My precious...

Anyone pick up Starcraft 2? Add me to your friend's list, to get pwned.

Perhaps Premature....

...but it looks like I may be leading the British Army to victory in the BPA WBC BoAR PBEM tournament. Those red D's are the American Army blown off the battle line. My opponent is up next, but unless he rallies those troops, its time to rewrite the history books.

Round 2 (of four preliminaries) will feature Guilford Courthouse, which will be a new game for me and I suspect a humility lesson as well.

Saturday Gaming

Since we haven't had a session report in some time ...

I showed up and Rob, Ryan and Dory were setting up Stone Age, so I joined them. I was pretty negative on this when it came out and figured it would be a flash in the pan, but it's still hanging around (and not just at SABG). In any case, I've had good luck with a "card rush" strategy (usually grabbing the 1-2 resource cost card, even if some of the "city" spaces are still available) and this time was no different. I only gained one meeple and two agriculture, but I got plenty of cards. By the midgame, I had 3x tools and 3x huts in my scoring pile, and I managed to get 7 of each for a 42 point bonus. The rest of my cards earned me another ~20, enough to win.

Then we played Small World (yay!) with the new "Random Event Cards" expansion (Boo!). I may play with the expansion again, if we agree to play only 'mild' cards. The major ones turn it into a crap shoot.

Then I taught Dory Glory to Rome with Rob (while Ryan grabbed dinner). We were just going to play a few turns, but I quickly built a Temple then Catacombs to end the game. Rob had to leave, so Dory and I played another game ...

We played a hand of Escalation, then had Scott A and another player (I didn't catch his name, although I guess his nick is Hobbit) played Dice Town. I rather like Dice Town .... Scott eeked out a win. After that I left for dinner, although there were still 4-5 people....

See ya'll on monday.

Caylus the Movie

Or some other famous boardgame/book.

Joking aside, looking forward to it.

Grognardian Goodness

Happiness is coming home to a big, chunky box from GMT Games sitting on your doorstep. Today I arrived to find GMT's Pensacola 1781 and Wilderness War (reprint) patiently waiting for me. For some reason I seem to be going through a musket phase...

The Wilderness War box in particular had a new, satisfying heft to it over the previous edition, with a nicely mounted board packed inside, worthy of the hoary ghosts of Avalon Hill. I'm a huge fan of the French-Indian War theme since way back in my days as a elementary school kid in Pennsylvania learning about Iroquois raids on the hapless colonists who lived in the area and reading lots of Fenimore Cooper. I find this particular card-driven wargame to be one of my favorites and particularly well suited to PBEM play due to the relatively low unit density.

Pensacola 1781 (still in shrink at the moment) seems to be a Battles of the American Revolution game on steroids, with the full campaign game predicted to last 8-10 hours. This is quite a feat, as the game system itself is quite simple and fast, so I'm curious to see the scale of the fight. The game includes French, Spanish, British, American, and even Native American forces who fought in the battle, so there is bound to be lots of chrome here.


In other news.....

• Come join your fellow SABG pals on League of Legends. Post your handle in the comments, and I'll "friend" you there. Its good, free fun.

• Another random recommendation: Puzzle Quest 2 (platform your choice, most likely) is dangerously addictive fun. Now if I could just catch up to Hornsfan on the leaderboard....

• This looks like good gaming food.

It appears, sadly, that 1 vs. 100 is toast.


Okay, enough rambling. I have some shrink wrap to pop.

Hellenes

R3Cube and I met to re-fight a chapter out the Peloponnesian War in GMT's Hellenes. I took the noble Spartan alliance, while my opponent took the evil, power drunk, decadent Athenians.

Deciding to skip straight to the final chapters of the Return of the King, on Turn 2 I marched the entire Spartan Army (plus most of their allies) to the gates of Mordor (a.k.a) Athens. The Dark Lord Perikles sallied forth his corrupt legions to meet me outside for a field battle. Cue evil laughter and pithy comments from the Emperor.

The Spartans, being studly B2 units fired first. I had 10 strength points (i.e., ten dice) needing anything but a three or four to score hits or routes. Assuming I decimated the evil army, I was ready with cards in hand to cast back-to-back plagues (a.k.a., cleansing holy light) on Athens, which would cast Perikles down into the fiery pit waiting for him. So... I confidently chucked the fist full of dice into my tower.

Out of ten dice, all but one were misses. Apparently my Spartan Army decided to just prance around the battlefield, showing off their six-pack abs to the Athenian Orc army, then retire for a session wine drinking and rubbing body oil on each other. The Athenians, now awake, struck back, rolling their dice, and killed and/or panicked my entire army.

Unfortunately a careful reading of the rules revealed that the 50% of my army not currently feeding the crows (because they were running scared for their lives) did not have a place to retreat to. Instead, the entire remaining army surrendered, sending the bulk of the red blocks on the map to the graveyard. Sparta!

Luckily, my recent experience sending George Washington on a similar death ride in Washington's War helped me keep composure and not upend the gaming table. I shifted to a guerrilla insurgency campaign and began popping barbarian allies and little revolts everywhere, keeping me slightly ahead on the prestige track.

We had to call the game with about a third of the turns left to play, and it was really too close to call. I was winning based on Prestige, but it was narrow enough that the game could have easily have gone either way on the final turns.

What a great game! Like Washington's War, Hellenes seems to tightly balance the asymmetry of the two sides and maintain delicious tension of a long attritional war, where you need to strike a soon as your opponent leaves an opening.

Always Practice Safe Corruption

Hooray! The card sleeves for War of the Ring: Collector's Edition have arrived! Maybe now I'll actually have the courage to play this $400 board game.

The Time of Man is Over

The time of the Skaven has begun.

Monday Gaming

What time will people be at Dragon's Lair? I can probably be there around 3-4pm ... I'm sure others have the day off.

Wargame Dilema

After spending some time debating between two player war games, I have realized that if I spend the money on a heavier, more time-intensive game, it will only collect dust in the closet. I narrowed it down between Conflict of Heroes and Memoir 44. Then, Battle of Westernos came along. I am going to go with this one because I feel I could get it to the table more often with family and there is always a copy of Memoir nearby. I would love to hear from anyone who has played Conflict of Heroes --especially the eastern campaign, I may be looking at it again for my next order.

I am going to place an order this week with Coolstuffinc.com and would love to have a few piggy-backers to ensure free shipping. We can make arrangements to meet up when they come in.

Doomed!

So, just when I thought I successfully discovered a totally free of cost, extremely fun diversion in Doom Rogue-Like (or DoomRL for short), I found myself motivated to go play Doom 3 again. Thank goodness Steam is having a Crazy Eddie-style self off right now. I picked up the the entire catalog of ID games for $35. Yowza. Its something like 20 games, some of which aren't even Doom clones!

At the risk of falling into my trap, if you enjoy Doom or even the Doom Board Game, I'd heartily recommend downloading DoomRL. Its a "coffee break" style Rogue, designed so you can jump right in and have fun, progressing reasonably far pretty quickly. Because its turn-based, the game play actually feels closer to Doom the Board Game than the video game, though I'm usually too excited / terrified to do much analysis.

To enhance the straight ASCII graphics, the designer has included all the key sound effects from the video game, plus the background music. Oh, and yes.... there is still the chainsaw! I haven't survived deep enough yet to get a BFG, but I imagine there will be a huge pile of ASCII characters flying across my monitor when I do.

These same fellows have also more recently published the Aliens rogue-like, again with sound effects and music, but so far I'm just getting annihilated by that one.

Future development of Doom is supposed to include a graphic tile (rather than ASCII) interface as well as on-line play (i.e., death match).

Anyway, they're both free, so go check them out!

The SABG Top 50 for 2010 are ...

available in geeklist form! Thanks to everyone who voted.