I was so ninja.
Last weekend, there was a game day event at a friend's house. Well, actually, it was a friend of a friend. I know this guy who organizes game day events at various households around the bay area (the San Francisco one) and this time it was in the east bay near Oakland. It actually might have been in Oakland or it might not. I don't know exactly where the city limits are and all of the cities have merged into a continuous mosaic of industrial, urban, suburban and municipal zones.
This neighborhood was on the edge of a run down area on its way to gentrification when the real estate bubble burst. Still, there aren't any vacant properties and no forest of for sale signs so I guess this area isn't as affected as others.
The household has a yappy dog, a cautious cat and a caged rodent that is probably a guinea pig, and boardgamers. There are about a dozen people in attendance, including some hangers-on and a toddler. It's a nice place with the entrance on the ground floor, kitchen, dining nook and living space on the second and bedrooms on the third. Games have been arranged on the second floor along with a variety of healthy munchies.
One of the women I had not met before is fond of teaching a game called Ghost Stories.
It's a cooperative boardgame where you play a kung fu monk, trying to save his village from evil. There is a deck of cards which are various monsters. Every turn, you turn over the top card which must be placed on the board (if possible) and some of them have effects that are triggered when they arrive (like they bring more ghosts) or effects that happen while they are in play (like they curse you or they try to haunt the village) or effects that happen when they are defeated (some give you bonuses, some give you pain). There is a 3x3 grid of villagers in the middle, which represent townsfolk who can help you fight evil.
Each player has a choice of one of two special abilities, and no player shares the same choices, so there are a total of 8 powers. That means there are 16 possible configurations of powers, not including the various seating configurations. Because of the nature of some powers, the seating arrangement can be important too.
There is a deck of very powerful evil spirits that represent the masterminds of the evil forces. One is selected at random and put near the bottom of the deck. There are 3 ways the players can lose - they can all be defeated, the town can be corrupted (on the easy setting this is when 3 tiles in a row are haunted or any 4 tiles are haunted) or you get to the bottom of the ghost deck.
Fighting is usually done rolling dice. The dice are 6 sided and have one dot for each color of players, black and white (wildcard). Ghosts have either a player's color which means they manifest on their side of town or black which means they go anywhere. Having a full set of 3 ghosts in front of you is very bad.
It's a tricky game, I plan on picking it up pretty soon. The game is beautiful, replayable and mechanically pretty simple. Me Likey.
Our first game ended in defeat. Too many tough monsters all at once overwhelmed us.
After that, somebody just bought Battlestar Galactica the boardgame.
It took a while to set up, as it was unpunched. Brand new. Unfortunately, that also meant that the owner didn't know how it went. I had played half of one game, so I sort of took the lead in getting things going.
At the beginning of the game, every player is dealt a random card that tells them if they are a human or a cylon. So you never know who is on your side. I started the game as a cylon.
This was immensely unfair because I was the only one who knew how the game went so I just played as a human for the first half. It didn't matter much because the cards went so badly the humans got pounded anyway. Every turn, a player has to turn over a card that is some sort of problem. Sometimes it's an internal problem like some internal affair that needs addressing or sometimes it's cylons attacking. We started out with a ton of cylons.
Every time cylons attack, it usually adds more cylons to zones around Galactica in addition to random civilian ships. If raiders end in the same zone as unguarded civvy ships, they destroy them and then you turn them over to see if there was anything important on them. You can lose population, fuel, food or morale when you lose civilian ships.
The humans can lose if they run out of population, fuel, food or morale. They can also lose if the Galactica is heavily damaged or invaded. They win if they manage to make 8 points worth of jumps and then one more. About half of the crisis cards (the bad things that happen every turn) also advance the jump counter which helps the humans move towards victory. Many of them add or activate cylons.
Players have skills which govern which kinds of cards they collect. Pilots get piloting cards which help in combat, technical staff get mechanical cards which help repair things, politicians get political cards which help dealing with people, officers get tactical cards which help with tactics and so on. Each one also helps with skill checks. Some of the crisis cards involve events which must be acted on by people to prevent catastrophe or to gain resources. They usually have a set of skills that will help and the rest which hinder. If it is a technical issue, then perhaps only the piloting and mechanical cards will help. For example, it might say 10 pts required, Piloting and Repair only. So two random cards are added and every player can add no cards, or as many cards as they like. Some players have no piloting or repair skills so if you see them adding cards to a technical skill test, they can't be trying to help. In this case, only piloting or repair cards are added to the total (every card has a number from 1 to 5 which is used only for skill checks) and any other type is subtracted.
In one such test, I noticed that there were three inappropriate colored cards in the pile when revealed. That meant that one of the other two players (I knew what card I contributed) wasn't trying to help at all. So, we immediately turned the eye of suspicion on the two others who contributed. Since I pointed it out, most people assumed that I wasn't the one who tried (successfuly) to sabotage the attempt. (There were two random cards added to the pile, and three bad cards so based on the number of cards contributed, either or both of the other players could have been cylons)
Eventually, one of the two outed himself as a cylon. Now he stopped pretending to help and got to play a different set of cards to interfere with the humans. I still pretended to be a loyal human.
When the humans make the halfway point a second loyalty card is dealt to all players. One player dropped out early and we just left the character fallow. It was thought that the absentee Gaius Baltar might have also been a cylon, as he is dealt two loyalty cards in the beginning and if either says cylon, then he is supposed to sabotage the game. At the halfway point, an additional cylon sympathiser card is added and dealt out randomly. If you get this card, you have to reveal it. If the humans are over halfway depleted in any of the four resources (people, fuel, food or morale) then the sympathizer stays loyal to the humans, if the humans are doing well, then the cylon sympathizer becomes a cylon. It's the game's way of tuning the difficulty based on current performance.
The other person who might have been a cylon drew the sympathizer card. Three of the four resources were over half gone, so no new cylon. Not that we needed it.
The game went pretty smoothly for the next jump, then fell apart on the penultimate jump. Everything but food was critically low and I just sat back and let things go to hell. I really didn't need to do anything other than slow play some of my cards to let skill checks fail and things degenerate.
We made the next to last jump and ran out of fuel. The cylon player was happy about it and then I revealed that I was also a cylon and several of the players were shocked. I had been fairly aggressive as Boomer shooting cylon raiders, protecting civilian ships and repairing damage. The humans had the opportunity to look at a player's loyalty card in the game and they hadn't even considered looking at mine.
I had even used Boomer's special ability to negate a crisis introduced by the active cylon player. I did it because it totally gave the impression that I was trying to help the humans to win and because it wasn't the absolute worst thing that could happen. Better I used up the ability before that came along.
Anyway, they couldn't believe I was a cylon all along. They have scheduled a rematch because they are certain that things will work out for humanity this time.
I'll let you know.
This neighborhood was on the edge of a run down area on its way to gentrification when the real estate bubble burst. Still, there aren't any vacant properties and no forest of for sale signs so I guess this area isn't as affected as others.
The household has a yappy dog, a cautious cat and a caged rodent that is probably a guinea pig, and boardgamers. There are about a dozen people in attendance, including some hangers-on and a toddler. It's a nice place with the entrance on the ground floor, kitchen, dining nook and living space on the second and bedrooms on the third. Games have been arranged on the second floor along with a variety of healthy munchies.
One of the women I had not met before is fond of teaching a game called Ghost Stories.
It's a cooperative boardgame where you play a kung fu monk, trying to save his village from evil. There is a deck of cards which are various monsters. Every turn, you turn over the top card which must be placed on the board (if possible) and some of them have effects that are triggered when they arrive (like they bring more ghosts) or effects that happen while they are in play (like they curse you or they try to haunt the village) or effects that happen when they are defeated (some give you bonuses, some give you pain). There is a 3x3 grid of villagers in the middle, which represent townsfolk who can help you fight evil.
Each player has a choice of one of two special abilities, and no player shares the same choices, so there are a total of 8 powers. That means there are 16 possible configurations of powers, not including the various seating configurations. Because of the nature of some powers, the seating arrangement can be important too.
There is a deck of very powerful evil spirits that represent the masterminds of the evil forces. One is selected at random and put near the bottom of the deck. There are 3 ways the players can lose - they can all be defeated, the town can be corrupted (on the easy setting this is when 3 tiles in a row are haunted or any 4 tiles are haunted) or you get to the bottom of the ghost deck.
Fighting is usually done rolling dice. The dice are 6 sided and have one dot for each color of players, black and white (wildcard). Ghosts have either a player's color which means they manifest on their side of town or black which means they go anywhere. Having a full set of 3 ghosts in front of you is very bad.
It's a tricky game, I plan on picking it up pretty soon. The game is beautiful, replayable and mechanically pretty simple. Me Likey.
Our first game ended in defeat. Too many tough monsters all at once overwhelmed us.
After that, somebody just bought Battlestar Galactica the boardgame.
It took a while to set up, as it was unpunched. Brand new. Unfortunately, that also meant that the owner didn't know how it went. I had played half of one game, so I sort of took the lead in getting things going.
At the beginning of the game, every player is dealt a random card that tells them if they are a human or a cylon. So you never know who is on your side. I started the game as a cylon.
This was immensely unfair because I was the only one who knew how the game went so I just played as a human for the first half. It didn't matter much because the cards went so badly the humans got pounded anyway. Every turn, a player has to turn over a card that is some sort of problem. Sometimes it's an internal problem like some internal affair that needs addressing or sometimes it's cylons attacking. We started out with a ton of cylons.
Every time cylons attack, it usually adds more cylons to zones around Galactica in addition to random civilian ships. If raiders end in the same zone as unguarded civvy ships, they destroy them and then you turn them over to see if there was anything important on them. You can lose population, fuel, food or morale when you lose civilian ships.
The humans can lose if they run out of population, fuel, food or morale. They can also lose if the Galactica is heavily damaged or invaded. They win if they manage to make 8 points worth of jumps and then one more. About half of the crisis cards (the bad things that happen every turn) also advance the jump counter which helps the humans move towards victory. Many of them add or activate cylons.
Players have skills which govern which kinds of cards they collect. Pilots get piloting cards which help in combat, technical staff get mechanical cards which help repair things, politicians get political cards which help dealing with people, officers get tactical cards which help with tactics and so on. Each one also helps with skill checks. Some of the crisis cards involve events which must be acted on by people to prevent catastrophe or to gain resources. They usually have a set of skills that will help and the rest which hinder. If it is a technical issue, then perhaps only the piloting and mechanical cards will help. For example, it might say 10 pts required, Piloting and Repair only. So two random cards are added and every player can add no cards, or as many cards as they like. Some players have no piloting or repair skills so if you see them adding cards to a technical skill test, they can't be trying to help. In this case, only piloting or repair cards are added to the total (every card has a number from 1 to 5 which is used only for skill checks) and any other type is subtracted.
In one such test, I noticed that there were three inappropriate colored cards in the pile when revealed. That meant that one of the other two players (I knew what card I contributed) wasn't trying to help at all. So, we immediately turned the eye of suspicion on the two others who contributed. Since I pointed it out, most people assumed that I wasn't the one who tried (successfuly) to sabotage the attempt. (There were two random cards added to the pile, and three bad cards so based on the number of cards contributed, either or both of the other players could have been cylons)
Eventually, one of the two outed himself as a cylon. Now he stopped pretending to help and got to play a different set of cards to interfere with the humans. I still pretended to be a loyal human.
When the humans make the halfway point a second loyalty card is dealt to all players. One player dropped out early and we just left the character fallow. It was thought that the absentee Gaius Baltar might have also been a cylon, as he is dealt two loyalty cards in the beginning and if either says cylon, then he is supposed to sabotage the game. At the halfway point, an additional cylon sympathiser card is added and dealt out randomly. If you get this card, you have to reveal it. If the humans are over halfway depleted in any of the four resources (people, fuel, food or morale) then the sympathizer stays loyal to the humans, if the humans are doing well, then the cylon sympathizer becomes a cylon. It's the game's way of tuning the difficulty based on current performance.
The other person who might have been a cylon drew the sympathizer card. Three of the four resources were over half gone, so no new cylon. Not that we needed it.
The game went pretty smoothly for the next jump, then fell apart on the penultimate jump. Everything but food was critically low and I just sat back and let things go to hell. I really didn't need to do anything other than slow play some of my cards to let skill checks fail and things degenerate.
We made the next to last jump and ran out of fuel. The cylon player was happy about it and then I revealed that I was also a cylon and several of the players were shocked. I had been fairly aggressive as Boomer shooting cylon raiders, protecting civilian ships and repairing damage. The humans had the opportunity to look at a player's loyalty card in the game and they hadn't even considered looking at mine.
I had even used Boomer's special ability to negate a crisis introduced by the active cylon player. I did it because it totally gave the impression that I was trying to help the humans to win and because it wasn't the absolute worst thing that could happen. Better I used up the ability before that came along.
Anyway, they couldn't believe I was a cylon all along. They have scheduled a rematch because they are certain that things will work out for humanity this time.
I'll let you know.