So I'd like to do a weekly column simply titled as this one is. Friday nights are our only gaming nights for my friends and I, and we've been going for a little less than two years now (just shortly after I got married, all the guys in the wedding party ended up meeting on a regular basis and playing the board games I gave out as my usher and groomsmen gifts!), and it's been pretty great so far.
Anyway, so for tonight's gaming we were planning on doing a level 7 D&D 4e dungeon delve. Well, that didn't happen, so instead it turned into a board games night. We started with playing some Betrayal at House on the Hill that went very well. I played one of the little girls as I am often prone to doing (I enjoy playing the character that can most humiliate the other players in my great victories), and was surprisingly not the betrayer. My friend, we'll call KG, he's the kind of gamer who won't read rules, won't try to think about things with too much depth, and always wants to make the biggest explosion or go out in a blaze of glory. Our group is lucky enough to really only have one of this type of gamer. So he becomes the betrayer and we all try to destroy him and kill his little rats that pop up all over. Of course it comes down to me and my little yellow-dressed, spear wielding girl. And...failure. He gets past me, barely surviving, into the room of our impending doom with a large pentagram in the middle. So close!
We moved on from there waffling about who would play Dracula in Fury of Dracula (not my favorite game by far with few character choices and not too much excitement throughout the game) when I remembered we hadn't played Cosmic Encounter for quite a long time, and we had the perfect number of players for the game - 5. Cosmic is one of my favorite strategy/competitive games. I ended with the, nuts, which race? Well, the important part was that the more ships died, the more my necromantic powers increased. Let me tell you, when the situation is the greater amount of death, the greater your power, it's incredibly easy to risk your ships as they just add overall to your power, and even when you're spread thin, you're still just as strong as ever. Very useful in a game of numbers and battling. My brother and I ended up sharing the victory this time.
The highlight of the night for me was my first real exposure to Wings of War (WoW), Watch Your Back, specifically. I remember every year at Gencon seeing the small WoW display at the Fantasy Flight Games booth and just being kind of bored by the idea. It seemed really expensive for what little you got, and the small ships were definitely a bit of a snore. I'm not really into historical gaming whether it's ancient or WWII - unless the word "weird" fits in there somewhere, it doesn't tend to trip my trigger.
WoW tripped the trigger and never let go. I lost my plane first unfortunately, but KG actually let me take over his half way through and we worked together, since he had played it earlier this week with the owner of Watch Your Back - Mr., we'll call him. The game play reminded me of the old Wizkids game, Crimson Skies, although less pretentious/visually interesting. I liked Crimson Skies for what little I played of it, but WoW seems much more strategically-sound. Less guns, no dice rolling (thank God!), and just much more about your wits.
Overall it was a great night when I thought it was going to be another disappointing week of no role-playing. All three games were a lot of fun and I learned about a new game that, as we speak, the other three guys (the third remains un-psuedonymed for now), and I are all thinking of ways to make a Galactica variant to do space dog fights with capital ships nuking each other from across the kitchen table. Good stuff.
(Quote in title is in fact a line from Baloo from Talespin, remember? Talespin? I do now!)
This amuses me.
ReplyDelete1. I see what you did thar.
2. FNG keeps making me think of Call of Duty 4
3. We've got prototype raptor and viper cards, I think.