The Games of CabinCon V

More follow-up here. Above is the hoard of games that made it to the cabin, I think this is all of the boardgames. There was also a Wii and an XBox 360, but those were ancillary. Below is what we actually did play, followed by the games I personally played in parentheses. I always keep a loose track of what's being played, besides, this stuff is always fun to track over on Boardgamegeek.com. On to the games:

7 Wonders= 5 (1)
Forbidden Island= 2 (2)
Ascension= 4 (1)
Martians!!!= 1 (1)
Settlers of Catan= 1
SoC: Cities and Knights= 1 (1)
SoC: Trails to Rails= 1
Race for the Galaxy= 2 (2)
RftG: The Gathering Storm= 4 (4)
Agricola= 2
Thunderstone= 3(1)
TStone: Wrath of the Elements= 2
Who Would Win?= 2 (2)
Total Games Played= 30 (15)

We ended the cabin on a high-larious note with a couple of games of Who Would Win?. This "debate" game that is an absolute blast. Basically you have a have a deck of cards that has real and fictional people in it, two people get one card each. Then you have a deck of activities, occupations, and the like, it's flipped over and the debate begins. You have about twenty seconds (timer is included) to plead your case to your friends as to why your character/person/historical figure would win at said event. We had some great matchups, such as King Kong vs. John F. Kennedy in art and Pokemon vs. Mahatma Ghandi in cooking. Of course I thought I had the best card when I drew Stephen Hawking vs. Cleopatra...until the event was lifeguarding! Winners and losers are determined by your peer group around the room. This game is the living embodiment of what it is to be a party game.


This Settlers of Catan variant, Trails to Rails, looked pretty cool. The board was massive, much larger than it looks here. Most of the same tenants and mechanics apply, but since I sat this one out I don't know exactly what all of the differences are.


Since I recently paid good money for Thunderstone and the first expansion, I'd like to say that it was a big hit. I don't know about "big", but it was played five times. I think part of this is because of ease of set up, and once you have the basics down it's a very easy game to play. Plus it helps that the basics aren't overly complex. I asked some of the folks their impressions and a couple of them just loved the game, a couple of others were kind of 'meh' on the issue. Having played it myself now many times I can see where its got legs, especially in a low-game environment. You'd have to dedicate playing time to it, but that's really like all games. I think it is best served as one of the primary games of a given group for a while, less so as a 'pick up' off the shelf game.


Now I did get in a game of Catan, but it was my favorite of the expansions; Cities and Knights. It's a totally different game, and I loved it. I don't know why I don't own it myself (well I do, money!) but I'd like to add a copy to the collection some day. If you've played Catan then you're probably familiar with all the expansions, and if you don't own Cities and Knights, pick it up, you won't be disappointed. Now if you don't own just the base game...go! Get it!


If you follow boardgame circles, you'll hear the name Agricola pop up, and often. No, it's not pronounced like a soft drink, but like a Roman name. Anyway, Agricola is a powerhouse of a game, with about a hundred different strategies and techniques to win. You want theme? You're a friggin' medieval farmer trying to support your growing family, come on! This game is awesome. I was surprised that there were four people at the cabin who hadn't played it, so I stepped aside and let them have at it. I think there's now four new converts.


Ah, speaking of good game, we're here looking at 7 Wonders. It's a good game, and accessible by gamer and non-gamer alike. It "learns" fast and has lots of replay value, it's a solid addition to the shelf and can be broken out even during the holidays with that brother-in-law who always looks down at you and your 'toy soldier' hobby. For me, I'm personally not quite as enamored with the game as everyone else seems to be. It's good mind you, but I'm not racing out anytime soon to pick it up. Haha, what a segue...and a pun!


I have a new favorite game, and it's called Race for the Galaxy. I will be racing out to buy this one, probably in a day or two actually. Race for the Galaxy has got it all, theme, gameplay, mechanics, style, the works. As an interesting side note I never even came close to winning, not once, but I still had a blast every single time I played. I love, love, love this game. Each turn has phases, and you're plopping down planets that produce goods, or you have robots that help you settle more planets, or you have an uplifted alien species to help acquire targets militarily. So many different ways to win, different strategies to try. Somebody should send a copy to Mik's Minis so you have good blogging karma for centuries to come. I will immortalize you with praise and song!


Martians!!! isn't the most finely tuned engine under the hood, but it is fun nonetheless. The conclusion we came to however was that this wasn't the best game considering how long it took to play and the fact that with a 20+ boardgame horde sitting just seven feet away it was too tempting to give it up and grab something else. If you are having friends over with the express purpose to play this one game for the course of the evening, you're golden. It's random and light-hearted and makes for a heck of a beer and pretzels game. It's lacking a little depth but you do at least get a whopping 100 Martian figs!


Good ole Catan, the regular 1995 insta-classic. I didn't play this version but only because I was in something else at the time. I've already droned on about this earlier when talking about the Cities and Knights expansion, so moving on...


I guess the deck-building game Ascension is going to wrap up this post. Theme is king here as the deck-building mechanic is kind of bland and the different strategic avenues are somewhat limited. But if you want a cool setting that involves a pantheon of gods, daemons from beyond, steam-punk monks, mechanica, druids, Elves, and more you will dig it. I see a trend developing in quick to learn and fun to play games, not a bad thing. Ascension falls into this particular niche quite nicely.

There you go, a bit of a wrap-up of the games we recently played. Enjoy!

Mucho Weekly Gaming

Last night we didn't have a plan for our mid-week game, total gamer apathy. Andy didn't have anything lined up, Chri3' zombpocalypse pet project hasn't launched yet, and Chrispy was MIA. My big plan was to work on the garden when I got home, so I certainly didn't have anything ready either. In preparation for our annual gaming cabinfest, we decided to test drive a couple of games and brush up on some rusty ones we hadn't played in a while. What started as a night with zero planning turned into a super night of no less than four games.

First up was Martians!!! which is a game I've surprisingly played a lot with my daughter lately. We don't play with cards in our hand, but for the most part everything else is the same (we also play cooperatively). For last night's game we played competitively however, which looked to be more fun actually. The rules are quick to pick up, and we were rolling through Backwoods, USA in no time crunching the alien menace. It's a tile-laying game, which has one big drawback; you can dead-end yourselves and the board no longer expands. This happened very early in the game, and we only had seven tiles to work with. Since no new tiles were being laid down, resources like bullets and health weren't going to replenish. Consequently, martians don't spawn either (except on crop circles of which we had two), so the only end-game available to us was to see who could kill x30 martians first. It was rough, and we eventually called it since it was next to impossible to meet the high body count with so little visible tiles.

We next broke out a kid's game called Sherlock. It's a memory card game that won some parent's choice award at one point. You may remember me talking about it a while back when I bought some games for family game night. It's so funny to see adults play this game, our memory being whittle away so long ago. Andy and I were struggling, big time. Chri3 on the other hand had some mnemonic trickery up his sleeve and he was just blazing away. The nature of the game relies all on memory, so if you've got it, it should be no problem. There's is a subtle layer of strategy involved as well, so all in all, it's a great party game for all ages. Although Chri3 was rockin' the memory, his margin of victory was slight.

Next up was another kid's game, Duck Duck Bruce. It seems incredibly childish in scope, but this one is another great party game for all ages. For the record, I was horrible at it, I had all the worst luck and trailed both Andy and Chri3 in the points race by at least thirty. It's a greed game where you lay down cards, hoping to get the highest number (1-4) of each 'suit'. If you lay down doubles of the suit, you lose those cards, if the dog Bruce shows up, you lose the whole row, but can then try to steal cards from someone else. Trust me, it's fun.

After these we were warmed up and launched into the award-winning Dominion. Here's the last time we played it. What a fun game this one is. I know that's an obvious statement, but really, this is such a good game. It requires little to no prep, and by the second or third turn, you've not only got the hang of it, but you're planning strategies and really in the flow. Somehow I pulled out the win on this one, but Chri3 who had never played the game before came in a very close second. If you don't know about Dominion, check it out here.

Up next we need to refresh our memories on Small World, as well as really refresh our memories on Shadows Over Camelot. There's some other games we still need to test drive too; Martian Flux, Versus (I dont' think this is the name, but it's a card game pitting fictional and historical figures against one another in amusing situations), and another one Andy picked up whose name escapes me right now, but I think it was a story RPG.

The Martians are Coming!!!

Next week we're doing a Martian-themed game night, stay tuned...

The Martiangeddon is Here!!!

them's a lot of Martians!!!

So I mentioned finally getting to play Zombies!!! a couple of months ago at Ruchtcon II. It was a blast, and before that game was over I knew I wanted to go buy it. However, there's tons of expansions, and a lot of people already own it, then I saw its cousin, Martians!!!, also by gaming company Twilight Creations.

Thanks to my girls, a copy of Martians!!! was just one of a few geek-related presents under the tree this year. There's a couple of things that Martians!!! beats out Zombies!!! in my book. First off, if I had to pick between aliens and zombies, I'd go aliens hands down. I like zombies, sure, but I'm not a huge zombiephile like some out there (I guess I'm a xenophile). Also, sinc eit came out just this past summer, there's just the core box to get, not multiple expansions. Lastly, and this was cool, the game can be played cutthroat screw-your-buddy style, or as a cooperative game with everyone working together.


There was quite a learning curve involved however. It might have been a case of being so easy we made it complicated, I don't know. A lot of the rules either just didn't make a lot of sense, or they were too vague and left too much to interpretation. The one thing that gave us the biggest hangup were those darn white grid lines! Looking at the pic above, you'll see not every tile has a full grid on it, and you can only move if you cross a white line. So how do you get from on tile to another sometimes? We just made do.

Like a tile laying game, you draw a city street randomly and 'connect' to an existing tile on the board. Unlike, say Carcassonne, the tiles don't always have four compatible edges. Sometimes you don't have a lot of options for where to put the new tile, the rules even cover what happens if you can't place the tile at all (though this didn't happen to us).

Other than the trickier-than-expected learning curve, the game was still fun. After a little more familiarity with the rules it should go much smoother. The first game we played was a fluke, we beat it cooperatively in less than ten minutes. The second time was more like it, and it was a long game, ending with us succumbing to the Martian hordes.


The components are great and for the price point, pretty darn impressive. You get a couple of decks of full color cards that cover items, actions, and equipment. You also get a sizeable stack of map tiles, which are illustrated well, but seemed like they were printed awfully dark, making it kind of hard to make out all of the detail. The player pieces are slightly above average as far as boardgames go, but the most impressive part is the one hundred Martians it comes with! These come in several different poses, and their detail is excellent, much better than the player pawns. In fact, if you're looking to acquire a large number of alien figs, this might be the route to go, even if you don't intend on playing the game, their quality is that good. They are a little small, say 20mm-ish, but being aliens, that's okay.

All in all, it's a fun game, and once you know what you're doing, it promises to give you something different every time you play it. Using the cooperative rules require a little 'houserule' tweaking, just to keep it challenging, but just use common sense. We took some notes, and maybe I'll post them once they're finalized. It's a solid addition and makes for a quick pick up game too on nights plans might fall through.