So as I've mentioned my boyfriend was at a board game convention in Dallas most of last week and I told him he needs to write up a recap/review of the games he played. Maybe I could post it as a guest blog! And he did. So I am.
The con:
Board Game Geek Con
Tuesday:
Landed and met with Astrolad for Netrunner goodness. Played many games
with him over the course of the con, and some of the longest Netrunner
ones I've had too. We almost decked the corp twice lol. One card I'd
like to see for the Corp in an upcoming expansion would be something
like:
Quote:
Back to the Drawing Board
Cost: 3
Operation
Draw a card. Return up to two cards from your hand back to R&D, then shuffle R&D.
|
This way the Corp isn't completely screwed if they draw into 3-4 agendas early in the game.
Wednesday:
Registration line was looooong when it opened but cleared up around noon.
Le Havre
Finally got to play this and it's a really good worker placement game.
We cut it short to make time for playing others, but I'm sold to play
this anytime someone is offering.
Spartacus
Not too bad. I definitely see this as a 4 player only game, and I see
what GAFers are talking about with the arena thing being a little bad,
but if your defense/attack is high enough then you're likely okay just
charging in and giving them the first hit anyway. Would love to play
this more and test out different strategies, but I don't think it's at a
'must play again now' sort of level.
Shadows of Camelot
BSG level of betrayal goodness. I ended up as the traitor this game and
probably played it too passively. Things were actually looking pretty
good for me so I didn't see a point to revealing as I get a bonus for
staying hidden the entire game too. We were down to 2 swords from losing Excalibur and everyone was split with the grail half corrupted.
Astrolad was teaching the game and one of the randoms we played with
accused him of being traitor right off the bat for "not being clear with
rules explanation" lol. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to evoke enough
emotion for everybody else to accuse him in turn for his gaffe to get
another free accusation out of it, and waited too long to accuse him
myself. Another mistake I made was probably helping out with the Grail
quest for 2 turns instead of 1. Most of the game I just wasted time by
drawing cards (I held 3 of the 7 available Merlins in my hand for a
majority of the game) and advancing evil w/o giving myself away. The
evil cards didn't roll my way though so in the end Good prevailed at 7
white swords to 5 black. Would play again but man, we either had an easy
game this go-around or the traitor really has to play perfectly to win.
Thursday:
I ran down early to take part in the Escape Experience, but the line was
kinda long and I didn't realize they had 8 tables of 5 playing so it
really wouldn't have been more than a 10 minute wait, so I went to the
Queen booth instead to learn/play it.
Escape from the Cursed Temple
This game is fun. At least for the first couple times anyway. For a
first time play, you feel really frantic because you're unsure of a lot
of things and the soundtrack really adds a lot to the experience, and
just barely eking out an escape or reaching safety in the last few
seconds feels really really good. Unfortunately, I think the base game
ends up being too easy once you get a better hold of your faculties. I
played the game about 5-6 times over the course of the con and each one
was progressively easier. Tried a few times with the curse mode and
while they add difficulty, it adds enough that it feels almost
impossible. With the curse model you're solving curses on your own and
getting 3/5 die or more often 3/4 (because of that always locked die
*shakefist*) can be a real chore to do for 2/3s of every explorable
tile. I feel it takes away from the 'fun' aspect of the game which is
also the main reason I would want to play escape.
Descent 2.0
Pretty good dungeon crawler. We played on and off during the con,
completing 3 and a half missions total. The adventurers and the DM both
level up from each mission, raising difficulty to match the hero
upgrades. As an adventurer, it felt like all the missions were stacked
against us, even the one we eventually won. But thinking back on it
there were a few tactical mistakes we made that probably would've won us
the mission otherwise. Aside from the normal hack and slash aspect, I'd
say the game is best if you can get starting gold/XP to customize your
character, or play a campaign or two to build your character from
scratch. The game plays pretty fast once your party can decide what to
do. I'd say about 20 minutes for set-up/teardown combined and about 40
minutes per map (some encounters have more than 1 map).
Artemis
It's a video game and not a board game, but I played it at the con so
I'll put it here. If you don't know what it is, imagine Star Trek. Now
imagine the main room with the Captain telling the crew what they need
to do. This game is exactly like that. You and a team of 5 others take
positions as Captain, Helm, Tactical (weapons), Science, Comms, and
Engineering to pilot a starship around your sectors of the galaxy and
defending it from the invading enemies. It requires good communication
between all stations as well as good orders from your captain. For
example, I was the helm and after getting the heading to a friendly
station, I had to turn our ship around in order to fly that direction
after a command of "Helm set course to bearing 270, warp speed". Well I
didn't realize our Engineering team could control my maneuverability and
was turning really slow to do a full 180 because Engineering was still
getting used to the station and had turning at minimum capacity. After 5
seconds of turning and not moving forward I received 2 more repeated
commands of, "Warp speed to bearing 270, helm". I said fuckit, if the
captain wants warp speed, he gets warp speed and hit the warp drives at
my current heading. This ran us headlong into a minefield and nearly
into an asteroid field, taking out our warp drives and we spent 5
minutes trudging back to DS1 half a sector away at impulse speed to get
repaired lol.
This is turning out to be a lot to type so I'll do a recap of the second half of the con later.
