International TableTop Day!

To those of you who follow this blog and don't know what International Tabletop day is... What are you doing here?... Haha, jaykay.

It is a day when Friendly Local Game Shop (FLGS) and game stores online have semi-underwhelming sales and get exclusive promos for games we all love. Dixit has had several promos. I haven't picked them up, but I have eyed them on ebay a few times. ($17 for one card is kind of out of my interest zone)

I, being the non-social gamer that I am, opted to spend the afternoon with my friend and her husband. The same couple I play D&D with; we also have reached May on Pandemic Legacy.

The premise of the Pandemic series is that you have a map of the world, and using a cast of characters, you try to find cures for 4 diseases spreading across the globe. It's fun, It is one of the first board games I ever bought, and we've played it a lot over the years. I have the old edition, but my friend bought to play with her kids and friends when I am not around, and the new edition has more pieces.

Pandemic *Legacy* (Season 1) is one of newly trending legacy games. Legacy means you make permanent changes to your game board, so every time you play, it is a little different than the last time. Pandemic Legacy takes place over 12 months. It is set up so that you get two attempts at "winning" each month, but the damages still take place. We failed May twice in a row, and had to make permanent changes each time. Every month you draw cards from the "legacy deck" which tells you how many to draw and which compartments of your secret, advent-calendar-style dossier to open.

There are 8 sealed boxes and several sheets of sealed advent-style information. The legacy deck tells you which items to open. Every month we end up opening a little more. Each door has stickers in them, some update the actual rules in the book, some provide stickers to modify the board, or the character sheets.

Pandemic Legacy is scary and makes you think about every single move you make, as permanent changes are made to your board every time you play. Each outbreak is marked by a numbered sticker, which you update each time that city outbreaks, 1-5. Each number represents limits placed on the city - it takes extra actions to move in and out, you have to discard cards to move in and out, or you straight can't go there, unless you have the ability to.

If you are in a city when it outbreaks, you get a permanent scar on that character. on the third scar, that character dies and is removed permanently from the game. In our box, the medic (Sanchez) got one scar and then we upgraded him so that he won't receive scars for being in a city when it outbreaks, because he is important for disease control and has played every single game.

We also played a few rounds of Star Realms, a two player, space themed, Deck Building game. It's fun. Ended up lending it to my friends so they could get a couple more plays out of it.

The last game we attempted was Food Chain Magnate. We waited until kind of late and tried to learn how to play - reading through several pages of dense rules with nto enough examples (and terms like "orthoganally adjacent".. which means shares an edge with, not-diagonal, n-e-s-w.

We were all a little worn out from the rest of the evenings activities, and i didnt have a quick rules layout, so we got worn out mentally and were making bad choices that quickly bit us all in the asses, so we decided to put a bookmark in it and come back to it.

Holiday Game Night: Chaotic Neutral Catan.

While I patiently await my shipment of PLA from Push Plastics that I grabbed on sale during the holiday, I have been filling my time with design and playing games. The designs I am not quite ready to start posting yet, as it's mostly just notes and measurements, nothing in the computer, just paper. I will have multiple posts once they are ready though, promise! 

So here are some photos from our game night last night, hosted by My Friend and Her Husband. His Friend joined us as well. 4 players is a great number for a lot of games! Enough to allow a buffer between super competitive people, and enough to play party games. (My Friend and Her Husband are the super competitive ones and having another person there dilutes the competitiveness. Their motto is "I don't care who wins, as long as it's not my spouse" Which I threatened to have put on their tombstones.

We started the name with the third round of Pandemic Legacy(not shown), a game that comes with a sticker sheet and hidden components you only add to the game when prompted. The premise of the game is that you only get a limited amount of plays, and the results are permanent and carry over between games.

Next we played Lanterns The Harvest Festival(also not shown) I forget to take pictures early in the night, until we are putting the game away. I had a slight issue with understanding rules (you go until all the tiles are placed, not until all the tiles are picked up) and it kind of ruined the game because strategies were planned wrong. I like it and the real rules make it more fun. I feel that Her Husband would have liked it 100x better if he hadn't squandered his win in ordered to sabotage My Friend.

Third, Splendor. My Friend won, I was close second! I love Splendor, it's a light game that could probably work well with any theme - baked goods, clothing/textiles, butcher shop. . but they chose Gems, and I like that! I would love to splurge on the upgraded gem tokens, or even non-canonical, acrylic gems - I feel that might be a cool upgrade that would be pretty thematic. You start trading in gems, then trade them to buy access to a mine, a trade route and then a front end shop. First to 15 points wins.

Then we played a round of Settlers of Catan, a favorite in My Friend's house. They have the nice anniversary edition in a gorgeous wooden box, and all wooden pieces, and it sees frequent plays. Her Husband won. It was . . a standard Catan game. I rarely ever win Catan. I started without a wood source and only got onto the #12 wood. (wood being a resource which is needed to do most things) I like Catan, but I win 1 out of maybe 20 games, so I have taken a self-imposed "lol-random" stance on how I play it. Chaotic Neutral.

While My Friend threw dinner together we played a quick round of King of Tokyo. I decided to go full aggro and kept Tokyo for many turns, and the turn before they killed me, I did 5 damage! I was happy. If I had made it one more round, I would have won on sweet Tokyo Occupation points.

We had a quick, delicious dinner of stuffed peppers and then cleaned up for Eclipse, their newest game. This is our second game of Eclipse, as we played last weekend as well (a rare two-weekend-in-a-row event!) We played a long game, with lots of alliances, no betrayals (somehow) and a very close ending, with My Friend at 38, Her husband at 35, I had 30, and the His Friend got a 28, which really isn't a bad scoring spread. Eclipse reminds me a lot of Xia: Legends of a drift system, for it's exploration and Terra Mystica for it's resource management/earning system. There is room for as much or as little combat as possible. You can form alliances, betray alliances, fight NPCs, explore and claim new space.

We also finished the night with two rounds of Codenames. We paired "Chicks V Dicks" Me and My Friend vs Her Husband and His Friend. His Friend and I played Spymaster and did pretty great, our clues and pattern were spot on!  We got a 4-card-success!

On My Friend's first turn as spymaster, after I missed one, she blurted out "It was clearly Nurse!" to which Her Husband ruthlessly started calling her a cheater and we had to start over. He was angry because he had a perfect 4-clue lined up.

We ended on a funny note, as it was starting to get late.

Let me know if my regaling of game night aren't what you wanna hear, I'm trying to fine tune my content.