I’m back, with an underscore.
Got beat at Silver and Gold by my 7 year old. the 3 year old did a fab job as chief card flipper.
Proceeded to get my own back later in Monster Baby Rescue
Does running an rpg count?
On Saturday I ran a session of my several years old GURPS campaign. This is “historical fantasy,” though “anthropological fantasy” might be more accurate; it’s in a world where technology ranges from Paleolithic to Bronze age, the magical traditions are spirit-based and often shamanistic, and there are seven races, all hominid, from the 3’ dwarves to the 8’ trolls. The player characters are a ghoul, two nixies, a selkie, and a troll who’ve teamed up to sail to distant lands and open up trade.
This latest session was fun because I twice blew the players’ minds. The selkie character, the ship captain, who is female but disguises herself as male to avoid being hunted down in vengeance for her previous career as a pirate, visited a selkie town with a different culture, hoping to recruit an apprentice or two who could carry on trade, and discovered that the male selkies were making a point of introducing her to their daughters—including at least one daughter who was anatomically male. The troll character, the ship’s doctor, who is female and presents as such, got into a discussion with some dwarves she was trading with, suggesting that a dwarf might travel with her ship and learn one or more of its languages; the dwarves brought out a smaller dwarf and then conveyed by gesture that the smaller dwarf wanted to know who on the ship it would be expected to marry; this led to the troll using spirit magic to actually talk with the dwarves and explain that this would be a loan rather than a trade and no marital aspect would be involved.
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Scrabble. I beat my sister 301 to 242, drawing ahead 3 to 2 in our April series.
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Sorry, gents - you posted these as I was moving the rest to the other thread, so I missed them.
Yes. (In theory we could have a separate thread for RPGs, and if there are lots of them I’ll do that, but no need yet.)
I wonder whether this is the Campbellian maxim applied to culture - show me an alien that behaves as complexly as a generic-WEIRD-human, but differently.
Among the “classic” board games, this is probably my favourite, though I’m not very good at it.
I think it may be a further step. I learned a long time ago that if I want to portray alien behavior, I can base it on things I’ve read about actual human cultures, which often include behavior exotic enough to baffle players who don’t read as much history or anthropology as I do. What I’m doing in Tapestry is having multiple different cultures for each race, so that members of a race can be baffled by other members of the same race. None of the Tolkienian “oh, you’re a dwarf, and all dwarves do so and so” effect.
Not that Tolkien was trying for the distancing effect that I want in this campaign. Or not as much; he had a little of it in The Hobbit.
The part with the selkies is very much “encounter members of your own race who have a different culture.” The part with the dwarves comes back to “encounter members of a different race”; the players haven’t figured out that dwarf sociality is partly modeled on that of naked mole rats. (Though there are elements of crustacean fortress eusociality in the way they defend their mines.)
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Yes, fair point - having monocultural non-humans is a lazy approach, ending up with elves as a proxy for 19th-century Prussians or whatever.
Yes, and I’m a big fan of “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more” as a literary effect.
I don’t know if I have a favorite classic game. The board game I love more than any other is Settlers of Catan, but it may be too recent to be “classic.” It wasn’t around in my childhood, or my college days. . . .
One of my Scrabble sets was my parents’. It is older than I am.
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Quality Mac Gerdts game! I need to play that more, along with Imperial. Concordia will have to take the bench.
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Had a one on one game of Arboretum with my older daughter last night. She was willing to have all trees in, so I conceded (with a smirk)
Soon we realised how tricky it is if you skip the odd number, you soon run out of places to plant trees (to your advantage, that is) with so many cards. The massacre was abysmal. I won’t say the score, but I did drop at the end a: “That’s why there re rules…”
I call that parenting.
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221B Baker Street
and Trainmaker
Finished up the second mission in the Return to Hoth campaign for Imperial Assault using the app. Man, this was a long mission. Sure, we did an encounter first, but that only too 5 mins or so. We started a little before 9 and only wrapped up just after 11:30. And we weren’t dallying, as if we did, we got perils which damaged us, so we were going as fast as we could. It just kept going and going.
We succeeded, though my character got wounded just before we finished the objective. My brother-in-law rolled for a wampa attack and just hammered me when I was already almost out of health. My wife had partially checked out about halfway through, but did do well when it came to doing her turns.
Hopefully the other missions aren’t quite as long, as it is near impossible for us to start any earlier than 8:30 because of our kids.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that my wife and I played a game of Azul Tuesday evening. We were both rather distracted, me with the forum(s) and her with Animal Crossing.
I was the less distracted, however, as I won, 61 - 29.
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I played a game of 1889 (a freely available printable-andable-playable 18xx game that will be getting a retail production run soon). I think through most of the game, my opponents thought I was in the lead but in the end, it was (SUSD forum member) EnterTheWyvern that pulled the, rightfully won, win.
It was the first 18xx game I’ve played and it was a fantastic introduction to the subgenre. 1889 is a 1830-clone and, as such, has a very tight tileset and a good amount of stock-market-manipulation-for-personal-gain. My best efforts to use the stock market to manipulate turn order nearly worked out but ultimately wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the game if it had.
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Yesterday, in the name of making progress on my 10 x 10 challenge, I convinced 4 friends to play Tzolk’in with me on boiteajeux.net. Turns out that 5-player Tzolk’in takes a looong time, but it was fun anyway. We played with the Tribes and Prophecies expansion - none of us were too convinced by the prophecies, which add incentives for completing certain actions during different phases of the game, but the extra asymmetry added by the tribes was interesting.
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As my copy of Street Masters finally arrived, I decided that I would sort the core box, and give solo a try (using the recommended setup from the rule book).
First attempt was a failure! 2 turns in and I hung up the towel. Nothing against the game, I’m just not really a solo gamer, but thought this might be the one.
We’ll, a few hours passed and I thought I would try again…this time to a fair amount of success. I was able to bring down the boss for the win, without too much trouble (though I played a bit reckless and could have gone down too).
I know many people find that if they win a coop on their first go, they loose interest. While I understand that sentiment with most games, given the modular nature of the game, and this being the most basic setup, I’m not too worried. I also think the cards were coming up in my favour (I also may have gotten a rule or two wrong, I’m not sure! Lol).
Overall, I’m excited to dig in more, and extremely hyped for when I finally get to play it with my boy!!!
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Earlier today I tried out Utopia Engine, based on Quinns’ latest video on solo print and play games. I lost horribly, getting 60 points on the scoring chart, though I did manage tonget one of the constructs on my very first roll.
I erased everything and tried again, with much better success, managing to get all the constructs (one with a perfect zero, naturally rolled), activated them all and managed to connect them. I did retroactively change one of the connection results because I forgot about the waste basket, so I went back and used it to get a much better result.
Had a final activation cost of 13, which I was able to lower to 7 by using all my HP. Needed to roll that or higher in 2d6. And of course, I rolled a 3. Total of 250 points. If I had succeeded, it would have been 315.
Pretty fun, but almost completely random dice rolling. Not sure I feel the need to play it again, but hey, it was free!
Tonight, we continued our Betrayal Legacy game, playing Chapter 7. Our friends joined via Zoom, but we had surprised them with their family boards, wrapped up in a package with some snacks when one of them had come out to pick up some latex gloves we had, which they were having trouble finding. They also had dice from their copy of Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate.
This was an interesting Haunt, but incredibly brutal. I won’t spoil it with any details, but everyone looked a bit flabbergasted after I read it off. Not due to complexity, but rather how screwed we knew we all were.
My wife finally got the Deed to the House, so we have all had it at least once now, which is cool.
Will try this again some night, but probably a couple of weeks out.
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Had an Arboretum game with my daughter last night. The tactics are settling in, and even though I had to help her on the very last move to convince her to place a 1 instead of a 7 on the table, she’s getting it. A one tree difference score (5 of 6 points difference only), and only because she didn’t realise I had the Jacaranda 1 in my hand to annul her 8… (so lucky I got it on the round before last)…tilted the victory on my side.
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Another solo go on Street Masters tonight (same scenario and fighter). I’m getting into now that the flow is “clicking”.
If I can get a storage solution to cut down on setup and teardown, this could actually get me into a bit of solo gaming.
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Gotten a lot of plays in over the last 3 week weeks after some great trades and a stress buying spree.
Escape from the aliens in outer space - several games played at 3. Went down very well. Very tense and very engaging. Really want to play this at 4-5.
Oceans - Just gorgeous. I am very taken with this. Just the right amount of interaction and it does fairly well to keep you from running away with it. The variety in the deep cards creating very interesting decisions. I love the balance of reactionary vs proactive tactics and the unique “ecosystem” that develops. It’s also generated some very fun stories and lots of laughs as you evolve yourself into a corner.
Survive- Escape from Atlantis - about 8-10 games because my partner’s daughter LOVES this. Still lots of random mean fun.
Flipships - I’m going to punch that mother ship in the face. This one isn’t sticking with me as well as I thought it would. I’ve been looking for a solid dexterity game, but I don’t think this is it.
Lords of Vegas - Best trade I’ve made. This is such a manic blast. Our games inevitably devolve into gamble-happy madness, and hostile takeovers abound. Haven’t played with Up yet. Definitely grab poker chips to replace the money. I have heard lots of praise, but it exceeded expectation. It’s all about trying to manipulate your odds and push your luck, and even when you’re on the pointy end of the stick, it doesn’t necessarily feel like you’re out. It’s simply fun to take those big risks.
Arboretum - So beautiful, so brutal. I managed my highest score ever at 23, but I kept a good chunk of those points by the skin of my teeth. Every turn feels painful, satisfying, and as worrying as building on quicksand. I adore what this game does to my brain.
Downforce - A hit with the group and with my partner’s family. It’s quick. It’s dynamic, though not very prone to AP. It’s fun to look at and manipulate. It’s vastly more fun than the rules lead you to believe. We’ve had some very close games. I love how we can crank a game out in 39 minutes.
Spirit Island - Still just brilliant. We’ve started playing with the more advanced spirits. Loving the discovery of spirit interplay and combo-building. The rapid shift from relative safety to disaster is exhilarating, and I love how the game seems designed to counter alpha-gaming. Considering the expansion but I’ve heard mixed opinions.
Karuba - Played 3 games in an hour. Such a fun little game! Great integration of different mechanics with that “why did I do this to myself???” feeling present in my favorite roll and writes. I’m a sucker for tile-laying, but the race aspect and route-building make it just complex enough to constantly second guess yourself. I also love seeing the routes others have built.
Hoping to get some heavier games to the table soon, but it’s been hard to muster up thinkiness near the end of a semester.
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