Mik's Moment of Zen, pt. 7

"Teaching through gaming through life experiences."

A Couple o' Keepers...

Last week we grabbed a couple of games of both Carcassonne and Small World. Being the night before Thanksgiving (happy turkey day, by the way) we had a few friends in from out of town. They don't have the gaming groups they used to in their new locales, so many were eager for some hanging (and geeking) out around the game table.

A couple of folks were familiar with Carcassonne, it making appearances in the most unlikely of households, but even for those who had never heard of it, it's very easy to pick up. I've been so used to playing with my daughter (and not scoring farmlands), I got my arse handed to me in the final score tally, arrrgh! Although we had intended to play Galaxy Trucker (great game), everyone was interested in trying out Small World instead.

This is another one of those great intro type boardgames. Carcassonne had a couple of people on familiar ground, sure, but Small World was new to everyone at the table, many had never even heard of it. I should also mention that one of our buddies there was a non-gamer to boot (gasp!). The game's an impressive sight when it's all set up, and again, the simple mechanics and fun-to-play environment makes it ideal for casual gaming with plenty of replay value, plus, it has plenty of colorful hands-on pieces with entertaining art.


So for the casual and hardcore gamer alike, these are two keepers that should be 'must-haves' in everyone's inventory and game closets. For a mere $20 bucks you can pick up Carcassonne, and this gem of a tile-layer has infinite replay value and can be played by both stalwart game veterans as well as your rookie aunts and uncles alike. Small World is a bit more pricey at about $50 bucks, but you get all the production value and quality of a $100 Fantasy Flight game, with half the learning curve, and half the pricetag!

3rd Annual Weekend o' Gaming

The ManCabin v3.0

It's been three years in row, so I guess we've got something of an event on our hands. A little backstory; I was a non-traditional college student, going in at age thirty, so it was kind of a big deal for me and my family. Upon graduating with my undergrad in Anthropology, as a graduation present, my wife and daughter gave me a cabin for the weekend up in the Smoky Mountains for me and my buddies to geek out in. Very cool. Well a year later, and I subsequently plowed through my Master's in Education and graduated a second time, thus a second cabin! So once again we packed up the XBox360, a bunch o' boardgames, and a metric ton of food and drink and headed again into the mountains.

We had no celebratory reason this year, but we had to do it again! So most of the original crew, plus a few guest appearances made plans and got yet another cabin with the intent of enjoying good food, fine drink, and nothing but gaming. Of course this year we all pitched in, which was nice for me! The big joke this year was doing a schedule and a "sign up matrix", but all jokes aside, there were a bunch of games to be played. I think our headcount at its height was at ten? Understandably, the entire affair blew by rather quickly, so my memory's a tad suspect, I did keep some notes though, heh.


In the previous two years we took some liquor with us, sure, but also a keg (Harp both years I think). For the sake of calories, ahem, we tripled the Scotch and Bourbon allotment, and left the keg behind (though we still had beer mind you). For food we go all out, and this year was no different making sure steaks we're at the top of the list. Sadly though, we didn't do ribs, which I enjoy quite a bit. This year I was able to bring some of my homegrown peppers though to juice up a little homemade salsa, woohoo!


A stack o' games

You'll have to excuse the blurriness of my pics, I was using my phone because I forgot a proper camera! The above pile of games is just the tip of the iceberg too. We also brought along a host of RPG's, my XBox360 with a ton of music games, and even had a Wii thrown in there for good measure. Only two games come to mind that were missing to my lament; Shadows Over Camelot, and Last Night on Earth (with its expansion).



Blood Bowl!

Wiht the pending release of the video game, plus all the teams I've been cranking out lately, we were in the mood for some serious Blood Bowl! We had a lot of gear on hand for some pure mayhem on the pitch and at one point we were sporting three games simultaneously. It was good because we had a few players who had never had a chance to play before, so they got to try their hands at it too. We had an obscene amount of teams on hand to pick from as well, I think we were pushing twenty completed teams out of the box.


Galaxy Trucker

I've only reported on this game once before, but man, if I knew it was this good, we would've been playing it much more all along. I can safely say that if this game wasn't the MVP of the weekend, it's near the tip of a top five list. We had a lot of people rotating in and out of this one, and many were still coming back for more.


Red November

I know I've posted a couple of times about this one. It's a fun game, a blast really, and I was really looking forward to it maxed out with eight player. Well, we did just that, but it wasn't the frenetic, zany fun I thought it might have been, too many players bogged it all down. There's a reason BBG suggests that it's best with four peeps.


Settlers of Catan

Well, if Galaxy Trucker wasn't quite first place, this one was. Oddly enough, there were a good number of people at the cabin who hadn't played this gem either. Like a knucklehead, after our last big game of Cities and Knights, I left all the pieces of one color behind, arrgh! We were only able to play five player games, but play them we did. The Settlers table was on fire, with many different players rotating in and out of this one too.


Carcassonne

You can't have a gaming weekend without everyone's favorite Meeplecentric winner, Carcassonne! This game is pretty amazing, no matter how many times I play it, it stays awesome. It was Spiel des Jahres after all (so was Catan), with an incredibly easy learning curve, easy setup, and amazingly infinite replay value.


Ca$h 'n Gun$

And now for something completely different. Ca$h 'n Gun$ is just plain fun, that's all there is to it. You play gangsters/crooks/mobsters/whatever and your goal is to split up the loot after a heist, of course your number one negotiating tool is the pistolero. You have a deck of cards in front of you ranging from bluff to full auto, and on the count of three, you point your foam pistol at another player. Before the action cards are revealed you can choose to duck down or stay in the 'negotiation'. Whoever is left standing at the end of each round splits the pot evenly. At the end of the game, those who are left alive compare their fat stacks o' cash and the big winner is (obviously) the one with the most dough.


Bear sign!

You can't have a trip to the Smokies without a bear sighting! This was taken off the back deck, but we saw this fellow early on walking about ten yards in front of our front door. Judging from the little log book left in the cabin, the last few families staying in the same place had also seen bears, multiple ones at times. Pretty cool...


That's a Wrap!

What a blast! I get in a lot of gaming, sure, but once a year I really look forward to this, I'm sure we'll continue the tradition next year. A lot of our gaming buddies who have moved on show up for it too, coming from many states away. What would I change for next year? I don't know, maybe less gaming and more hanging out, haha! I will say this, don't try to use Splenda as a substitute for sugar when making Sangria!

Like I said, I kept a tally of the games being played just for posterity. We played a ton of Rock Band, Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero World Tour, Wii Golf and the like, but I'm not counting those below. Here's the breakdown of what all went down:

Carcassonne: four plays
Munchkin: one play
Robo Rally: one play
Blood Bowl: three plays
Galaxy Trucker: six plays
Settlers of Catan: six plays
Red November: one play
Ca$h 'n Gun$: four plays

Best Game of Carcassonne...EVER!

She may look like her mom, but she's got my geek genes!

Well, this is something new, my daughter and I sat down for a friendly afternoon match of the great game Carcassonne! She's seen me play countless times, and has even painted a few figures of her own, but this is the first time that both worlds truly intersected. I've got an XBox 360 (which has been collecting dust lately, but I did download a trial version of the video game port of Carcassonne, and it's not bad at all. She's been playing that off and on, so is familiar with Meeple placement, scoring, and the overall scope of it. This would be the first time the two of us sat down and played the original version.


Prepping the table for the game


Turn 1!

The only difference here is that we were not scoring farmlands. Oddly enough, the trial version on the XBox doesn't either (it might if you buy the full version). She picked black and I picked green and then turn one was under way.




The game progresses...


I didn't set out to slaughter her in her first game ever, but also I'm of the mind that "letting people win" just doesn't pay off in the long run. Obviously I helped along the way helping to remind her to 'finish that road', or 'that monastery needs more surrounding pieces', etc. She needed zero help with placing tiles and always looked over the whole board, turning her tile in different directions to see which was the best fit. A couple of times she would say things to herself aloud that made me smile, like, "I can't put it there, it'd help your city", and "Ooh, a church, I'm definitely putting a Meeple on there!"


Pulling ahead!

After completing a rather large city section with a couple of tile pieces (which I thought she'd never finish), she pulled ahead in the points. This of course bolstered her confidence as she continued to play, and I thought to myself, "Okay, the gloves are off!".


and the winner is...

Okay, well maybe the gloves weren't "off" per se, but we had a great go at it nonetheless. The final score however was her with 64 points, and me with just 60, a pretty close game! How can a game like this be anything but fun? She held her attention throughout the entire game, beginning to end, and didn't get discouraged when she was behind in the points. The funniest moment was when she asked at what point do we hit the "Y" button, which in the XBox trial game let's you watch the match on auto-computer.

This opens up a lot of possibilities, and considering I can't even get my wife to play Scrabble, my daughter might be the only gaming buddy in the house on a rainy day. Maybe the spouse will have to cave in once she sees both of us having fun. What's next? Well obvious some more miniature painting, and maybe a basic combat tabletop system, she does enjoy playing with all of my old Mage Knight stuff. Maybe Kids of Catan?


Cleanup is as important as setup

Saturday Night Shenanigans

It wasn't even last Saturday night, haha. Our buddy Todd was in town, and we were looking for some social geekin' out with little prep work involved. This of course meant Munchkin and Carcassonne were in order, so away we go.


Meeple-mania; it all starts out simply...




I never win at Settlers of Catan, but my results are a tad better at Carcassonne, however it wasn't to be as Todd pulled ahead at the last minute for a rookie win.


For the record, it's very hard to get an 'action shot' of either game.


Kick in the door, kill the critters, take the treasure, and stab your buddies. Simple enough...


It could have been an epic comeback, but as you can see I don't have that much of a chance. A Cleric cursed with Necrophobia, oh, the irony, haha...

Meeple-Mania

This week saw a return to some semblance of a regular geek night. After warming up with some Rush on Rock Band, we slid into some tasty riffs with Carcassonne. I don't play this great little game enough, if you don't know about it, or haven't heard of it, just click here, they'll lay it out better than I could anyway. It plays fast, simple to learn, every game is different, and if you fancy, there's a plethora of expansions out there for it. The Tower expansion in particular looks interesting. Shown above is the core set...and a Donut of Doom™. We played three total games, and each of the three players (me, Andy, and Ray) won one game a piece. As a footnote, you may recall I've never won a game of Settlers of Catan, so seeing a nice distribution of wins was quite refreshing.


In the third game, agricultural land-grabbing was all the rage.



Stretched out pic of the first game, in which Andy (yellow) was victorious.



For those of you keeping score at home...no, this doesn't earn you any points!



Me and my soon-to-be-completed twenty-six point city.



The full board of game one.



The first few turns of game two, which would eventually go to Ray.



Full board of game two.



Beginning to game three, in which I would eventually emerge the winner...shockingly.



Every game has its humble beginnings.



...the Donuts of Doom™.