Since last week was my birthday week, I managed to convince Gwen to let me go a little bit early (arriving at 7:30 instead of 8:00), and while I still wasn't able to jump right into a game, I did go ahead and set up Troyes for right afterwards.  We had a couple of guests joining us for the first time; a Dad and his daughter who happen to have a little "date night" on Tuesdays.  They played No Thanks! with some of the guys and seemed to have fun, so I hope they come back to see us again sometime! 

Troyes [BGG]

So, once No Thanks! was done, Tim, Steve and Kenny joined me as I taught them Troyes.  I decided early on to go with just white (religious) and yellow (city hall) dice.  Tim, on the other hand, went all military (red dice) all the time, which I thought was pretty cool (and would like to try sometime).  Steve played similarly to me (to start with anyway) and Kenny was more balanced through the whole game.

It's hard to really describe the narrative for a game of Troyes, but one thing that I think made a pretty big difference was that in the last two turns, I used both the Goldsmith (which give 1 VP and 2 deniers) and the Pilgrimage (which just gives 2 VP's) multiple times.  I also managed to get into all 3 levels of the Cathedral, so I avoided any negatives as well.

But everyone else was incredibly close, and they really weren't all that far behind me either.  
 
 
Time: 105 minutes
Score: Norton 40, Tim* 29, Steve* 28, Kenny* 26
Ratings: Me 8, Tim 6, Steve 7, Kenny 7.5

Troyes is a hard game for me to evaluate.  First of all, I like the actual playing of the game a lot.  It's really fun to make all those little decisions about how to manipulate and use your dice, and there's always something that you can do that feels (at least mostly) productive.  It may go on a bit too long, but goining around the table taking one action each really breaks up any downtime, and it doesn't seem to wear out its welcome for me at all.

After a couple of plays now, however, I really question where there's much strategic depth in the game at all. 

Let me qualify this, though, by explaining myself more clearly.  Troyes certainly has a lot of variety and replayability with the fact that you only see 1/3 of the activity cards each game.  And like I just said, it's absolutely chocked full of decisions to be made.  I'll even give you that (once you know what sorts of things the different colors do) there are some strategic-level choices about which buildings you want to place your citizens in to get workers (aka dice).


But all those turn-by-turn decisions that you're making all the time seem almost completely tactical.  And since you don't know which Activity cards will show up on later turns, you really can't start formulating a strategy from the start of the game.  You just have to make the best decision you can at that time and then work on revising your play when you get more information.  It's fun, but also comes off feeling a little more random or chaotic or just slightly pointless than I'd like in a game of this length and weight.

However, I'll finish by saying that I could still be very wrong.  I've only played twice, and maybe repeated play will continue to show me more and more higher-level decision-making.  And even if it is a mostly tactical game, that still doesn't make it bad by any means.  It's just maybe a little bit disappointing to me based on the ideas I originally held about it.  But I guess we'll just have to wait and see as I keep playing it... 

The Awful Green Things From Outer Space [BGG]

Tim and Steve had to go, so Kenny and I pulled out his shiny new copy of the brand-new reprint of a game that holds at least a little nostalgia for both of us, The Awful Green Things From Outer Space.  My brother Tony had (maybe still has?) the original Dragon Magazine in which this first appeared, and he gave me a copy of the 1980 TSR version that I still have in my game room.

I didn't actually play it all that much when I was younger, but I still remember it pretty fondly.  Neither of us were very brushed-up on the rules, so we mostly read our way through setup and basic play, but I think we got it more or less right.  I played the crew, and got a really nice start against Kenny in the first few turns.

Later on, when the fire extinguisher turned up the "5 Dice to Kill" result, the game got even better for me.  I wiped out stacks of baby aliens with one attack using it, and managed to keep the rest of the population under control until I could sweep through and eliminate the awful green threat from the mighty Znutar!

Even though I read it out earlier, we forget to grow the Awful Green Things when they ate a crew member, however, so the score officially gets an asterisk because we don't know how much effect that would have had.  Kenny ate something like 8 or 9 crew, so it would have been a nice boost, but I still think that with the array of weapon effects I had available, I would have won anyway (though certainly not with as many points, which is derived from surviving crew).   


Time: 51 minutes
Score*: Me (Crew) 185, Kenny (AGT's) 0
Ratings: Me 7.5, Kenny 8

The Awful Green Things From Outer Space is really cool.  It's completely luck-based (mostly in the chit draw for weapon effects), but it's just campy and silly enough (and not too long) so that it's a total blast.  I don't think that I'd want to play it every week or anything, but the production quality, inclusion of old expansions, and low price point on the reprint have me interested in maybe buying it even though I have an older version. 


The possible effects of the different weapons range from "Grow" (which actually makes the AGT's get bigger) all the way to "5 Dice to Kill", which is really good in an area-effect weapon like the fire extinguisher
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game  [BGG]

After playing a 2-player game of the Lord of the Rings LCG last week, I had lots of people interested this time around.  Keith played the Spirit deck again, I took Lore, Tom had Leadership, and Kenny played the Tactics deck.  And since we had beaten the Passage Through Mirkwood quest last time, we stepped it up to the Journey Down the Anduin this time. 

It was a nightmare flipping up four Encounter cards a turn.  But with all four decks in play, we had a lot of resources to bring to bear as well.  Questing went pretty well for the most part, especially once Tom played out Faramir and could let all of my 5 or 6 questing characters each have +1 to their Willpower.  Fighting also went pretty well, with Kenny's forces (Legolas and Gimli, of course) tearing up enemies left and right.  What most got in our way were locations, which we didn't have any easy way to deal with.

After looking through the decks more at home, the Spirit deck actually has several ways to help deal with locations (mostly with the Northern Trackers and Lorien Guides), but they didn't really show up.  And even though we made it to the last quest card, we eventually got torn up by Treachery cards that dealt damage to us.  I did some healing with the Lore deck, but once we lost a hero or two, the wheels started coming off and we lost.

Time: 95 minutes
Score: Journey Along the Anduin (Quest) - Win; Forces of Light (Keith, Kenny, Tom & Norton) - Lose 
Ratings: Keith 8, Kenny 8.5, Tom 8.5, Norton 8.5


The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is really good.  The mechanics of the "opposition" in the game (flipping cards from the Encounter deck equal to the number of players) is incredibly simple, but the nature of the threats and variety of ways in which they must be dealt with makes it feel like the walls are closing in from all sides.  And as a Living Card Game, the variety in the player decks, each having its own strengths and weaknesses, offers a ton of variety in play and demands players to really cooperate in order to do well. 

I definitely feel like I've just scratched the surface with this game, but my experiences with it so far (both at game night and solo, which I'll hopefully write about soon) already have me committed to buying the first batch of Adventure packs and maybe even another copy of the base game (just to have more variety in deckbuilding).

Other Games Played

Alien Frontiers
Time: 65 minutes
Score: Chris 10, Ian S. 8, Shawn 7
Ratings: Chris 8.5, Ian S. 9, Shawn 8

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer
Time: 60 and 60 minutes
Game 1: David 60, Jessica 52, Sean 49, Brad 47
Game 2: Jessica 61, Brad 55, Sean 51, David 47
Ratings: Jessica 9, David 9, Sean 9, Brad 9

Coloretto
Time: 22 minutes
Score: Tom 43, Keith 32
Ratings: ??

No Thanks!
Time: 25 minutes (for 2 hands)
Score: Tim 49, Ken 51, Jeff* 68, Steve 69, Hannah* 90
Ratings: ??

Olympus
Time: 101 minutes
Score: Stacey* 35, Brad* 31, Keith* 30, Tom 19
Ratings: Stacey 8, Brad 6.5, Keith 8, Tom 8

Saboteur
Time: 20 minutes
Score: Brad* 4, Stacey* 0, Keith 0, Tom 0
Ratings: Stacey 7, Tom 7

Troyes
Time: 62 minutes
Score: Stacey 39, Chris* 36, Shawn 31
Ratings: Stacey 9, Chris 8.5, Shawn 9

Vegas Showdown
Time: 79 minutes
Score: Stacey 66, Tom 64, Chris 59, Shawn* 48, Keith 43
Ratings: Stacey 9, Tom 7.5, Chris 8.5, Shawn 8, Keith 8

* First play for that Person