Trains and (Space) Trucks

Game night this week saw a couple of really cool boardgames hit the table. One, Galaxy Trucker was a return trip, but the other, Ticket to Ride, made its debut. Both were great games, we had a lot of fun,, yada, yada, yada. I had taken some pics, preparing to write it up something fierce, but its just been sitting in my queue doing nothing while I didn't really feel motivated to be my loquacious self. So here you go...


My "level one" ship was a pretty good build. As you can see, I had plenty of crew, including an alien Golgothoid, a smattering of guns, and a decent set of engines for such a small ship. It's funny, as I type this, I realize I shouldn't have had a Golgothoid at all, but a Magentoid, since that's the type of enviro-chamber attached to it.


I won the first race with that little ship, but by the third time around, and the largest ship template, my game turned into a disaster. It was a good ship, but didn't have enough crew, and had way too many connectors open to space.


Galaxy Trucker is an expensive game to say the least (but worth it), so why not protect it as best as you can? Andy's whipped up a clever little organizer to hold all GT's bits, and a card box downloaded from BBG to hold all the, well, cards.

EDIT for Jmezz382: The concept for GT is three fold. First, it is a tile laying game, this is how you build your spaceships. Like any tile laying game, only certain pieces will match up with other pieces, which gets tricky because every ship will need guns, engines, cargo holds, crew, and the like. To make matters even trickier, the ship building phase of the game uses a timer, so it can get pretty hectic when time's running out! Whoever finishes first gets the number one pole position, and so on. After all players are done with their ships, everyone then inspects the other ships for mistakes, and believe me, mistakes will happen.

The second phase is pretty straight forward, remember how I said 'pole position'? Basically all the ships present start on a "track", which is a jaunt around the cosmos, and it is essentially a race. Whoever finishes first wins the most prize money. Prize money determines the overall winner of the game.

The third phase of the game is the race itself, and you're not just zipping around empty space. You encounter all sorts of obstacles, from pirates to meteor swarms which you have to fend off. You also encounter mineral rich planets and abandoned stations that you get loot from which can be cashed in for prize money. Obviously how well your ship is built will determine its success during the race, if you don't have a lot of guns, you'll not be able to fight the pirates. Not a lot of shields means susceptibility to meteors. No cargo space means passing up loot. You have to find the right balance with all your systems, and still be fast enough to win the race.


Then we played Ticket to Ride. It's a tough concept to sell really, umm, you're making train tracks across America. That's it? Yup, but man, I can now see why this game has won so many accolades and awards. Holy crap, man of man it was fun!


I'm not going to review it or anything, there's plenty of places to go for that. It's got all those facets that make games good; innovative mechanics, hands-on pieces, easy-to-learn rules, and of course great replay value, which I'm always looking for. Although it was Andy's game, Chri3 and I thoroughly gave him what-for. The two of us were neck-in-neck the whole game, and had it not for a controversial rule interpretation, I think I could've taken the lead! T2R is a very fun game, and it is also the perfect 'gateway' game for newbies and non-gamers alike. Don't let the concept fool you, the game is an absolute blast.

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

Keep truckin', like the doodah man...

Woohoo! Galaxy Trucker!

The other night we wrapped up a tad early with our Dark Heresy game, so we gave Galaxy Trucker a spin around the block and kicked the tires. It was fun, a lot of fun. At first, trying to learn all of the tiles involved with shipbuilding I thought to myself "This is way too complicated..." but it came together rather nicely and ended up being a lot of fun to play with a rules system that was quick, easy, and intuitive. Most of all, and since I've mentioned it twice now in the first paragraph...it was fun.


The board(s) in action, sorry for the cell phone pics

The caption link up top is going to give a thorough and in-depth review from a trusted source and do a much better job than I could here. For us though, we've never played it before, in fact we were still punching out playing pieces while we were setting up, but it played fast and easy. You're playing truckers...space truckers. You throw together a ship, rather randomly at the beginning of the game, ensuring to add battery cells, laser cannons, engine thrusters, crew compartments, and cargo holds. You'll want as many of everything you can snag, by the way, but good luck cramming it all in!

Everything links together via 'connectors' on the tiles themselves, if you can't link up the tiles, they can't be built. At the end of the shipbuilding phase you get to check your opponent and make sure they're legit. If not, you dismantle their ship accordingly. Once built, you literally race around a space 'track' picking up cargo along the way. At the end of the race you get space bucks (or whatever they're called) for each piece of cargo you've got.

There are also special action cards where you can salvage a hulk, attack smugglers, get smacked by asteroids, and the like. All the upgrades on your ship (or lack thereof) determine your success against these obstacles and more. The complicated setup makes me wary that the casual player, but if they just give it a chance, it's not as bad as you think, and you can get right into racing and trucking. The races are scalable too, you start with small freighters, then work your way up race after race to bigger ships.


My ship; The Cosmic Cash Cow

The components that come with the game are plentiful and full of character, some might even call the plastic spaceman 'meeples' "cute". The overall package oozes high production value, and makes the steep price tag easier to swallow. There are instances where you can shoot one another, but I got the vibe that wasn't a core mechanic, dodging aliens, smugglers, and the like seemed like the top zany factor. It seems to be an overall solid game, and promises a lot of fun at parties, but has enough replay value that a gaming group can make it a regular game in their rotation. I'll definitely play it again.