Galaxy Defenders

After spending an eternity painting up GD, I'm now in a position to play the game!

I actually managed to get it to the table last night.  I wasn't able to finish the game but did get enough playtime in to start getting more familiar with the rules!  Had a lot of fun so it was a real shame that I didn't have enough time to finish.

This picture was taken at the start of the game as my agents arrived in the desert to check out reported alien activity.  From those figures in the distance, this is now confirmed as ET activity!

Game Night! - 30 September 2016

Game Night!

We had a group of 6 again so continue with our current zombie craze.

Zombie game
We went for one of the downloadable custom missions this time around.  Basically, we had to go and find the key to the local weapon store before stocking up on weapons and escaping from the map.  Things went fairly well but we did have an issue midway through when the one door out of the building got blocked off by an abomination.

Frantic searching, aided by a flashlight, did get us the molotov cocktail in time which allowed us to deal with it.  Overall, we did well this mission as we had zero deaths!

Methinks its time to up the difficulty.

Get Bit!
We were late starting so it was fairly late by the time we finished up the zombie game.  We did have time to get in one game though.  We had an extra player for this last game so there were 7 of us.  As you can imagine, absolute chaos reigned before the latecomer ended up winning.

Castle Ravenloft - The hunt for Strahd

After picking up the SunSword in my last quest, it was time.  Time to hunt down Strahd and end his threat to Barovia once and for all!.

Anyone familiar with the game knows that things start slowly.  Although things start slowly though, they can go south quickly if you roll badly.

Despite that, we managed to get things back on track quickly enough.  At the end of the day, mooks aren't a real threat.

Speaking of real threats - Strahd is guarded by Klak, the Kobold Sorcerer.

Relatively speaking, Klak is one of the weaker bosses so we really lucked out in pulling him as the guard.  It didn't take long to put him down.

Which left the Count himself.  Time to go kick his undead booty back down the secret stairway!

Unfortunately, the dice had other ideas.  With his AC of 19, our party had difficulty hitting him.  In fact, my fighter never even managed to touch him despite 4 attempts to do so with his brute strike.  The rest of my party didn't fare much better and it wasn't long before Strahd was able to saunter back to his secret lair with 3 additional vampires for his army.

Castle Ravenloft - Quest for the Sunsword

After numerous adventures in and around Castle Ravenloft, it was time to take care of the Count - once and for all.  However, before doing so, we would need the legendary Sunsword.  One of our party had the blade - an heirloom handed down over the generations.  All we needed was the hilt which was rumored to be in the Crypt of Sergei Von Zarovich.

Setting off into Castle Ravenloft and immediately under attack

Fighting our way through the Castle, we eventually came across two corridors.  Unsure of which was the correct way, we decided to explore both.

Left or right?

In any event, both corridors met up at the end before we found the Crypt.  Inside was the famed hilt and we made our way back out.

All roads lead to ... a crypt?

Final thoughts
This was one of the missions designed by WoTC and made available to download.  The mission itself is ridiculously easy as we didn't even come close to needing a healing surge which also meant that the big bad of the mission never came out.  Granted, I had great rolls as all of my attacks and quite a few of the enemies missed.  Even so, I suspect the mission was designed to be relatively easy.

Lord of the Rings LCG - Conflict at the Carrock

While searching for Gollum in the Anduin valley, you recieve word that a group of Trolls have come to the Carrock.  As this area is under the watch of the Beornings, you seek out their leader, Grimbeorn the Old, and discover he has already set out in a rage. You follow, hoping to find him before he confronts the Trolls.

This quest starts off with deceptive simplicity as the focus of Mission 1B is simply to travel to the Carrock in order to find Grimbeorn.  The Carrock location card itself starts off in the questing area but you can't actually travel to it until you complete Mission 1B.  Once you do complete Mission 1B, by collecting 7 progress tokens, you automatically travel to the Carrock.

Thematically, this simply represents you travelling to The Carrock.  Easy enough right?

Well, not quite.  This wouldn't be LoTR LCG if the quest was that easy!  However, I'll save my specific comments on that for later!

You approach the Carrock, and find that the Trolls have been watching you from the top of the rocky river landmark. As you approach, the Trolls close in and attack!

The quest only has 2 missions so is relatively short in that sense (compared to many other quests I've played which often have 3 missions).  Mission 2B only requires 1 progress token to complete.  However, the mission cannot be completed if there are any Troll cards in play.  As you can probably guess from the mission intro, you actually get ambushed by four Trolls so in essence, Mission 2B revolves around you surviving that ambush and fighting off the four Trolls.

Which is no easy feat!  Even just one Troll in this game has been enough to give players nightmares and there are a ton of blog posts out there around how to defeat the Hill Troll in Journey Down the Anduin.  And here you find yourself facing off against four trolls at the same time - all of whom boost each others stats!

Assuming you manage to defeat the trolls, the Quest basically ends and you win.

Quest thoughts
I mentioned before that Mission 1B is deceptively simple.  My first time through, I had no idea of what was waiting for me so pushed through to Mission 2B quickly.  I promptly got my rear end handed to me by the four Trolls.

The key to winning this quest is to use the time during Mission 1B to get ready for the trolls.  Realistically, your deck is probably going to struggle to deal with four trolls unless you specifically prepared for it and the game helps you by providing Grimbeorn as an ally - provided you can find him.  And finding Grimbeorn in the Encounter Deck is actually the real main focus of Mission 1B.

Grimbeorn, in addition to his amazing stats, also has a massively useful ability in that he doesn't exhaust when defending against a troll.  This allows you to use him to defend against the trolls attack and then use him again, together with some of your other characters, to kill off the trolls one by one.

There are two ways to find Grimbeorn.  You can get lucky and draw him directly from the deck.  Alternatively, there are three Bee Pasture location cards in the deck which, if you can clear, allow you to pull Grimbeorn from the deck directly.  Even after you pull him from the deck, you still need to put 8 leadership tokens on him so you need a lot of leadership resource generation as well!  As you can see - getting Grimbeorn isn't easy but he is so good that he is totally worth the trouble.

All in all, this was a massively fun quest with some really nasty encounter cards which really force you to change your tactics (and hope for luck!) in order to win.

Game Night! - 4 March 2016

Game Night!

Just 2 people this time so we started with one of our favourite 2 player games.

Battle Line
We actually wanted to start with Battle Line as my friend struggles to beat me at this game.  Granted, that makes me sound really horrible but hopefully, a little context will make things clearer!

I played the first game with an open hand and talked through my thought process as I played through the game.  Primarily, this was to let my friend see how I played the game so he could try and pick up some tips to try and beat me.  Unf, I don't think it helped him much as after winning that game, we played 2 more with closed hands (ie normally) and I promptly beat him twice.
:D

Aliens: This Time its War
After the despair of defeat, my friend wanted to revisit one of his favourites.  Primarily as he believes the Aliens player has the advantage in this game as he has managed to win using the Aliens several times.  The reality is that, while the game isn't perfectly balanced, it is balanced much better than my friend realises.  In case that statement isn't obvious - I won.  Twice.
:D

Star Realms
I don't actually have this game in a physical format but only have the app.  I recently introduced it to my friend and we took this opportunity for me to teach him the basic strategy to playing the game.

After introducing the concepts to him, I showed him a game against the AI.  After this - we naturally had a game one on one.  I naturally won as it was effectively his first game.  Either way, hopefully, he picked up enough of the basic strategy to get started and we can have a more challenging game at some point in the future.

Game Night! - 26 February 2016

Game Night!

We had 5 people turn up so did a repeat of the games that we played in the last Game Night!

Get Bit!
To get ourselves warmed up, we played 3 games of Get Bit!

As always, we had a ton of fun and at one point, were told by "The Man" that we were too noisy.  Oops!  If nothing else, I guess this proves how much fun we were having!

Also - I managed to win one of the games!  Woot!

Castle Ravenloft
As with before, Castle Ravenloft was the main event of the evening.

I actually had some reservations as I'm not convinced that 5 player Castle Ravenloft works - my main concern being that with 5 players, there is too much downtime.  This is actually based on a previous experience with playing Castle Ravenloft with 5 players.  This time around, things seemed to go a bit better in that the players didn't seem bored during the game.  With that said, I'm still not 100% convinced that the game works with 5 (yet).

We took on the Flesh Golem again as four of the players were involved last time when we lost that mission.  As such, we were eager for revenge.

We initially tried to calm down the golem but halfway through, we realised that we likely wouldn't have enough time to do so and switched to trying to kill it instead.  It was a close thing which ultimately came down to a final dice roll.  Our fighter needed to roll a 9 to kill the golem.  This was our last chance as, if he failed to do so, we would lose as we were out of healing surges and we had PCs down and out.

Our fighter rolled an 8.
>:(

Game Night! - 29 January 2015

Another game night so soon?  Be still, my beating heart!!

Making up for a shortage of game nights in recent months, we decided to have a double in January.  Good thing too as last week only had a turnout of 2 people.  We originally had 5 people scheduled for this weeks game night but only 4 showed up.

Get Bit!
We started off with a simple game of Get Bit!  Or rather, 3 games of Get Bit!

As always, the game went down extremely well and was really popular with the group.  It's actually been a while since I played and I have to admit that this is a pretty great filler game.  It's quick, fun while having just a little bit of brainpower needed and at the same time, it's always amusing to pull arms and legs off the little toy pirates!

I lost the first game but did manage to pull out a win in the next two (as usual, we played with my house rules where the game ends as soon as 1 person is eliminated).  To be honest, I'm still not sure how I managed to win twice!

Castle Ravenloft
We then moved onto the main event of the evening - Castle Ravenloft.

This is a game which I always enjoy playing even though it's a relatively simple dungeon crawl.  We decided to take on the Flesh Golem which the others hadn't faced before (but which I had in a previous solo game).  The Flesh Golem is a really good mission and can end in a really exciting manner as you end up in a running fight through the dungeon.

Unfortunately, due to the way the cards played out, we drew the Flesh Golem only 2 squares away from the Start tile.  This didn't give quite the running battle I had initially hoped for.

It was a close battle but we did end up losing.  :(

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!!

Tabletop year in review - 2015

Well, we are at the end of the year and I thought it would be interesting to do a review of my tabletop gaming over the last year.

Full analysis below:

The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game	32
Ticket to Ride	22
Yomi (second edition)	20
Zombicide Season 2: Prison Outbreak	16
Space Hulk: Death Angel – The Card Game	12
Aliens: This Time It's War	10
The Agents	9
Battle Line	8
Mistfall	8
Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game	5
6 nimmt!	4
Forbidden Island	2
Get Bit!	2
Monopoly Deal Card Game	2
Castle Panic	1
Tsuro	1

Wow.  154 plays spread out over 16 games in 2015.  Given my "gut feeling" that I didn't get anywhere close enough time to game, that number is a lot higher than I would have expected.

I won't talk about every game on the list but did want to talk about the games where I had over 10 plays (on the basis that these are the "best" games I played in 2015).

Lord of the Rings: The Card Game

No surprise that this is leading the pack.  I got this game in May and immediately fell in love with it.  It's a brilliantly thematic game which combines the deep deck construction that you see in games like Magic but without all the issues that Magic has.  The only reason it didn't get more plays is because its quite difficult for me to get hold of the expansion packs.

I fully expect this game to continue getting a lot of plays in 2016 particularly as the game works brilliantly as a solo game which makes it relatively easier to make it to the table.

Ticket to Ride

This is a really fun entry level Euro which I primarily play at work with some colleagues during lunchtime.  This really should have more plays but sometimes, its hard to find the time to play - particularly when everyone is busy.  Regardless, I expect this game to continue to get a lot more plays in 2016.

Yomi

Another great game which I rate extremely highly.  Part of the reason that this has so many plays is that you rarely play just once when you play - normally going for a best of 3 or best of 5 to determine a winner.  We even managed to get several multiplayer games which is an interesting twist on the normal 1v1 mode.  Although I prefer the 1v1 mode, it was fun to try out the multiplayer. 

Unfortunately, the rest of the group doesn't like this game as much as I do and its likely that the number of plays in 2016 will drop significantly.

Space Hulk: Death Angel

Got this game in February and managed 12 plays.  This is actually surprisingly low given how much I enjoy playing this game and how quickly the game is to setup and play (relative to other games on this list).  Part of the reason for this is the overall lack of time I have to play games.  Another part of this is my buying Lord of the Rings in May which coincided with when I started to play this game less often.

Despite this, I very much enjoy this game and it will like see more plays in 2016.

Aliens: This Time it's War

This is a fun two player game which is actually available for free as a print and play game.  Of the 10 plays this year, 4 of them were solo.  This was either using the variant solo rules or with me playing the game 2 handed.  While the solo rules are okay, my preference is to play 2 handed with me controlling both sides.  The other 6 plays were with my main gaming buddy on the odd occasion where our game group session only had 2 players showing up.

Both my friend and I enjoy this game as it manages to capture the theme extremely well and it is likely that this will see more plays in 2016 (although I don't know if it will make over 10 plays if I don't play it as much solo).

Lord of the Rings LCG - Hunt for Gollum

Gandalf has requested your assistance in the search for the elusive creature known as Gollum. Your search begins in the Anduin Valley between Mirkwood Forest and the Misty Mountains.  You make your way along the banks of the Anduin River, a likely place for Gollum to find food.

The quest starts off really thematically in terms of the mechanics.  As you start your search for Gollum, if you quest successfully, you draw 3 cards and keep 1 of them.  This card is in addition to the card per player you draw as part of the questing phase which means that you are burning your way through the encounter deck.

Mechanically though, this really works well as it really feels as if you are searching for something in the encounter deck.

While making the staging area more dangerous, it does have a minor advantage in that you can possibly dump really dangerous encounter cards.  Overall, not sure if its a net positive or negative from a difficulty point of view but I love it mechanically.

Rumors have led you to the eaves of Mirkwood Forest, where the Woodmen whisper of a new terror in the night...

Mission 2B on the other hand feels really odd.  The story has you going to Mirkwood Forest.  However, mechanically, the only difference with Mission 1B is that you draw an extra encounter card at the beginning of the mission.  This is counterbalanced by the removal of the extra card per questing phase that was present in Mission 1B.

This is further exacerbated with Mission 3B which has no additional story beats but simply introduces an additional mechanism where only Heroes who previously found a Clue to Gollums location can quest.  Thematically, this could have been really interesting if the story supported the mechanics.  However, the story fails hard.

In effect, you spend the entire quest searching for Gollum.  You never actually find him but you spend all 3 missions searching for him - and without any story beats, the quest ultimately falls flat and feels boring.

Extra Cards
Despite the failure of the quest itself, I am glad that I bought this adventure pack.  The pack comes with some extra cards - some of which are extremely fun and useful.

To start with, you get Bilbo Baggins whose power lets the first player draw an extra card.  I used this ability to create a new deck focused on deck draw which has been extremely successful even with the limited cards that I have.

In addition, this adventure pack introduces a new type of card called Songs.  The Song of Kings, which is available in this pack, gives the hero it is attached to the Leadership resource icon.  This is pretty cool in that you can give it to a non-Leadership hero and he ends up with the ability to pay for cards from 2 different pools.  When couple up with Steward of Gondor, which grants 2 extra resources per round, you can build a deck that is extremely flexible in paying for whichever card you happen to have in your hand.

Game Night! - 4 December 2015

Wow - it's been a while since I managed to get to a game night.  Due to some unfortunate issues outside my control, we only had 2 people at the last game night - and one of those was me.  Regardless, we made the best we could and managed to get in several games.

The Agents
We started off with 3 games of The Agents.  As I promised back in September, I managed to get revenge and won all 3 games.  Woot!

With that said, I'm not convinced that this game works as a 2 player game.  It seems like it really suffers from a runaway leader problem.  In all 3 games, I got to an early lead and managed to use that lead to boost myself to victory.  With more players, the runaway leader is handled organically as you have more players out to wreck the leaders formation.

Regardless, I did have fun as the core mechanics are interesting.

Aliens: This Time its War
My friend was keen to get this back on the table.  It's one of the rare games where he has a good record against me versus other games where I normally beat him and he probably needed a pick-me-up after I drubbed him in The Agents.  On the other hand, it could just be because this is a fun game.  :)

As before, I played the marines while he took on the xenomorphs.  I managed to get a really strong start in the first game which I was able to use to get the win.  Unfortunately, my friend managed to get revenge in the second game and beat me to even the score at 1:1.

Which was a good time to move onto -

Battle Line
Given that there were only 2 of us, we naturally got Battle Line back on the table.  Definitely one of my favourite games as its a game with simple rules but with amazing strategic depth.  We generally save this game for the end of the day as the mix of heavy thinking required to do well in this game can really wipe you out.

I had a really good draw in the first hand to the extent that I didn't even bother grabbing any tactics cards.  My opening hand in the second game wasn't as good which meant some tough choices as we played through the game.  I still managed to win though.  :)

Co-op Hearthstone

I recently mentioned how impressed I was with the Tavern Brawl mode in Hearthstone.  The most recent Brawl actually introduced a completely new way of playing - co-operative!

The game basically revolves around you and your "opponent" trying to kill an enemy which has 95 health.  If either player dies, then both players lose.

The enemy is setup to switch to each side so that your minions can attack it.  On its turn, it can either power up its attack, attack each player, attack 3 random enemies or destroy a minion.

What's cool about this co-op mode is that the pre-built decks have a lot of cards which benefit both players.  As a result, provided the other player knows what they are doing, you can actually setup some really nice combos.  Unfortunately, this does depend on the other player knowing what they are doing - not always a guarantee in any co-op game.

Overall though, it was a really fun mode and I hope Blizzard bring it back at some point.  Either way, I continue to be impressed with Tavern Brawl and how it changes up the games mechanics.

Lord of the Rings LCG - Ninjadorg fan made content

As I've mentioned before, I've been playing Lord of the Rings card game recently and been having an amazing amount of fun with it.  The game does a fantastic job of bringing the world of Middle Earth to your tabletop using nothing but cards.  This is especially true for those who are serious fans of Tolkien (this isn't actually me as I've only read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) as the developers have done a really good job of turning theme into mechanics.

However, what brings the game to life for me is the opportunity to go on a grand quest over several different games - with each game building a different chapter in that quest.  You can see some of that in my previous posts about the game on this blog.  I had some difficulty getting the Adventure Packs for this game so while I was still hunting for them, I decided to try out some of the fan made scenarios on BGG (and really, there is an amazing amount of fan created content for this game).

I started out with ninjadorg's fan made scenarios.  Ninjadorg has created an amazing amount of content for different games and is a really well known member of BGG so his scenarios seemed like a good starting point for fan made content.

Overall, he has done a really good job of coming up with interesting twists to create interesting scenarios.  And throughout this, he was able to weave an ongoing story into each mission so that the overall story develops as you progress through his scenarios.  This is a really good way to entice players to keep playing through the scenarios as you want to see what happens next.

Ninjadorg has also managed to explore the gamespace really well.  His first scenario is actually really basic and easy.  However, with subsequent scenarios, he really mixes things up well and introduces different twists in the mechanics to make that scenario interesting and challenging.

I really have to give kudos to Ninjadorg for coming up with a set of interesting scenarios that come together to make up an interesting story while at the same time introducing new challenges for your decks to face.

Hearthstone - friendly PvP

I recently got a surprise when I found out that one of my friends read this blog (Hi!!).  Luckily, I hadn't said anything bad about him.
:D

My posts about Hearthstone got him interested in the game as well.  As a result, he recently installed it and has started learning the game by playing against the practice bot.  Not sure how far he has gotten but he did say that he was still in the process of unlocking all the basic characters.

I actually came across him the other day online while he was playing.  Figuring that he might have a custom deck by now, I built up a deck using just basic cards and challenged him to a match.  After wiping the floor with him, I found out that he was still using just the basic decks and hadn't yet built his own deck.

Boy, do I feel like an a$$hole!

Game Night! - 30 September 2015

We had another group of 4 with 2 newbies.  With that said, the 2 newbies seemed to pick up the rules to the games we played pretty quickly and seemed to enjoy themselves so there is hope they might come more regularly.

The Agents
Once again, we started with the Agents.  This was primarily because the game was already out as the host and I tried to sneak in a quick game while we were waiting for the 2 newbies to arrive.  Unfortunately, we didn't get very far but as the game was setup anyway, we decided to start with this game.

The host managed to get the win (his first win at this game!) with some good combinations of missions and agents.  Grrr - I shall have my revenge next time!

Castle Ravenloft
Next up was Castle Ravenloft.  This turned out to be a good choice as one of the newbies had played cRPGs before so was quite keen to play a mini's based board game.  We took on Klak as we wanted a boss to go up against but at the same time, wanted a mission that wasn't too hard given the 2 newbies.

Good choice as we ended up winning the game without using a single healing surge!

I ended up playing the Rogue - the first time I've played the Rogue.  I have to admit, the rogue is better than I first gave her credit for.  Her ability to disarm traps more easily seemed too situation specific to be really useful so I never really ranked her.  However, she has some nice abilities which make her useful outside of her ability to disarm traps.  Would play again!

Castle Ravenloft - Flesh Golem!

Felt like a dungeon crawl for my Sunday Mini Game Day this week so ended up pulling out Castle Ravenloft.  It's a fun game which is pretty simple and quick to play (approx 1 hour) so good for a quick dungeon crawl experience.

More details of my session on BGG here.

Game Night! - 28 August 2015

It's been a while since my last game night so it was good to get another one in last Friday.  We had a group of 3 which, while not great, is actually a decent number for several of my games.

The Agents
We started off with two games of The Agents.  Three players is probably the best player count for this game as it means that each player can effect each other player.

I managed to get a win in the first game but lost in the second game.  The second game was interesting as I lost due to some bad valuation play by one of my opponents.  The board was setup such that the player who won was getting a stackload of points each round from a combo which I couldn't impact.  The other player was also unwilling to destroy that combo as he was getting 4 points off it each round (whereas the winner was getting approx 7-10 points off it).

That player also makes this same valuation mistake.  He overvalues points to himself instead of valuing actions based on the relative swing in the game.  If he had destroyed the combo board position, he would have gotten a +3-6 point swing in his favour even though he wasn't getting the 4 points.

I would complain except that this kind of bad valuation allows me to beat him most of the time as well.
:)

Monopoly Deal
This was actually my friends game which he had been playing 2 player before I showed up.

I managed to win both of the games we played of this.  The play of the night though was when one of my opponents played a house on one of his full sets.  I managed to steal the entire set, built a hotel on the set and then played double rent.  I managed to get $60M in one round and managed to wipe the board clean for one of my opponents.

Legen-wait for it-dary!

Yomi
Last game of the night and we went back to our current favourite - Yomi!

As there were 3 of us, we decided to try out the 2 vs 1 variant of this game.  However, rather than the standard hero, we decided to try out the Deathstrike Dragon.  I took control of the Dragon while my opponents picked Geiger and Zane.  My main opponent on this game picked Zane while the other player, who was relatively new to Yomi, went with Geiger.

And I basically wiped the floor with them.

To be fair, that Dragon is amazingly powerful.  Granted, I did get some good reads which really helped me but even so, the Dragon is powerful to the point of being overpowered.

Still - 3 wins.  :)

Hearthstone - tavern brawl

I've been playing some more Hearthstone recently - particularly at the weekend.  This is primarily a result of a new play mode that Blizzard recently introduced.  Tavern Brawl.

Tavern Brawl is a mode that is only available at the weekend but does a really good job of mixing up the game.  Mechanically, Tavern Brawl changes gameplay by introducing one key change to the way the game plays.  Each week has a different change and so far, there has been a really good mix of changes.  One week, they gave you custom built decks where, other than a couple of spells, the entire deck was comprised of portals which gave you a random minion but with a reduced casting cost.  Another week, the game started you off with 10 mana instead of having to build up your mana round by round.  As you can imagine, with just basic cards, I got owned pretty badly during that brawl by people who had access to every high cost card in the game!

All in all, I have to give credit to Blizzard.  They have done a really good job of giving you different ways to play the game and keep your interest up.