So not every game night can be spectacular as the last one I wrote about.  As always, I has a good time last week, but I was pretty disappointed that I didn't get the chance to play the Game of the Month!,  Age of Empires III.  But I did manage to get in 5 plays of 4 different games, and enjoyed getting the chance to play most of them with Chris Ingersoll.

To start off the night, I jumped into a game of God Dice with Chris and Jen.  I hadn't ever heard of it before, but it sounded decent and relatively quick.  In the game, each player controls an adventuring party made up of standard D&D-type characters: Hero, Cleric, Monk, Sage, Assassin, and Bowman (which was actually a chick, so "Bowperson" or "Bowlady" would have been more appropriate).  You build your party by choosing 4 of the characters, one at a time, taking turns with everybody else.  So in the end, Chris got a little screwed by having to take 2 Assassins (which were pretty good offensively, but sucked on hit points).

On your turn, you basically just choose which character to attack with, and the player you're attacking chooses a defender.  Then you roll the 9 dice and try to build combinations that are listed on the character's card.  You can re-roll each possible result once, so there's a decent level of decision-making and tactical thought involved in which order to use the re-rolls.  Usually, if you managed to form one of the combos, you take the core damage rolled (adding all the "5" results) and then add or multiply it by the effect of the combo.  The damage is applied to the defender, and if it kills them, that player will play with less characters.  The game ends when only one player has any characters left, which in our game happened to be Jen. 

I left out a few details, but that's pretty much how it goes.  In general, God Dice was pretty fun.  Using the Yahtzee-like, combo mechanic than the traditional "roll to hit" mechanism was pretty novel for a combat game, and seeing some of the cool effects get pulled off from time to time was cool.  The only real complaint I have is that the game wore out its welcome a little, and I think that it might play better starting with only 3 characters.  But still, it was an entertaining way to spend 56 minutes.

From there, Chris and I played a game of Metropolys, which is one of my favorite filler/light-strategy games right now.  It was the first time I've played with less than 4 players, and in general I thought it played very well one-on-one.  The auctions did play out differently, because you can predict a lot more clearly what choices your opponent will make, but the game still felt mostly the same in how it played out.  It's sorta hard to figure out how the game plays on your first try, so I managed to win pretty easily.

The "Big Event" of the night for me was to finally play Big City.  Britt picked up a virtually mint copy on ebay for a steal, and had brought it once or twice before to game night.  In the meantime, I had listened to Mark Johnson's recent "All About Big City" episode of Boardgames to Go, which got me really excited to play (and to buy the Valley Games reprint, if it will ever be released).  Anyway, between the two of us, we taught Carol (his wife) and Chris how to play, and got down to work building our city!

In the first game, I jumped out to an early lead by building a few 2-space residential buildings.  I managed to hold on to the lead until late in the game, when I had a crazy brain-fart and was thinking that you couldn't build businesses on the outskirts of the city (which isn't true, of course, it's just that you wouldn't get the bonus point for being in the city core).  That cost me a turn or two, allowing everybody else to catch up and pass me.  Chris then rode the 30-point construction of a shopping center to a close win.

Denise then stepped in and took Chris' place as we played again.  This time, everyone (including Denise, who had watched pretty much all of the first game) was a lot cagier in how they played.  Britt was pretty obvious in setting up a big shopping center, and the rest of us conspired to foil his plan by laying the streetcar track right through the middle of his building site.  I thought I was in a good position to win, because I was holding the last three spaces in one neighborhood, including the double-number space, and planned on my next three turns to fill them up and bulild the 15-point church.  Unfortunately, all four of us had set ourselves up to build a church, and Carol and Denise managed to get theirs on the table first, stealing the only 2 churches available.  In the end, Denise won the game by 11 points over Carol (81 to 70), leaving me (at 65) and Britt (at a laughable 40 points) in the dust.

After playing, I'm even more excited to own this Big City.  While I can see some serious weaknesses in the game, I still enjoyed it a lot.  I don't know if it's the toy-factor of the buildings, or the idea that it could be a great "couples game" for Gwen and me, but I definitely want to get this into my collection whenever I get the chance.

I then finished off the evening with a game of Witch's Brew.  Adam, who played and enjoyed the game the week before, joined me along with Charlie, James, and Mark, giving us a full 5 players.  It's hard to really recount the way that Witch's Brew plays out, but it was extremely close all game long.  In the end, Mark won with 22 points, edging out Adam and James at 21 points, and Charlie and I brought up the rear with 18 points each.  Everybody had a really great time, and I plan to keep bringing this as long as people remain excited about it.

So there we are; another game night completed.  But what's even better is that tonight is another one, and this game night will include a Small World...


Britt, Carol, Denise and I all work on the Big City