October Games

Wow... So the entirety of Q3 was a bit of a bust... and... Q4 did not get off to a great start either... I didn't play any games at all for the first two weeks of the month... then... 

Monday, 14 October 2024

On the holiday Monday of the Thanksgiving weekend (in Canada!) Orion stopped by to have a "practice game" for the upcoming Path to Glory campaign to try out our respective forces and figure out the full Age of Sigmar rules - which ARE somewhat different from the Spearhead rules, which we've been playing with for the last few months! 

Orion's Soulblight Gravelords just hammered on my Hedonites of Slaanesh! 

There is a brief game report here:

Age of Sigmar - Path to Glory Practice

Sunday, 20 October 2024

A week later, Keiran and I went over to Shannon and Kevin's place to play some games with them and Kevin's son. 

First we played some Carcassonne. 

it was a VERY close game... 

Then everyone else played NMBR9... (because it only plays four and I don't LOVE the game) so I flipped the cards for them. 

Keiran just LOVED the game and utterly DESTROYED everyone else... I think they had 121 points at the end... next highest score was 81...? 

Next we played a few rounds of Tinderblox. A quick little game where you flip a card and try and add blocks to the existing pile in the orientation shown on the card, using the very slippery, odd angled tweezers!?

As soon as you drop something, knock something over, or something you just placed falls over, you are out of the game. 

Keiran, surprisingly, was less good at this one!? I would have thought with all the sewing and other crafty things they do, and the accompanying precise motor skills, they would have rocked this one as well... alas, they were out on the first round for BOTH games.  

The first game the stack got CrAzY high!?

Shannon won one of the games.

I won the other (miniature painting, yo!) 

Finally we played Pirate Fluxx. I'd not played Pirate Fluxx before, but plenty of other Fluxx games, and they're all pretty much the same. It's been a while since I've played any. Sometimes it's a REALLY FAST GAME! Other times it just goes on and onnnnn.... for-EVAR... this was closer to the latter! 

Still it was good to get out and play same board games again!!!

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

After a two and a half month hiatus... I sat down with Amanda and Finnegan to work towards finishing up Warhammer Quest: Shadow over Hammerhal. 

Finnegan played the Cogsmith, Golnir Coalbeard, which he'd originally been playing, and Arvios Sunhelm - Lord-Castellant of the Hammers of Sigmar. Amanda played Vizrin Kyre - Black Ark Fleetmaster (as usual) and took on Alnaryn, the Aelven Loremaster. The four heroes blasted through "The Vile Dungeon" filled with some dank, nasty Putrid Blightkings and a Rotbringer Sorcerer! 

You can read the full report of the evening's adventures here:

Warhammer Quest: Shadows Over Hammerhal - Session Five - The Vile Dungeon

And... that was IT?! 

Once again... not a LOT of games going on... I didn't even get around to trying out Devilry Afoot - or playing a second game of Five Men in Normandy!? (I had thought of trying a quick solo game this evening... but I was just too tired...) 

This was all kind of starting to get me down until yesterday when we played Warhammer Quest. It was SO MUCH FUN! I just LOVE that format of play and both Amanda and Finnegan seem pretty committed to finish this off - and then continue on with MORE of the Warhammer Quest games! I'll need to get painting the rest of the stuff for Silver Tower and/or Cursed City - as we could very well be moving on to one of those in the next few weeks!!

Feeling a bit more positive about next month - with the renewed interest in Warhammer Quest and the new edition of Warhammer Underworlds just a few weeks off and the kick off of the Path to Glory league.. Also Brent has arranged to stop by tomorrow and try out Lost Patrol. 

Things are looking up! 

What did YOU get up to playing over the last month!? 

May Games

With demolition going on in the basement, the Game Room has been closed and will probably remain so until the fall... but that didn't stop us from playing games! I ended up playing games at three friends houses and even managed a few at home - where we could. 

Finnegan has shifted his D&D games back to the kitchen table. I kind of forgot how loud they can be! It's probably a bit louder still as a couple players have returned from University in other cities for the summer and attendance at game nights has been up! He's currently running TWO different campaigns - one on Saturday evenings and one on Monday evenings.

 

Friday, 5 May 2023 

Friday evening Amanda and I rolled over to our friend Shannon's new place to check it out and play some games. She was actually having a house-warming party the following evening, and had invited us... but I don't love parties, especially where I don't know who is going to be there and a large proportion of them are likely not going to be people I know... so we went over the evening before and played some games with Shannon and her boyfriend, Kevin. 

We started with a tiny little game called Tinderblox, which Shannon had brought over as a gift for Amanda's birthday a few weeks earlier. 

It's a fun little dexterity game that fits in a little tin box that can fit in your pocket. 

You draw a card from a deck which shows the orintation of one or more blocks which have to be stacked in the orientation specified on the card, and then added to the fire without knocking anything over. 

We played a few times! 

Afterwards Shannon and Kevin introduced us to Boss Monster. You play a Boss Monster (like, in a video game) and build dungeon to lure adventures into and try to kill them. I ended up with a pretty kick-ass dungeon (largely due to luck of having drawn some powerful cards that worked really well together!?) 

Saturday, 6 May 2023 

As I mentioned, with the renovation well underway, and the game room is closed for the next few months, Finnegan was back to running his Saturday D&D game on the kitchen table, amidst all the mess of stuff in boxes that were dragged out of the basement. That's left the rest of us unsure what to do... THIS Saturday we ended up playing a few games on the corner of the desk upstairs... 

Amanda and I started off with a game of Century Golem Edition

Keiran joined us for a second game. 

Afterwards we played Azul. 

Finally we played a game of Splendor. 

We didn't play any games the following week, but the week after that... 

Thursday, 18 May 2023

Finnegan and I rolled over to Brent and Barbs to play a few games. Jasper joined us there as well. 

The first game we played was Clank! In! Space! Neither Jasper nor I had ever played the game and Finnegan had played it once, years ago, at ToonCon. It was an interesting game - there's deck-building element and moving around a board doing stuff and kind of a race and trying to keep yourself alive... a LOT of moving parts. I died... Then Finnegan did. Both Jasper and Brent made it out alive and scored. 

It was a bit of a bummer as when I died, it was my move next and I easily would have gotten to a place and healed half my injuries... and into the end area where, if I then died, I'd have still scored points... I only had 65 points accumulated. I guess making it to an escape pod would have gotten me another 20 and I might have picked up a card or two with points in the final round or two it would have taken me to make it TO the escape pod... would have been close... alas. 

Afterwards we played Cyptid. The name sounded cool and both Finnegan and I had visions of cool cards with pictures of crazy monsters on it... Unfortunately the only monster illustration was on the cover of the box and it turned out to be a very abstract game of deduction... 

It kind of hurt my brain. We accidentally played with the ADVANCED RULES (by selecting a black bordered card, instead of a white one) It's a little like clue, everyone has ONE clue about where  the Crytid could be hiding in. You win by figuring out what everyone's clue is... and then finding that ONE HEX on the board that meets everyone's criteria!? 

Saturday, 20 May 2023

Saturday I wandered over to Kurtis' to play some games. Eli drove into town for his birthday to play some games. They're played a few before I got there. 

Brent had also showed up and the four of us played a game called Beyond the Sun. We each played a faction trying to develop technologies and/or colonize other planets.

There are a lot of moving parts to the game. 

By the end of the game I felt like I was starting to get a sense of what was going on and how to play the game... but then it was over. Probably should have leaned a little more into developing technology and worried less about snatching up planets earlier in the game. 

After that Eli had to take off... 

We were joined by Joe and played Castles of Mad King Ludwing. 

I love Castles of Mad King Ludwig. I just love making weird castles - that are strangely reminiscent of the hundreds of castles I drew on graph paper in my youth. How did I not end up being an architect?! 

After that we played Imhotep. 

I've played it once before (also at Kurtis'). I could take it or leave it... 

Finally, Brent and Kurtis and I played Shakespeare. 

This was kind of interesting. You have to recruit artisans and actors to build a set make costumes and put on a play. 

Wednesday, 24 May 2023

The following week Jasper and I rolled over to Brent's again and played some more Clank-In-Space! We had talked about playingVinci, but Brent suggested it was better with four and we should wait for a week when Finnegan was available. 

The first game I was just one move away from scoring any points... when I died... Had I been able to play one more hand I'd have made it across and scored around 125 points. Instead I scored ZERO and Brent won with 95. I think Jasper also died without scoring. 

We had time, so we played a SECOND game adding in stuff from the Apocalypse expansion. 

The second game I died one move away from an escape pod... 

GAH!? SO CLOSE.... 

So, I won this game with 76 points... because no one else made it far enough to score before they died!? 

The game is pretty brutal. 

Tuesday, 30 May 2023

This week Finnegan was available so we arranged to play Vinci... but then Jasper sent a note at the last minute saying he couldn't make it... Since Brent had set it up, we played with three anyway. It was interesting. I've never played, but I'd heard about it. It's a moderately historical game that Small World was based on (a game I have played a LOT of!) I had thought there might be specific empires - Greeks, Romans, Celts, Saxons, Vikings, Franks, etc, etc - like History of the World and a few other similar games - instead each new empire just had some random generic strengths or abilities - VERY MUCH like Small World! 

Finnegan found Brent's d100 in a container full of odd dice and delighted in trying to roll it... or... more to the point, getting it to STOP rolling!? 

We got through Vinci quick enough that it was decided we should play Clank-In-Space! AGAIN! 

Once again, I died just before making it to an escape pod. Brent AND Finnegan both escaped! 

And that's about it for this month... That's 32 games I've played so far this Quarter and 76 so far this year! I'm pretty excited about this Kill Team: Ashes of Faith box, I'm hoping in the next month I'll be able to knock out enough figures to play the campaign included in the box! I hope I can convince Finnegan to play out the campaign, I think it's seven games... six campaign games then a finale...? Seems doable through the summer! 

What's everybody else been playing? Let me know in the comments below!