Weekends Spent Gaming

The last couple weekends have been pretty awesome.

February 28th was the annual Fire & Ice convention in Manitowoc, WI.  Ben went with me and we played a bunch of games together.

We crushed everyone else in a game of 7 Wonders.  Especially impressive since it was Ben's first time playing.  I went for a technology win and he just went the simple route of grabbing points whenever he could.  At one point it was kind of funny as the other players in the game were all debating how well they were doing progressing on military points or accumulating different kinds of cards and how many points that would get them in the end and Ben just looked down at the table and commented, do you guys even notice all the point cards I have in front of me?  I'm not sure they heard him.  In any case the debate continued ... it's as if with all the different ways to get points, simply grabbing a card that says "X points" seems too simple to be a viable way to win.

Though to be fair, maybe it is.  I mean, Ben didn't actually win.  I beat him by one point.  A girl named Daria passed me a tech card that got me another 7 points for the win.  The dude next to hear couldn't believe she'd done that.  I'm not sure why ... he was nowhere near within 7 points of me and he had passed Daria a card that got her 13 points to jump from nearly last place into 3rd.

So how badly did we beat them all?  Ben & I had, like 71 and 72, respectively.  Daria was in the mid 60s.  Everyone else in the 50s.

We had some time to kill, so we played a game of Stone Age with a couple of the 7 Wonders players.  I've played it once before and decided that this time I'd copy what the winner of the game had done last time.  Population, Wood, and cards.  As the cards got you the resources needed, pick up some huts.  It worked for me.  I pretty aggressively went after collecting the full set of card symbols, ended up with a bunch of miscellaneous resources and scored points on the generic resource huts.  I don't remember the final score, but it wasn't close.

We played a game of Dominant Species that I really liked.  It had a similar theme to Evo (evolving a species by competing with others in a changing environment), but with mechanics to encourage symbiotic relations.  I didn't catch on to how I could score by moving with other players instead of isolating myself in my own niche until about 1/2 way through the game.

Finally, we played a game of Eclipse.  Fun.  I got to be the Planta and was able to generate a nice bottleneck into my own little corner of the universe.  I held out there, keeping my one system full of spacedocks, dreadnoughts and cruisers just teched out enough to discourage the military powerhouses from spending time coming my way ... and as opportunity allowed building a couple monoliths.

I wasn't involved in any combat until the last turn of the game.  One of the players had gone the missile route and created some very intimidating missile boats. He was getting, like, 36 shots at +4, each doing two hits of damage before even the first round of combat.  Two of us had focused on tech to avoid missiles.  Me through heavy defenses:  -3 computers and hulls 4 to 6 deep.  The other guy with point defenses and Anti-matter cannons to try and blow the missiles out of the sky.  Missile guy took the center hex towards the end of the game and both point defense guy and I moved in the last turn.  Honestly, I thought I would have to get lucky to take the center ... but it was the last turn.  I was willing to try my luck.  I didn't expect point defense guy to move in, too.

Turns out having about 24 anti matter cannons  will wipe out more than missiles.  He had the initiative and I didn't even get a shot off.  Doesn't hurt that he hit with 23 of his 24 shots.  Consider how lucky that is ... a 1 is an auto miss.  On 24 dice he only rolled one.  And it's not like he hit on a two!  I mean, he did (yes, even with my -3 computers) on about 2/3 of the shots, but the rest needed, like 4s or better.  But I got my 2 point chit for combat.  Then point defense guy wiped out missile boat dude to take the center tile.

In the end, I won by ... 2 points.  Yay throwing the dice.

Ben, unfortunately, got in a really tough spot early in the game with only, like, 4 tiles to develop into.  He would have had to expand by fighting his neighbors and they both had enough resources to keep bigger fleets than Ben had.  He said he still liked it though.

Fire and Ice was a ton of fun.  Good games.  I saw a bunch of friends from when I lived in Sheboygan.  Ted Bingham and his son Craig, Randall, Dan, Steve.  Ben got a t-shirt and a book.  I got a winged fox stuffed animal for Tabby.  I'm glad we went.

Then last week Tabby and I started playing in something called the Pauper Swap League at Gnome Games.  They give us a semi-random deck of 60 cards, we play others in the league for ante (2 cards each) which is used to improve our decks.  We also get points for playing (1 per game, +1 more if you win) that can be spent to get cards from the bank.  They're just commons, and they're donated to us by the store, so the ante is never a big deal.  Officially, all the cards belong to Gnome Games anyway and if we ever accumulate more than 60 (like by winning the ante) we have to return the excess to the bank.  But it's fun to improve the decks from game to game.  Fun to go play Magic for a couple hours on Saturday, especially with Tabby coming along.

I think she's actually more excited about her kitty themed deck box & sleeves than she is about Magic.  She seems to enjoy the games though.  She crushed me one game and came from behind to eek out a win in a second against me.  She also played two other guys in the league and lost both, though putting up a good show.  I played a third game against a guy in the league and just had a sweet lucky draw of cards while he got stuck with a bad start on mana and couldn't play much.

Good times.