Gaming in May

May was a bit of a down month (as was April, at least compared to the first quarter of 2010) as far as my gaming was concerned. The month featured a couple of big gatherings for party games, one at my brother-in-law's place in Vermont, and the other here at the Todd Residence. The former consisted of a big game of Time's Up won by the Mrs. and Emily, a couple of games of Ca$h'N Gun$ (the Mrs. and Mike the two winners), and a three player session of Ghost Stories in which Tom, Emily, and I emerged victorious (despite playing on Nightmare difficulty) The latter game night featured a nine player game of Pit (which I didn't realize until mid-game is actually only an eight-player game), and another session of Time's Up, this time with three teams of three. I liked the 3x3 configuration for this one, and amazingly enough the game ended in a three way tie at 40 points each!

The Mrs. and I had another couple over with their son to play games. After one big game of Dixit, the grown-ups attempted a play of Ghost Stories, but we had to cut it short due to lateness of hour.

The Mrs. and I played a couple of games while we were visiting my Mom's and we couldn't manage to recruit my sometimes lame gaming family to play anything. One was Ghost Stories on Nightmare which we lost in epic fashion, and my latest expansion for Carcassonne (Abbey & Mayor...thanks darling!), which the Mrs. won by a landslide.

I did manage to keep up a weekly online game throughout the month, so that is a big positive. At various times myself, Tom, Ben, Trevor, and Toph all participated. Most frequent game played in May was Puerto Rico, which I'm really loving despite really not being very good at it at all, followed by Pandemic. Everyone seems to be enjoying both games and I look forward to delving further into those two and adding to the variety as we continue our weekly meetup.

My final bit of gaming in May is my return to Magic: the Gathering. I played a fair amount about a year ago when Shards of Alara, Conflux, and Alara Reborn were the newest sets, and I built a couple of decks. Now I have the full Zendikar block to play with and there seems to be some pretty fun stuff in there.

I haven't had much of an opportunity to play yet, mostly I've been tossing around ideas and trying to come up with a fun standard deck to play, and I've been trying to sell off the more valuable of my standard legal cards before they rotate out and lose value. Really one of the tricks to maintaining the value of one's collection in Magic is to try to sell or trade cards while they still hold strong value, and acquire others that are either older and are poised to better maintain price, or are brand new and will be tournament legal for another year or two. I have certainly sold some cards I would rather keep this time around, but I can always reacquire them a year down the road once they're a lot cheaper.

Besides building a new deck for standard tournament play I've been working on two EDH (Elder Dragon Highlander) decks. This is a format that I love (from very limited play, of course, but I love the idea!), and it tends to be a very inexpensive format to play. Because of this I'm able to maximize the play value of my limited card pool and can convert a few expensive cards into a decent stack of EDH staples.

Looking forward to June, I intend to play a bunch of magic, continue my weekly online board game night, and get to playing a whole lot more strategy board games! Also, perhaps I'll write a little more often in this ol' blog. My fan is demanding higher output, so I'll try to write just a little bit more than I have these last couple of months...

Games in 2010

Thus far in 2010 I've had several opportunities to get board games to the table. I tried Pink Godzilla for the first time with Trevor, Ghost Stories online with Tom and in person with Sarah and Zach, and a bunch of party games with a group of eight.

Pink Godzilla

Trevor and I were able to meet up in Worcester, MA while I was attending a brief culinary conference at the College of the Holy Cross. He brought Carcassonne and Pink Godzilla, though we only had time for a play of the latter. The game pits players against one another as rival video game designers attempting to program the best and most elaborate titles. Although fairly light and quite random, there are a few interesting mechanics in Pink Godzilla, and enough strategy that I would gladly give it at least a few more plays. The powerful cards can certainly come up at times that makes it much easier for one player to gain the advantage, but there are tough decisions to be made as to which cards a player keeps in his hand and which he gives his opponent the opportunity to steal. An auction mechanic for the commonly available cards on the table also plays a part in reigning in the random aspects of the game.

Ghost Stories

I am up to perhaps 5 or 6 plays of this excellent cooperative title, yet have only been victorious once--last night with the Mrs. and Zachary. Though we seemed to be overwhelmed by ghosts fairly early in the game, we were somehow able to hold them off just long enough to get a chance to face Wu Feng, who happened to be the best possible incarnation for our situation at the time of his arrival. Zachary died just before the incarnation was drawn, but the Mrs. and I were both in ideal positions with the right mix of Tao tokens to secure victory. Tom and I have played several 2-player games of Ghost Stories but victory has thus far eluded us. I recently read that the 2-player game is the most difficult to win, so perhaps that is not that surprising. I feel that I've mastered most of the rules at this point, although there are still a couple of gray areas. Ghost Stories still feels like a very similar game to Pandemic, although very differently themed.

Party Games

The Mrs. and I hosted six guests last weekend for games. We played Bananagrams (the Mrs. and I for the first time), Pit, Time's Up: Title Recall, and Say Anything. I would say Zachary and Chris were the two best at Bananagrams (with Rosa close behind), and I was perhaps the worst, only really being in close competition for one of our 8-10 plays. Pit was frantic and fun, though very light on the strategy. We found that since the bear and the bull tend to pull scores down each round, that it actually takes quite a while for anyone to build up enough points to secure the victory. The rules suggested playing to 500 points, but since we were eager to play other games we cut that down to 150, which is a good thing since even that score took quite a while to achieve. Next was Time's Up which has become our favorite party game, although the Mrs. has proven to be much better at it than I, a fact further proven by her and Zachary mopping the floor with the rest of us at the game (although Zach himself is a theater professor, so he perhaps has a natural inclination to be good at charade style activities!) Say Anything rounded out our night and wasn't begun until past 11:30 pm, so people must have been having a good time to be up for yet another game that would take us into the new day to complete. As usual, the game did not disappoint. It is essentially Apples to Apples but with slightly deeper scoring and much more creativity.

Here's hoping for much more frequent boardgaming in 2010!