Love at First Sight?

I picked up The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth from my friendly local gaming store on Friday night with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I am a huge J.R.R. Tolkien fan, having read most of his books (including ones like The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales) several times. The Lord of the Rings (LotR) movies are my favourite of all time (not so much The Hobbit ones). Unfortunately, the LotR games I've tried so far did not turn out so well for me.

Theme in Board Games

One of the ways I try stay stay in shape and also save money is bike to work. It's not a bad trek, only about a 15 minute ride. I try to make the most use of that time and usually listen to podcasts from my favourite authors and pastors. The last few weeks, however, when I've needed a break from something deep and introspective, I've found a few board game podcasts that I really enjoy. Being a solo gamer, my favourite two are Solosaurus and ENGN (Every Night is Game Night). You can easily find them on any podcast app.

On April 12, the host of ENGN (Jason) was joined by Paul Grogan (Gaming Rules on YouTube) and Marc Davis (Thoughful Gamer blog) for a very interesting discussion about theme in games. This was one of the most informative and thought-provoking podcasts I've ever listened to. Sure, board games may not be life changing (although they might be...), but this was a really good podcast, especially for someone who is a player, reviewer, and designer.

Birthday Board Bash: Part Deux

Another board game celebration for me! On Saturday we did a collaborative Easter/birthday dinner with my wife's family. This delicious DQ ice cream cake had this cute little image on it. After we had ate our fill of cake and got the sugar-delirious children to bed, the games came out.

Paragon of Light (Playthrough of Call to Adventure)

Fenwick was just a lowly settler when he first came to this land, gifted with just a little bit of constitution and intelligence. The only thing that set him apart from others like him was his thirst for knowledge. As he read and studied in the local library, he learned about the virtues of purity and goodness and honest. He strove to be an example of living for others. 

Stay in Your Lane, Girl

Yesterday I was finally able to throw down a few games of Mephisto: The Card Game. This is a PnP that I backed on Kickstarter earlier this year. Here's the description right from the Kickstarter page:

Mephisto is a 1-4 player dungeon crawling card game where you play as a power hungry adventurer who’s made a deal with the archdemon Mephistopheles. In exchange for unholy strength, you must collect the souls of monsters you defeat in the dungeon. The catch is — you aren’t the only one who’s agreed to this pact, but only one of you will receive the demon’s gift. Race to collect the most souls for Mephisto before time runs out or be doomed to serve the beast for eternity!

In this game you have a 60 card deck of cards. You start with a hand of cards (varying amounts depending on player order) and you use those cards to defeat monsters in the dungeon. The deck consists of four different types of cards: (1) monsters that you battle and gain souls from, (2) weapons that you use to battle the monsters, (3) spells that allow you to boost weapons and gain cards, and (4) items that work basically the same as spells. The difference between spells and items are spells are one time use and items stay in their lane (more on that later). You use the weapons, spells, and items at your disposal to defeat monsters and gain the most souls. That makes you the winner.

Birthday Board Bash

My 33rd birthday is right around the corner (April 18) and so on Saturday night I had a few of my closest friends over to play some games. I'll start off by apologizing for not taking any pictures. I was enjoying the quality time with friends too much to stop and snap.

But what luck! Renegade and Call to Adventure, which weren't supposed to arrive until today, got here on Friday! I don't usually like to learn a new game with other people, but I really wanted to get one of these to the table in a multiplayer game.

We were waiting on one friend, so the three of us decided to tackle a dungeon for our first game. A 5 Minute Dungeon, that is. I haven't tried the new Curses! Foiled Again! expansion with three people, so we gave that a try with the second level boss, the Grime Reaper. Three players is the most difficulty becuase you only have 3 decks - with 5 players you have 5, with 4 you have 4, and with 2 people you each take 2 decks, giving you 4 total. But, with 3 players, there are only 3 decks. So by far you have the fewest cards available to you. 

No-No Solo

Aye yai yai. I had so many plans to play games this week and it just has not turned out! Mounds of marking, fever-ish children, extracurricular excitement, oh my! I've missed writing here so I thought I'd do a little update on what I'm going to be playing, because I do have a few games in the mail or otherwise coming soon.

So, here's what I'm looking forward to playing!

In Mephisto: The Card Game you play as one of the power hungry adventurers who has made a pact with the archdemon Mephistopheles. The deal is simple. Collect the souls of monsters you encounter in the dungeon and receive unholy strength in return. The catch is: You aren't the only contestant seeking his gift, but only one of you will receive it. Be the player with the most souls by the end of the day or be doomed to serve Mephisto for eternity! (from BoardGameGeek)

I really don't know much about how this single deck adventure game works, but I backed the PnP version on Kickstarter earlier this year. The high quality version was just "delivered" and looks really cool. I'm a big fan of the artwork for this one. I got a hack job printed off, sleeved for ease of shuffling, and I'm going to try out the solo rules as soon as I can.

The Thrust of the Matter

March has been a busy month and April is going to be moreso between birthdays (mine!), speech competitions, and basketball tournaments. But, right here at the beginning of the month, I was able to sit down with my game co-designer, Aaron, and play with our game. We have the first mission basically complete, just need to finish some balancing and still working on the XP system.

Good Reef

You may get some deja vu reading this, because yet again I played a game of Kingdomino with my friend Brennan while hanging out with his whole family. It's only because we really like each other and the game is colourful enough that it distracts the children from ruining it for us while we try and play. I won again, but this time it was much closer. Maybe I should stop playing with him so he doesn't beat me.

In the evening, my ex-student teacher (not because I didn't pass him, but because he DID pass and is now a real teacher) came over to play games. At the end of his practicum with me, after my marks were already in, he bought me a copy of Clank! Now, a year and a half later, I have all the expansions and we finally got a chance to play! We tackled the Dwarven Mine together and he beat me good. I'm not sure what went wrong. Maybe he stole some artifacts while I was taking the dog out? That would make the most sense.

What I enjoyed about playing this multiplayer as opposed to solo was the race to get the most gold deposits mined. This is one area that I succeeded at, and so I got a bonus 20 points to Shane's 10. That kept the game a little bit closer. I can see how in a 3 or 4 player game this can really turn into a race to get to the gold deposits before others do.

After Clank!, Shane introduced me to Reef. I'm not a big Euro-gamer (who would've guessed?) but I'm always up to try something new. In Reef, you are building a coral reef. It's sort of a spacial awareness game where you make stacks of different coloured coral and try to match patterns on cards to get the most points. On your turn you either play a card or take a card. Each card has two parts to it. The top part gives you two new coral pieces that you place on your board. The bottom part gives you points for the layout of your reef. For example, you might get 5 points for every 3 blue coral pieces in a row. Or maybe 5 points for every red piece of coral that is at the 4th level of a stack. I found it really hard to balance getting new cards with building my board properly, but I think I did alright. Shane crushed me, but, I had 50 points still. I would definitely give it another go as it only took us about 15 minutes to play. I can commit to 15 minutes of Euro.