Game Night

Friday Jan 11, 2008
This particular Friday night, I headed over to Justin Easley's place for the BIG EVENT. I had purchased Starcraft with the money I had won on a BGG giveaway to ThoughtHammer. We had all wanted to get in a bit of an epic game and we all wanted to try this out. When I arrived, Justin Kosec was already there, so we sat down and started to punch everything out and sleeve all the cards (thanks for the help guys). About the time we were finishing up, Mike Garrett arrived and helped us finish up. I started going through the rules (which I wasn't at all familiar with) which lasted for at least another hour or more. Once we had the jist of it, we picked factions and started setting up the board, realizing we all had no clue what we were doing or going to do. JE was the blue human faction, JK the orange Protoss faction, Mike was the green zerg, and I the purple zerg. Each faction has its own special victory condition and to some extent ability. Despite warnings to the other players about placing orders, I managed to screw myself up each round of the game. Despite this, I though I might be in good position to win after 4 rounds with an attack on the next turn. Mike reeled me back to reality when he showed me a new tech card he had just played that was going to make any fight a bit harder. And before I could decide what I might do, JE and Mike announced they had won through their special victory condition. When we checked, they were correct and it also turned out that Mike had won the tie breaker. A clumsy first game, but one that we were all eager to play again.
We all weren't ready to go home yet, so Mike pulled out Ca$h 'n Gun$. This game might loosely be described as being like a light version of Reservoir Dogs - players are thugs fighting over a bank robbery pile of loot. Each turn you play a card which either has a shot on it(limited) or a "click" (bluff) then point your foam gun at another player to try and get them to back away from the loot. Get shot or chicken out and you don't get a chance at the loot that round. Get shot enough, and you are done. Its light and fast and with the right group will draw a number of laughs. The first game saw Mike and I split a HUGE pot in the second round, so we called that game a tie and restarted. The second game saw JE and I split a good sized pot, followed by a lot of guns pointed my way, then towards JE. As expected, the guy who hardly ever had a gun pointed his was won - Justin Kosec. After we freed our brains a bit, we ended the night with a game of Race For the Galaxy. Interestingly, I had to go for yet another new strategy to me. About 5 cards in, I got a 6 card that gave me 2 pts for having developments with consume abilities and 1 pt for planets with consume abilities, so I started trying to get as many of those as I could into play. JE was ahead of the rest of us building things, and ended the game with 12 cards on the table. He scored the same as me (at 9 cards) with 33 points. Mike was a bit all over the map and had 30 points. JK had started slowly, but had got to 9 cards down with a lot of points and scored a win by one point with 34.