he has been able to win several times recently.  ;)

We played two games and as before, I went with the marines while he went with the Aliens.  Given his recent success, I was determined to get some wins.  My friend, on the other hand, was looking to get the night off to a good start.  Unfortunately for him, luck was not on his side and I managed to get 2 wins.

What was most hilarious though was when I killed the Alien Queen and my friend tried to get revenge by destroying my Power Loader.  I informed him that the Power Loader can't be destroyed by the Alien player at which point he expressed shock at how unfair the game was.  Coming from someone who previously claimed that the game was unfairly balanced in favour of the Alien player, this was music to my ears!

Battle Line
We followed up with one of our combined favourite games.  Battle Line is a great game which is simple to learn and play but has massive depth.  And as per usual, I won all 3 games.
:)

Talking with my friend, I did realise why.  Primarily, he isn't good at risk assessment.  There was one situation where he started off with two 1's and then split them up into separate war zones.  This was a bad idea as he could potentially have had three 1's which, while not the best hand, would have at least forced me to potentially commit something better to that battlefield.  Instead, he split up his hand and allowed me to defeat the other two battlefields more easily.

Red7
A new game.  This was actually a game my friend had purchased and I was looking forward to playing it as I had heard good things about it.  Unfortunately, my friend didn't really understand the rules so the first game we played was a complete farce as the rules, as he understood them, were clearly broken - a fact which I promptly proved to him by exploiting the flaw to get an easy win.

At this point, it was pretty obvious that we didn't understand the rules so I jumped onto BGG and downloaded the rules to read myself.  I only skimmed the rules but got enough to let us play almost correctly.  We played 2 more games with the new rules and we both ended with 1 win each.

I have since reread the rules properly (taking my time so that I didn't miss anything!) and we did miss a pretty important rule about card draw.  This was a shame as the rule would have changed the game significantly and added a lot more skill to the game.  As it was, I didn't really enjoy the two games we played as the game felt so random.  Hopefully, I'll get a chance to replay the game again at a later date using the proper rules.

The Long War

Welp - kinda disappeared from the blogosphere for a while.  Hopefully, I'm back to normal now and can start up my blogging again.

Part of the reason for the delay is due to XCOM - specifically The Long War mod.

Over Christmas, I purchased the XCOM enemy within DLC which was on sale at Steam.  Fair warning - Steam sales are dangerous!  I didn't get very far in the game before I got bored.  To be fair, part of the reason I got bored was because I was itching to try out The Long War mod.

If you've never heard of it, The Long War mod is pretty much considered THE essential mod for XCOM.  It changes up the game massively - so massively that I'll leave the detail to the link above.  However, in brief, you have new classes, more soldiers, new equipment, a new tech tree and tons of voicepacks and maps added to the game (strictly speaking, the maps weren't added but recycled from the special missions which in the past, weren't used for normal missions).  Naturally, to take into account all the new toys and skills you have - the difficulty in the game has been ramped up massively.

What is really impressive about the mod though is the way it forces you to change how you play.

Soldiers now suffer from fatigue after a mission and need a rest before going back out into the field.  And the missions come thick and fast so you really don't get much chance to rest!  This means that you are constantly cycling through soldiers so you have to focus on building up a great squad rather than relying on just a couple of super soldiers.  The fatigue mechanic also makes SHIVs (robots) useful again - in the base game, they were just a waste of time and its great to now actually use them regularly.  This is combined with an increase in the base squad size from 4 to 6 soldiers so that you don't feel punished by including the SHIV in your squad (bearing in mind that SHIVs don't gain experience).

This design philosophy permeates through the whole of the mod.  Another example is that fighter kills are now tracked and fighter pilots gain experience and get better as a result of this.  Suddenly, choosing which fighter to send out on an intercept has much more meaning.

The one big problem that I can currently see is that The Long War really is a long war.  You have so many tactical battles that progress in the game slows to a crawl (which is further exacerbated by a slowed research speed).  To be fair, this isn't a problem if you love the tactical game and are willing to spend lots and lots (and lots) of time on it.

In my case, with the lack of time I have to game, I can see me taking months to play through this mod.  Hopefully, it doesn't impact my blogging schedule too much!!