Don’t Talk To Strangers, first play. Yet another in the series of games using the art of Steven Rhodes. Last week it was Let’s Dig for Treasure. All of the games have been pretty light, but also pretty easy to get into and play. It’s nothing deep, but what the hell, games can be just stupid fun and nothing else. The board is a map with various scoring spaces, as well as spaces for aliens. If you draw an alien, you place it wherever you want, hopefully somewhere that will inconveniance your opponents. You get a bunch of schoolkids to start, and generally you only have one at a time to worry about. Your kids start in the school bus. You move them around by playing a movement card. And that’s about it. There are some areas with spaces for multiple kids, and some just with one. You just hope you draw decent movement cards, and it’s game over when all the alien spaces are filled. Which didn’t take too long in our game. Barely got into it, and its game over man.
Nemesis, our first four player game of this. And we’re playing in sem-coop mode, not fully cooperative. I was the Pilot. My objective cards were research two alien weaknesses, or ship must reach Earth/be the only survivor. In the second round, we had an adult alien come out. Once an alien appears for the first time, you have to select which objective card to use. I chose the ship reaches Earth/be the only survivor card, figure it would give me two chances at success.
Then I picked up a larva, but I stay cool, calm, and collected. I get a contamination card too. I want to use my Rest card to get rid of it, but if I’m infected, I would die (because of the larva).
I head for the engines, because I’m chasing the “ship gets to Earth” objective. I’m at engine 1, but I can only check, not change the engines (didn’t have the right card). The engine is damaged. I keep quiet about the information, figure no-one is going to believe me anyway. Another player gets to Engine 2, and has to tell us if he changes the engine status. He can’t remember whether or not it was changed, and would we believe him anyway? I figure while I’m down there, I’ll check the engine myself. I do, and it’s damaged as well. So, I’ve got some work to do here.
Another player gets a larva, and heads to the shower room to remove it. Unfortunately, he’s wrong, the shower room removes slime, not larva. Apparently the room required is the Surgery, which we haven’t found yet. But we only have a few rooms left to explore, so it can’t be too far away. I get another contamination card from a larva.
Managed to check the cockpit with a card, and it shows we are heading to Mars. So thats not good. To sum up: two engines damaged, and we’re going to Mars. Well, actually we’re going to explode from the engines first. My objective is looking harder to accomplish.
The, we draw the event card “Eclosion”, which means anyone with a larva is now dead. So that’s me gone. So I become the intruder player. I can’t win anymore, but if I can kill everyone it will feel like a win for me. Haven’t had an intruder player before. I draw three cards from the Intruder Player deck, but I only get one action each turn. I can either move, attack, or do the special action on the card I choose. I’m wondering whether or not I should tell about the engines and the course, but end up not doing so.
So, as the Intruder player, I try and attack on of the other players, but they dont draw the right card and the attack fails. Next turn I attack another player, who had two serious wounds already. She dies…Next time, I play the special action from one of my cards, which is to draw three Event cards and play one. The event card I choose adds another malfunction token to a room, which takes the ship up to eight. Just one more and the ship explodes. On the turn after my next turn, I get the same Intruder card, so I again draw three Event cards. The one I choose is “Damaging Fire”, which puts a malfunction marker to any rooms on fire. We have one such room, can’t play the malfunction token, and the ship goes KABOOM! I’m not sure what I think of the Intruder player, to be honest. I get the idea, making the game end faster so the player killed isn’t hanging around for ever.
Heist:One Team, One Mission, haven’t played this with four either. Certainly makes it a bit more challenging. And the dog was going a bit crazy with the alarm noises, so that was an added distraction. We beat the game at level four (there are five normal levels, and a hidden sixth level). It’s a pretty simple game really. There are an assortment of objects, like a laptop, goggles, explosives etc. Each player chooses which character to play (according to the side of the Heist box). The game will say various instructions, like pass the goggles to the Money Man, or use the laptop. When it says to use the object, the player who has that object has to press their button. And, that’s about it. Great for a quick filler, no real decisions to make, just follow the instructions. When you succeed, the top of the box flies off and all the loot (gold bars) fly out. Ok, it’s pretty pointless, but it feels like a reward.
Cascadia, another great play. We’re really enjoying this. And of course we had to play John Denver as we played. We had a new player, so we used the starting set of “A” cards again. Scores were…not quite as close as last game. The winner had 106, she got almost all the bonuses for having the highest regions, and didn’t score badly for the animals, including a very nice 25 pointer for salmon - it was the single biggest value for anyone. Scores ended up 106/87/72/70.
Moon Adventure, first play. This game looks a lot like one of Oinks earlier games, Deep Sea Adventure - probably my favourite Oink game. But it’s fully cooperative. The players have to gather supply crates that have been scattered across the Moons surface. Naturally, you need oxygen to survive. If you start a turn without any oxygen, you die, and the game is over. On your turn, you select an oxygen card, which gives you either two or three dice to roll. The dice only have the values one, two or three. Your roll is the number of action points you get. Your actions are movement, place an OGS (Oxygen Generation System), develop a route (place a cube that allows that space to be skipped, making it faster to get around), share oxygen with another player, gather supplies, and abandon supplies.
As in Deep Sea Adventure, the best tiles are the ones further away. The tiles here come in three type, three, four, and five. The number refers to the number of good tiles that exists. So, among the “three” tiles, only three are good, and the others are bad (they don’t count).
The OGS tiles are essential. Since you die (and everyone loses) if you have no oxygen card to use at the start of your turn, you’ll want to land on the OGS tiles, and then you get to draw oxygen cards. But, if you draw a magnetic storm instead, the OGS is damaged and can no longer be used. You only have limited space for oxygen and supplies.
This is the special edition, so you get ten character cards to choose from. I chose the character who gets extra action points if I roll the same number, so of course I never managed to do that. Another player could put down an OGS for a single action point, instead of three, so she became the master of oxygen.
The game is over when all players get back to the ship. Then, you turn over your supplies and see how many successful files you have. At 3p, we needed seven to win, and we got eight. High fives all round! This was a pretty fun game, looking forward to more plays.
With my friends being nerds suffering from needing to math out probabilities… we played a few rounds until someone broke through -40 points (my partner made it to -58 by busting on the last roll).
