by Matt
Big write-up! We've got my first tournament report (courtesy of an X-Wing Kessel Run stint), our funniest story yet for The Resistance, and more stats than you could ever need for Netrunner. I didn't include reports for all of our plays (there's so many!), but I tried to hit the most noteworthy ones. Lots of initial impressions as well, including Eclipse, Lords of Waterdeep, 1812: The Invasion of Canada, King of Tokyo, and Puerto Rico.I've got a couple big GeekLists coming up that I'll be posting as blog content as well. Notably, my favorite games that were released in 2012, a list of my favorite gaming moments in 2012, and my first ever Top ??? Games list. I'd like to hit Top 100, but I have not quite yet played enough games to make a Top 100 list without including such prestigious titles such as Fluxx and Munchkin. So... yeah, we'll see.
In the meantime though, we have got a lot of catch up... My mom was diagnosed with cancer a few months ago and had surgery to remove a tumor in her liver at the beginning of November. So I traveled to see her and spend time with my family then. We went up to Longmont to spend Thanksgiving with friends. We went down to Texas to spend Christmas with Katie's family. Finally, we had friends over to our place just prior to New Year's. And we got to play games with each group, so... enjoy!
Most Played Game of November:Android: Netrunner (11 plays; Most Played game for 3rd month in a row)
Favorite New Game of November:Lords of Waterdeep (:star::star::star::star::nostar:)
November Additions to Our Collection:
7 Wonders: Leaders
Campaign Manager 2008
Caylus
Dixit Odyssey
Domaine
Empire Express
A Few Acres of Snow
Mice & Mystics
Power Grid
Power Grid: The Robots
Power Grid: The First Sparks
Ticket to Ride: India/Switzerland
Wits & Wagers Family
Most Played Game of December:Android: Netrunner (23 plays; Most Played game for 4th month in a row)
Favorite New Game of December:Eclipse (:star::star::star::star::star:)
December Additions to Our Collection:
1812: The Invasion of Canada
Android: Netrunner - What Lies Ahead
Days of Steam
Escape: The Curse of the Temple
King of Tokyo
Rune Age
San Juan
Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures - TIE Interceptor
Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization
Total Plays These Months34
Total Plays All-Time68
Rating :star::star::star::star::star:
There is probably not a lot to be said for Netrunner that I have not already said. Our plays (both literally and exactly) doubled over the past two months. November and December mark Netrunner's third and fourth months in a row as our most played game. I thought that the release of Star Wars LCG back in December would slow down our Netrunner plays, however that has really not been the case. More details on that in the initial impressions for Star Wars though. I will now use this as an excuse to post an insane amount of Netrunner-related statistics...
Fun Facts - Top Overall Players
1: .735, Dave (36-13)
2: .667, Kesh (6-3)
3: .608, Katie (14-9)
4: .589, Matt (33-23)
5: .500, Tony (4-4)
Fun Facts - Top Corporations
1: .714, Dave (28 games)
2: .600, Matt (30 games)
3: .600, Jason (10 games)
4: .538, Katie (13 games)
5: .500, Tony (6 games)
Fun Facts - Top Runners
1: .762, Dave (19 games)
2: .700, Katie (10 games)
3: .667, Kesh (6 games)
4: .577, Matt (26 games)
5: .307, Lori (13 games)
Fun Facts - Best for Each Faction
Best Jinteki Player: Matt (4-3)
Best Haas-Bioroid Player: Dave (12-4)
Best Weyland Player: Matt (7-4)
Best NBN Player: Nobody
Best Criminal Player: Katie (7-3)
Best Anarch Player: Dave (11-2)
Best Shaper Player: Matt (6-6)
Total Plays These Months4
Total Plays All-Time6
Rating :star::star::star::star::star:
On November 7th, I introduced my dad and brother-in-law to Power Grid. It went over very well with both of them, and ended up being a very close game. Going into the final turn, my dad and I had 12 cities, while Jon had 15. The turn prior, I had decided not to expand and sit. My dad, going after me, also decided not to build so that he wouldn't lose his spot on the turn order. With 163 electro, I was able to expand into six new cities and won, powering 18 cities to my brother-in-law's 17 and dad's 15. They're both looking forward to playing again when they visit next week.
On Christmas Day, Katie and I introduced our two uncles to Power Grid. It also went very well and they're looking forward to their next opportunity to play. It ended up being a close match between Katie and myself, where I powered 17 cities on my final turn to her 16.
On December 27th, Katie and I introduced her parents to Power Grid. It... didn't go quite as well. They're big Ticket to Ride fans, but anything more complex has left them a bit confused. This game was yet another close match between Katie and myself, where I powered 14 cities on my final turn to her 13.
We've also had a great deal of fun showing off our Power Grid goodies that we received from our Secret Santa last month. :D
Fun Facts
- Matt has won 3 of 5 games, with an average finish of 2nd place
- Katie has won 2 of 4 games, with an average finish of 3rd place
- Matt averages 14.6 cities powered on the final turn
- Katie averages 13.5 cities powered on the final turn
Total Plays These Months5*
Total Plays All-Time15*
*Includes all Ticket to Ride games and expansions
Rating :star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
Ticket to Ride's actually been getting more plays than usual lately, in part bolstered by the addition of the India and Switzerland maps to our collection. My dad, the biggest Ticket to Ride fan in the family, played Switzerland with me while we were in the hospital with my mom. I won 150-117, extending my winning streak to 4.
Enthusiastically describing the Switzerland board to Katie when we got home, she insisted on playing and I extended my winning streak to 5 by beating her in a two-player game.
During a game day at our house, Katie played the original Ticket to Ride without the 1910 expansion and finished fourth out of the four players, continuing her complete lack of quality finishes with the original game. I was playing Lords of Waterdeep and skipped this game of Ticket to Ride.
Ticket to Ride was requested by one of the couples in our small group, so we got in a 1910 play with four of us that I ran away with, scoring 173 points (second highest: 98) and extending the winning streak to 6.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and the streak stopped at 6. Katie got back into her groove with her first win in a long while when we played with her family in Texas. Nonetheless, the winning streak caught me up to her in most of the stats and made us look competitive on paper, in a series that used to be ALL Katie's.
Fun Facts
- Katie is 6-7 in all Ticket to Ride games/expansions and averages 135 points per game
- Matt is 6-7 in all Ticket to Ride games/expansions and averages 131 points per game
Total Plays These Months6*
Total Plays All-Time17*
*Includes all Resistance and Resistance: Avalon games
Rating :star::star::star::star::nostar:
We played Avalon a couple more times in early November, but the most notable plays had to be our Resistance games over Thanksgiving.
My wife's best friend (Christina) and her best friend's husband (Steven) live a couple of hours away. We've introduced them to several new games over the past year and they've enjoyed most of them. All four of us live in Colorado now while our families are scattered across the states, so we always get together for holidays whenever we're not traveling ourselves to see family. A few weeks ago, we were visiting them for Thanksgiving, and they had one of their dads (Randy) in town as well. He'd been told all about our recently developed board gaming addiction and was informed beforehand that he would have to participate.
By the time our Thanksgiving feast had concluded and we sat down to play games, my wife and I had decided to introduce the three of them to The Resistance. We'd never had a chance to play it with them before, since there were always just the four of us. So now that there were five folks present, we decided this would be a great time to bring it out.
I kept the explanation short, but Randy was already rolling his eyes at this game and complaining about how complicated it was. Nonetheless, we started the game up, and he successfully went undetected as one of the two spies along with Katie, contributing to a victory for the bad guys in the first game. Without hesitation, he immediately proposed that we play a second game.
I was a loyal member of the Resistance once again, and was sent on the first mission with Randy. The mission was a failure, so I went about adamantly accusing Randy of being a spy yet again. Working aggressively to clear my name and with some deductive assistance from around the table, we managed to pinpoint Chris as the villain and just needed to figure out who her accomplice was. Knowing that I was loyal and Randy had flipped the first mission, I argued repeatedly and boisterously that he had to be the other bad guy. With the game tied at 2 a piece, Katie bought my argument and selected Steven, herself, and me for the win.
At least, that's what I thought. After the mission was sabotaged and the spies won another game, we discovered that Chris and Steven were the spies. Randy, also a member of the Resistance and not actually a spy, had mistakenly failed the first mission and decided to just go along with it for the rest of the game instead of admitting his mistake and starting over.
We all got a good laugh out of it, and ended up playing two more games before finally hitting the road and heading back home.
Fun Facts - Winning Percentage
1: .800, Tony (5 games)
2: .529, Matt (17 games)
3: .400, Alexa (5 games)
4: .375, Brian (8 games)
5: .357, Katie (14 games)
Total Plays These Months4
Total Plays All-Time7
Rating :star::star::star::star::nostar:
Early December at a game day, I introduced X-Wing to our friends, Kesh and Tony. It went over quite well... so well that they each went out and bought one of everything available.
Conveniently enough, the following week was our store's Kessel Run tournament. For those unfamiliar, Fantasy Flight had originally expected full shipments of all of the Wave 2 ships for X-Wing to arrive prior to Christmas. When the majority of their shipments got pushed back to February, they decided to do something a little bit different, and sent a package to retailers throughout the country to allow them to run a tournament and give out Wave 2 ships to the winners.
Now, prior to the tournament, I had only played four games of X-Wing, and that included learning matches. In fact, in all four of those games, I was either learning to play or teaching someone else to play. These tournament matches were my first time playing with asteroids or with a time limit. I also felt as though I might be at a disadvantage, since I could only field three ships with the Rebels or four ships with the Imperials. Needless to say, my expectations were not high going into the event.
I ended up going with two X-Wings and a Y-Wing, with Wedge, Biggs, and Horton as the pilots. Wedge had a Swarm Tactics upgrade, so one of the other two could fire first with him, and Horton's Y-Wing was stacked with 2x Proton Torpedoes and an Ion Cannon Turret. Biggs had one of the astromechs to hopefully increase his survivability for a turn or two, but he's mostly cannon fodder to buy Wedge/Horton a turn to tear the other squad up.
Kesh, who had just gotten her miniatures in (literally opening them while we were setting the tournament up), enjoyed the learning match we had the previous week that she had hers rush delivered and made it to the tournament, eager to participate.
Prior to the tournament kicking off, the store owner asks me if I'll be the alternate tournament organizer (since I help out with all of the store's LCG events). I let him know that I would, and he let everyone know that I was the alternate in case any questions came up for games that Nathan (our primary TO) was involved in. The question comes up at this point, jokingly, as to who makes the rulings if Nathan and myself end up playing against each other. Which naturally means, when the randomized round one pairings are announced, Nathan and I are matched up against each other in the first round.
There end up being 8 players in the tournament. All 8 players have Rebel builds, 7 of those 8 players have three-ship builds.
Round One - Matt (0-0) vs. Nathan (0-0)
Nathan is the only player with a four-ship build, running Wedge (X-Wing), Rookie Pilot (X-Wing), and 2 Gold Squadron Pilots (2 Y-Wings). Through some fortunate rolls and good early-match maneuvering, I actually manage to take out Nathan's best pilot/ship, Wedge, in the first combat round. I then made a few rookie maneuvering mistakes and brought my full-combat-load Y-Wing fairly close to the edge of the playing area. On the same turn, Nathan manages to bring both of his Y-Wings behind mine. Nathan made successful ion cannon hits on my Y-Wing the next three turns in a row, causing me to fly Horton straight off the playing area. I was never able to recuperate and ended up losing.
Round Two - Matt (0-1) vs. Kesh (0-1)
My second game was against Kesh! Given how new she was to the game (okay, I'd only played three matches more than she had, but still... it was something) and how easily I had won in our learning match the previous week, I felt pretty confident going into the game. It ended up being one of the closest matches of the night though. Time was called, so we had until the end of the current combat round to determine a winner. She had a clear shot on Wedge and likely would have won... except that Biggs was within range, and she had to take the shot at Biggs instead of Wedge. Biggs took some damage but stayed flying, leaving an opening on her best pilot/ship. I took out Luke and R2-D2 from her team, netting me the points necessary for the modified win.
With a loss and a modified win, I had an outside shot at the prizes but needed a non-modified win to have a shot.
Round Three:Matt (1-1) vs. Cam (1-1)
My third match was against Cam, the store owner, and it was never really close. His strategy was fairly similar to mine, running Wedge, Biggs, and Dutch instead of Wedge, Biggs, and Horton. Courtesy of a proton torpedo from Horton, I managed to down his Biggs in the first round of shots fired, and a "masterful move" (his words, not mine!) on my part put my Wedge behind his Wedge for another quick takedown. He had free shots on my ships the whole match with Dutch, but had to spend them on Biggs repeatedly, leaving my other ships free to roam. Ended up being probably the shortest match of the day, and an easy win.
I ended up finishing in fourth place, and I went home with a TIE Interceptor... one step closer to being able to assemble a competition-level Imperial fleet. =) I'll also be competing in GenghisCon's X-Wing tournament in Denver next month, where they already have 12 people signed up!
Total Plays These Months2
Total Plays All-Time2
Rating :star::star::star::star::nostar:
Okay, confession, these weren't actually our first all-time plays of Spades. This is an all-time favorite and we have played hundreds of Spades games in our lifetimes. We spent an entire European vacation through Germany, Czech Republic, and Austria doing nothing except playing Spades (well, when we weren't being tourists and sight-seeing). That said, these are in fact our first Spades plays since we were exposed to BoardGameGeek and 'real' board games. Katie has been in a cards game mood lately, and Spades came up over the Thanksgiving holiday visiting friends. We decided against partners and played as a four-player free-for-all. We ran out of time before dinner was ready, but we were glad to put away the disastrous start to this game. Katie, clearly rusty from not playing in so long, was set in every round, while I was set just once and still finished back in third place. We played again over Christmas with her family.
Total Plays These Months1
Total Plays All-Time1
Rating :star::star::star::star::star:
Yes, I finally got around to playing Eclipse, and it is my favorite new game played in December. Since we only had a 2.5 hour timeframe to play the game in with three brand new players (and one semi-experienced player teaching us), we raced through the game with the basic Terran races. I really, really loved the game.
My two neighbors were the other two new players, Jo and Tony, with Brian across the galaxy from me. Jo started off building Dreadnoughts and such early on, so I explored in the opposite direction and made an alliance with Tony as soon as we met up. Tony nabbed some elaborate alien technology weapon blasters and used it to take the galactic core by a storm of pew-pew with a wave of eight loaded Interceptors. With no way for Jo to reach me (without going through the core) and a firm trucewith Tony, I sat back and concentrated on conquering aliens and building monoliths. While all of this was going on, Brian and Jo were embroiled in conflict for their half of the galaxy.
Tony ended up cruising to victory with 38 points, and I took second with 24. Jo and Brian were far behind with 11 and 8 points each.
Can't wait for our next match, Eclipse is a favorite of mine already.
Total Plays These Months1
Total Plays All-Time1
Rating :star::star::star::star::nostar:
I played this once with Brian, Alexa, Tony, and Kesh on a game day back in November. First, it should be noted that I'm not a D&D fan (of the RP'ing variety, nor the dungeon crawler adventure board games like Wrath of Ashardalon) and was quite a skeptic of this game at first due to the D&D franchise tag thrown on it. Second, it doesn't matter, because this was my favorite new game of November. It's a simple, light, worker placement euro with the D&D theme thrown on, and in actuality, the theme and components really shine in the game. I did end up winning the game with 123 points, with everyone pretty close behind. I really enjoyed it, and it's been at the top of my wishlist ever since we played.
Total Plays These Months9
Total Plays All-Time9
Rating :star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
I was a skeptic of this game, because I rarely enjoy games that involve a significant amount of dice chucking. This entire game is based around chucking dice. That said, Katie's uncles love dice rolling games, so we ended up getting this and Escape to introduce them to dice rolling games of the more thematic variety. Both went over very well with them, and King of Tokyo won me over as well. It's a great, fun, light game. We ended up introducing it to our niece and nephews as well, and it was a big hit with them. We enjoyed it so much that we ran out and ended up purchasing the expansion last month as well.
The expansion is nice, in that it adds evolutions for each monster, which gives them each a unique ability that no other monster has. I particularly appreciated this, as the monsters in the original have nothing but aesthetics to distinguish them from each other. The addition of unique abilities and powers gives each monster their own flavor, which is neat.
Total Plays These Months7
Total Plays All-Time7
Rating :star::star::nostar::nostar::nostar:
Another game of chucking dice, this time done cooperatively to escape a collapsing temple. The use of a 10-minute soundtrack that prods you into action around the temple is a bit novel, but wears thin fairly quickly. For me, it wore out its welcome pretty quickly, and I'm in no rush to get it back to the table. That said, Katie is still enjoying it, and her uncles got a kick out of it and kept wanting to play again, so I'm sure it'll be brought out any time they're around.
Total Plays These Months4
Total Plays All-Time4
Rating :star::star::star::star::nostar:
We're up to 19 plays of 7 Wonders now, but these were our first 4 plays with Leaders. Overall, we both really like what it adds to the base game. Along with some variety, it's nice to have some goals laid out before the game really gets started, and having a direction to start building your city in. I doubt we'll play without the Leaders expansion from now on, unless we're introducing people entirely new to 7 Wonders.
Total Plays These Months1
Total Plays All-Time1
Rating :star::star::star::star::nostar:
We finally got around to playing Puerto Rico! Partially due to poor play and inexperience on my part, but man was I screwed over in this game. I lost all of my goods on two separate occasions due to just missing out getting my good onto a ship, costed me about 15 victory points over the course of the game. My fault for not picking up a warehouse earlier! My first exposure to the game on BGG was the frequent comparisons between it and Agricola, before Twilight Struggle and Through the Ages jumped into the mix. Katie really, really enjoyed Puerto Rico and prefers it over Agricola. I really, really enjoyed Agricola, and prefer it over Puerto Rico. In any case, Katie enjoyed Puerto Rico so much that we ended up getting San Juan (since everyone else in our group already has Puerto Rico).
Total Plays These Months:2
Total Plays All-Time:2
Rating :star::star::star::star::nostar:
Our gift from Secret Santa! We pulled it out twice in December, playing the introductory scenario both times, and everyone who's played it has enjoyed it so far.
In our first game, the British held the lead the entire game, but a late American offensive brought them within a single objective of bringing the game to a draw. With the final battle, the Americans sought to reclaim one of their objectives, which would tie the game up if successful. The British snuck out a 2-1 victory with an unexpected Command Decision by the Native Americans that placed them in an unoccupied enemy territory that gave them control of an objective and the win.
In our second game, the British fell behind early, losing the objective-packed center region. It looked bleak, but a massing of Native American forces and repeat of the Native American command decision trick brought the game to a tie. This time though, the game was decided on a Canadian Militia movement over water to capture a weakly defended American objective on the other side of a Great Lake. Another sneaky victory for the British!
Gameplay was very simple and easy to learn/teach, and I discovered that I really enjoy cube-pushing wargames. Perhaps the surprising part, was that our gaming group (primarily thematic and euro gamers) enjoyed it just as much as I did, and is interested in trying more. I'm hoping to get it pulled out this weekend while I have family in town for our first full five-player match.
Total Plays These Months:2
Total Plays All-Time:2
Rating :star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
We picked this one up primarily because of our love for Power Grid. Our only problem with Power Grid is that it normally runs just a bit too long for our weekly game night. First Sparks had been recommended to me as it uses several of the same mechanisms from Power Grid while typically running shorter.
Three of us hit the 13 clan members mark on the final turn, with Brian and I having 1 food left over and tying for first, while Tony took third with no food. The girls came in 4th, 5th, and 6th, with Katie taking up the next-to-last spot in 5th.
We ended up having mixed feelings about it. While both of us prefer Power Grid, I still really enjoyed First Sparks, and Katie did not enjoy it at all, but wants to give it another chance since it was at the end of a long game day.