Plaid Hat Game Night
Really good night of board gaming tonight. We got Dead of Winter to the table again, which is a great game that tells a good story every time. We wound up basically getting our asses kicked and not coming all that close to winning, but we all had a lot of fun in the process.
We also tried out Specter Ops for the first time, and that's going to be a favorite for sure. It's a hidden movement game that's essentially Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game. One player is an agent infiltrating an enemy compound, moving secretly from place to place and trying to stay out of sight of the other players. The agent's goal is to get to three special objectives and then escape the board within a certain time limit. The other players are hunters trying to find and kill the agent character before he escapes. The game is really intense the entire time, and we all loved it. The actual play session was awesome as well - Frank and I were the hunters, Greg was the agent. We managed to catch sight of him as he was trying to escape after fulfilling his second objective, and I blasted him for a point of damage (he had four total). The next turn I located him again and hit him a second time, and Frank arrived to try to finish the job. He had two dice to roll, and if neither came up a 1, Greg would die. One of them did come up a 1, so Greg was down to 1 hit point. Greg managed to give us the slip again (a couple of times he did this by intentionally taking bad moves that he knew we wouldn't check up on, which was good strategy), and so we moved to block the exits as Greg got the third objective. By triangulating Greg's location using my character's power, we were able to use Frank to cut Greg off from two of the exits, leaving me guessing as to Greg's route to the last exit. I somehow managed to intuit where Greg was hiding as he prepared his escape, and again got to take a shot with anything other than a 1 finishing the job. I rolled a 1, and Greg won the game. It was a loss, but I felt really good about how I played, first locating Greg and chasing him down in the middle, then realizing that we could cut off a huge part of his escape by posting Frank in the hall as a sniper, and finally correctly figuring out where he was at the end of the game. Anyway, the game is great and I'd really like to play again, trying things out as the agent.
We also tried out Specter Ops for the first time, and that's going to be a favorite for sure. It's a hidden movement game that's essentially Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game. One player is an agent infiltrating an enemy compound, moving secretly from place to place and trying to stay out of sight of the other players. The agent's goal is to get to three special objectives and then escape the board within a certain time limit. The other players are hunters trying to find and kill the agent character before he escapes. The game is really intense the entire time, and we all loved it. The actual play session was awesome as well - Frank and I were the hunters, Greg was the agent. We managed to catch sight of him as he was trying to escape after fulfilling his second objective, and I blasted him for a point of damage (he had four total). The next turn I located him again and hit him a second time, and Frank arrived to try to finish the job. He had two dice to roll, and if neither came up a 1, Greg would die. One of them did come up a 1, so Greg was down to 1 hit point. Greg managed to give us the slip again (a couple of times he did this by intentionally taking bad moves that he knew we wouldn't check up on, which was good strategy), and so we moved to block the exits as Greg got the third objective. By triangulating Greg's location using my character's power, we were able to use Frank to cut Greg off from two of the exits, leaving me guessing as to Greg's route to the last exit. I somehow managed to intuit where Greg was hiding as he prepared his escape, and again got to take a shot with anything other than a 1 finishing the job. I rolled a 1, and Greg won the game. It was a loss, but I felt really good about how I played, first locating Greg and chasing him down in the middle, then realizing that we could cut off a huge part of his escape by posting Frank in the hall as a sniper, and finally correctly figuring out where he was at the end of the game. Anyway, the game is great and I'd really like to play again, trying things out as the agent.