My gaming weekend part 2: International Tabletop Day!
Normally it's just every other Friday I get to go board gaming, but when Mom and first checked out High Tide and started talking to Navid, International Tabletop Day just sounded too good to NOT miss out on! Navid also said they'd do a live-stream broadcast with one of the actors from the Big Bang Theory show. Also there were going to be more prizes and giveaways!
I'm so glad I went, because I got to learn two games and meet other gamers there. :)
I got off work a bit early again to go, and Mom got me some food from Taco Bell to eat over there. There were these stationed tables run by volunteers who brought their games and taught people who were interested on how to play them. A bunch of people showed up! But before I could get any gaming in, I wanted to eat first. So I sat at the table near four people who were playing the awesome board game called Power Grid, and they didn't mind me watching as I ate. I played this game once and enjoyed it. I hope to play it again sometime. :D
In Power Grid, one to four players, you're powering up cities. Players first bid for the power producing resources, or bid for the air powered fans that don't have resource costs at all. It's always good to have at least one air to power up some of your cities so you can save a bit of money. After the bidding and getting resources, you have to pay attention to how many cities you can power up by looking at the cards. You can't get money for any more than the number of cities you can put power into. Yeah, payment comes after placing your resource pieces on the grid board of cities, you get paid so you could bid for a card for something better to replace or build further on what you already have to power up more cities. But as your opponents by the same resources you buy, the price goes up.
The first person to power up to 17 cities wins.
All four people were in the middle of their game, so I looked around at some of the other stations. I saw people playing 7 Wonders, and Small World... Those are fun. Mom really, really likes 7 Wonders. I never played Dominion but that table looked full. However I saw there was no one playing Star Wars X-Wing, and I remembered I was very curious about trying that one.
So I told the guys who were running the station I was interested in playing and they walked me through it through parts of it and let me figure out some of it for myself. There's quite a bit to set up, lots of pieces and this big black felt you lay down. But once you get down to playing, there isn't actually too much going on to get into the strategy of it.
X-Wing is a two player game, action/strategy platform. Either all your ships get blown up, or your opponent's do. The objective is very simple; to be the survivor of the starship battle with at least one of your ships. The two sides are the Imperial Empire ships, and there is your small duo of Rebel ships. The plastic models of the ships are so detailed and there are these long cardboard pieces you use to help move your ships. There's another thin cardboard piece that helps you determine firing range.
You start with shield pieces ship. There are cards that tell you the ship's status; their shooting, shield, how strong the hull is... The A-Wing got a missile and that is just a one-time use throughout the game I think.
I picked the Rebel side. It didn't really matter to me on whatever side I got. The Empire side got more ships, but they weren't as powerful or endurable as my A-Wing and X-Wing ships (especially the X-Wing). You kind of do have to be familiar with Star Wars to be familiar with the ships. The powerful Interceptor had a bit more than those other two Empire ships and one of the guys who moderated around this table suggested that it would be best to take out the Interceptor ASAP.
The way of play goes like this. First, you prepare to move your ships, by using these round dials that help you determine and remember on where to move. (forward, drift right or left, hard right or left, or forward then a U-turn) You don't get reveal your movements to the other player except when it's your turn to move your ships. Once you decide where you want to move your ships, that's it. You can't go back and change where you want to go. So this means you must think and predict where your opponent's ships will go. You use the straight or curved line pieces to help move your ships across the black felt.
Then the firing and evading starts, and you use green dice for evasion and red dice for attack. For the X-Wing I got to roll 4 red dice, for example. The card that informs you of your ships' statuses displays the number of attack dice and the number of evading dice you can roll during battles. But as your ship takes damage once the shields are gone, I think the number of dice you roll decreases a little.
There are times in which your ships can't fire at the other so it's just back to movement again. Gotta watch out for those asteroids! Because if one of your ships get next to one, you have to roll one red dice to determine if your ship gets damaged or not. I didn't think my X-Wing was going to collide with one of them, but it turned out it did! The disadvantage of being next to an asteroid is that you can't fire at your opponent's ships, and this leaves your ship vulnerable. LOL yeah it's a very cool game.
I didn't win, but I took out the Interceptor and went out fighting all I could! Oh, and I told them of my group and they seemed interesting in coming over on a Friday night to check it out, and one of them is kind of familiar with the area my bookstore is at, so I gave him my flyer about starting up my own meetup. Maybe he'll tell some of his friends about that too. That'd be cool. :)
Sure, there's quite a bit to set up, and this game requires a lot of space, but it's not difficult to get the hang of. I enjoyed this one a lot. It's on my games to-get list, next to the other game I got to learn.
But before that, I just hovered around this table between two people who were playing the World of Warcraft board game a little bit. The board sure looked neat and interesting. They said that there are these quests you take your chosen race character to go through, up to 8 quests. The first person to complete all their quests wins. Looks promisingly fun, and I've never played the actual online game. I don't think I ever could, LOL! I spend enough hours RP writing and video gaming as it is. But the board game I'm sure isn't supposed to be as long.
So after hovering over that table station a little bit, I noticed the group who played 7 Wonders was packing up and getting ready to try out a game most of them have never played before. I decided to join in too, and one of the three guys I remembered because he and some friends of his were teaching Mom, me, and some others of our meetup group this game called Pirate's Cove. (I think I liked that game, but I don't remember how to play it, haha.) His name's Barrett. I was introduced to his friends John and Angus.
The card game we were figuring out how to play is a two to four player game I think, called Infernal Contraption. This one is a crazy fun game in which you use your cards to build your own machine that not only affects the opponent you choose to attack, but yourself as well! The card illustrations are adorable, for these cartoony green goblins are on them. This is a game of elimination. The last person with a draw pile to build their machine with wins. If your Parts Deck is gone then so are you, and your contraption is no longer functioning. You're out of the game.
Each player gets a Power Core card to start with, and there are four purple outputs that are universal in which you use to connect any of your Parts cards to. The rest of the output connectors have to match up. The same goes with Modifiers, and the one time use cards that are removed from the game after being used once. The Modifiers are mainly green colored, but they have different colored outputs that either go two ways or in all four directions. For example: there is one card that reads you can pick up the top card of the discard pile, or scrap pile, and put it face down on top of your Parts pile. If you attach a Modifier to it, the output connectors matched up, you can add two scrap pile cards to your deck. Add another one and you can pick up four!
Mainly you gotta have enough space on the table for your contraption to get longer, horizontally. You can add onto your contraption with any number of cards as long as you have enough to scrap. The first card you put down is free, but the others to attach to your machine you have to have one parts card to discard for the other. Then, after you build onto your contraption, you choose your opponent--if more than two people are playing.
Normally I imagine this game could go fairly quick. It took a little longer since all of us were learning and figuring things out as we went along.
There is this one time use card that is evil! EVIL! XD This one card read that everyone's Parts pile had to get shuffled and redistributed equally, meaning you're very likely not going to end up with any of the parts you want. That, and your deck might have fewer cards than you originally had!
Barret won, but I was the second to the last person to go out! Because I had a bit of advantage to take from the scrap pile and put it into my parts pile. Barrett was saying to one of the other guys earlier, "Come at me!" Because his Parts pile was the biggest towards the end. I highly approve of this game, and definitely want this one too.
After that, Barrett, John, and Angus were interested in Cthulu Fluxx. I got out my copy out of my little bag of games I brought, and the Hastur Creeper was played again. Angus had it in his hand I think, and the forbidden word he picked was "card". Hilarious! This is why I say I hope you get this card for your copy, Anja. Hastur got passed around a lot that time, and Barrett once said, "Card. Card, card, card, card!" to deliberately get Hastur. The others said "squarzies" or "slips of paper" to mostly avoid getting Hastur but there were quite a few slip-ups and I ended up with Hastur a couple of times too. If there are some of you who never played Fluxx before, normally you wouldn't want any Creepers because they prevent you from winning the game.
Nobody won, because Cthulu won, and nobody had the Secret Cultist surprise card to win that Ungoal so I ended up showing it to them after the game was over. That's my other favorite card I like besides Hastur, hehe. (I'll have to tell Shawn at Third Eye about the Hastur Creeper, lol.) I don't think you really need to be a fan of H.P. Lovecraft to enjoy this game. Fluxx can be crazy enough, but Cthulu Fluxx just makes the game really insane! XD
I do hope to see them around again, because they were all nice, funny, and very cool to game with.
They left, and Mom arrived when it was nearly done, so we played Forbidden Island, the 2-4 player co-op game in which you team up to get all four treasures before the island completely sinks, you lose both temples of one treasure, the helicopter pad sinks and is removed from the game, or the water tide rises all the way up to the skull and crossbones. OR, there's a gap in the tile based island and there's no way to go where you want to go, because the color you picked doesn't have that ability to move across gaps!
Mom and I did not win. We were SOOOOO close! There was only two squares of island left. We had all four treasures and we were trying to get the card to get us off the island. Then the water rose all the way to the skull and crossbones.
No one came and joined us, but oh well! We played a round of the Fandooble dice game, and mom stole a lot of gold pieces from me and those merciless dragons on her dice rolls. Her stash pile was so much bigger than mine.
Still I felt a little bad for Mom, that she didn't get to game with any new people. We didn't get to experience the live-stream event with, oh, I forget that actor's name.... Will Something, and he was also in Star Trek. I know it wasn't Shatner, I know that much lol! I don't watch Big Bang enough, obviously. Mom and Dad watch it more. Although, we did get some giveaways. Alan will be getting a little something for one of his games later. (I of course will be copying and pasting all this I'm emailing onto my LJ entry. Not gonna say what we got for him. It's going to be surprise for the next time we meet up. =p) But I will say we got a free card game, one that Alan already has called Gang of Four. I got some stuff to games I don't even have; Dungeons and Dragons, and Resistance...
I know Anja likes D&D, so I'm considering to snail mail her this card and little pin that reads, "D&D NEXT. I'M IN." I just now set those aside for her, if she would like them!
I think the one other free giveaway from Navid we got was a Munchkin bookmark.
All in all, it's been a really fun weekend!
I'm so glad I went, because I got to learn two games and meet other gamers there. :)
I got off work a bit early again to go, and Mom got me some food from Taco Bell to eat over there. There were these stationed tables run by volunteers who brought their games and taught people who were interested on how to play them. A bunch of people showed up! But before I could get any gaming in, I wanted to eat first. So I sat at the table near four people who were playing the awesome board game called Power Grid, and they didn't mind me watching as I ate. I played this game once and enjoyed it. I hope to play it again sometime. :D
In Power Grid, one to four players, you're powering up cities. Players first bid for the power producing resources, or bid for the air powered fans that don't have resource costs at all. It's always good to have at least one air to power up some of your cities so you can save a bit of money. After the bidding and getting resources, you have to pay attention to how many cities you can power up by looking at the cards. You can't get money for any more than the number of cities you can put power into. Yeah, payment comes after placing your resource pieces on the grid board of cities, you get paid so you could bid for a card for something better to replace or build further on what you already have to power up more cities. But as your opponents by the same resources you buy, the price goes up.
The first person to power up to 17 cities wins.
All four people were in the middle of their game, so I looked around at some of the other stations. I saw people playing 7 Wonders, and Small World... Those are fun. Mom really, really likes 7 Wonders. I never played Dominion but that table looked full. However I saw there was no one playing Star Wars X-Wing, and I remembered I was very curious about trying that one.
So I told the guys who were running the station I was interested in playing and they walked me through it through parts of it and let me figure out some of it for myself. There's quite a bit to set up, lots of pieces and this big black felt you lay down. But once you get down to playing, there isn't actually too much going on to get into the strategy of it.
X-Wing is a two player game, action/strategy platform. Either all your ships get blown up, or your opponent's do. The objective is very simple; to be the survivor of the starship battle with at least one of your ships. The two sides are the Imperial Empire ships, and there is your small duo of Rebel ships. The plastic models of the ships are so detailed and there are these long cardboard pieces you use to help move your ships. There's another thin cardboard piece that helps you determine firing range.
You start with shield pieces ship. There are cards that tell you the ship's status; their shooting, shield, how strong the hull is... The A-Wing got a missile and that is just a one-time use throughout the game I think.
I picked the Rebel side. It didn't really matter to me on whatever side I got. The Empire side got more ships, but they weren't as powerful or endurable as my A-Wing and X-Wing ships (especially the X-Wing). You kind of do have to be familiar with Star Wars to be familiar with the ships. The powerful Interceptor had a bit more than those other two Empire ships and one of the guys who moderated around this table suggested that it would be best to take out the Interceptor ASAP.
The way of play goes like this. First, you prepare to move your ships, by using these round dials that help you determine and remember on where to move. (forward, drift right or left, hard right or left, or forward then a U-turn) You don't get reveal your movements to the other player except when it's your turn to move your ships. Once you decide where you want to move your ships, that's it. You can't go back and change where you want to go. So this means you must think and predict where your opponent's ships will go. You use the straight or curved line pieces to help move your ships across the black felt.
Then the firing and evading starts, and you use green dice for evasion and red dice for attack. For the X-Wing I got to roll 4 red dice, for example. The card that informs you of your ships' statuses displays the number of attack dice and the number of evading dice you can roll during battles. But as your ship takes damage once the shields are gone, I think the number of dice you roll decreases a little.
There are times in which your ships can't fire at the other so it's just back to movement again. Gotta watch out for those asteroids! Because if one of your ships get next to one, you have to roll one red dice to determine if your ship gets damaged or not. I didn't think my X-Wing was going to collide with one of them, but it turned out it did! The disadvantage of being next to an asteroid is that you can't fire at your opponent's ships, and this leaves your ship vulnerable. LOL yeah it's a very cool game.
I didn't win, but I took out the Interceptor and went out fighting all I could! Oh, and I told them of my group and they seemed interesting in coming over on a Friday night to check it out, and one of them is kind of familiar with the area my bookstore is at, so I gave him my flyer about starting up my own meetup. Maybe he'll tell some of his friends about that too. That'd be cool. :)
Sure, there's quite a bit to set up, and this game requires a lot of space, but it's not difficult to get the hang of. I enjoyed this one a lot. It's on my games to-get list, next to the other game I got to learn.
But before that, I just hovered around this table between two people who were playing the World of Warcraft board game a little bit. The board sure looked neat and interesting. They said that there are these quests you take your chosen race character to go through, up to 8 quests. The first person to complete all their quests wins. Looks promisingly fun, and I've never played the actual online game. I don't think I ever could, LOL! I spend enough hours RP writing and video gaming as it is. But the board game I'm sure isn't supposed to be as long.
So after hovering over that table station a little bit, I noticed the group who played 7 Wonders was packing up and getting ready to try out a game most of them have never played before. I decided to join in too, and one of the three guys I remembered because he and some friends of his were teaching Mom, me, and some others of our meetup group this game called Pirate's Cove. (I think I liked that game, but I don't remember how to play it, haha.) His name's Barrett. I was introduced to his friends John and Angus.
The card game we were figuring out how to play is a two to four player game I think, called Infernal Contraption. This one is a crazy fun game in which you use your cards to build your own machine that not only affects the opponent you choose to attack, but yourself as well! The card illustrations are adorable, for these cartoony green goblins are on them. This is a game of elimination. The last person with a draw pile to build their machine with wins. If your Parts Deck is gone then so are you, and your contraption is no longer functioning. You're out of the game.
Each player gets a Power Core card to start with, and there are four purple outputs that are universal in which you use to connect any of your Parts cards to. The rest of the output connectors have to match up. The same goes with Modifiers, and the one time use cards that are removed from the game after being used once. The Modifiers are mainly green colored, but they have different colored outputs that either go two ways or in all four directions. For example: there is one card that reads you can pick up the top card of the discard pile, or scrap pile, and put it face down on top of your Parts pile. If you attach a Modifier to it, the output connectors matched up, you can add two scrap pile cards to your deck. Add another one and you can pick up four!
Mainly you gotta have enough space on the table for your contraption to get longer, horizontally. You can add onto your contraption with any number of cards as long as you have enough to scrap. The first card you put down is free, but the others to attach to your machine you have to have one parts card to discard for the other. Then, after you build onto your contraption, you choose your opponent--if more than two people are playing.
Normally I imagine this game could go fairly quick. It took a little longer since all of us were learning and figuring things out as we went along.
There is this one time use card that is evil! EVIL! XD This one card read that everyone's Parts pile had to get shuffled and redistributed equally, meaning you're very likely not going to end up with any of the parts you want. That, and your deck might have fewer cards than you originally had!
Barret won, but I was the second to the last person to go out! Because I had a bit of advantage to take from the scrap pile and put it into my parts pile. Barrett was saying to one of the other guys earlier, "Come at me!" Because his Parts pile was the biggest towards the end. I highly approve of this game, and definitely want this one too.
After that, Barrett, John, and Angus were interested in Cthulu Fluxx. I got out my copy out of my little bag of games I brought, and the Hastur Creeper was played again. Angus had it in his hand I think, and the forbidden word he picked was "card". Hilarious! This is why I say I hope you get this card for your copy, Anja. Hastur got passed around a lot that time, and Barrett once said, "Card. Card, card, card, card!" to deliberately get Hastur. The others said "squarzies" or "slips of paper" to mostly avoid getting Hastur but there were quite a few slip-ups and I ended up with Hastur a couple of times too. If there are some of you who never played Fluxx before, normally you wouldn't want any Creepers because they prevent you from winning the game.
Nobody won, because Cthulu won, and nobody had the Secret Cultist surprise card to win that Ungoal so I ended up showing it to them after the game was over. That's my other favorite card I like besides Hastur, hehe. (I'll have to tell Shawn at Third Eye about the Hastur Creeper, lol.) I don't think you really need to be a fan of H.P. Lovecraft to enjoy this game. Fluxx can be crazy enough, but Cthulu Fluxx just makes the game really insane! XD
I do hope to see them around again, because they were all nice, funny, and very cool to game with.
They left, and Mom arrived when it was nearly done, so we played Forbidden Island, the 2-4 player co-op game in which you team up to get all four treasures before the island completely sinks, you lose both temples of one treasure, the helicopter pad sinks and is removed from the game, or the water tide rises all the way up to the skull and crossbones. OR, there's a gap in the tile based island and there's no way to go where you want to go, because the color you picked doesn't have that ability to move across gaps!
Mom and I did not win. We were SOOOOO close! There was only two squares of island left. We had all four treasures and we were trying to get the card to get us off the island. Then the water rose all the way to the skull and crossbones.
No one came and joined us, but oh well! We played a round of the Fandooble dice game, and mom stole a lot of gold pieces from me and those merciless dragons on her dice rolls. Her stash pile was so much bigger than mine.
Still I felt a little bad for Mom, that she didn't get to game with any new people. We didn't get to experience the live-stream event with, oh, I forget that actor's name.... Will Something, and he was also in Star Trek. I know it wasn't Shatner, I know that much lol! I don't watch Big Bang enough, obviously. Mom and Dad watch it more. Although, we did get some giveaways. Alan will be getting a little something for one of his games later. (I of course will be copying and pasting all this I'm emailing onto my LJ entry. Not gonna say what we got for him. It's going to be surprise for the next time we meet up. =p) But I will say we got a free card game, one that Alan already has called Gang of Four. I got some stuff to games I don't even have; Dungeons and Dragons, and Resistance...
I know Anja likes D&D, so I'm considering to snail mail her this card and little pin that reads, "D&D NEXT. I'M IN." I just now set those aside for her, if she would like them!
I think the one other free giveaway from Navid we got was a Munchkin bookmark.
All in all, it's been a really fun weekend!