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. |
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.
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