Gaming

This weekend saw a lot of games being played. Friday started out with Justin Easley and I whipping through a quick two-player game of Samurai. I had a good run of tiles and never even used my Ronin. Two days later, Justin got revenge, beating Mike Garrett and I in a three-player match (in which I got completely schooled). Such is Samurai - I can only seem to get on track for one mode and tend to then get killed in the others (number of players).
Saturday, Steve Wicklund brought his two sons Chance (13) and Jeremy (10) over and another fellow from work, John Davis, joined us for an afternoon game of Descent: Journeys in the Dark. The boys had played, though not defeated the first scenario before. John hadn't played, so I started them on the first one (I being the Overlord). With semi-experienced players and an easy scenario they players didn't have much difficulty. I got a few kills in, but nothing to keep up with their gains. I forget how quick kids are - they remember everything and Steve's boys were very fast at counting - it was like they could tell you all the totals the second the dice stopped moving. Descent is a lot of fun anyway, but it was quiet a bit of fun playing with a couple of players that were VERY into the game. I'd love to show them a bunch of other games I know they'd love, but I'd hazard a guess that they will want to play Descent again if they come back (and that's ok).
Later that night, Mike Garrett stopped over and we got in a game of BattleLore - Mike being familiar with the basics of the system, prompted me to just start us on the first Lore scenario. Mike got an early lead, but I managed to fight back to make the game 4-5. Mike tried repeatedly to shoot down the last unit he needed for a win, but I lucked out and managed to stay in the game (on the same note, I must have hit his Cavalry with flags EVERYTIME I attacked - including a three flagger). I closed in on his guys to try and tie things up, but Mike finally landed the punch he needed to finish me off 6-4.
After that, we pulled out a couple of games that I had on my un-played list. The first was Terra Nova. This is an abstract with a very very thin theme tacked on about settling or some crap. Basically, the board is a hex map with different terrain types (could have been patterns, colors, whatever) under the hexes. First you place your meeples on the board (could have been colored stones or any marker). Then you take turns doing 3 things - moving guys and after moving one (or more), placing fences. When an area with 3 or less terrain types is sectioned off, the majority controlling player scores points based on the size of the area, with bonus multipliers for single or double terrain types. Pretty straight forward and nothing special, but I knocked it off the un-played list. Our major complaint? They short you meeples in two colors. If you play two player, you have to be red and yellow. Three players adds blue. You cannot be green unless you play 4-players. That's just retarded. Same thing that Pompeji did and it is still annoying. Anyway, I'm half interested in trying with three players, but won't be sad if I never do. I actually grok'd the game pretty quickly, but wasn't facinated enough to want to play again either (might have been my getting really tired). We finished up the night playing Zertz, which is part of the Gipf series of two-player abstract games. While I didn't hate it, it was not even close to being as good as Yinsh. Having only played two Gipf games (Yinsh and Zertz), I definitely rank Zertz as my second favorite of the series, but feel certain it will not be second after I try any of the others. Its not a bad game, but there wasn't anything special about it (I won too, so it wasn't even that I lost and hated it) It was even behind Terra Nova for abstracts, so there you have it. Thanks to Mike for helping me knock off a couple games.