And just because I can't wait to share it, let's start with the surprise.  When I got home from church yesterday, there was a package leaning against my door.  I wasn't really expecting anything (since Ascendancy's release date has been pushed back again and again), and was a little nervous because the package itself was half out in the rain.  Anyway, this is what I pulled off the doorstep...

And just in case you can't read the address label, here's a closeup:


Yes, this was my prize for getting 6th place in Doug Garrett's "Holiday Prize Contest"!  As I opened the package, I found that I actually ended up receiving my 3rd choice (much better than I expected) of the 11 prizes he had available (behind only Space Alert and Powerboats), which was...


Apparently, I'm one of the only people that haven't picked up Stone Age already.  Heck, I'm one of the only people that hasn't actually played it yet either!  At least I now have it in my grubby little (okay, they're actually pretty big) hands, maybe I can get it played at home or elsewhere.  Thanks to Doug for his generosity and his very excellent podcast!

But the really cool thing about my long New Year's weekend was that I actually got to play some games!  On Saturday, Britt, Chris and Jim joined me at Hypermind to play a few of the longer games which are hard to fit into a regular game night. 

While we were waiting for Britt to get there, the rest of us started with a game of Ghost Stories, which we lost miserably.  But I think that Chris' growing displeasure with the dice-rolling (and often dice-failing) in the game is like a bad-karma mojo that poisons all of our attempts these days.  Of course, I can also see why he gets so frustrated.  In one case, Jim was trying to exorcize two ghosts, a 2 resistance red one and a 4 resistance black one.  The red one had its resistance lowered by my power (the "Enfeeblement Mantra"), and between Jim and Chris (who was also on that spot), they had 3 black Tao tokens.  Plus, Jim had the blue power that let him have two chances to exorcize each turn ("Second Wind"), and he used his power token to also use the green power that gave him a fourth Tao die ("Strength of a Mountain").  What happened?  In two rolls (8 total freaking dice), not a single red, black, or white result came up - so the red ghost was sent to hell using the lowered resistance and a Tao token, but the big black mutha' was still sitting right there to taunt us into oblivion.  I still enjoy the game (a lot more than Chris, anyway), but it is certainly more hopelessly frustrating than Pandemic, for instance, because of cases like these when you've done pretty much everything that you can to prepare but still get screwed by the dice. 

Anyway, we then decided to try out Battlestar Galactica.  I think that all of us had at least one play under our belts, but we were all still a bit shaky on the rules and how the game flows.  I chose to play William Adama, Jim was Laura Roslin, Chris was Sharon "Boomer" Valerii, and Britt was Chief  Tyrol.  

First thing, Boomer jumped out into a Viper to face off with the initial group of cylons.  Despite three evasive maneuvers cards, she was almost immediately sent back to sickbay when the elite Cylon raiders took her down.  After jumping away from that threat, we found ourselves in a relatively cylon-free zone for a couple of more jumps.  Despite the obligatory random paranoid accusations, we pretty much figured out that all of us were bonafide fleshy humans at this point.  We even managed to get one resource (Morale maybe?) into the red before the sleeper phase agent phase. 
 
Sharon got three cards and went to the Brig, and then the Chief joined her pretty soon so they could have some "conjugal" visits.  Things got tighter and tighter as we encountered more cylons and some difficult decisions from crisis cards.  Our resources were slipping into the red, but President Roslin gave an inspiring speech that helped our morale.  But still, there was no obvious cylon.  Suspicion fell on me despite JIm taking a look at one of my lotalty cards from some skill crisis that we passed because I was picking jumps that cost us pretty heavily in resources.  Of course, I was totally human and picking jumps to get us there faster, so I don't know what they were thinking.  I ruled out Britt as a Cylon because he had the sympathizer card from the sleeper phase, and I was relatively certain that the cylon card hadn't been dealt out at the start of the game.  And that left either Jim (President Roslin) or Chris (Boomer) as the cylon, but neither of them had done anything particularly "cylon-ny".  

Things continued to go smoothly for the humans.  Before long, we had reached 8 distance and were preparing for the last jump to victory.  Unfortunately, our fuel was at 1, but the last jump wouldn't require drawing a card, so unless we lost fuel through a crisis we would be good.  In a last-ditch effort to thwart our win, Chris finally revealed his true nature when he used Sharon's power to make us fail an important crisis check.  In the end, though, it wasn't enough.  Having plenty of population, we risked 3 to jump at the first opportunity and won the game.  Even those few ships made it, though, and our final resources looked like this:
     
Despite a relatively easy ride, we were still on the brink of failure, and Chris could have won if he'd found a way to knock off that last point of fuel.  In general, I liked the game better than I did after my first play of it, but it still seems to pale in comparison to my favorite coop games.  It's just way longer and (to me) less thematic than Shadows Over Camelot.  Don't get me wrong; this game has tons and tons of theme, but it just seems to break down for me when there aren't any cylon ships on the board.  Drawing those crisis cards each turn still becomes way more mechanical ("let's play skill cards to meet this number") rather than thematic ("let's pull together as characters to meet this thematic challenge").  And Pandemic is just a tighter, quicker, and better constructed game in pretty much every way.  Anyway, I still want to play this every so often, and I hope that its length doesn't keep it on the shelf too often.

We finished off the day with the great Lord of the Rings wargame, War of the Ring.  Despite three of us owning the game, I was the only one who'd played it recently (at MACE), so it was a essentially a learning game.  Jim (the Witch King) and I (Saruman) were the shadow forces, while Chris (Rohan, dwarves, and the north) and Britt (Gondor and the elves) were the free peoples.  Things started looking bad for the good races on turn two, when we already had all the evil nations at war and I played Saruman.  It was also a really bad thing for them when I drew the Corsairs of Umbar, but they would know that until we started our assault on Gondor and Dol Amroth felt the weight of my Oliphants.  Within a turn or two, the greatest human nation had fallen and the White Hand of Saruman was about to strike Rohan.

Before I made my invasion, Chris managed to get Strider, Boromir, and Pippin into the Fords of Isen, and when I attacked he used a battle card requiring a hobbit to kill off Saruman.  Even without my minion, my forces crushed the pittiful horsemen, leaving us only 2 points from victory.  Britt's elves from Lorien laid seige to Moria in a bold strategic move, but due to the arrival of a couple of cave trolls, they weren't able to seal the deal. 

With Lorien lying mostly undefended, Jim launched his forces west from Dul Guldor while my fighting Uruk-Hai moved north from Edoras.  Our forces met and combined, and after a few turns of seige, finally crushed the elves to spread our shadow over all of Middle Earth.  

One thing that I saw for the first time in an actual game of WotR was an attack by Dwarven forces. Of course, they were destroyed in the process, but at least Britt managed to get in one swing with the selfish little bearded folk!

The game went pretty smoothly, but Britt and Chris never really had a chance.  They allowed themselves to get drawn into a military confolict and ended up completely ignoring the fellowship for most of the game.  Plus, there's just a familiarity that you need with the game and what cards can do in order to effectively plan out how you're going to run your forces.  In retrospect, I should have been a bit more intentional in choosing sides and ended up playing one of the free peoples, because they are less straight-forward than the shadow forces. 

Chris didn't care much for the War of the Ring, but the rest of us had a good time.  It was Chris' first play ever, though, and he probably had the hardest nation to play (again, I should have thought that through a little more clearly), and I hope that he'll be willing to give the game another chance now that he knows what he's doing.  I've also decided that I rreally need to pick up the Battles of the Third Age expansion, if I can find it at a good price.

So, now I'm looking forward to Tuesday night and our new Game of the Month!, Cosmic Encounter!