My Tabletop Day has started! Well kinda a “soft” start with me taking my turns in Star Realms (which if I counted app plays of boardgames is my most played boardgame ever!) and Patch Work.
Through out the day my Instagram account will be getting photos uploaded of the day's activities, which by the power of interweb magic gets shared on Facebook and Twitter. But sadly not here, unless you count the little widget on the left of the page.
Catch ya through out the day…
Don't forget today is International Tabletop Day, there are loads of events going on. Fenland Gamers have a gaming session going on from midday until the evening. You don't have to attend the whole thing, pop in and pop out whenever you want. Message me through the contact page if you want to come along for details.
Or why not pop along to your FLGS or for some it may just be LGS to see what they have going on? And like the lottery if you are really lucky it may be one of the few stores with a Tabletop promo kit.
I'm taking a variety of games with me to the Fenland Gamers one, such as Splendor, Suburbia, Codenames, Five Tribes, Nations the Dice Game, Elder Sign, Batman Love Letter plus others. Then other members will be bringing games from their collection. So we will have a wide variety of games, some gateway games, some more “gamer” games. And that's the point this is a great time to try out new games, genres, themes.
I do hope that you get a chance to go along to an event and play some games.
You can look for registered events on this page HERE
So Captain America Civil War hits the UK cinemas today, and surprise surprise a certain small box themed expansion for the best comic book themed deck builder Marvel Legendary hits the shelves of your FLGS.
If you have all the existing expansions you have soooo much variety, then add in this, wow! Plus I'm a Cap fan, oh yes I'm Team Captain America in this civil war.
That is all that interested me from the baubles that Esdevium left for us mortals this week. I'm not into Heroclix or Pokemon.
Yep that's this Saturday, which also happens to be a super special day, it's my birthday. My local gaming group the Fenland Gamers are holding a gaming session Saturday lunchtime to early evening. Register at the groups forum for more specifics, like location etc.
My biggest problem is deciding what games to take along. I'm thinking a mixture of “gateway” games, games on my pile of shame, gamer games.
Most LGS should be doing something for Saturday, so it's worth looking them up and finding out. Who knows they may be one of the stores with a rare Tabletop store kit for the day, and you can pick up a promo or two.
Last night saw the inaugural race of the Fenland Gamers Formula D league.
We chose for our first race the Valencia race track from the Circuits 2 pack for the game. After some great indecision amongst ourselves we decided that the races for our league would consist of two laps of the track. Something we hadn't done before, and also meant we would have pit stops too. Another new thing for us playing the game.
For the inaugural season of our league we are using the basic rules for the game.
So which brave souls decided to risk all whizzing round the tarmac for fame and fortune? First up on the grid in pole position was Katie, taking second place on the starting grid was Jo, in the third starting position was myself and in last position on the grid was Jonathan.
Jonathan repeating his “dice hate me” rolling from when we play Memoir '44 rolled so that he stalled his engine. Katie and Jo made good use of their advantageous starting positions on the grid, and took an early lead, battling it out for pole position. Katie edged in front, as I caught up and did battle for second place with Jo.
With great negotiation of the corners Katie extended her lead, enabling her to take a pit stop and continue as if nothing had happened. Jo and I also pit stopped, with me getting the edge and getting back out first. Meanwhile in the Lewis Hamilton position Jonathan was doing his best to catch up and took the risky tactical decision of not stopping for a pit stop.
That decision quickly came back to haunt him when he over shot the first corner big time and took enough damage to take him out of the race.
Katie was so far out in front there was no way Jo or I would catch her up. As she cruised over the finish line, Jo and I were left battling over second and third spots. Jo edged out in front. On the penultimate corner I snatched the lead back and held on to it to grab second place. Leaving Jo to finish in third.
We followed up Katie's emphatic victory in our first Formula D race with a game of cunning and bluffing, Batman Love Letter. By the end of the first round Katie had three points, one more in the next round it would be another win for her.
Luckily my mind reading act guessed her card and forced her out of the round before she had a chance to grab the win. Jonathan used this opportunity to score a couple of points.
Our final round was won quickly with Katie guessing my card to give her the final point needed for victory.
The final game of the evening was King of Tokyo. As our kaiju (I think that is the correct Japanese term for these monsters) battled it out over Tokyo I was watching the others rack up victory points leaving me with only one real tactic if I was to win, be the last one standing.
Katie's luck had run out, she was the first to be eliminated. Not long after Jo managed to knock out Jonathan, but in doing so left herself open to a final blow from myself to grab the win.
A great start to our Formula D league, race two happens in a months time.
First up the mid point in the Mumbad Cycle cycle arrived. Nothing in this data pack really grabbed me as “this has to go in my deck”. So for the time being this is a bought to just keep my card pool upto date. I felt dirty typing that, and even dirtier reading it back.
Can you believe that the UK Games Expo wasn't one of the promo game tiles made for Suburbia by Bezier Games when they did the Game Con Bonus Tiles promos? I know shocking!
This time I do really mean finally a replacement Batman Love Letter. I will manage to keep one of these one day.
So that's all the new additions to the new gaming wing being built.
Friday The Luxe finally got Batman vs Superman Dawn of Justice on its screen. I'd been waiting for my favourite cinematic experience venue to get the movie, so I caught the 14:10 showing of the movie.
I enjoyed the movie. However it has a lot of faults. I just hope Warner Bros/DC learn from this movie and never ever ever let Zack Snyder the director near the DC Universe again. However I doubt that is the take away they got. Especially considering that they are adding humour now to an already complete movie that has that abomination looking Joker in it.
If Synder had not decided to try and squeeze as many plot lines as he could into a single movie, and instead concentrated on a single one, the movie would have been much better.
While DC seem to have got the tv universe right with their shows, they still don't get it with their movies. Such a pity.
I'd love to go more in depth but this isn't that sort of blog.
After seeing the latest DC cinematic efforts it was time for some gaming.
After last week this session was last chance saloon. Compared to last week this week was very poorly attended by the late teen/twenty somethings of the group. Which did have one big bonus from my point of view none of that loud music being played.
But it does make me wonder what is it about this week that attendance for the gaming groups has been low?
The evenings gaming started off with my Noise running against Ben's PE Corp scum deck. I had tweeted it to improve my economy. I lost both games to meat/net damage. The first game was within a couple of turns. Whilst the second time if my I've Had Worse had gotten selected in the first wave of damage I would have survived the second wave of damage, gotten through on R&D and scored three agendas for a win. Fortune favours the brave and that evening it didn't favour me.
Our next game was a couple of plays of King of Tokyo. I didn't win either game, the honours for the wins were shared between Ben and Jamie. This was my first play of King of Tokyo, I had played King of New York before. But I've tried to blot that evening out, and the memory of Nath (not my son) and his mind scaring bum note joke. I thought that King of Tokyo would be the easier game to teach out of the two, plus I have both expansions for the game, we could shake things up if we wanted to. Both games had the costume cards from the Halloween expansion mixed in. This doesn't make any noticeable change to the game play, so I hadn't seen a reason to take them out.
The final game of the evening was Deep Sea Adventure. This was a hit with Ben and Jamie. It's a nice little push your luck game. It's interesting to see how different players play the game. Previous games my opponents went deep before taking a treasure and starting the clock ticking on the air running out. Whilst in this game treasures were being taken very early and starting that clock. This meant that no one managed to score in the first two rounds. With only timid play enabling some scores in the final round.
I'm still undecided about this group. I had a good experience this week. But will it be back to the usual irritating loud music next week when the numbers are back up?
I love bandwagons and jumping on them. Hence this post.
If like me you have no life you'll know who Wil Wheaton is. If you don't he stared in the movie Stand By Me, played the “fan favourite” Wesley Crusher in Star Trek The Next Generation, plus numerous guest appearances in tv series like The Big Bang Theory. He's also an author, micro beer brewer and the important part for this blog post, avid boardgamer and host of the web series Tabletop.
Among the gaming community there is much interest in which games they will be covering in upcoming episodes. So a portion of the internet went into meltdown when Wil Wheaton on his blog announced the list of games that they will be featuring on series four of Tabletop.
It's a handy list to be aware of, because normally once a game has been featured on the show it is hard to get hold of, sales figures spike, it goes out of stock, etc etc. It's why I bought Marvel Legendary when I did, I knew it was going to be on the show, I had been undecided about getting it. But knew once I'd seen the show I'd get it, so,I bought it early, and boy am I glad I did. It meant I was able to luckily get the Fantastic Four expansion before it went out of print (that expansion goes for stupid money now). Mind you Council of Verona has never been easy to get hold of over here in the UK as far as I can tell.
Anyway here are a list of the gaming big winners this season:
Six of those games are already in my collection, with only one of them sitting on my pile of shame. So I'm very happy about that. The rest apart from Champions of Midgard have not been of interest, or even been considered for my wishlist.
It will be interesting to see which “celebrity” (some times this word is applied in a very very very lose way) friends/guests he has on the show to play the games with him.
Season four will be hitting the interweb sometime in June/July according to Wheaton. With a second series of his hit (well relatively speaking in Interweb terms) RPG Titansgrave sometime in the Autumn.
There that's my bandwagon ride all over. Boy was it a dozy.
There wasn't anything last week from the gifts that Esdevium deemed us worthy to receive that caught my eye. However this week we are rewarded with a couple of items that interest me.
The first is Android Mainframe, the latest game from FFG set in the Android universe. Android Mainframe reimplements a game called Bauhaus, which I understand was an abstract area enclosure game. So I'm not sure how well the actual theme will come across in this game. I'm curious about the game. Definitely want to have a play of it. I love the Android universe.
Lastly the fourth instalment of Lost Legacy is out next week. Now this is good news for me, but bad news and of no interest what's so ever to Jonathan who hates the game! I won't go into what Jonathan dislikes about the game, I'm pretty sure he will contribute in the comments (I'm hoping he will to save me typing) with a rant about the failings of the game. However as I said I like the game. So I'm excited about this release.
So there we have it two interesting releases next week from my perspective.
Thought I'd do a little post about a couple of things to look out for coming out in the future, instead of next week.
First up we look at a game that first came out in 2004, got a second edition in 2010, and that is…
Avalon Hill(Hasbro)/Wizards of the Coast last week announced that this fall (whose betting it turns out to be Halloween?) are releasing the very first expansion for the game, Widow's Walk.
The expansion will be adding twenty new room tiles that expand the house up onto the roof! An amazing fifty new haunts, new monsters, items and events.
I think this announcement took everyone by surprise, and also got a lot of people excited at the same time. Does this allow Betrayal to get some sort of award for longest time between game coming out and it's first expansion arriving?
The other thing to look out for happened on Kickstarter this week, unsurprisingly smashing through its funding target in less than a day, and that's Darksouls the boardgame.
A dungeon crawl based on the popular video game franchise it was a sure thing to get funded. There is a backing level aimed at your FLGS. Which is cool. However it does put people in a quandary if their FLGS is a backer. Do you support your FLGS and buy from them, or back yourself and get the game with the stretch goals (extra stuff) that don't come with the version that FLGS get? It's this decision I don't find cool.
Anyway this project isn't due to hit until at least April 2017 so a year basically if they hit their deadlines.
Anyway that's it for this post, hope you found it useful.
Posted by me using my iPad and the Blogsy app