I woke up Saturday and realized a person probably only gets a dozen or so Saturday birthdays. With that epiphany, I decided that I would indeed go for a bike ride, maybe for 51 miles to celebrate the occasion.
I started rolling around 10 after coffee and a banana, checking my online games and generally stalling for a while. Then I started out not sure how far I'd go, but generally heading north and west. Pedaling was feeling pretty good, so I decided to head for Holly-Holdridge mountain bike trails and see how far it felt. I got there after ~17 miles and decided to take the easy of the three loops a two miler without any severe technical challenges. Usually, that is. we've had a bit of rain, to put it mildly and there were several patches of mud on the single track trail. In general, mud is ok. When you are threading through trees, it's a little more nerve-wracking. I did manage to finish with nothing more than clanging a pedal off a hidden in weeds hunk of wood and decided not to tackle the six mile loop. At this point, I decided that I could probably do 51 and headed a little farther west before swinging back towards home. My extreme upper back legs were a little distressed before I got done (gotta buckle down and get some bike shorts), but with a .14 loop after arriving home, I hit 51 exactly.
I hosed off the bike, put my shoes, gloves and helmet on the porch to dry, grabbed a shower and snack and we headed out for the parent's meeting for summer hockey. After the pep talk from the coach explaining how important commitment is, my son still elected not to wait an hour for the second practice when the first one filled up, vowing instead to hit the bike and maybe run a little Sunday. We headed back, picked up my daughter and went to Jalapeno's for lunch before heading out to ROBA. We dropped the girls off and Hanson and I set out.
ROBA was full again, good to see folks prioritizing games over nice weather! For some reason when we go to cons, boardgame meetups, etc. we wind up playing with the same folks over and over. Good thing that they are fun! As loyal readers may remember, I'd played Keyflower with six and two, here was a chance for five, so Greg, Elizabeth, Hanson, John and I started colonizing. John likes a brief overview, then "Let's just play!" so we did. Unfortunately, he didn't hear the part about the winter tiles being up for bids and I didn't mention the part about goods, people and skill tiles only counting for one form of VP at the end, so he claimed the game has an asterisk when he finished second or third because his 41 points of skill tiles (counting both ways) turned into 25. This game gets more fun every time. I think my one complaint is that the rules don't provide an easy overview. Once you know the game, it's pretty easy to teach, but we were a little lost when reading them the first time because no one had an idea of the flow of the game. Maybe there isn't an easy way to describe it, but after having played, it's way, way easier to teach.
The Keyflower gang and Tom decided to head to my house for some more games after a stop at Culver's. Hanson and I just grabbed some dessert to go (mmm, caramel cashew) and Concrete mixer and smoothy for the women at home, while the others grabbed dinner and showed up a little later. Ken was expected shortly, so we broke out King of Tokyo. Only Hanson and I had played, so we taught the game and we got started. This game features players taking the role of monsters attacking Tokyo with skillful dice rolling and/or upgrades to one's monster. The game ends when a monster gets 20 VP or all other monsters are out of life points. Each turn a player rolls six dice Yahtzee style (three rolls, freely re-rolling) and resolves the effects. Each die has a 1, a 2, a 3, a heart, a claw and a lightning bolt. Each heart heals a damage, a lightning gains an energy cube (to spend on upgrades) while a claw deals damage to the monster(s) not in the same location. Sets of three of the same number provide that many VP. Monsters are either out of Tokyo (and start there) or in Tokyo and damage from attacks are dealt to monsters in the other location. If a monster is out of Tokyo and rolls damage, damage is scored on the monster(s) in Tokyo, who may then retreat. If there is a space in Tokyo, the monster on turn that rolled damage must enter, gaining a VP. If a monster is still in Tokyo at the beginning of its turn, it gains 2 VP. While in Tokyo, the monster deals damage to all monsters not there, but may not heal. When the game is down to four or less monsters, there is only one space in Tokyo, otherwise there are two. The upgrade cards come in two types, Keep and Discard. The latter have an immediate effect then are discarded while the keep cards provide an ongoing effect. After three or four rounds, we were down to five monsters with a couple of us in double digit points, but no one above 6 (starting with 10) life points. John managed to start in Tokyo alone and score a bunch of hits to already weakened opponents, then bought the upgrade that gave another turn and finished off the rest of us. I think he took four of us out on his final turn with the extra to become undisputed King.
Ken showed up near the beginning of KoT, so we now had seven players. What else but 7 Wonders? We'd picked up Cities at Origins, but Tom requested that we play the base game since we had seven, so we did. We did use the new monuments in the shuffle and Catan and Mannekin Pis came out. We started building, squabbling and some of us gained science knowledge for three ages. When the dust settled, I think Greg (not sure, but it wasn't me) had the most points with an almost 20 point lead over second place.
Then an embarrassing thing happened, we decided to play RoboRally or Phantoms of the Ice and I couldn't find either one in the basement. so stay tuned, I may get an auction going soon after doing some organizing in the game room.
John decided that he needed to head home and Tom was itching to try The New Science. Since I'd convinced him at Origins to grab Road to Enlightenment with the promise that we could try my Kickstarted version of The New Science, we convinced Elizabeth and Hanson to share a position since it only took five. This was my second and possibly final play of this game. It was better with five than with three, but I've decided that Conquistador Games, Inc. either doesn't finish development before publishing games or that their games just aren't the type that my usual group of gamers enjoy. If we get five people that want to try it again, I will, but other than Tom, I am not sure the other players will try it again. To be fair, the rules for New Science were pretty clear and I really think that it may play the way that they intended as opposed to Enlightenment for which they've released a new rulebook that makes it appear to be a completely different game than the original rules.
The New Science is a worker placement game where players try to research, experiment and publish various achievements in science and math. These are arranged on a tech tree and you can only do research in an area if you've successfully experimented in the prerequisite sciences or anyone has published them. Players get points primarily for publishing, but only one player can publish each science. I actually like the tech tree and to a certain extent, the worker placement part. The actions that the workers can be placed upon are rest, cards, influence, research, experiment and publish. Each player also gets a scientist card with some flavor text describing the scientist and also granting a start position on an influence track or two. Also, each scientist has a rating for research, experimenting and publishing.
Rest is turn order next round and banking an energy. Each round two cards are available (only one with 2-3 players). Some of these are just events that occur and have an effect on the round. Some of them are one shots (i.e. gain an influence, everybody else loses an influence, immediately put research marker in a discipline) and others are keep that give an ongoing benefit. Each player can only have one keep card at a time. The influence spots move a player's influence up in one of four areas (government, church, science and workmanship(or something similar). There are influence requirements sometimes in multiple areas to publish most of the sciences.
The other spaces allow players to place markers or move them up in a science. With five players there are five research and experiment spaces and three publish spaces. With fewer players some of the spaces are not available. Research can only be done in an area where the player has experimented in the pre-reqs or someone has published them. It takes one to three research points to research. Depending on the research space claimed, zero to two research points are provided, the player's scientist also provides zero to two research points. The difference is made up with accumulated energy from the rest action. To experiment, the player indicates an area that he's already researched and rolls a die. To this depending on worker space claimed, he adds zero to two points (and one of them provides a re-roll) as well as zero to three from his scientist and rest points as needed. The first player to successfully experiment in an area needs five to seven with anyone subsequently experimenting in the science needs one less. To publish a player needs to have successfully experimented in the science and have influence in specified areas as well as two or three publishing points. Worker placement gives one or two, the scientist gives zero to two and rest makes up the difference. He then scores points for the accomplishment and all pre-reqs are also considered published by him, but no points are scored for the pre-reqs. One of the publish spaces gives only half points while another allows a player to be one short in the required influence.
The game ends one turn after the cards run out (fourteen turns for five player) or when all four top of the tree sciences are published. In addition to points earned by publishing during the game, the player that published the most gets three VP and the player(s) with most influence in each of the four spheres get two VP.
Looking back on it, I am not sure why I have a negative impression and that's part of why I'll give it another try with four or, preferably, five players. The cards could be frustrating. There was one turn where players couldn't get VP for publishing unless they gained influence in religion and science due to two event cards coming up. Since there are only two of each influence space and players only have three workers to place, it led to a frustrating turn for players that wanted to publish that turn. It may also just have been that groups shouldn't start worker placement games with the potential to stymie their opponents' plans at 10:30. I think with rules, we spend 2-1/2 - 3 hours on the game. With experienced players, I think the time could drop to 75-90 minutes. However, I am not sure that it will ever be my first gaming choice for spending those minutes.
After that, Tom started for home and we pulled out Get Bit!,Get Bit! Sharkspansion and Get Bit! Dolphin Die Expansion. No one had played with the latter two, so we opted not to use Get Bit! Squid Die Expansion. Hanson volunteered to be the shark and we dove into the ocean with no preamble (since Walk the Plank! isn't out, yet). We quickly discovered that the dolphin cards don't work with the deluxe version (different backs), so we substituted the 7 cards and continued. In this delightful race to not be eaten, players select a card (1-4 with four swimmers) secretly. When the cards are revealed, if any cards are the same, they don't move. Other swimmers move to the front of the line in ascending order of their cards. The swimmer in the back loses a limb, jumps to the front and collects all of his cards. (Otherwise a player collects his played cards when down to only one.) When only two swimmers are left, the one in front wins the game. The dolphin adds a card to the players' hands that represents rolling the dolphin die (0,2,3,4,5,9) This is then resolved as if the player had played a card with that number including the consequences of matching another player's value. (Ken was good at rolling zeroes as his dice "skill" held true.) The shark complicated the process a little in that the shark has to select a particular limb that he hankers after or he can select his head card or any limb card. However, while the head card removes swimmer entirely, it is a miss if there were any ties. Similarly, not being picky (any limb) only works if there were at least one tie. Otherwise, if the swimmer in the back still has the selected limb, it's eaten normally. The shark player gets as many misses as there are original swimmers. If he gets discouraged by too many misses, the swimmer with the most remaining limbs wins. Otherwise, the shark wins if he reduces the pack to one swimmer. Hanson's shark wasn't a good predictor and at the end, the swimmers had 3,2,2 and 2 limbs left.
Greg and Elizabeth took off at this point and Ken and I played a world championship Schotten-Totten before calling it a night. I really miss having this game on yucata, so it was good to play it again. In this version, there is a deck of six colors (not particularly well defined, my Sharpie may come into play next time) of one to nine. Players alternate playing a card on their side of the nine pasture boundary stones trying to build the best three card hand. In descending order they are straight flush, three of a kind, flush, straight and total. When a player can show that his three cards can't be beat by examining the other played cards, he can claim the stone even if the other player hasn't played three cards and no more cards can be played to that location. The player that wins five stones or three in a row wins.
Another great night of gaming! Thanks to all that participated (by being there or vicariously).
I started rolling around 10 after coffee and a banana, checking my online games and generally stalling for a while. Then I started out not sure how far I'd go, but generally heading north and west. Pedaling was feeling pretty good, so I decided to head for Holly-Holdridge mountain bike trails and see how far it felt. I got there after ~17 miles and decided to take the easy of the three loops a two miler without any severe technical challenges. Usually, that is. we've had a bit of rain, to put it mildly and there were several patches of mud on the single track trail. In general, mud is ok. When you are threading through trees, it's a little more nerve-wracking. I did manage to finish with nothing more than clanging a pedal off a hidden in weeds hunk of wood and decided not to tackle the six mile loop. At this point, I decided that I could probably do 51 and headed a little farther west before swinging back towards home. My extreme upper back legs were a little distressed before I got done (gotta buckle down and get some bike shorts), but with a .14 loop after arriving home, I hit 51 exactly.
I hosed off the bike, put my shoes, gloves and helmet on the porch to dry, grabbed a shower and snack and we headed out for the parent's meeting for summer hockey. After the pep talk from the coach explaining how important commitment is, my son still elected not to wait an hour for the second practice when the first one filled up, vowing instead to hit the bike and maybe run a little Sunday. We headed back, picked up my daughter and went to Jalapeno's for lunch before heading out to ROBA. We dropped the girls off and Hanson and I set out.
ROBA was full again, good to see folks prioritizing games over nice weather! For some reason when we go to cons, boardgame meetups, etc. we wind up playing with the same folks over and over. Good thing that they are fun! As loyal readers may remember, I'd played Keyflower with six and two, here was a chance for five, so Greg, Elizabeth, Hanson, John and I started colonizing. John likes a brief overview, then "Let's just play!" so we did. Unfortunately, he didn't hear the part about the winter tiles being up for bids and I didn't mention the part about goods, people and skill tiles only counting for one form of VP at the end, so he claimed the game has an asterisk when he finished second or third because his 41 points of skill tiles (counting both ways) turned into 25. This game gets more fun every time. I think my one complaint is that the rules don't provide an easy overview. Once you know the game, it's pretty easy to teach, but we were a little lost when reading them the first time because no one had an idea of the flow of the game. Maybe there isn't an easy way to describe it, but after having played, it's way, way easier to teach.
The Keyflower gang and Tom decided to head to my house for some more games after a stop at Culver's. Hanson and I just grabbed some dessert to go (mmm, caramel cashew) and Concrete mixer and smoothy for the women at home, while the others grabbed dinner and showed up a little later. Ken was expected shortly, so we broke out King of Tokyo. Only Hanson and I had played, so we taught the game and we got started. This game features players taking the role of monsters attacking Tokyo with skillful dice rolling and/or upgrades to one's monster. The game ends when a monster gets 20 VP or all other monsters are out of life points. Each turn a player rolls six dice Yahtzee style (three rolls, freely re-rolling) and resolves the effects. Each die has a 1, a 2, a 3, a heart, a claw and a lightning bolt. Each heart heals a damage, a lightning gains an energy cube (to spend on upgrades) while a claw deals damage to the monster(s) not in the same location. Sets of three of the same number provide that many VP. Monsters are either out of Tokyo (and start there) or in Tokyo and damage from attacks are dealt to monsters in the other location. If a monster is out of Tokyo and rolls damage, damage is scored on the monster(s) in Tokyo, who may then retreat. If there is a space in Tokyo, the monster on turn that rolled damage must enter, gaining a VP. If a monster is still in Tokyo at the beginning of its turn, it gains 2 VP. While in Tokyo, the monster deals damage to all monsters not there, but may not heal. When the game is down to four or less monsters, there is only one space in Tokyo, otherwise there are two. The upgrade cards come in two types, Keep and Discard. The latter have an immediate effect then are discarded while the keep cards provide an ongoing effect. After three or four rounds, we were down to five monsters with a couple of us in double digit points, but no one above 6 (starting with 10) life points. John managed to start in Tokyo alone and score a bunch of hits to already weakened opponents, then bought the upgrade that gave another turn and finished off the rest of us. I think he took four of us out on his final turn with the extra to become undisputed King.
Ken showed up near the beginning of KoT, so we now had seven players. What else but 7 Wonders? We'd picked up Cities at Origins, but Tom requested that we play the base game since we had seven, so we did. We did use the new monuments in the shuffle and Catan and Mannekin Pis came out. We started building, squabbling and some of us gained science knowledge for three ages. When the dust settled, I think Greg (not sure, but it wasn't me) had the most points with an almost 20 point lead over second place.
Then an embarrassing thing happened, we decided to play RoboRally or Phantoms of the Ice and I couldn't find either one in the basement. so stay tuned, I may get an auction going soon after doing some organizing in the game room.
John decided that he needed to head home and Tom was itching to try The New Science. Since I'd convinced him at Origins to grab Road to Enlightenment with the promise that we could try my Kickstarted version of The New Science, we convinced Elizabeth and Hanson to share a position since it only took five. This was my second and possibly final play of this game. It was better with five than with three, but I've decided that Conquistador Games, Inc. either doesn't finish development before publishing games or that their games just aren't the type that my usual group of gamers enjoy. If we get five people that want to try it again, I will, but other than Tom, I am not sure the other players will try it again. To be fair, the rules for New Science were pretty clear and I really think that it may play the way that they intended as opposed to Enlightenment for which they've released a new rulebook that makes it appear to be a completely different game than the original rules.
The New Science is a worker placement game where players try to research, experiment and publish various achievements in science and math. These are arranged on a tech tree and you can only do research in an area if you've successfully experimented in the prerequisite sciences or anyone has published them. Players get points primarily for publishing, but only one player can publish each science. I actually like the tech tree and to a certain extent, the worker placement part. The actions that the workers can be placed upon are rest, cards, influence, research, experiment and publish. Each player also gets a scientist card with some flavor text describing the scientist and also granting a start position on an influence track or two. Also, each scientist has a rating for research, experimenting and publishing.
Rest is turn order next round and banking an energy. Each round two cards are available (only one with 2-3 players). Some of these are just events that occur and have an effect on the round. Some of them are one shots (i.e. gain an influence, everybody else loses an influence, immediately put research marker in a discipline) and others are keep that give an ongoing benefit. Each player can only have one keep card at a time. The influence spots move a player's influence up in one of four areas (government, church, science and workmanship(or something similar). There are influence requirements sometimes in multiple areas to publish most of the sciences.
The other spaces allow players to place markers or move them up in a science. With five players there are five research and experiment spaces and three publish spaces. With fewer players some of the spaces are not available. Research can only be done in an area where the player has experimented in the pre-reqs or someone has published them. It takes one to three research points to research. Depending on the research space claimed, zero to two research points are provided, the player's scientist also provides zero to two research points. The difference is made up with accumulated energy from the rest action. To experiment, the player indicates an area that he's already researched and rolls a die. To this depending on worker space claimed, he adds zero to two points (and one of them provides a re-roll) as well as zero to three from his scientist and rest points as needed. The first player to successfully experiment in an area needs five to seven with anyone subsequently experimenting in the science needs one less. To publish a player needs to have successfully experimented in the science and have influence in specified areas as well as two or three publishing points. Worker placement gives one or two, the scientist gives zero to two and rest makes up the difference. He then scores points for the accomplishment and all pre-reqs are also considered published by him, but no points are scored for the pre-reqs. One of the publish spaces gives only half points while another allows a player to be one short in the required influence.
The game ends one turn after the cards run out (fourteen turns for five player) or when all four top of the tree sciences are published. In addition to points earned by publishing during the game, the player that published the most gets three VP and the player(s) with most influence in each of the four spheres get two VP.
Looking back on it, I am not sure why I have a negative impression and that's part of why I'll give it another try with four or, preferably, five players. The cards could be frustrating. There was one turn where players couldn't get VP for publishing unless they gained influence in religion and science due to two event cards coming up. Since there are only two of each influence space and players only have three workers to place, it led to a frustrating turn for players that wanted to publish that turn. It may also just have been that groups shouldn't start worker placement games with the potential to stymie their opponents' plans at 10:30. I think with rules, we spend 2-1/2 - 3 hours on the game. With experienced players, I think the time could drop to 75-90 minutes. However, I am not sure that it will ever be my first gaming choice for spending those minutes.
After that, Tom started for home and we pulled out Get Bit!,Get Bit! Sharkspansion and Get Bit! Dolphin Die Expansion. No one had played with the latter two, so we opted not to use Get Bit! Squid Die Expansion. Hanson volunteered to be the shark and we dove into the ocean with no preamble (since Walk the Plank! isn't out, yet). We quickly discovered that the dolphin cards don't work with the deluxe version (different backs), so we substituted the 7 cards and continued. In this delightful race to not be eaten, players select a card (1-4 with four swimmers) secretly. When the cards are revealed, if any cards are the same, they don't move. Other swimmers move to the front of the line in ascending order of their cards. The swimmer in the back loses a limb, jumps to the front and collects all of his cards. (Otherwise a player collects his played cards when down to only one.) When only two swimmers are left, the one in front wins the game. The dolphin adds a card to the players' hands that represents rolling the dolphin die (0,2,3,4,5,9) This is then resolved as if the player had played a card with that number including the consequences of matching another player's value. (Ken was good at rolling zeroes as his dice "skill" held true.) The shark complicated the process a little in that the shark has to select a particular limb that he hankers after or he can select his head card or any limb card. However, while the head card removes swimmer entirely, it is a miss if there were any ties. Similarly, not being picky (any limb) only works if there were at least one tie. Otherwise, if the swimmer in the back still has the selected limb, it's eaten normally. The shark player gets as many misses as there are original swimmers. If he gets discouraged by too many misses, the swimmer with the most remaining limbs wins. Otherwise, the shark wins if he reduces the pack to one swimmer. Hanson's shark wasn't a good predictor and at the end, the swimmers had 3,2,2 and 2 limbs left.
Greg and Elizabeth took off at this point and Ken and I played a world championship Schotten-Totten before calling it a night. I really miss having this game on yucata, so it was good to play it again. In this version, there is a deck of six colors (not particularly well defined, my Sharpie may come into play next time) of one to nine. Players alternate playing a card on their side of the nine pasture boundary stones trying to build the best three card hand. In descending order they are straight flush, three of a kind, flush, straight and total. When a player can show that his three cards can't be beat by examining the other played cards, he can claim the stone even if the other player hasn't played three cards and no more cards can be played to that location. The player that wins five stones or three in a row wins.
Another great night of gaming! Thanks to all that participated (by being there or vicariously).