Wüntercabin Tres!

The views, the spendor...the games!  Another winter (yes, Wünter!) cabin is in the books.  Yes, it was eight months ago, and yes I'm just posting now, but better late than never.  Here's the view I wake up to in the mornings.  Not bad for a game weekend.  Speaking of which...

What is it?  Well due to the popularity of our summer cabins where we get the gang back together annually for nothing but what we always have done, game, we thought we needed more.  Hence a halfway point...the winter version!

If you think this is overkill, you should see the food...and booze!  There's way too many games here, but choices are good, options are good, but trunk space, err, not so plentiful.  I think we got a speeding ticket on the way home.  And destroyed a toilet at Arby's somewhere in the middle.  

Terra Mystica, Quick Pics Post

The game; Terra Mystica.  The beer; Highland Brewing

Player mat up front, game board in the background

The spirit of brotherhood, the spirit of giving

The 'terra' of the game; matching your race to their biome

Controlling, terraforming, conquering, building...it's all here

Last of the quick pics posts, or at least the ones that were queued up.  The game is Terra Mystica and after playing this just one time I was in love and sought it out immediately.  So much replay value, so much in the box, fantastic components, and a ruleset that just doesn't quit.  There's so much to this game I could do an entire series of posts on it, but that's a tale for another time.  Enjoy!

Krosmaster, Quick Pics Post

Kassius Kaos slinging poison gas bombs!

It's a boardgame that plays and feels like a videogame

Grid based movement and multi-combat action

The quality of the pre-painted figs is top notch

Components laid out in the box

Today's quick pics post centers around a boardgame called Krosmaster Arena.  This was picked up as a Kickstarter game but it's pretty widespread now.  It's a fun game, plays fast, and has that chibi-style that has drawn me to a similar game, Super Dungeon Explore.  Of course this one comes painted and it seems the draw here is to collect the different types of characters as singles.

Decanterized

In the background is the excellent boardgame Kemet, remember my incredibly brief review of it not too long ago?

But, this post is the new game room addition of my bourbon decanter!  Bonus for my lead crystal bourbon glasses!

Gaming is an awesome hobby, but aside from the different worlds it takes us to, the strategies (or lack thereof in my case), and lifestyle in general, for me gaming is number one about hanging out with your friends.

Me?  I like to hang out with my friends with maybe a drink in my hand and to this end, I'm not using plastic cups.  As a side note, I still like the games too, so if you're going to drink, drink and game responsibly.  Ha!  Now I know I'm getting old!

I know the blog's been a tad cob-webby, thanks for sticking around readers.  -mik

Kemet; the Boardgame

I was in the draft stages of this one and though I'd get clever and schedule it up. Thinking it'd remain a draft until I was done writing, well, that didn't happen.  Getting warmed back up to blogging means a couple of little rookie mistakes here and there!

What am I talking about tonight?  Kemet, the boardgame!  Frankly it was this review by Shut Up and Sit Down that eventually sold me on it, but I had a very eyebrow-raised eye staring it down just prior to the video.  Sold I was however, and haven't had a bad game yet!

What is it?  An area control, resource manager that's wrapped in an Egyptian theme.  Not just a theme, but you (that would be the BIG human sitting at the table moving around game pieces) are THE Egyptian god.  All of your troops are just fodder and sacrifice for your will.  If the troops ain't dying, you ain't trying.  You can also buy out of a community pool of cool corresponding resources, such as the ability to stargate travel, improve your battle prowess, or even harness big critters to ride around on in battle.  I think the big critters really sold me as well.  Once you get, say, the Sphinx, that's it, there's only one and no one can get one.

There's a great power resource that revolves around your pyramids too; red for battle, white for commerce and religion, and blue for magic.  The resources you draft are only as powerful as your pyramids are.  Of course if you spend all your time upgrading you'll lose the area control battle.  There's a really neat turn/action system too that specifies what you can and can't do, and tracks what you've already done, all very smart-like and efficiently.

It's a bigger box game, and will weigh in at least about fifty bucks, but it's worth it, not for one aspect or another, but as a game to break out now and again or every game night for the next six months.  It's a keeper; cool theme, solid rules, great components...the whole package.  Enjoy!

Dungeon Roll; the Dice Game

If you haven't heard of Dungeon Roll, well, now you have!

Dungeon Roll was another Kickstarter game I backed months ago.  For a mere fifteen bucks however this was a huge no-brainer, and that included shipping.

What is it?  A press-your-luck dice game themed in a dungeon crawl with your active dice representing fighters and thieves, wizards, and the like.  The dice you roll against are the denizens of the depths; undead, oozes, goblins, and of course dragons.

Each 'level' you venture down you're rolling less dice, but of course each lower level of the dungeon where you're rolling less, the bad guys are rolling more.  Go as deep as you dare, before calling it quits and heading to the tavern.  You 'cash in' the level you went furthest as experience and then the turn goes around the table for the next active dungeoneer.  At the end of three rounds tally up the point and score it.  The rules of course are a bit more in-depth than this, but surprisingly not by much.

Is it a deep game?  No, no not at all.  Is it a fun beer and pretzels game, definitely.  Fantastic filler game while waiting for the rest of your friends to show up?  Without a doubt.  A short and quick 'just one more game' before calling it a night?  Yup.

It's still ridiculously cheap looking around, and although you don't get the exclusive Mimic box like what's pictured here, or some of the bonus cards obtained as goal rewards, it's still worth picking up and putting in rotation.

Hegemonic; the Boardgame

A few months back me and 999 friends backed the boardgame Hegemonic on Kickstarter.

At the time I had visions of having all these concurrent sci-fi themed 4x style games, but that's died down just a tad, still got the game though.

Being Kickstarter you always get those teaser extras and stretch goals, in this case neat features like felt bag, metal coins, and the like were fantastic and didn't feel tacked on but add to the game.

We've played it once, a large six player fest while learning the rules along the way, it was good and we all seemed to 'get it' after just a few turns.  I've got to compare it to Eclipse, because they are both in the same vein and give you the same experience; a sprawling space game with so many options to victory, and so much to do getting there.

Eclipse is a great game, Hegemonic is a great game, and sadly they're just similar enough where you don't need both.  Also sadly, Hegemonic might edge out Eclipse in accessibility alone.  It all depends on the group though, if your group loves getting into one game for a while, and learning it inside and out, and making it 'the game' for a while, well Eclipse might be the one for you.

If you're looking for a fun, immersive game that you can break out once in a while and get stuck in quickly, then you'd be leaning to Hegemonic.

I know this is a pretty light 'review' if you can call it that at all.  Hegemonic has great components, is big on production value, and has a rulebook that makes all the concept easy to grasp and explains the rules rather well.  Our gameplay was a lot of fun, and many of the guys were kind of hooked about halfway through, talking about this feature or another that appealed to them while the game was taking place.

Looking around online you can find both Hegemonic and Eclipse at about the same price, which is much, much cheaper than I paid for either game I might add.  You can't go wrong either way, or just get both.  Rock on.

Friday Rucht Hour: The View from RuchtCon

Usually, around St. Patrick's Day, I run a gaming convention from my house. This year, I went big. As big as I could get. I had some folks flying into my tiny convention. There were the locals and there were folks from Georgia and North Carolina. Baltimore was as furthest distance traveled. Check out the dragon cake!

Anyhow, the weekend started with a round of roleplaying games. There was Gothic Earth Eternal, a Pathfinder-based horror game that I wrote. There was also Deadlands and Inspectres. Inspectres was interesting - basically it's a game where you form a Ghostbusters franchise of your own and go around bustin' ghosts!

Saturday morning was cartoons, sugar cereal and boardgames. We played more than one rousing game of Zombicide, which was great fun. Nick drove a car around the board, running over hordes of undead while the rest of us scrambled for resources.

While zombie killin' was going on, elsewhere people were playing Elder Sign, which is a dice-centric game which is the nephew of Arkham Horror. 

While some zombies were bashed and Elder Gods were battled, other folks adjourned upstairs for a game of Arabian Nights! 

After that, we adjourned back to role-playing games. I had tremendous fun playing the Trail of Cthulhu, which uses the Gumshoe system. In the Gumshoe system, you are allowed to "spend" skill points in order to gain or ensure success, which is great for investigative scenarios. It's not a question of if you find a clue, but how good the clue is that you receive. Meanwhile, other folks had fun with Mouseguard and Shadowrun. 

In the evening, for me it was another round of Gothic Earth Eternal, while Fantasy Flight's Only War got off of the ground. In the kitchen, people battled martians in a 50's sci-fi mash up using the Savage Worlds rules. 

Finally, on Sunday morning, we got together one last time to do that old favorite - Fiasco. However, I was lucky enough to play Jason Morningstar's newer game - Durance. I'll just say this. Mik, Durance is right up your alley. 

All right, that's all for now. Happy Friday everyone!

Non-GW GW Boardgames

Early last month in a state-of-the-blog update I had mentioned that more and more boardgaming had been working its way into the fold.  Here's a bit more of that.

Since then I have picked up these two Fantasy Flight Games, which in a neat twist are both based on beloved GW properties, yet are decidedly not GW.

First up is Blood Bowl: Team Manager, and where I love regular Blood Bowl, after almost twenty years of playing it's hard to stay enthused.  This one isn't supposed to replace the original, but is another take on the Blood Bowl experience.  In about an hour you will take your team through an entire season of ups and down, wins and losses.  I haven't torn into it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Next up is Space Hulk: Death Angel which is an even more abstract game centered on just as anchored a property.  I would say I've heard mixed reviews on this one, but the positives seem to be far outweighing the negatives on this one.  It supports up to a whopping six players, but one of the main selling points is that it can also be played solo too.  This purchase was made even better by the fact that I ended up with the first two card expansions as freebies to boot.

All that said, I am gearing up to get into my boardgame collection, dust off and give some gaming love to those forgotten titles, re-learn a bunch of gems that have been neglected, and put these new games through their paces.  The responses were positive for some boardgame reviews, and that's what I'm going to do. 

Until next time, rock on!

Sunday Rucht Hour: The View from Dragon*Con - Gaming Edition

So, last time I talked about Dragon*Con and showed off some of the cool costumes. What about the gaming?

Well, because our gaming panel track expanded this year, I didn't get to game as much as I would have liked. Still, got in a playtest of Alpha Wolf Pack with some of the crew at Epic Games. That was very much fun. Those guys are already big fans. It was pretty neat to sit down with the president of the company, their lead level designer, one of their lead developers, and one of the founders of the Escapist website and roll some dice with them.

I also got to hang out with Darwin Bromley, one of the fathers of modern board gaming. He's largely responsible for bringing Settlers of Catan over to the United States and turning board games from monopoly into something akin to what we have now. He taught me how to play Seven Wonders, and we played a game of it. Seven Wonders was the big hit in terms of board games that year. It was like Argricola in scoring, but had a neat mechanic where you passed cards around to your left or your right. You had to pull cards to make runs or matches, but you had to pull cards so that your opponents to your left or right couldn't make runs or matches.

Jason Bulmahn, the lead Pathfinder designer, hung out with us quite a bit as well. He even taught us a few drinking games.

Jason Morningstar was there, heralding the indie spirit, and ran a fantastic panel for us where everyone got to participate in some indie game techniques through live participation. He helped run the Games on Demand tables, so if you came, you could have played in a game with Jason Morningstar. Clint and Jodi Black showed up as well (the folks who run Savage Worlds). Eloy LaSanta, one-may publishing house was present as well, being the jack of all trades.

The big coup, of course, was getting Monte Cook and Tracy and Laura Hickman. Monte was there to talk about his TSR days and to hear about his new project Numenera. Tracy Hickman ran our charity event, which was a role-playing session with the Guild. The cast of the Guild played a table top RPG with Tracy and we auctioned off one seat at that table for charity - our annual drive for Lou Geherig's disease.

Anyhow, I'll leave you with a few pictures of our panels and the Warmachine tournament which ran in the gaming basement.

Jason Morningstar, Tracy Hickman, and Laura Hickman do a panel on Storytelling through Roleplaying

It's the Legion of Everblight vs. Trollkin! Both sides were exquisitely painted. 

Great shot of some Trollkin on the move.

Two warbeasts slug it out. 

He wasn't used in the tournament, but he made for a great picture - the Trollkin Mountain King. Amazing model and paint job. 

A size comparison of that Mountain King.

An exquisitely painted Deathjack and support squad.

Infinity! Check out that awesome Infinity terrain! 

And here's the big panel! Tracy Hickman runs an RPG with the Guild playing the game! 

Some End-of-Summer Notes

I haven't been the most active here on the blog, you can always count on Thursdays of course, and you can count on Mondays and Fridays, ahem, mostly. I kid of course, and am more than delighted to have both Miller and Rucht on board. Because of them Mik's Minis is starting to become something a little bigger and a lot better, if you haven't checked out their weekly features, you should, links above.

The garden still grows. I got frustrated with the zucchini and removed it with extreme prejudice. Other than that, we are rolling along as you can see here.

Speaking of what you see here, as you can tell from my shoes and fancy moisture-wicking shirt, I am still playing tennis. I wish I could report a ton of wins, heh, but they seem to allude me. I am getting much needed exercise (which is my primary goal) and I am starting to feel myself get better at the game. It's been an interesting experience, and it has been a surprisingly mental exercise as well. Anytime you're playing strangers in direct head-to-head competition in a purely physical arena you're bound to learn all kinds of things about yourself. It truly becomes a 'make or break' situation.


We've been gaming too, but as I have mentioned many times in the past, we lack some focus. Hopefully Infinity will remedy that to an extent, but other great games seem to be hanging in the wind; such as the new Marvel RPG and a promising Legends of Anglerre campaign that never got off the launchpad. It's funny, with all the focus on minis (buying, painting, the like) it is these two roleplaying games that I miss the most.

On the other hand, lack of focus and not having a minis game prepped and ready to roll does mean that there has been a good deal of board-gaming going on. With all of the solid selections out there right now, this certainly can't be seen as a complaint. I've recently taken stock of my own boardgame collection and have been kicking around the thought of doing a new series where I learn/re-learn what I've got, play it with the group at least once, then review it here. I recently ordered the Gears of War boardgame, so that may be the first one I do if and when that happens.

Reaper Bones: Too Good to Pass Up?

The sheer thought of adding 200+ unpainted figures to the queue is laughable really, in my neck of the woods anyway. Not to mention adding all of those figures in one, single shot. The Reaper Bones Kickstarter however may be too good to pass up.

For the 'Vampire' level you get all of the figs shown here on the left, by the time lunch rolls around here on the eastern seaboard there's a good bet owlbears and griffons will be included as well. This brings the total closer to about 220 figs, or about .45 cents each.

I've got a bit of geekin' out money squirreled away and I was eye-balling Super Dungeon Explore, which is a fun, light boardgame that comes filled to the gills with 52 cool looking miniatures. A game I can play with friends and family, and a lot of figs to paint. An extra thirty bucks and I get three times the number of figs with the Reaper deal.

A hundred bucks could also buy the excellent boardgame Eclipse, one of those games that you're always glad your buddies own because normally you wouldn't drop a hundred bucks on a single game.

Bah, I don't know. I'm an impulsive buyer, but often suffer buyer's remorse as well. I'm a minis gamer, but also not painting a lot of minis right now. There's other boardgames that have been on my wishlist for some time like Dominant Species, Eminent Domain, Alien Frontiers...heck, I could almost get all three of those.

So I don't know, with the Reaper deadline approaching (about 57 hours) I do have a little breathing room to think about it, but I still don't have a clue. The figs would be a great haul, and at a great price. Some boardgames would get more use though, without a doubt. Super Dungeon Explore solves both issues to an extent.

What do y'all think?

Sunday Rucht Hour: ManCabin Round Up pt. 2

Continuing the game count at ManCabin....

Last Night on Earth 

After our rousing game of Epic Spell Battles, we got together a game of Last Night on Earth. Now, Last Night is probably one of my favorite games of all time. If you don't already know what this game is  - it's a cinematic zombie survival game. One or more players plays the zombies, while one or more people play the heroes. Mik has his own review of the game here.

What makes Last Night on Earth so distinctive is its bent towards the cinematic. Zombie players can play cards that make the lights go out in a building, zombies appear out of nowhere, or characters to make stupid decisions like splitting up. Heroes can gather weapons like chainsaws, dynamite, and even fence posts. The zombies start out as slow, but far tougher than the human heroes. As heroes gather more weapons and other playing cards, they become more powerful. However, each scenario has a turn limit, so human better hope they peak early enough to make a difference!

The mechanics for this game are excellent. They are very easy to learn. The game is quick to play as well. You can play a game in two to three hours. Because of these two attributes, it's an excellent gateway game for people just getting into boardgames, or a game that you can play with non-geeks.

Lords of Waterdeep

In a complete surprise, Lords of Waterdeep was the MVP game of the cabin. We played multiple games of Lords of Waterdeep. What made this game so appealing for many of us was that it was a lighter version of Agricola - which, if you've played it - sort of needs a lighter version.

Like Last Night, the rules of the Lords of Waterdeep were quick to learn and each game was quick to play. Again, hitting that two to three hour sweet spot. In this game, you play a Lord of Waterdeep, a character from the Forgotten Realms literature or game material. For example, I got to play as Mirt the Moneylender. As someone who played in the Forgotten Realms back in the day, it was pretty delightful to be able to be ol' Mirt.

Each Lord of Waterdeep attempts to gain the most influence points. You gain influence points by completing quests. You complete quests by sending adventurers on these quests. Thus, it's a resource gathering game, where the resources are thieves, wizards, priests, or fighters. For example, your quest might be to deal with one of the local thieves guilds, and you can only do that if you have 4 thieves, 3 fighters, 1 wizard and 1 priest.

You can see here - the cubes are resources, while the meeples are agents.

To gather these resources, you have to send agents out into the city. This plays like Agricola in that you have to place down a counter, which represents your agent, to an area on the board which gains you specific resources. Place an agent on a certain place on the board, and you might deny your opponent that spot. You might also play an intrigue card to steal resources from another player. While there are a few ways to put the screws to your opponent, the game mainly rewards players who can form a plan of action and gather the most resources. Mainly, you're playing against the board and the game.

The game was so popular with our group because it was quick to learn, fast to play, and a great social game. There are games that are so intense that you don't really talk to your friends while you play. This wasn't one of those games. Plenty of drinking and joking went on at the table.

Catacombs

Well, I can't rave about this game enough. I almost didn't get to play it, too. On Sunday, I was milling about, having coffee, and Mik kept pushing me to play Catacombs. "You've been talking about his game for six months! Come on! Go play it!" I had played it two years ago at a past ManCabin. So, I cracked open the box. In about fifteen minutes, I had read and understood the rules. Then, I gathered some people and played. If you want to read more detailed, pictured, and complete review of the game, find Mik's version here.

Each room has barriers which make it harder to just sail across the board and smash an opponent. 

The game is a dexterity game. One person is the dungeon keeper who plays all of the monsters in a dungeon, while the rest of the players are an adventuring party, who are making their way through a dungeon. Each time the players conquer a room, a card is flipped, revealing another room. If the players survive, they eventually reach a final room with a boss monster, controlled by the keeper.

So, here's where the dexterity aspect comes into play. You don't move pieces around a board, you flick them, the same way you would a paper football. If a piece is flicked off of the board, you place it back on the board where it left it. The adventurers and monsters fight each other by bumping each other. Bump your fighter pog into an orc pog, and you inflict a point of damage. Some monsters take a single hit to kill, others require two.

Where the game gets nuanced is all of the different abilities each monster or adventurer has. The archer, for example, can flick smaller, wooden pieces at opponents to hurt them, while staying in the back. The wizard can summon a skeleton pog to flick at opponents, or place a shield counter on the board which blocks opponents. The barbarian can rage for multiple flicks (multi-attack, essentially). And the thief gets extra movement.

Again, very quick to learn and very quick to play. I bought a copy of this game because it seems to have high replay value and it's so easy to pick up. I recently played this with my home group and had one of the other players be the keeper. Yep, it's easy enough that you can give a newbie the keeper job.

Anyhow, all for now.

ManCabin Round Up

So, as you all know, we recently gathered for our annual summit - ManCabin. Or, as it's known in my more polite circles, "our gentleman's retreat".

Much drinking was done, much gaming was had. No one wants to hear about how drunk we got, so here's my review of the games I played. Keep in mind that these are only the games that I played. There were many games going on at any given time.

Dominion

Chances are, if you do any amount of boardgaming, you've heard of this game. Mik has already mentioned it here.

Anyhow, it's a deck building game - of which there are now about a dozen clones. Everyone starts with a hand of cards full of money. Each card is a "coin" worth only 1. With the coin, people buy stuff from a central bank of nine different cards. Each card does something different. The idea is to buy cards that will help you draw more cards into your hand, shut down opposing players, trash cards from your hand, or any other variety of things. The end goal is to create a small deck of cards that will allow you to buy points of dominion. The player with the highest number of points at the end wins.

This is a very popular game because of its ease to play, quickness of play, and depth of mastery. Plus, it's like playing a collectable card game without having to buy booster packs. It's an excellent game to get people who aren't into hardcore gaming into the hobby. Or as a bridge game that you can bring out with the family or non-gamer friends.

I won't go more into it, because I'm probably already preaching to the choir, here.

Mansions of Madness

I prepped all week for this game, before bringing it to ManCabin. Prepping all week? A little intense? Not at all. Mansions of Madness is one of the more innovative games that I've seen in quite a while and I prepped for it all week because I wanted to get it right.

In Mansions of Madness, one player is the Keeper, who plays against the other players. A Dungeon Master of sorts. The game takes place in a mansion of some kind. The mansion is generated ahead of time with tiles. In this game, the investigators are trying to unravel a mystery. To give you an idea of the scope of mystery and suspense in this game, let me give you a sample set up:

Your investigators are driving down a road, when suddenly your car hits a small child in the middle of the road. Getting out, you try to find the small boy, but he's nowhere to be found. Distraught, you travel to a nearby house and are let in by the butler. As you look around, you see that the house is covered with paintings of the boy - the same boy you swear you hit with your car....

And that's the set up for one of the scenarios (altered a bit so it's not too spoilery)! That's what I love about Mansion of Madness. It's not just about playing a game, but uncovering a mystery and experiencing the atmosphere.

As the players move their characters around the board, they flip over cards, which offer clues to the mystery or items that can help them in their journey. Dark events occur as they do these things. For example, the lights may go out, monsters may appear, the house may catch fire, or people might start to loose their sanity. These events are trigged by the Keeper who must spend threat tokens to pull them off. One of the cooler elements of the game is that many of the key items and locales are locked off by 7th Guest type puzzles. There are combinations that you have to decipher and patterns that you have to connect.

Another cool element of the game is that each time, the end objective of the scenario is hidden. The Keeper is working towards some goal that you don't know about. Your own objective is hidden until you uncover all of the clues. However, as the game counts down, the players' objective is eventually revealed, so as to avoid complete frustration.

In the game that we played, the players didn't discover the objective of the scenario until late in the game, but they had inadvertently foiled my objective most of the game. Through actions that I took and a few clues in the game, they were able to discern part of my objective, which was cool. They were able to win the game without knowing my entire goal.

Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre

The game is as awesome as its title and really easy play. I will definitely have to pick this one up when the budget allows. The premise is easy. Everyone plays the part of dueling wizards, trying to slay the other players at the table.

You slay other players by making spells. To make spells, you are dealt a hand of cards. The cards have the beginning, middle, and ends of spells. To cast spells, you do so on your turn, using either a beginning, middle, and end of a spell or just a middle and end; beginning and end; beginning and middle - etc. Alternatively, you can just play one card to activate a spell.

Spells which use three cards do the most damage and have the most effects, but they are slower than two card or just one card spells. So, where the strategy comes in is banking on how much damage you can take before cranking out a spell of appropriate size to kill your opponent. Throw a really big spell, and you might kill your opponent. But if your opponent uses a quicker spell, he might be able to kill you before you crank out the big, bad spell.

What makes the game ultimately fun is that the spells themselves are hilarious and as over-the-top as the title of the game. Also, it's written specifically in the rules that you must adopt your best grandiose wizard voice when you cast each spell. We enforced this rule at the cabin and one player lost his spell because he didn't use his wizard-y voice. Heh.

Okay - I've rambled enough. I'll finish the round-up in my next post.

The Cabin v6.0

Two days from we'll be kicking off our sixth mini-con of supergaming and culinary indulgences. Tomorrow we've got another Thor's Day Hero, and Friday I'm sure Mr. L has something special in store for us with Friday Rucht Hour, so this is the last post by me until I get back. I'll try to recap the last five preceding mini-cons:

• Cabin I: I received my first two European boardgames; Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan. We tried to play Blood Bowl at this one, but it was not conducive to extended trains of thought.
• Cabin II: Same location as last time, more games, more food including steaks, ribs, seafood, and a keg of Newcastle.
• Cabin III: We saw a bear come up to the house, someone fell down a flight of stairs but miraculously didn't spill their drink, and two inebriated people who have never played Wii Golf before destroyed all sober challengers who dared swing a virtual club on the same green.
• Cabin IV: This one was cool because there were a pair of standup classic arcade machines. I played more Time Pilot '84 than any XBox or Wii games combined. It was almost an injury-free cabin except for the wasp sting on someone's genitalia.
• Cabin V: This one saw the epic eight hour game of Settlers to date; six players with both Cities and Knights and Seafarer's expansions in full effect.

The gist of it is we rent a modern cabin somewhere up in the mountains. Everyone brings truckload of games, we spend almost as much on beverage and groceries as we do the cabin itself, and we lock ourselves in for a solid three or four days. Gaming, eating, drinking, and even more gaming (and more eating and more drinking). I'll try to get some pics up to the mobile feed and I'll post an AAR when the dust has settled as well and my body has mended.

We found out early on that miniatures games are not suited for the cabins, you've got the hassle of lugging all of those armies up there, plus terrain, but then you have to worry about keeping everything safe and finding all the table space. Quick play games and easy to learn rules are the most imperative. There's a lot of games on this list I am eager to play; Super Dungeon Explore, Eminent Domain, Alien Frontiers, and Stone Age immediately come to mind. We'll see how it all goes, until next time, enjoy!

Gunship First Striking

Lots of good, quality components make up the game...

It has been a while since I first mentioned Gunship: First Strike! here on the blog. Frankly, I was hoping for a whole lot of hands-on time with this game and it just never seemed to happen. Gunship wasn't the only neglected thing around these parts, but neglected it became nonetheless. We remedied that last week however and got some time in finally.

With almost a thousand backers on the Gunship Kickstarter project you can guarantee this one has some staying power. Also, since there's only a couple of days left I thought I would post here and let you know if you've been on the fence with this one, that "yes" it is worth picking up.

Shown here, Oz's ship is getting pretty banged up!

It's a space battle, between you and the enemy, a classic "red versus blue". It's not just the one Gunship however, you've got your huge carrier as well as fighter squadrons. The first thing I thought of was how cool it would be to proxy actual starship models into the game. This wouldn't work for the iconic gunship itself for reasons I'll detail below, but it would be awesome to have some fighters out there as well as a huge carrier ship.

The Gunship is your main weapon in this battle, and the template you use on the table is also where you track what types of armament you have on board as well as where your structural damage is. Your wing weapons, which I thought was cool, are not only interchangeable but the wings themselves can be blown off!

The turn boils down to a few elements but picking the right one and the right strategy is a fluid affair that changes all game long. Do you want to make a run on the enemy's carrier? Maybe you intend to thin the ranks out of fighters? Perhaps you've got it in for the enemy gunship and you're on a collision course with it? Lots of options to think of and that's not even taking the enemy's actions into account.


Your fighter squadron strength is determined by how many are still in action. As they take hits, your squads lose their effectiveness. Your fighters can run point defense for your carrier, escort the gunship, go off on their own strafing runs, and more. They're not going to last the entire game however if you're doing your job right. As a note to parity, Oz's fighters were destroyed completely within a turn of my own being destroyed, so balance is definitely there.


The whole point is to take out the enemy carrier. Oz beat me to the punch, destroying mine first but I had his down to just a few [hit] points when mine broke up and burned up in the atmosphere.

Even though it was out first time, the rules were concise and easy to pick up. Sure, we had to look some things up along the way, but these are the kind of things you only need to learn once and then you've "got it". The gameplay itself was fast and fun, alternating initiatives is a nice touch and keeps everyone on their toes. The theme meshes well with the game itself and you do get the sense of being at the helm of a few elements of a massive space force hell-bent on destroying the enemy ships. Overall? It's a fun game, and cool that it's being produced on a 'garage-level' by someone like the rest of us.

Three days left on Kickstarter, check it out, you may find yourself at the helm of your own Gunship before you know it!

EDIT: I didn't mention this, I guess I should have! I plopped down my support for the project and opted for the economical "Hangar Crew" which guarantees a copy of the game. However, since Gunship: First Strike! has really taken off, over half a dozen stretch goals have been "unlocked", so for your entry level order you get the basic game, but you also get A LOT more add-ons under the hood.