Over a Candle

These are the games I’m taking with me today.

• Robo Rally
• Illuminati
• Empire Builder
• The Stars are Right
• Munchkin
• Munchkin Cthulhu
• Gloom
• King’s Blood
• Settlers of Catan
• Carcassonne
• Zombies!!!
• Fluxx
• Monty Python Fluxx

The Gamers Club at my school is getting together with the club from the school across the river for a massive game day at our local gaming store. I’m sure there will be plenty of other games there. I just want to make sure we have lots of options. Heck, I may even buy one or two more games just for good measure.

Today is about putting aside the collectible games and the video games, and having a blast with table-top games that don’t require a heavy investment to be able to play. I don’t know how many we will get through, although, if the twenty or thirty people show up that have said they might come, a lot of these games could see action.

Personally, I’m hoping for some old favorites, particularly Robo Rally and Illuminati. But I wouldn’t mind some Settlers of Catan, too.

Sure, I could sit home all day, avoiding my grading, and playing Borderlands. But I’ve been looking forward to some table-top gaming for a long time. Now’s my chance to give into that side of my geekness. Sometimes, it’s just better goofing off with other people.

Let the games begin!

So this weekend was my first non-comic book con. Valley Con is the local sci-fi convention. In the ten years I’ve lived here, I’ve never actually made it to the con. This year, I was recruited to run some Star Wars minis tournaments. So I set up tournaments for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Friday, was just a small, four person, tournament. I lost every match. And yet, I didn’t care. It was fun organizing it, and this is one game I don’t mind losing (though I don’t like making stupid mistakes).

I came back early Saturday morning. I wanted to catch a screening of the old Batman serial that was one of the features of the con. But I couldn’t find the room, so I got some breakfast. When I got back, I found the room, but only caught the last couple of minutes of an episode of the serial. I did get to see a few episodes of the old Adam West television show.

I do still get a kick out of the campiness. Still, I’m trying to figure out why the Penguin thought that marrying the daughter of the police commissioner would give him immunity from prosecution. But I decided not to dwell on it.

The second tournament on Saturday afternoon grew to six players, as we drew in a couple of new participants. I did much better, winning two of three (and I might have been able to win the third match, but we ran out of time). The one downside was that while running the tournament, I missed out on seeing the guest speakers. George R. R. Martin was one of the speakers, and Peter Jurasik was the other. While I haven’t read Martin, I am a huge fan of Babylon 5, on which Jurasik played Londo Mollari.

I did manage to sneak away for long enough to get an autograph from him. I tried not to be a complete geek. But when I was asked what I wanted him to write on the picture he was signing, I blanked. He was very gracious and witty and came up with something appropriate:

In case you can’t read it, it says “To Phil, I raise my glass to you, my good and dear friend! Londo Mollari” Very nice. Very appropriate. Other people were asking him to write lines. I never managed to come up with something clever. I guess I’m not as good a fan. Or maybe not as good a geek?

After the tournament, I got to play Descent, a board game that seems a lot like D&D-lite. A dungeon crawl without too much roleplaying. But it was a lot fun (even if it took much longer than any of us expected it to). When we finally finished, we had a couple of drinks at the bar, and then I left for the evening. I would have liked to stay and hang out in one or more of the con suites, but I wanted to get home more. I still had a tournament to run on Sunday.

Sunday came, and as I began to suspect, people had managed to run out of steam. I didn’t get any players for our tournament, but that did leave me free to go to a Q&A session with both Martin and Jurasik. It was cool to actually get to hear them speak a bit, about writing and acting.

Afterwards I caved in and got another autograph. (I never really thought of myself as that much of a fan-geek.) Still, it gave me a chance to talk with Jurasik again. He was a very friendly, genuine sort of person. (At least, that was my impression.) Which of course puts him at complete odds with certain aspects of Londo’s character. Still it was incredibly cool to get to meet him and chat with him a bit. I said nothing memorable, but that’s okay. I don’t need him to remember me.

Finally, I called it a con. It was a long, fun-filled weekend. I must say, while I spent a lot of time in the gaming room, rather than experiencing a good chunk of the rest of the Con, I still had a lot of fun.

The Stars Are Right is a new card game by Steve Jackson Games. I just picked it up a couple of weeks ago and finally got to play it yesterday. I haven’t geeked out on here much lately, so I thought that a quick review was in order (especially as a run-up to Valley Con, which begins tomorrow).

The game comes in a box that looks a lot like the Munchkin starter set. Indeed, though the illustrations aren’t by the wonderful John Kovalic, they do remind me a bit of his work. While I was expecting a Munchkin-like game, I was very pleasantly surprised to find out I was completely wrong. (Don’t misunderstand me: I love Munchkin. But I wanted something different.)

In the game, you are trying to summon enough creatures from the Cthulhu mythos. There is a 5×5 star-field to start play, and you have to use your cards to rearrange the field in order to get the constellations you need for your summonings. Since everyone is trying to get different constellations, other people’s modifications of the star-field are likely to screw you up.

The game was very easy to learn, and yet the complexity of trying to rearrange the star-field to get the constellations you need really keeps your attention. There are a lot of interesting and clever games out right now, and I’m getting a kick out of learning and playing them. Out of all those games, The Stars Are Right is a rather inventive entry. And it seems to be fun even with only two people. Definitely worth picking up and destroying the cosmos with some friends.

The Gamer’s Club at my school had its gaming convention today. As a result, I bought a couple of new card games that are a lot of fun. Since I haven’t talked about any table top games in a while, I thought I’d share these with you…

The first one is King’s Blood, which is a Japanese card game that Steve Jackson Games has brought over to the States.

This is a hard game to describe. Recognizing I’m probably not doing it full justice, the closest thing I can think of is a more sophisticated version of Uno. You are building a genealogy of the royal family, but you play cards from your hand to build the family tree. In order to play cards, you have to match either numbers or colors. Matching members of the opposite sex forms marriages and begins new generations to build. The person who gets rid of all of his or her cards first, wins.

Once you get clear on some of the more esoteric rules, the game plays very quickly. But it’s a lot of fun. We played a couple of games, and once we got the hang of it, really got into it.

The other game is Gloom, from Atlas Games.

Each player has a family of five members. Your object is to make your family as miserable as possible and then kill them off. Whoever has the most miserable family at the end of the game, wins. The game play is pretty straight-forward, but incredibly amusing. The cards are clear, with various fields filled in. This allows you to place your modifying cards (showing positive or negative Pathos) on top of your character cards, building up negative or positive Pathos. Once the characters are feeling badly enough, you play an Untimely death card on them to kill them.

It’s a rather simple game, all told. But it takes longer to play than King’s Blood. Still also fun, and facilitates some amusing story-telling, if you are so inclined.

Both games were a blast, and very easy to pick up and play. So if you’re looking for some fun card games to play, these are both worth a look.

I found a blast from the past today, and I am so excited…

It seems that Steve Jackson Games has reprinted the Illuminati card game.

Sitting around the large round table in the dorm lounge, we used to play this game often in college. (That reminds me of a story involving the same large round table, but that’s for another time.) I have fond memories of someone (sometimes me, sometimes others) pissing off Kent and watching him kamikaze into said someone.

Now I hope to find some unsuspecting victims… players… for this new printing of a classic game.

I haven’t posted in a while, it seems. And I was trying to figure out what I had done with all my time.

My only conclusion… I seem to have been lost in a haze of Magic the Gathering.

I went to a sealed deck tournament for the release of the new set, Lorwyn, on Saturday. I got kicked around, but it’s all about having fun, right? While I did do other things (board meeting, dinner with Ronni, etc.), I wasted a lot of time building decks and reading about the new set on line. It’s not really a life, but it was a pleasant substitute for one during one of my few free weekends of the school year.

I won’t bother writing about the new set here. I’m not a good player, so my reflections would be much less useful than any of the hundreds of other articles you could easily find elsewhere. And besides, I don’t think many, if any, of you play.

Instead, I’ll just share of my favorite cards from the set. You can still appreciate the art, even if you don’t care for the game…

I’ll be spending the day returning to the “real” world. I may have something of more general interest then.