Gadora's Tabletalk

Gadora plays board games and (more rarely) rpgs. This is where it posts about what it's playing, and about tabletop games in general.

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The D&D writeups seemed to eat a lot more time than they were worth, so I think I'm going to come back to this, but leave the non-convention RPGs off.

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Board games with N and K yesterday was very welcome.

We started out with Marvel Champions, facing off against The Once and Future Kang, a time traveling alien conqueror who forces a break in the middle of the fight where everyone gets banished to different shattered timelines, each ruled by their own variant of the villain.

Our team of Hercules, Spider-Woman, and Doctor Strange had a decently simple time of it; I would honestly have liked a bit more difficulty in the battle. But we had fun, and that's one of the big things game days are for.

We followed that up with Grand Austria Hotel, and I was honestly a little abashed at how well I did. I assembled an absolute legion of hotel staff, getting a whopping nine into play over the course of the game, with one of them being the one that makes them all worth two points apiece. I ended up with a score of 160, which lapped K on the 75 point point tracker and was about ten shy of lapping N, too. I'm really not sure what I did that worked so well, even; just got lucky with my initial staff cards, I guess?

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Made it out to board games with N and K on Saturday.

We opened with more than a few games of Bomb Busters, which N pulled off the demo shelf. I'd previously seen LoadingReadyRun stream it, so I had some very, very vague, six month old memories of the game. It's not quite my kind of game, but it was interesting to poke at.

We followed that up with a long game of Terraforming Mars, which I forgot to take a picture of. I ended up as the city corporation, with two preludes that also placed cities, so I was able to claim the milestone for three tiles on or adjacent to volcano tiles on turn one, and going Viral Enhancers into the Nitrite Reducing Bacteria let me claim the milestone for five microbe/animal resources on turn two, once I had cash again. Despite going so city heavy, I wasn't the one who had the runaway economy; that was N, who ended the game with a whopping 81 credits per turn. K and N both ended up leaning hard into space stuff.

We finished out the day with two games of Medici: The Card Game, with our first game being a two way tie at 140 coin, and third place being 135 coin. Just a wildly tight game, given that coins come in denominations of 5 at the smallest. The second game was another tight one, with, I think, a 15 coin spread between first and third.

[hingadora-plays-games]

No board games yesterday due to snow and no D&D yet again, this time because Mordadin's player had some life come up last minute. Since our game fell through, my brother, our DM (B), and myself made it out for a board game day.

We opened with introducing B to Wolves, which went over well. We kind of forgot about meeting needs from reserves in order to free up more gifting, and I fell behind early and stayed pretty well behind throughout the game. My brother took this one, with B taking second, and me coming in a distant third, but we did make it through the end of the game without ever having someone go unfed.

We followed that up with introducing B to Flash Point, and it's rare to see that game so explosive. We just kind of had fire everywhere, and the house collapsed on us one turn before we could get the last victim out.

Finished off the day with Dice of Crowns. It's one that... I've a friend who loves this series, but it just doesn't click for me. It's a time filler, though.

It was a pretty fun time. :>

[hingadora-plays-games]

I made it out to board games on Saturday, with Marvel Champions hitting the table. (No D&D again this week, alas.)

We picked out Green Goblin as our foe, facing him first in his scheming businessman form, flipping between Norman Osbourne and Green Goblin. I was on Spider-Woman again, N was on the Hercules precon, and K was on Doctor Strange. Hercules was pretty cool; I like the way the labors and gifts work. The Norman Osbourne Green goblin scenario was... pretty underwhelming. There was no threat to it, and I'm not sure how you'd adjust it to make it better.

In our second game, we faced a Green Goblin who was spreading mutagenic gas across New York City, turning people into minions. For this one, K switched to N's Thor deck, and this game was rad. We were pretty quickly on the back foot, with Hercules having a labor that pulled an extra side scheme for him alone to handle, which boosted the attack of all Goblins in play. Between that and Thor wanting extra minions, we were through the deck pretty quickly the first time, as well as being on to the second stage of his scheme. Fortunately, we were able to get things turned around, and from there it wasn't exactly smooth sailing; we still managed to end up one threat away from losing, but it was manageable. Loads of fun. I'd happily face this villain again.

The second game also saw K play Face the Past to bring out Loki, drawing a total of five cards for that single play. Unfortunately, Loki is a trickster, and he discards the top card of the villain deck when defeated to see if that was really the real Loki you were hitting, so he had to be defeated five or six times before it finally stuck. Great fun.

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No D&D today after all. Big finale next week instead, hopefully.

[hingadora-plays-games]

I had board games with N and K today.

We tried out Defenders of the Wild today, which is a co-op game where you're a band of furry folks trying to clean up after the cursed machinery spreading everywhere, while building support and spreading your own camps around the board.

We played two games, and the rules were just a bit too fiddly, and the difficulty didn't seem well tuned. Playing on the introductory difficulty, we ended the second game baffled as to how one is supposed to have enough time to spread all the player camps; we were pretty efficient on our turns, and I'm not sure how we could have done better. It also had player elimination as a reward, where a player completing their camps removes the player from the game, which feels... bad. We never got all that close to anyone making it to that point.

It's a shame we bounced off the game so hard, because the game has a really solid aesthetic. It's also got a nice way to handle factions, where six of your twelve action cards are set by your faction, and the other six are set by your choice of one of the faction's two heroes.

[hingadora-plays-games]

D&D happened on Sunday! \o/

We gave Percival's player a recap of the session, and explored what he was doing during our misadventure, before he started off on his own misadventure.

Percival rallied two crew and two of the surviving lizardfolk and went off in search of the rest of the party. His little band picked the wrong hole down into the ship, then opened a door to discover a wounded prisoner being set upon by two not-dogs. The not-dogs quickly dispatched both lizardfolk and one of the crew, before Percival closed and barred the door, retreating and leaving the prisoner to die.

Meanwhile, the rest of our party retreated to the topdeck, hauling our yuan-ti prisoner up with rope. This prisoner kind of came to naught, but at least we tried.

We determined which hole Percival and companions had gone down, and yelled down it, calling him back to reunite the party. Not liking any of our options for going forward, we set up the Yuan-ti ship to be towed and settled in for a night of rest, knowing we were giving our quarry time to make preparations.

Come the morning, we started exploring the ship again, and found only sacrificed prisoners in cells. After a couple of instances, we broke off and Moradin cast his tracking spell on Percival's captured hireling, discovering that he no longer felt like Sean. We headed down near the front of the ship and found a bunch of Yuan-ti hiding behind a globe of darkness. Percival attempted to negotiate their release in exchange for the release of their captives, but Ethan mocked the idea, stating that we'd forced their hand overnight, and all the captives were either dead or, in the case of Sean, converted to Yuan-ti. After Sean introduced himself with his new identity, our party let loose a volley of arrows and bolts, all of which missed. We're starting next session off by rolling initiative, with Percival ready to signal for the NPCs to fire the ship we're on.

Next session is expected to be our finale, and we're already a bit roughed up, given the lingering poison. There's some talk of trying a Star Wars rpg after this wraps up, starting with the Age of Rebellion beginner box.

[hingadora-plays-games]

I had board games with N and K yesterday, which was much needed, given the week I'd had.

K brought his rather nice Dominion setup, and Hireling was a bit absurd in our two games, being rather a strongly escalating draw engine in our slow starts.

We followed that up with two games of Lords of Waterdeep, and it was fun, as ever. The second game had a wild fighter shortage, with all three other classes plentifully available.

[hingadora-plays-games]

Made it out to D&D last Sunday, in the midst of all the craziness going on, for a third consecutive day of tabletop.

My brother had to miss, so Percival mostly sat this out, despite me having his character sheet. His absence was keenly felt, as another combatant would have been very nice to have.

We healed up injured crew and looked for a way into the ship, searching for the employer who'd backstabbed us and our captured companions. Finding a bunch of weird tubes down into the deck in place of stairs, we decided that those were ambush points and we'd be chumps to go through them, so we had Diesa start chopping a hole in the deck. While she was doing that, hopefully attracting attention below, Aesling slipped down another tube to try to do rogue stuff. She quickly encountered a lurking spidery monster, and the rest of the party (minus Aesling) dove down to her unnecessary rescue, with Diesa charging out and into the hall after the spider beast was down.

Following after, we ran into a naga-like Yuan-Ti who shot us with poisoned ball bearings from a strange bow-like contraption. It was a bit of a wild fight, with Moradin doing what no wizard should do, and running in to grapple the Yuan-Ti down from the ceiling. He then proceeded to win several rounds of grappling, during which we managed to disarm them of their spine-like humanbane rapier. They managed to get out of the grapple and went invisible, and Aesling responded with a very expensive maneuver, throwing an ounce of saffron at the invisible foe in an ineffective attempt to replicate the flour counter to invisibility.

The Yuan-Ti cast deep slumber and dropped Diesa and Moradin's summon to sleep, and we were rather ineffective until they attacked us and broke the invisibility. We did finally manage to take them prisoner, with Moradin down two points of strength from poison, and Aesling down a whopping six points of strength and spending two minutes with her legs paralyzed.

I actually got this post out after the next week's D&D session, due to the chaotic nature of things going on. Oops.

[hingadora-plays-games]

I still need to find the time to write up Sunday's D&D session, but I got to sit down with my brother tonight and play two games of the Star Wars: Unlimited Hoth introductory set. It was a fun and fast little game, and I'll play again (from my brother's budding collection), but dang if it doesn't make me want the kind of stories you could get from Decipher's Star Wars CCG that I played as a kid.

SWCCG was super jank, but dang if it couldn't produce wild and thematic stories from its games. This one just kind of felt like a modern TCG; could've been any property, really.

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I made it out to board games today, with N picking out Canvas from the store demo shelf.

Canvas is neat. It's a card crafter, with the usual clear cards, and it uses those to be about making art. Three cards make up a painting, with each card containing two scoring elements, an art element, and a title element.

Paintings are scored based on a selection of four public goals (use all five colors, have pairs of triangles, have three of a scoring element in a row, etc), earning ribbons for each given goal. Ribbons are worth an amount determined by the goal, but it's always better than linear scoring. Some cards will have things that award silver ribbons for scoring elements on the card, and silver ribbons are worth a flat two points apiece.

You take your cards from a market of five, spending "inspiration" to skip cards in the market and claiming any inspiration that's been spent to skip the card you take, then refill the market from the back, so the market currency very quickly gets back in circulation, which is neat.

The game's neat. I won the first, and N ran away with the second.

After that, we set up for a game of Terraforming Mars. Unfortunately, the store staff swapped the table registration without us realizing, so the table was free until two, rather than until seven. We had to abandon our game one round before it would have finished, and the gaming ended on a bit of a sour note.

[hingadora-plays-games]

I made it out to board games at a new place last night, introducing two folks to Flash Point. We played the basic map, and the comic book store owner was advised by one of the other players to stock the game, "because [it] would sell copies of itself." Getting that kind of reception after introducing folks to a game felt pretty great. :>

Things never got too out of hand in Flash Point, but it showed how things could suddenly spike, so the game cooperated nicely with being a good teaching game.

We followed that up with three games of Cross Clues, which is an interesting Codenames-ish game. You've got a 5x5 grid, with words lining both axes. Depending on player count, you either get a hand of a single grid coordinate or two, and when someone's got a clue for one of their cards, they give a single word, and the group confers before picking a coordinate. If they get it right, then the card goes in that spot, and if the group misses, the card gets discarded, unseen. If it's discarded, the game is a bit harder, because that's some missing information.

Cross Clues was neat, and I'm definitely down to play it some more. The clue I was probably proudest of was "Masque" (giving the spelling is allowed) for the intersection of Costume and Red.

[hingadora-plays-games]

Yesterday was a Terraforming Mars tournament where I, once again, forgot to get any pictures.

Game one, I won handily, with a major push for Jovian tags.I was getting over sixty money per turn by the end of the game.

Game two was an amazingly close game, where I really pushed for plant tags. I took second, with a score of 107 to 109.

Game three... I really needed to get food in me sometime during game two, in retrospect. I didn't touch the milestones or awards, and my cards were a non-synergistic mess. This was the winner's table and it bumped from a three player to a four player game, meaning I took fourth, being about 15-20 points behind third place. I know I can play better than I did.

I'm bummed that I didn't get to play at the same table as K from my Saturday board game group all day, despite him attending. It was nice to run into J from the Wingspan tournament again, though. She played in that first game and took second place over all. The tournament was won by M.

Anyhow, it was a good tournament over all, because I just got to play about eight hours of a game I like. :)

[hingadora-plays-games]

Made it out to BattleTech tonight, playing against the same person as last week; his Gray Death Legion mercenaries against my pirate lance.

We rolled a playtest mission that drops a control point almost dead center in the map, which... kind of made most of the map unfortunately irrelevant. Bit of a bummer how that one went, but it's a playtest for a reason.

Round one, we didn't see too much shooting, with the only hits being some nice shots from my Marauder 11D on his Regent. He controlled the point that round, in part because his list was five mechs to my four, and in part because his mechs were a fair bit heavier than mine that could contest it; I didn't want to commit my lighter ones and lose them; a hesitancy that kept me out of the center far too much.

Round two saw his Marauder in trouble, as I focused fire a fair bit. I was a bit too pleased with my Marauder's nice sniper nest, and held it back from contesting the objective for a bit too long, but it, my Hunchback C, and my Awesome 11H pounded his Marauder pretty well here. My Hunchback took a pretty nasty pounding here, and I mostly kept it alive by having other mechs be more attractive targets.

Over the next two rounds, I lost my Awesome, trading it for his Marauder, and all the mechs just kind of clustered around the center, with my opponent's greater number of mechs just winning the points each round. My Piranha stayed pretty mobile, though it kept being chased around by my opponent's royal Locust, taking nasty damage to its rear and only staying alive and intact through some luck. His Panther kept sticking to my heaviest mech, hitting it with weapons that inflict extra heat, with that keeping my mechs unable to fire its weapons as fully as I would have liked.

My Piranha lost a leg and a stray plink of a shot knocked my opponent's Regent's pilot unconscious. I gambled that it'd stay down and blew up the the Panther and focused on trying to take out the Warhammer while his Locust finally finished off my Piranha. I failed to take out the Warhammer and his pilot regained consciousness after only one round down. In the final round, I gambled on running the Hunchback out to knockdown the Warhammer with a kick, but lost the Hunchback instead, while I only blew up the Locust.

It was a fun time. I lost heavily, but I feel like I put up a decent fight, and I have some ideas as to where I went wrong.

[hingadora-plays-games]

No D&D this weekend, because of a buttload of packing and cleaning, but weekly Wingspan was great fun.

Friend eeked out a win, where everyone had some silly things going on. The first bird myself and the AI players played to our wetlands were birds that gave everyone a card from the top of the deck and it just got sillier from there. It was fun, and both my friend and I were pretty on top of things. :>

[hingadora-plays-games]

I made it out to board games with N and K today!

We opened with two games of Wingspan, where I just didn't perform to my usual standard. Scores were unusually low. K won the first game pretty handily and N and I actually tied the second game, right down to the tie breaker. It was pretty wild.

We followed that up with two games of Sagrada, where I made a pretty window in the first game and a less pretty game in the second. I used to do the most difficult windows without ever using tools, but today... not so much. Really feeling off my game. I won the first game and N the second.

At least game one's window was kinda pretty.