Games and Culture

Well over the past week I was able to make up some more ground in the "play some games" category. Our regular Thursday night VS System event was lightly attended, but everyone had a deck built for the format. That's rather unusual lately so I was happy to see it. More than that though, I was happy to play with one of my personal favorite decks: JSA w/ Lobo. There's an earlier article about the deck and how it works here, so I won't go into the details of it. It was originally built for this format, and modified to work in Golden Age play with the addition of a team-up card. Of course I was playing without that, and was very happy to not only get Lobo out on the table each game, but actually trigger his text in one of them. Granted it's a turn six or seven win, but it's fun and does what it's supposed to do quite well.

We followed up the VS games with a test run of Sentinels of the Multiverse. WIlliam had already played the previous week, but Scott and Anthony wanted to join in too. As we were a little pressed for time I opted to play the villain and environment card for them and walk them through the game steps for the first few rounds. The team started things off a little shaky, but pulled together nicely after the second Kraken appeared!

Time did run out for us though and we weren't able to finish the game before the shop started to close up.

Saturday I wasn't expecting to get any gaming in. After doing some last-minute shopping I headed off to my nephew's birthday party. The little guy is now a hyper-active three year old and as such is a great amount of fun. Lots of pictures, lots of laughing. After he tuckered himself out I headed back home and met a few folks for dinner.

Now, generally Laarni has next to no interest in board games but on occasion will surprise me by suggesting we play one. That's what happened on Saturday evening and we ended up playing a two-player game of Touch of Evil vs. the Vampire! Our characters were quite weak so we decided to team up against the villain and make a go of it. After collecting some tomes and weapons, as well as a few extra health space we hunted him down. Of course we'd never fought a vampire before so we had no idea that he had a crazy mist form and could become all but impossible to hit! Luckily my partner was packing some holy water and kept tossing it into the monster's eye each time he attacked us.

I'll have to say that the finish of this game was a little dissatisfying. The way the vampire's mist-form is worded, it sounds like he is impossible to hit at all. However, after we melted his un-dead behind with holy water, I looked up the rules online. Apparently he still gets hit like normal, but gets a sort of saving throw for each of those hits. Hopefully I'll remember that the next time we play him!

On Sunday we spent the day off getting cultured at the local museum. There was a film costume exhibit on display, and I finally had a chance to check out the Warriors display that opened up a few years ago. Actually, I suppose we got a double dose of culture last week! The first production by Vertigo Theatre has begun and I bought season tickets again. The play was really tense and thoroughly enjoyable, as always.

Monday's game night was good but I'm a little disappointed by the lack of interest so far. This is the second week in a row that I've been unable to garner a group of players big enough to play a three player game. If I've ever invited you to play games on a Monday, don't feel like it's a one-time invitation. The schedule is up here on the blog, although we don't exactly stick to it! Just give me a call or a text or an email and let me know if you're interested in coming out. I'll be more than happy to make a chair available should there be space. And lately we've not been lacking for space!

Both of the games on the schedule for this week are better multiplayer so we ended up shelving them. Instead we played A Game of Thrones LCG using only the core set decks. Our game was House Stark vs House Targaryen. This is only the second time either of us has played with these cards, but we each started out with very strong board presence and a lot of cards in our hands. It went quite long because neither player could garner a distinct early advantage. Finally after seven full turns my Targaryen forces started to pull ahead with the repeated assistance of Khal Drogo. By that point though we'd had enough and House Stark surrendered.

After playing a second game with the core set I'm inclined to say that I actually prefer AGoT LCG as a multiplayer game. We'll have to rope another player or two into it and see if my initial thoughts waver or not.

Finally we played a game of Magic: The Gathering. William wanted to try his newly-purchased pre-constructed Foil Sliver deck. I grabbed the first deck in line out my deck box; a Red-Blue Budget Burn. My deck has no rares in it at all. I should have taken a mulligan right at the start, as I only had one land in my hand. However, I had a few red creatures and two copies of Lightning Bolt, so I decided to hold on. The result was a game that took way longer than it should have. By the time I got some Islands out William's mana pool was huge. I locked down some of his slivers with Narcolepsy, but couldn't make the swing back from 3 life.

Magic is one of those games that I do enjoy, but don't want to play that often. I will really only play in small groups of casual players. I'm not competitive enough, nor interested enough in following and purchasing each set, to want to play in tournaments.

I had planned a brief rant to cap off this entry, but I'll keep it for another day; I'd rather end on a positive note. And of course, I invite people to leave their comments, feedback, suggestions or complaints on this or any other entry on my blog.

Happy Tuesday!