Master Magi & The Elder Sign

There probably isn’t any bigger sign of nerdom than engaging in a game that is essentially an excuse to LARP. Behold a round of Magiquest I enjoyed for my birthday last weekend. Oh wait, there are no pictures because we, a group of thirtysomethings, were far too engaged in our game play to take any pictures. (It’s also not even the first time we have done this. We got to be “returning magi.”)

So, anyway, uh, yeah, I had fun. I admit it.

 

There was also Elder Sign, which I think is properly referred to as “Arkham Horror Lite.” Except in the event of getting a bunch of crap cards at the beginning of the game. All the same, the game mechanics are simpler, which is nice. I’ve never had the occasion to play an Arkham Horror game that didn’t last for the length of a workday (owing to various player dynamics) and as much as I enjoy games, I also need to be able to get up and move around. (I’ve considered keeping a trampoline and jump rope by the table).

And my new achievement of reaching the final stages of Eureka. Hmmm. Okay, look, honestly, the show is something I really do enjoy but my god, it gets so utterly and completely ridiculous that I feel bad for having condemned Fringe for all these years.

Post-Holiday Dorking Bells

So, post holidays and I really have little to say despite a lot of TV because I’ve also had a lot of work. Thanks, work.

I enjoyed the Tor.com rewatch of “A Clockwork Nebari” (Farscape).  It’s probably because I actually only saw it for the first time earlier this year but that wonderful hideousness of the eyeballs is killer. Of course, that’s not actually the most effed up part of A Clockwork Orange but it was rather, shall we say, iconic?  Most of the rest of the dorkscape (of RSS feeds and all) has centered on The Hobbit (which I actually haven’t seen, due to scheduling conflicts and a general introvertedness) and Star Trek: Into Darkness, which I also haven’t seen since I’m not a time traveler or pirate.

Thanks to their finally being in stock, I am now the proud owner of the second series of the Futurama Tineez. And thanks to the awesomeness of one of my friends, also, Futurama Monopoly. This gift involved my unpacking every single piece and card and reading through everything. I don’t know whether it’s awesome or sad that there was not a single reference that I missed. I choose… awesome. Yes. Hint: It comes with Professorland Fun Bucks.

And allegedly, Zuko’s mom finally has her day in the Avatar comics.

Recent Games People Play

Board Games

Don’t forget about the classics.

• My friends and I finally got around to playing Smallworld. Round one was just about the most hollow victory I’ve ever seen in a board game and I wasn’t even the winner. We had so badly jumbled and confused the rules that the final win was really more the result of our 10 turns being up than it was any strategic advantage. I may be bitter because my Seafaring Amazons failed to see their full potential in their +4 conquest bonus. (The game seems ripe for band name generation: “Hordes of Dwarves”, “Marauding Priestesses,” etc.) The text of special abilities isn’t always clear on the shortcut cards or in the rule book. For example, the Amazons had that +4 conquest bonus but their special ability of “seafaring” meant that they could keep collecting coins after going into decline. What does this mean? We don’t know either because every group could keep collecting coins after going into decline. It’s not enough to destroy game play, by any means (and we played with expansions so we had additional fun race and ability cards) but it’s frustrating all the same. Especially since those Days of Wonder games are expensive. Side note: Why does everyone at Days of Wonder hate Android and Windows users? It’s great that they’ve developed games for the iPad but seriously, we’re not all iOS users. I’d happily take a downloadable game for Windows if you don’t want to make one for Android. That’s fine. But please, create something other than iPad apps. Please? Please?
• Then there was my first A Touch of Evil. Somebody had referred to this game as being a “mini Arkham Horror.” I think there’s some truth in that. We had the Coastal Expansion included in our game so I can’t really speak to the base game alone. One of the most annoying things about Arkham Horror (to me, anyway) is how long it takes to get through a full turn, especially with combat involved. I think the difference to ATOE is that the turns move very quickly. Three actions per turn, smaller board, etc. Not that there’s anything wrong with the involved complication of Arkham Horror and its epic game play; I just tend to lose focus if I’m forced to sit still for more than four hours. In any case, combat moved quickly as well, especially once we were all sucked into the final showdown with the villain. I’d like more clarification on some of the supply and trading rules (since you can trade items among players when you share space, but who knows if you can trade currency?) but that’s what house rules are supposed to be for, I suppose. Oddly, my one complaint of any note is the fact that there are so, so, so many cards and it’s virtually impossible to reach them without having to constantly ask another player or to stand up and reach across the board space. I know it was designed so that the location cards would be adjacent their locations (e.g. “The Manor” cards are stored next to “The Manor”) but perhaps a tray that could be passed from player to player would be helpful? Otherwise as your number of players expands, you run the risk of never actually being able to reach what you need in order to take your turn.

Video Games

I curse the fall sale on Steam.  Goodbye Christmas gifts for other people! Hello video game goodness for me!

• While I’m enjoying it, it turns out that I kind of suck at Awesomenauts.  I blame this on the fact that I haven’t adjusted to the Apple style touchpad on my laptop more than I blame it on anything else. Whatever. It’s still a fun (if also ostentatious and sensory killing) game. Destroy the other team’s base. That’s the only real objective. Makes it easy. (This, of course, is also why I feel bad when I can’t destroys things in game.)
• A friend showed me Eufloria via PS3. I played the demo on PS3 but ultimately ended up installing the PC version. Others who were watching the game said it was boring. Playing it, however, was not. There’s something to be said for calm and relaxing slow-paced games. The most action-oriented times of Eufloria are when enemy seedlings invade your planets and you have to send seedlings to fight them off. (The tiny lasers are adorable, by the way.) Apparently it was part of the last Humble Bundle, which I didn’t download, but I guess that’s because I’m a terrible person.
• Being two years behind is not a big deal, right? I hope not since I finally got a copy of Portal 2 with the Steam sale. I’ve wanted to play it for a really long time but never had a mechanism to do it, by which I mean, I had a really buggy piece of crap computer that rejected practically anything I tried to play through Steam. And then I just kept forgetting to get it because $20 for a game you can’t play right now still seemed to be a silly purchase. With it being $4.99, though, and with having a brand new computer, it was time. I haven’t even had a chance to play it yet, though.
• The Adventures of P.B. Winterbottom is cute and kitschy. It’s also fun. I’m fond of the fazing pie-eating men who kick one another and who basically have to survive a pie puzzle. It’s entirely black and white (at least so far) and very simple to play. (No mouse controls on PC. Everything is keyboard-based.)
• I had to re-download Star Trek Online. Oh wait. Do I play that? Yes, I think I admitted to it elsewhere on this blog anyway. I don’t know why I’m embarrassed, actually. I haven’t had the occasion to play in months, and I attribute that to having a bad computer for the past four months. So logging in again was an interesting feat. I think it’s because it’s a Star Trek game. (This did not stop me from buying the How to Host a Mystery Star Trek The Next Generation board game back in the summer though, so I don’t know what my problem is.)

 

Android Apps (Because You Have to Play on Your Phone, Too)

I know they’re still technically video games. I’m just distinguishing for the sheer reason that these are things I play on a very small screen.

• I’m angry that I’ve been sucked into both Ayakashi and Deity Wars. I’ve had a long-standing rule against card-trading games. (Ahem, Magic.) That rule originated a long, long time ago because I just didn’t understand the point. Since understanding the point, the rule was really based on some stupid dork pride issue. “I’m the kind of dork who doesn’t play those sorts of games.” Whatever point or purpose this has, I haven’t got a clue anymore since I’m clearly past that stupid phase of my life. Fine. Fine. Fine. Build a deck. Pretend it’s just a straight-up RPG. Go on.
• And lastly, I’m horribly, horribly hooked on playing Flow. (Not to be confused with the PS3 game, which is also addicting and awesome.) I ended up spending about $10 for in-app purchases to get all of the packs and hints. The tablet packs, which are designed for larger blocks, probably would be a whole lot more fun if you were to play on a tablet rather than a regular Android phone screen. The game touts itself as being simple but addicting, and I think they’ve got their marketing dead on.

Ticket to Ride Halloween Expansion

It’s so silly but I just had to invest the $12.99 into buying the Ticket to Ride Halloween expansion trains. For a while now I’ve been scooping up expansions and add-ons every time I go in my local nerd game haven. I like my trains. Since this is my first blog entry from a brand new ultrabook as well, I can also add that I had to re-install (or properly, update this new computer) all of the Ticket to Ride software for my online play with Steam. I learned recently that I have the standard American board completely memorized. Every path, width, color, and number of spaces is committed to memory. Most of the routes and their points in the standard game and the chief expansion (1910) are up there also. I even drew out segments in a MS-Paint document just to see if it was possible. Turns out that it is. I’m still desperate for the Android mobile game, though. We’re not all iOS users. Ostensibly the Halloween expansion could also allow you to add a sixth player to the game but I imagine this isn’t the primary purpose of said expansion. And a friend finally bought Smallworld so I don’t have to.

the tuesday nerd round-up

So, after long-lamenting the lack of literature where kids kill kids, society has finally recognized just how exceedingly common such books are.  All of the Hunger Games books are in my “finished reading” list but until this past week I’d never actually sat down to read Battle Royale. (I love how a Google search for “Hunger Games” or “Battle Royale” also yields the result of “Lord of the Flies” and a bunch of other ‘kids killing kids’ novels.) While the Hunger Games books and Battle Royale certainly have commonalities, they’re not the same. Obviously both evoke a conversation about fighting tyranny and unjust regulations but they do so in different ways.  Without evaluating spoilers, let me just state that I’d happily see both of these side-by-side as examples of a certain genre in much the same way that Frankenstein and Dracula are considered classics of horror/monster literature. (This is not an endorsement of either of those books as being the ‘best’ in said category.)

I recently re-watched the first season of Eureka because it had been years since I saw it and I wanted to move onto later seasons now that it’s all available on Netflix. I really wish that this show had a bigger following because I think more things could be done with it if it had a wider audience. (Anything on the Sci-Fi channel [[note– calling it “SyFy” demeans me as a geek and as a person]] does seem subject to minimal popularity, though.) What makes this show enjoyable isn’t that it’s overly intellectual or that it’s got action so intense that it’s unavoidably tense. What actually does it is the quirkiness of the characters. Even when they’re silly, they’re enjoyable to watch.

Lastly, Caledea. I had a chance to play this last weekend and it’s fun and not terribly difficult to learn. It’s got some flaws, though, in that it doesn’t really leave enough room for skill and strategy once battling begins. The game relies a bit too much on luck and with its limit of four players, this makes it harder to get invested in the early strategizing. I may have won the first game (all of us were first-time players) but I pretty much attribute that to the luck of the dice rolls I made.  (Okay, not entirely, but enough of it was luck that I can’t go around legitimately calling myself the “master of Caledea,” even though that may be what I kept crying out in the immediate aftermath of the game.)  Still, not a bad use of 90 minutes or so. (It may honestly have been longer. I lost track of time.)

batman and games roundup

Countdown to The Dark Knight Rises: -3 days. I’m actually starting to get stupidly excited over heading to a midnight show. I think I’ve been excited by every one of the Nolan Batman movies but I guess it’s the fact that I need something dorkish to look forward to doing.

Cards Against Humanity truly is a game for “horrible people.” And I love it. As someone who has spent years playing Apples to Apples in a horrifying fashion,  I have to admit to not finding CAH “shocking” but rather more in keeping with our group’s style of behaving like horrible people during board games. I really love that CAH is distributed under a Creative Commons license and therefore provides the ability to create your own deck.  Hooray for being a horrible person! And for party games!

Why does Steam continue to offer awesome sales on things I want while I am currently undergoing computer revisions? It’s like the universe is out to get me. I always seem to have a soft spot for the indie bundles. Honestly, my video game world has taken a serious decline as I continue to play round after round of Ticket to Ride Online. Behold the unfortunate power of the nerd who is over-invested in finding some surprise at turn 1,000.

train of thought

I like trains. Hundreds of hipsters and engineers out there also love trains but I’m not really a hipster or an engineer (at least not one who deals in locomotive engines) so my fascination mostly rides the rails of “ooh, pretty” and historical fiction.  I don’t cosplay steampunk fantasies but I enjoy the visuals of old-fashioned gears and wheels and the puffing of steam. I don’t have a Lionel obsession but toy trains are ridiculously enjoyable to set up and watch as they run in circles. I appreciate the role of rail in the triumphant advancement of the world. I’d love to have the time to travel by train across the country rather than always being forced to hop on an airplane and take a shorter trip to my destination.

I also like games.  So I’m naturally going to launch into a discussion of Ticket to Ride, which was my birthday present a few years ago.  I obsessively play the online version and even the solo offline downloadable game. I’ve collected the European maps, the expansions, and the various bits of paraphernalia associated with it in both the computer game and the board game. I love constructing train routes across the maps, and possibly in the same way that Settlers is enjoyable, I find myself frequently smiling while playing TTR.

Imagine my dorkish glee when Wil Wheaton played Ticket to Ride with his wife Anne, Colin Ferguson (of Eureka, a show not nearly enough people like, if you ask me) and Amy Dallen on TableTop. I watched all 27 minutes with a trembling face, happy eyes, and the inability to stop myself from giggling every so often.  Hopefully you’ll enjoy this video also.

Geek & Sundry TableTop – Ticket to Ride

I classify myself as a road geek, which is a hobby surprisingly few people on the internet seem to share. It means that I like road signs, mapping out routes and places I’ve been on physical and digital maps. I relish gaining knowledge of how roads and bridges are constructed and love seeing how different cities are interconnected. Being so aware of transportation geekery, the giver of Ticket to Ride clearly knew me very well. It’s been a lot of fun in recent weeks while I’ve had to unwind from the process of packing up boxes of books and such (for moving) and even when I’m merely fighting the computer players for paths to new cities I like the practice of card counting and train logistics. (Ha. I actually do count route numbers and cards but it’s mostly subconscious.) The replayability of the game is tremendously high, which makes it a worthy item for the $9 I paid for the online version.

If you want to play with other people online, please feel free to ask for my Days of Wonder user name.