A Whole Lot of Losing (Unless You Are Matt)

Erik Von Burg and Nathan Winchester stopped by Friday night for a bit of gaming. We started the night playing a little Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game. I enjoy this little co-op game with its dungeon romp theme and light gameplay and I'm glad Erik suggested it. Of course, we started off on the wrong foot as Erik's dwarf cleric started getting hammered on (no pun intended). We settled down and started kicking butt and exploring, but we eventually grouped our guys together to try and take advantage of the cleric's healing powers and some room traps got the better of us. Ah well - now I need to try and get my son interested in this again so we can play through some of it.

We finished picking up and Nathan got a call that Matt Longieliere was on his way over. We thought he'd be a short while, so I pulled out the game of titanic battles and high stakes - Colossal Arena. It has been years since I've played this, but I'll have to admit I'm glad I've kept this one. This is a fun little gambling game with a cool theme - mythological creatures battling it out! We went through the rules for Nathan and then Matt arrived, so we simply dealt him in and re-explained the rules. Matt started the game betting on the Amazons and secretly betting on them as well. We revealed this, and yet the rest of us spent our time killing each other's baddies off and it was pretty obvious Matt was going to win. Unfortunately, we ran out of cards in the last round before we could rid ourselves of Matt's crew and he walked away with an easy win.

We finished the night playing Ra. Unlike last weekend, I made some pretty poor choices. I went for monuments and some civs, but in the last round I didn't get a civ and was really far behind the others in points. The game ended with drawing Ra's and most of us were really off from Matt, who had scored huge draws with his good suns. So Matt walked away from the night as the only winner. The rest of us were winless for the evening. Ah well.