Game Night

My wife was off doing something for work this weekend, so Nathan Winchester stopped by after I had the kids in bed. I guess even before that, I started the night with a game of Pokémon with Ashton. He had earned a new deck (with Mightyena on it) and wanted to try it out against a new deck I had picked up for $6 at the Game Depot. Well, my deck was not a good match for his and he wasted me with his Charmeleon in about 5 minutes flat. That's ok, it happens in this game, and I enjoy the glee on his face when he wins that big. And I also like that when he wins REALLY big, he feels bad for me. Mostly I just like playing games with the guy - he's turning into a good gamer.
So, back to when Nathan arrived. I pulled Ido off my shelf for us to try. Nathan is of course almost always willing to play an abstract (a good thing), so off we went. Ido is this strange game where you have two sizes of blocks. Each block is only allowed to move to a space which is the appropriate size for that type of piece and the goal is to move the pieces across the board from your start to your exit space. The trick of the game is that there is a grid "overlay" that you can move - moving it changes the board and possibly moves your pieces around. I'm not sure I saw the strategies or anything, but I apparently grok'd it better than Nathan and pulled off a win. He wants to play again, but he didn't get it out of the gate.
After Ido, Nathan indicated he'd be willing to try out Heroscape. I showed him the folder of cards to look through as I setup the battlefield. I put together the Foresaken Waters battlefield and we played the "advanced game" scenario Winter Holdout (without glyphs). This scenario was 300pt teams, with a 160pt team of reinforcements that can enter the game between turns if you roll 16+. Nathan built a team of mostly Marro: Ne-Gok-Sa, Me-Burq-Sa, Marro Stingers, Marrden Hounds, and Isamu (whom he took with his last 10 points). His reinforcements were Arrow Gruts and Grimnack (he should have taken Krug, but whatever). My army was a mishmash of guys. I had: Syvarris, Theracus, Minions of utgar, Iskra Esenwein and Major Q10 as my reinforcements. I started strong, using my Minions of Utgar to take out Me-Burq-Sa before he could do anything. I also used Theracus to get Syvarris into prime sniping position. Nathan's hounds made up for it and then some, taking out nearly everything else of mine. Luckily, I got my reinforcements on the third round and the Major went to town with his deadly multiple attacks each round. In fact, I was down to a 2hp Major looking at a number of Nathan's squads. Fortunately he didn't have much left in the firepower department and the Major made short work of Nathan's troops. It was close at the end though. Nathan had two gruts left and they had the highground. The Major had one HP left and all it would take was one bad roll for Nathan to swipe away the victory I had fought for. The Major made his defensive rolls and his wrist rocket attack left two smoldering spots where only moments before had been two orcs with bow and arrows.