Meetup Recap Series (#4): August 13, 2015

Another week and another great turn out. Every week it appears we are seeing new people coming to check us out. This week we had another four new faces by my count. More people means a greater variety of games hitting the tables, which is great to see. 

Joe:

Another fun evening!

Max, Mike, Niall and I broke out Fleet with Niall earning himself a healthy win.

Next up Mike, Kurt, Rick and I played Trains: Rising Sun. The game ended up tight with Mike eking out a 1 point win over Kurt and me.

Finally, Mike seemed to mistake Roll for the Galaxy for Race and smoked Kurt and I by quickly completing his tableau. Well done!

Michael:

Joe, thanks for the summary. It was fun to be able to come out again. However, I feel obliged to mention it was Kurt who eeked out the 1 point victory in Trains, with you and I tied for second. Also, after playing Roll for the Galaxy, Kurt and I got burned bad in the co-op game Sylvion.

Niall:

Had fun this week.
First we fished out the water around Nunavut in Fleet. A short bidding/hand management game.

Then we journeyed to the Forgotten Realms and spent a little while on the Sword Coast in Lords of Waterdeep. This is a great worker placement.

Finally we let the world be devoured in a sad game of Elder Sign. Though I realize now I forgot to use my special ability the whole game >_<

Jana:

Another great turn out last night. Eight of us started the night playing a game Mag·Blast (Second Edition). It's like Bang in space. It looked cute and light and filler like, but with 8 playing there was waaaaay too much downtime between turns. I fortunately got blasted to smithereens - Thanks Steve - and was knocked out first so I got to choose the next game we played. The best part were the sounds effects everyone had to make upng unleashed a blast onto another player's ships.

Then Steve, Luke, Matt and I played Medieval Academy. This is a light deck building race type of game that as a knight you try to earn the most chivalry points. There were 7 mini-boards that you could choose to move your knight along. There's some depth to the game because it is a race and decisions are tough based on where your opponents are. It was a lot of fun and I finally won a game - yay!!!! barely beating Luke by one entire point! Thanks to Dave for letting us use his game and to Steve for reading the rules.

Other games I saw being played: Tammany Hall, Sylvion, Elder Sign and Lords of Waterdeep.

Dan:

Didn't expect to make it out, but ended up blowing off my work event, since was feeling slightly under the weather. So rather than some physical exertion (event was team building at the Altitude Gym's Clip 'N Climb), I thought to take it easy and play some relaxing board games. Alas, I had forgotten Jonathan wanted to give High Frontier a try this week. So for a third week in a row, I got to play another 4 hour, 5 player brain burner >_<. Dave, Frank, and Danny were the other 3 to participate in this interesting "game".

So if you haven't heard of this game, it's about launching spaceships into space in order to survey planets and asteroids, and eventually build manufacturing facilities there for points. It's notorious for it's complexity. Space travel is no simple stroll around the VP track, and the designer wanted to capture that complexity into something realistic and accurate. You have to boost various components of your spaceship into low-earth orbit, accounting for weight (the heavier, the more costly to boost). Then fuel your ship, again factoring in weight and the efficiency of your thrusters to try to plan a route to where-ever you're planning to go. Lots of pre-planning in this game, since you need to make sure you have enough fuel for the number of burns you need to make along the way to whatever corner of space you're headed. And when you get there, you need to make sure you have the ability to land, and also a means to leave the planet if you're planning to take crew.

So many mistakes were made in this game, and space travel is not forgiving. My first attempt to Mercury I discovered I didn't have strong enough thrusters to land with the weight and fuel I brought along. So I had to leave my stuff, make the slow trek back to Earth, top up on fuel, and make a second excursion. Yay, landed on Mercury! Now, the plan was to get my crew back home, as there are VPs if a crew makes a round trip from Mercury. Slight problem... the means I used to land on Mercury could not be used to leave its atmosphere and gravity. My initial miscalculation for my first attempt at landing still held true for taking off... well Scheiße. I guess my crew is stuck there making a colony. The entire game was much of that: planning, miscalculations, and trying to get your crew home (unless you were the Chinese, whose faction ability allowed them to abandoned crew #toughlove).

The crazy part is we played the simple game; the advance game tacks on additional layers of complexity and difficulties that make it all the more ridiculous. Well, I think the sentiment afterwards was "at least we can say we've tried it".