Game night was a little wonky for me this week.  I was out of sync with most of the other people there, and therefore ended up playing mostly fillers all night long until I jumped ship from the boardgamey thing and did a little playtesting for an RPG scenario.  The night was pretty normal in terms of attendance and all, but I just couldn't get plugged into the games I most wanted to play.  But anyway, here's how it went...

Chaos  

I'd heard a little about this new Z-Man small box card game on a couple of the podcasts I listen to, and was happy to give it a try with John the Z-Man Demo Guy.  Chaos is an odd little mash-up of rummy, go fish, and a trick-taking game with some extra twists thrown in for flavor.  Even with that infelicitous despription, it was actually pretty cool.  After a hand or so, I started to get my head around what kind of things you could do, and was even able to pull out a win by getting to 13 points!     

Time: 47 minutes
Score: Me* 13, John the Z-Man Demo Guy 9, Brett* 8, Chip* 4
Ratings: Me 7, Brett 7.5, Chip 7, John the Z-Man Demo Guy - no rating due to an obvious conflict of interest (stuck to the part line that it is the "greatest card game ever... except for the other Z-Man card games, which are all equally superlative!"

I liked Chaos, and for freaking $10, I'll definitely pick it up sometime.  The 47 minute play time is a little worrisome for what it obviously supposed to be a light, filler card game, but I do think that it will decrease with repeated play.

Agricola  (which I didn't get to play  )

The biggest issue for me is that while I was playing this little filler that was supposed to buy me time to get in with the larger group of gamers to decide what we'd do next, two games of Agricola started up.  This dismayed me greatly, because I really wanted to play it again this week.  Heck, I even brought along my extra tricked-out version; with all the animeeples, veggimeeples, resourceameepples, and even the farmer stickers (including the werewolf and alien ones) that I bought a back issue of Spielbox to get.  And neither of the games moved very quickly, which left me with 2 or more hours to fill until a larger reshuffle could happen.   

Time: 113 and 148 minutes
Game 1: Alton 56, Chris 49, Adam* 31, Michelle* 29, Ken 27
Game 2: Charles 41, James 41, Beth 32, Keith* 31
Ratings: Alton 9.5, Chris 9.5, Charles 9, James 9, Beth 7.5, Adam  9, Keith 7, Michelle 8, Ken 9


As I look over these results, one big thing stands out to me.  And that'd be just how bad Kenny really sucks at Agricola (despite the "thumbs up" in the picture).  He's played a few times now, owns the game, and still loses to newbies!  But I guess that we can fogive his ineptitude, because he was probably distracted by getting older, since the next day was his 35th birthday.  We even had cake to celebrate!

Through the Desert  

None of "my group" for the evening had played our Game of the Month! yet this week, so we pulled it out next.  As I tend to do, I looked mostly for chances to wall off sections of the board, and ended up missing several other quick scoring opportunities in the process.  Near the end of the game, Chip and I got into a bit of a battle over the seafoam caravan, and I should have counted more carefully, because there was no way I could win it.  Instead, I should have focused on the cream-colored caravan, because I probably could have taken the largest caravan for it if I'd tried really hard.  In the end, though, Chip beat me by two points to win. 

Time: ??
Score: Chip 66, Me 64, Tom* 60, David* 60
Ratings: Chip 8.5, Me 7.5, Tom 8, David 7.5

Throught the Desert always seems to be very close.  It's easy to teach, is intuitive to play, has has very little downtime.  But it definitely packs in the tension of a much heavier game, because you always want to do more than you can on your turn.  I may be underrating this game...


Kingdoms  

I'm not sure why we didn't start something heavier at this point, but I guess that I was still sorta holding out hope that the Agricol-a-thon would end quickly, and I didn't want to get stuck in missing out the next round of other games.  So instead, we pulled out my copy of Kingdoms, which is one of my favorite light boardgames.  And I got the chance to play this game with my good friend Graham, who I haven't had much of a chance to play anything with recently.  And let me go on the record stating that this period of Graham-free game playing was in no way intentional, and does not imply me having a poor opinion of him or his game-playing capabilities. 

Anyway, there's not much to really tell about this game.  we played out tiles and castles, then did some math and scored them.  Then we did it all two more times.  And in the end, once again, Chip won by scoring two more points than me. 

Time: 28ish minutes
Score: Chip 201, Me 199, Tom 187, Graham 156
Ratings: Chip 7.5, Me 7.5, Tom 7.5, Graham 8

Kingdoms has a great balance between trying to jump in on opportunities at the right time and trying not to set other people up with great opportunities that they can benefit from more than you can.  I also own the Beowulf the Movie game (which is an expanded version of this game), and I really need to try it out sometime soon. 



No Thanks!

And just to make my "filler night" complete, we played what is probably the best filler ever designed, No Thanks!  This was a game characterized by greed leading to a fall, because Keith pushed things just a little too far at one point in attempting to get a few extra chips, and because I had already crashed and burned in the game, I took the card he needed just to spite him.  So for a third freaking time in the evening, Chip won the game by two points. 

Time: 26 minutes (for 3 hands)
Score: Chip 48, Keith 50, Tom 92, Me 109, Graham 115
Ratings: Chip 8, Keith 8, Tom 8, Me 8, Graham 8

We actually ended No Thanks! a little sooner than we normally would, because the rest of everybody then finished up their farming simulations.  

Fiasco 

Kenny, Tom, and I have been working on a new playset for Fiasco, and we wanted to do a little face-to-face playtesting to see if it would work as well as we wanted it to.  Keith was interested as well, so he jumped in as well to give his fresh opinion on what we had done.  We ended up actually just playing through the setup portion of the game a couple of times, which is where players actually use the playset to determine the whole scenario for the game. 

The playset is titled "Action Six News", and is all about the news team at a local TV station.  It's influenced by things such as WKRP in Cincinnati, Anchorman, NewsRadio, Broadcast News and, of course, the insanity that happens in real local news groups in all of our home towns. 

In the first run-through, Keith was Dan Wrightman, the Big Anchorman at Action 6 News, and I was his junior anchor sidekick, Lance Storm.  Kenny was Dr. Daphne McCardle-Wrightman, Keith's new stepmom who was actually younger than him, who was going to perform a live colonoscopy on him in the hopes of raising colon cancer awareness.  Dr. McCardle-Wrightman, however, was not actually a doctor, but was instead a con-artist working with fellow Columbian-med-school-dropout Rodrigo de la Nacho (played by Tom, of course), who were working out a big scam to take down Dan and get into Dan's father's will.  I had some sort of information implicating one or both of them, and I was hoping to turn it into a Peabody-award-winning story that would get me the Big Anchorman job, with or without the use of a bag of peanuts and someone's well-known peanut allergy. 

The second time was a little harder to fit together, but in the end seemed to be even funnier.  Kenny was Paul Gorman, the Big Anchor for Action 6 News, who had a beautiful baritone voice, stunning good looks, and was as smart as a bag of rocks.  I was Earl Bucket, host of Earl's Show and Tell, a local call-in swap-shop show on Channel 6 and former journalism school classmate of Paul Gorman.  I hated Paul Gorman with a passion, because while I had the brains and drive to be real a news man, I had a face made for radio.  I was broken and hopeless, but still held out the hope of one day having my own exposé-style news show.  Keith was Edward Brice III, a young producer from the big city who was responsible for both of our shows, and who was looking to made a bundle off the book and movie rights of his time in purgatory at Action 6 News.  There was also a bit of a complication between him and Paul, because the teleprompter was either being hacked or going haywire, and Paul would mindlessly read the most ridiculous, embarrassing, and slanderous things that would appear on it.  Tom was Ted Anderson, the lead anchor at Action News 11.  Paul was under the mistaken impression that he and Ted were somehow friendly colleagues, and would frequently hang around the Action News 11 studio, trying to pal around with his "good buddy".  Ted and I had also had an alcohol-induced homosexual fling at an Action News 11 Christmas party a few years ago, probably while commiserating about our "Paul Gorman problems".    

After doing the setups, we went through the playset and identified weaknesses.  Keith's input was really invaluable, and I hope that we'll be able to get a "final" product ready pretty soon.  But I'm still not exactly sure what we're going to do with it then...   

Other Games Played

Army of Frogs
Time: 33 minutes
Score: Graham* - Win; Chris, Ken & Michelle - Lose
Ratings: Graham 7.5, Chris 8, Ken 7, Michelle 8

Chaos
Time: ??
Score: Charles* 17, Beth* 10, Denise* 6, David* 4, Mark* 4
Ratings: Denise 8, Everybody else ???

No Thanks!
Time: ??
Score: Mark 91, David 134, Tom 149
Ratings: Mark 8, David 8, Tom 7.5

R-Eco
Time: ??
Score: Graham* 11, Brett* 10, Denise* 10, Mark* 9
Ratings: Graham 7.5, Brett 7, Denise 8.5, Mark 6.5

Race for the Galaxy
Time: 16 minutes
Score: Mark 70, Alton 50, Chris 44
Ratings: all 10's

Stone Age
Time: 100 minutes
Score: Alton 257, Michelle* 211, David* 209
Ratings: Alton 9.5, Michelle 9, David 9

Throught the Desert
Time: 34 minutes
Score: Graham 79, Chris 72, Alton 66, Ken 61
Ratings: Graham 8.5, Chris 9, Alton 8.5, Ken 8.5

Tobago
Time: 33 minutes
Score: Chip 41, Graham 34, Adam* 29, Chris 24
Ratings: Chip 8.5, Graham 8.5, Adam 6, Chris 8.5

* First play for that Person