It was good! 3 rounds, 2.5 hours (plus a bit) each, 6,000BV for Mechs from up to 3052 (so up to the end of the Clan Invasion).
My first time running a Battletech tournament. Had a few minor hiccups, but only one moment of tension:
And old skool player in the last round got upset that his opponent wasn’t playing “fair.” I use quotes because what happened (near as I can tell) is:
Final round, the Attacker picks one of his enemy’s Mechs and says that it is the Target (get a bunch of bonus points for destroying it). The old guy picked one of his enemy’s big, stompy mechs. The Defender then picks one of the Attacker’s Mechs, and the new player picked the easiest to destroy mech on his enemy’s side.
“No,” says the old guy, “I picked a big heavy mech. You have to as well.”
“No I don’t,” responds the new player, correctly.
“Sure, but that’s against the spirit of the game,” says the old guy. “The point isn’t to win, it’s to have fun and have a great battle.”
“But I want to win,” says the young player. “And the rules say I can pick anything I want after you picked. And I pick that easy target.”
They both have points: the point IS to have fun, but the rules do allow you to pick any target, not necessarily the same tonnage or class as your opponent picked. And there are clear strategic reasons to pick a heavy or light target. But mostly I was annoyed at the old guy for trying to force new players to play the way HE says the game “should” be played. And he complained earlier because I allowed a particular weapon into the tournament (Arrow IV, a small artillery weapon) that most tournaments ban. Only 1 person brought it, and the old guy still beat him when they played, but again it didn’t jive with his idea of how the game “should” be played.
Anyway, 95% successful event, even with a few points of friction. Best overall player was playing Comstar (the militant phone company), and he had one of the best painted armies to boot. Best painted was the Davion army on lava bases, which was stunning, but it was very close between 3 or 4.guys that did exceptional work.
Fun event. Will I do it again next year? I dunno. It was a lot of work and a VERY long day. But I am glad people seemed to have fun.
I can imagine the work that went into it. That’s quite impressive that you have organized something of that size. How did you find players or rather how did they find you? And what type of location is that?
A Curling Rink (for those of you not in the know, “Curling” is a game where two teams of 4 players line up to drink beer, occasionally scotch, and hurl both insults and rocks down a manicured stretch of ice that is unfathomably popular in many parts of Canada, including the section of Southern Ontario where I live. It’s a little like bowling? But the pins are your opponent’s bowling balls? Watch Men with Brooms, it will sort-of explain it).
Upsides: Inexpensive, big, licensed (so alcohol in the tournament space is encouraged).
Downsides: Since it is an ice-facility, it is not air-conditioned (heated, yes, but that’s not useful in June). It got pretty toasty with 300+ people in the space, even if it wasn’t super crammed (thankfully).
The big work I had to do was before the tournament, write the rules package. Battletech has a metric craptonne of optional rules, and decided what models/'Mechs would be legal, and which optional rules, was hours of homework, cross-referencing, updating, answering questions… and after all that there were still 3 players that showed up and didn’t read the package. A little frustrating, but not a huge deal.
Day-of I had to handle a few rules questions that don’t come up often (“If my Centurion charges his Axman, and hits and pushes the Axman off a Level 1 elevation hill onto the Level 0 elevation ground, does he take falling damage from the initial Charge, or only if he fails his Piloting roll? And can the Axman hit the Centurion with its Axe as long as it passes its PSR?”), and that one weird conversation about expectations I listed above, but otherwise it was just a lot of doing things. Answering questions, clarifying a few rules, reminding people about how much time was remaining in the round… I brought work with me, but didn’t get any of it done. Just never more than 4 or 5 minutes in a row without having to do something.
In an attempt to be a bit less rubbish at the game, I picked up Horizons of Spirit Island and we tried it yesterday evening.
Of course some of the components are redundant if you have the original game, but it’s reasonably compact; I prefer these Blight markers to the fiddly little plastic ones, though the invaders and Dahan are a bit huge and the board can get clogged up at times. I was quite surprised to see that it only runs up to three players; four is a very standard sort of player count to aim for.
The main difference of course is the spirits, which to me at least felt rather more effective: I didn’t have as many options (for example I had no way of moving Dahan about), but the ones I did have were more likely to be things I could use.
In previous “full” games we’ve tended to lose to Blight; this time I don’t think we ever placed any, and instead managed a terror level 3 victory at the start of the third phase of land cards by destroying the last city. It still wasn’t easy for us, but we did it, and so it was a bit less dispiriting; I feel we may now have more scope to try different things and start actually improving.
UnderQuest. Ziggy and I have continued to delve ever deeper into the dungeons. Level 3 bore significant fruit, garnering the information I needed to conclude another two of my quests – the only down-sides being that neither of them benefited me beyond directing me to my next goal. Firstly I found a magical ring which required abilities I do not possess; and then I sneaked into a prison to rescue a man by the name of Borko, who provided me with new intel; and although he was prepared to join my quest, I had to choose between him or my faithful Ziggy. Sorry chump; but hey, thanks for the information! The battles are getting tougher, and I have yet to discover any weaponry in the dungeons that I favour over those I entered with; but I managed to get the drop on two different enemies, ambushing them with my dagger to make relatively short work of the matter. At the end of the level I found myself facing another exalted foe – a giant beetle-like creature with a hardened shell, a poisonous bite, and unusually vicious for its kind. I staggered away from the encounter with the toxins beginning to take hold, and I have no present way of removing them; but I did find ingredients which were useful for crafting more health potions (the only things I have successfully crafted thus far), and so I made my way into level 4 feeling stronger than I’d been for some time, which will prevent the poison from being a concern for at least a little while. I only hope I can also recuperate some of my ‘grit’ before long… fighting the beetle was taxing, and I’m nearing the end of my reserves. I found a another merchant early on Level 4 and he provided the final part of the puzzle I needed to locate the Sanctum that Borko had told me of – the penultimate stage of my quest! From there, I find myself headed towards The Death Warden. Ziggy appears unfazed by the news.
Keyforge - this is shittier than i expected and I wasnt expecting much from it. Bad rule book and terms that arent in the rule book. Rule ambiguity. It should be simple but what a shonky design
BalatroAce of Spades - entertaining solo as introduced by someone. It’s Balatro the board game. Other than reducing your screentime, why not play Balatro??
Star Wars the living card game - good game but Netrunner exists
Cosmic Encounter - Ooh I’m back into Cosmic in a big way. Tonight was five players. I foolishly got ahead early and was targeted for zaps. Unfortunately the Clone was able to build up quite a big stock of cards from compensation and rewards before everyone figured out that maybe they shouldn’t be inviting him (three new players, so overinviting is pretty normal when you’re learning the ropes). We were pretty close to stopping him but a lot of people had used their best cards on previous non-winning encounters (again, new players) so while the final one-v-all was still very close, he did secure that solo win.
Magical Athlete - Banana rolls poorly Dicemonger: “Come on, reroll, you need to catch up!” Banana: “Ok fine.” Banana rolls even worse.Repeat ad nauseum.
Container (5p) … in which lessons are learned about the consequences of continued over-bidding for shipments from the same company :).
This was good fun, and a bit of a mind-bender. Each colour of container has a different value to each player (everyone has the same set of values, ranging from 2-10, but applied to a different sequence of the colours – and the only sequence you know is your own). At the end of the game you’ll lose all containers of the colour you have the most of, so you want to successfully bid for lots of the ones which aren’t valuable to you – but those same containers are very valuable to some of the other players, so you’ll need to outbid them just to get enough throw-away containers so that you’ll be able to score the ones that actually make you money. You can manufacture containers, but you have to sell them to other players. And the containers you purchase from other players similarly can’t be loaded into your own ship – you again must sell them to other players, who will eventually ship them to the island – at which point the rest of the players will all bid to acquire them. The bank doubles the winning bid; so if a shipment is worth 30 to you, and you bid 20, then you’ve made a profit of 10, while the seller gets 40. Which can make you start to question whether you actually want to bid on shipments at all :). The seller can also choose to out-bid the winner and keep the containers for themselves, but without the bank contributing… and assuming they even wanted those colours… and if they’re not valuable then they’re very likely making a net loss on the entire process…
The final scores were mostly remarkably close: 107, 133, 134, 135, 242.
I had absolutely no hopes of doing well in my first game of Container, so the triumph of Saint Krill Logistics caught me by surprise. I think I’ve peaked early, as I’m pretty sure that no one is going to let this happen again! :).
I also played 5p Container yesterday! I had hardly any containers on Container Island but managed to come second by buying lots of cheap containers and reselling them to other people. Hardly produced anything all game!
Thirsty Meeples Oxford last night. Car park strangely deserted, in that gap between the end of university term and the arrival of the summer schools.
I’d played DNUP but the others hadn’t, so we tried that first. And it turned out I’d been taught it slightly wrong. I like this better than Scout to the extent that I might well get rid of the latter now.
Recent hotness Hot Streak next. Not the best written rules (which really matters in a game like this); we had fun, but I didn’t get the “oh, wow” feeling that a lot of players apparently do. Maybe in a larger and/or drunker group.
House rule: the winner gets to turn the knobs and wind up the track at the end.
Time for some short games to finish things off: Faraway (no expansions alas), in which I had a great time and did terribly, and then Flip 7: With a Vengeance, chaotic and suitably mean.
Played this a couple of times on BGA - not sure I’ve really understood it properly to understand why people are saying they prefer it to Scout. Which I really like
We chatted a bit about that last night (two of the three of us having played Scout before.) When I play Scout I feel that I have very limited options: usually I can’t beat the current act, so I have to take a card. With dnup there are multiple “current act” slots (one per count of cards) even if I can’t beat anything that’s on the table, and I have the option of adding to someone else’s set, even picking up cards is occasionally useful, and it’s quite rare that I fall back on rotating.
Despite winning my game and having more containers on the island than anyone else (they were worth $10x4 + $(5+5)x5 + $6x4 + $4x4 + $0x5 = $130), I came away thinking that most of that had been a mistake, and I was just lucky that other people were making even bigger mistakes than I was :). Even the few cases where I appeared to profit more from an auction than the seller were still subject to my future investments to ensure the return… and the numbers were pretty low in those cases – I feel that they don’t need to get very high before it just seems highly unlikely that the bidders could ever profit more than the seller. But if everyone bids low… at what point does it actually become profitable for the seller to out-bid the others and keep their own containers?
I’m looking forward to our next game of this, to see just how differently it plays out!
There’s a tendency with mine where I like buying from the docks and selling them to the island because people often overbid on the island auctions. Good fun
Not what happened in my previous game though. Whoops
Yes, but it would have gone better if I’d read the rules first. Or during. I’d been taught that a play had to beat the previous play by Scout rules (I.e. higher or bigger).
Shogun / Ikusa - 5 player and this is one of the better ones from the old Avalon Hill line up. I prefer this over Axis and Allies but I highly prefer History of the World
The only think left we didn’t really play was Fortress America which I would be keen to play again. Maybe the FFG edition would be the realistic one I could get
Innovation - another 2 player game. Great game! Perhaps we had this topic already on what you will keep if you do decide to move countries: Innovation is a no brainer.
Played a game with a container in, containing a number representing bananas. Also known as Puerto Banana, fun as always. Lots of groans and grins when your bid does/doesn’t come off
Also played Race for the Galaxy: Xeno Counterstrike, frontier game. It’s fun, the frontier cards add a push your luck element as you draw three and can settle one immediately. If you can’t or don’t want to you add one to you hand. Tableau and VP pools are increased to 15 each but the game still accelerates in the same way.
