Resurgence of the 24-Hour Gaming People

[mcreeper]

Had a most excellent weekend down in Galveston with my gaming posse. As always, three of them teamed together to rent a beach house for 10 days, and they let the remainder of us shiftless slackers abuse their hospitality by bum-rushing the place for the first weekend. Rambling Girl and I got down there a little after 11:00 PM on Friday night after

Comments

[cactusgirl]

New job, hooray!

[mcreeper]

Yeah, but seriously, if I had remained a jobless bum through mid-October, I coulda stayed at the beach house an extra couple of days, AND enjoyed every minute of the upcoming week-long Fantastic Fest, AND gone on a cruise for virtually free on Rambling Girl's father's dime. Now I don't get to do hardly none of that. On the other hand: paycheck is good.

[jmlease]

Agricola banned?!? Oh, dear.

Some boon companions of mine voyaged forth to GenCon this year, and they brought me back some swag: Dominion-Seaside, Dominion-Prosperity, and Thunderstone-Doomgate Legion. excellent prices at the National Gaming Convention.

They were demoing the Prolific Games collection out there, and did pretty well...but it remains to be seen if they generated enough interest to push the Kickstarter Program their using to try and get a 2nd print of Flapjacks & Sasquatches into production...

[mcreeper]

You know, I think between Rambling Girl and myself, we have two Dominion expansions. Definitely we have Seaside. However, most of the Dominion stuff is still in lockdown mode, bagged and sealed for another few months of sequestration due to the Great Bedbug Infestation back in November. And for some reason, I just never really could get into the game all that much. I seem to like it in the abstract...just not in actual practice.

Really wanted to hit GenCon this year, but it felt irresponsible under the circumstances. Should be going in 2012, though.

[jmlease]

I'm hoping to get to to GenCon in 2012 myself, assuming my job situation remains stable.

Dominion is a lot of fun, and I like having a game in my hoard that plays fast. And with 4 sets now, I have enough cards and combos to keep the game fresh and replay value high for a long time.

If you like Dominion in concept, maybe Thunderstone would be more for you. It's known as the "deck-builder with a purpose" game. Much better work on the theme, and the game play is a little different so it rarely becomes a race to buy 1 or 2 cards and whomever gets the most of those almost always wins. Much more situational and great opportunities to pursue different strategies.

I've heard Tigris & Euphrates is good, but haven't played it yet. the next 2 games on my list are Alhambra and St. Petersberg, both of which look like fun.

Tonight, I tried Quarriors, which is a dice game that uses a deck-building mechanic. Instead of buying cards, you buy dice to add to your dice pool. It's pretty neat. Fluffy fun.

[mcreeper]

My problem with Tigris & Euphrates is that I've only cycled through it two or three times, and I'm at about the 70% comprehension level for the rules. I'm still not quite grokking when it's in my best interests to make one particular move as opposed to another option.

Played Thunderstone once or twice and I remember thinking "Huh, kinda cool", but honestly I can't recall anything about it.

Came close to playing Alhambra at the beach house, but somehow got distracted. Need to learn it sometime.

I actually played St. Petersberg at the 2010 GenCon. It wasn't bad. I realized about three-quarters of the way through that I had overlooked the value of certain options and had therefore committed grievous tactical errors that resulted in me getting thoroughly thrashed. Fortunately, it was a check-out from the games library, so I was only playing against Comic Book Lad, therefore my humiliation was limited.