[Gaming] Whollycon part 2

[karohemd]

So yesterday was an all day (well, from early afternoon) boardgames extravaganza at whollyrandom's. Quite a few more of his friends turned up so we usually had two games on the go at the same time.
I joined the following (all of which were firsts for me):

Red November: A fun and quirky little cooperative game set on a gnomish submarine. You have to keep the boat from exploding, burning, depressurising, flooding, losing its oxygen or being eaten by a Kraken as you race against time. Both whollyrandom and I fell foul of bad dice rolls (as a result of poor planning) and burned to death rather early in the game but the others managed to win. Good fun.

Manhattan: Building skyscrapers in cities, trying to accumulate as many points as possible (controlled cities, highest tower and total number of towers). Quite a simple idea with an interesting mechanic combining luck (if you get the right card for the space you want to build on) and strategy (where to build and how high). Managed to win this one by a huge margin due to some lucky area control management early on.

Dominion: A card based game (a huge amount of cards, not all of which are used in a game, allowing for many different combinations) in which every player tries to build their dominion by acquiring more and more cards, first ressources so you can increase your capital (and create effects to produce as much treasure in a round as possible so you can buy more and more things). In the end, only the cards with victory points (which have no game effect) count. I watched the first game being played as it looked like far too complicated but it's actually not that bad as soon as you get the hang of it. I utterly lost that one as it took me too long to get my strategy right. On thing I found a bit odd is that there's only one card that affects the other players: the Militia forces them to discard down to 3 hand cards.

Pandemic: Another cooperative game and this one is HARD. You're trying to prevent four diseases from spreading across the world in a race against a number of randomly occuring epidemics that can cause the infections to spread in a domino effect. We played this in easy mode and failed, twice.

There was supposed to be Arkham Horror in the evening but dinner (rather nice Indian takeaway from the Spice Merchant on Trumpington Rd) had dragged on a bit longer so it was 9:30 when we got ready and as in our group nobody had played it before, setting up the game and getting to grips with the rules would have taken far too long (and whollyrandom said last time he played it took them 6 hours) so the idea was abandoned and we played Pandemic instead. Shame, really, as I'd been looking forward to that. Oh well, some other time. The others played Smallworld which looked like good fun. It's a similar idea as Vinci but on a smaller board and set in a fantasy world with random race combinations.

A very good way to spend a Saturday, meeting new people (*waves*), playing new games and generally having fun. If only I'd been able to switch off and go to bed at 1 rather than 3:30...

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Ooh, those look fun. I will bookmark this post as a list of things to consider buying when I have an income :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Re: Pandemic - This was played quite a lot (though not by me) when I was on holiday a couple of weeks ago. The consensus opinion was that it's almost impossible unless you have the medic.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

We had the medic twice and still failed. The trickiest bit was finding the cures. Even with the Dispatcher, getting five cards of one colour to one player was really difficult. In both games we only had one or two cures.
In the first game, the deck ran out and in the second both the deck ran out and the Outbreaks had reached the final stage.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

You may have been rather unlucky, then. I got the impression the game was being beaten about half the time on "normal".

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Alternatively, we were just crap at it. ;o)

[whollyrandom.livejournal.com]

We finally beat the game this morning as our "I'm kicking you all out now but let's just try one more time" game. 3 cards from the end, 2 cards from the last epidemic, we made it ...

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Well done!

[djonma.livejournal.com]

Red November rocks!

Rob's played Pandemic but I've not had a chance yet.

[fractalgeek.livejournal.com]

I like Pandemic lots - the replay level has ben higher than any game I've seen since Puerto Rico.

[theoldcatlady.livejournal.com]

I've played Pandemic, introduced to it by the 15 yo friend (Tyler) of my son. Cool game, ran kind of slow for my liking, but I won it the first time I played it alone. Tyler walked me through his version of a tutorial before that.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Likewise!

Congrats for winning in Pandemic! What was different this time? Did having the Scientist(?) help?
Hehe, I can imagine.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Excellent!