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!

Red Tags at the LGS

My beautifully maintained "miniatures bought" streak of just ONE came to a crashing halt today. Well, not "crashing" but I did double it in size to a whopping...two! At my FLGS I was trying to find a birthday present for a six year old, to no avail. I did find some great half-price sale items though.

First off was this expansion? for boardgame great Settlers of Catan. It's basically just a frame that you put around the tiles of the island once you've put it together. The tiles themselves snap together like puzzle piece, and they have all the usual harbors and what-not on them. It has enough pieces for regular, or the 5-6 player version too. I've never had any problems with the map itself, but it has been jostled around from time to time, this frame should, ahem, shore it up nicely. It was just five bucks, and I figure it will help the overall ambiance of SoC if nothing else.

Next up is the fig that killed my lovely low total for so many months. Brother Captain Stern is an awesome model, bar none. He's a personality in the Inquisition, decked out in relic terminator armor, has a gauntlet-mounted storm bolter, and one heck of a power sword. This is one cool figure. Deathwatch is right around the corner, so what better time for a Grey Knight to make their debut? Ten buck still seems steep, but it was half off!


I was pretty surprised to see they had the mythic Army Painter products, even more surprised to see that the black primer was half off! I snatched it up, five bucks is doable in my book, unfortunately they only had one can. The other colors they had were full price except Necrotic Flesh (which was $7 bucks). I thought about picking it up "just because" but held off. Anyway, I've heard so many good things about it I thought I'd take the plunge and see what the fuss was all about.

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

Cities and Knights!

I had to put an exclamation in the title because Cities and Knights is such a good game! The other night, just a couple after our last Settlers game, we broke out the set and fired up a five player game of Settlers, this time with the Cities and Knights "expansion".

In keeping with the theme of adding all kinds of punctuation, and then explaining why I added said punctuation, I shall now pontificate on the quotes around "expansion". With the Settlers series you will end up paying for them. You have to buy the basic set, then the 5-6 player add-on, then the Seafarers set, then the Seafarers 5-6 player expansion, then the Cities and Knights set, and then the Cities and Knights 5-6 player expansion...see where I'm going here? The guys we were playing with are pretty versed in the series, and I take their word on the Seafarers set being rather lackluster.

The Cities set however is fantastic and it's not just an "add on", it adds so many new levels, strategies, and dimensions to the basic Catan set that it becomes a completely different game, and where the basic Settlers is solid fun, the Cities and Knights version is fun to the tenth degree. I highly recommend it to anyone out there.


You're still building roads, settlements, and cities. This time however, there is a barbarian horde sailing across the sea in bound to the island. When they arrive to sack the cities, you must use your knights to defend the land and drive them off. Don't worry, they'll be back, again and again. The new element is building knights to protect with, the player with the fewest knights will find themselves losing a city. Knights can grow in strength and need to be activated after they are used. They can also drive off the dreaded Robber token and harass neighboring knights and rival cities.

What better way to defend your cities than with a castle wall? Castle walls are another new element, and they don't do much except to allow you to keep more cards in your hand, which I guess is pretty handy after all.

In addition to the resources of wheat, ore, brick, wood, and sheep, there's three new ones that dovetail off of wood, sheep, and ore; paper, cloth, and coin respectively. By using these resources you can upgrade your cities by turning them into fortresses, abbeys, marketplaces, and the like. There's additional building tracks to follow that utilize these new buildings, and based on what level building you have you might get additional benefits. One that comes to mind is the aqueduct, which allows you to take a single resource card (of your choice) on a turn if none of your resource numbers get rolled.


The Land of Mikatonia

Nestled in the fertile pastures and rich forests of Catan is the land of Mikatonia. An extensive road network stretches to the coast where Mikatonia's main harbor lies. Rumors and tales abound from the unspoken relations between the humans of the city and the Nymphs and Dryads of the forests. Alliances have been rumored to have been forged with the reclusive Wood Elves as well. It is even said that the Knights of Mikatonia, princes of King Mik himself, share equal parts of human an Elven blood.

Some Weekday Gamin'

Dark Heresy

We got in a couple of games this week, with the second installment of our new Dark Heresy campaign being the first of the bunch. I'm still getting to grips with the system, mechanically anyway, the setting is very familiar. It's just hard, because without situational modifiers, it cna get kind of frustrated constantly needing around to accomplish tasks but only having a 30% chance of doing so. That's just mechanics though, there's plenty of goodness in the game for me to not worry so much about die rolls.

We continue to investigate the origin of a dockworker who turned up with illegal augmentations and a strange alien control organ. This time Andy's Feral Guardsman and my Imperial Cleric were joined by another duo of acolytes that consisted of Chris M.'s Adeptus Arbites, and Chris O.'s Techpriest.

We were in the process of stashing two bodies of augmented thugs that attacked us when local enforcers from the precinct were dispatched to recover them. This made them guilty immediately and we didn't have time for pleasantries, we were on a mission from the God-Emperor! We set about attacking this enforcers with reckless abandon, well, just Andy's character really, who jumped from a two-story window to hopefully land atop their APC...but slightly miscalculated his landing!

I had switched from my autopistol to the autogun, which did much better for me in combat, although the stats are very similar. We dispatched most of the troopers, but they took off in said APC, with a few of our party being drug along for the ride. We finally got their vehicle stopped by crashing it into a building, and tried to smoke them out with a Blind grenade. The sergeant we overheard conspiring on the vox unfortunately took too much damage to be able to capture him alive, but thanks to the honor bound Feral Guardsman, we had at least one breathing prisoner, the rest were cut down. The plot thickens, and now involves the local police force too, we'll have to dig deeper to find a resolution.


Settlers of Catan (stock photo)

Our DH game ended fairly early. Okay, really early, with the night being young we decided to break out a 'classic', being Settlers. We had one fairly experienced player, one person who had never played before, and me (which I fell somewhere in the middle). It was a great game, and although I didn't win, I claim a moral victory in that I pretty much played better than I ever had before. By the time Andy pulled off his tenth and final point, we were all within one or two points of each other, including multiple roads all in contention for which one would be the longest. This game's a classic for a reason, and is a blast to play.

More Settlers...

Well, we were all geared up to play some Forgotten Realms last Saturday, but that was a bust. I'd rather not dwell on this, so, umm, I won't, but let's just say "bah" and move on. We had a semi-full house, so we decided to go to the shelves for some gaming. We had World of Warcraft, which I actually love, even though it's been a while since we played it. This may be why we opted out of it, there is a bit of a rules ramp up, and I think we were all too cold with the rules to just roll out of the box. There were a few other usual suspects; Munchkin, Arkham Horror, Carcassonne even...but as you can tell from the pic, we went with good ole Settlers again.

We played a four player game first, I don't remember the particulars, just that I continued my perpetual losing streak. There was absolutely nothing noteworthy, from my perspective, that went down. We had a fifth person show up a tad later, so we finally cracked the seal on the 5-6 player expansion, woohoo. It's the little things in life. Anyway, the pic up top is from the five player game, with all the expanded tiles and kinda near the end of the game to boot. That's when I realized I hadn't updated the geek blog in a while, and an "action" shot of the board would be better than nothing. Okay, here's the deal: I suck at Catan. I love the game, it's a lot of fun, it's not too complicated, but the gameplay somehow still has a lot of layers to it. The interaction with the other players is great, and all in all it's a lot of fun. I have never won a game. I don't think I've even come close. If you look closely at the pic, I'm the color orange, you'll see there's zero orange presence on the map, haha. I took a moral victory in that I had the 'largest army', but that was literally all I had. On a good note, it was nice to watch the Vols beat Memphis and take the number one spot, and I'm not even a basketball fan...

Settle this, y'all!

Game night rolled around, and because I haven't complained about it enough, we ended up not playing Forgotten Realms, argh, haha! So we poked around a bit in the game room, I think sometimes it's a curse having quite so many options to choose from. We opted away from minis though and Ray pulled this one off the shelf, good ole Settlers of Catan. Holy crap, it's my own game and I've barely scratched its surface before now. It kicks so much arse it's not even funny. We whipped it out, fumbled through the first few turns, then we're rolling. It was a good night, there was some Michelob and Yuengling, we thoroughly trash talked one another, and listened to the Smiths, Talking Heads, the Refused, and, if there's adult beverages present, you've gotta have Skid Row!

But I haven't talked about the game. Where to start? Well, go here to get the gist of the mechanics. You lay out some tiles to represent a vast island full of natural resources; sheep, ore, wheat, and wood. I may have left one out. Anyway, you've got a build chart that shows you how much of what kind of resource you need to make roads, settlements, cities, and the like. You can also buy up development cards which really do a lot for you, I need to take more next time. You only get resources if you have a city bordering one of the producing lands when that land's number is rolled. If you're lucky, you'll be spread out enough to have access to varied resources, if not not, you have to trade...that's where the trash talking starts! There's also a 'robber' piece, but that's a whole other story.

We got two games in and a few close calls when it came down to determining a winner, there weren't any blowouts, the game plays very well balanced. The first game I messed up and went for the win just a tad early, a turn, maybe two turns actually. The win eluded me, but it was fun nonetheless. In the second game, that nefarious Ray blocked my route to getting access to wheat early on, argh! I was dependent on trade for the rest of the game. My resources were pretty scarce to begin with too. Jon pulled the win out with game two, sneakily pulling off quite the multi-combo in the end. It was pretty impressive actually. All in all it was a good time, a really good time. I see us playing it a bit more in the future.


With Catan, it's kind of hard to have any "action" shots, lol!