Category Archives: father son gaming

father son gaming

Mutant boss rant

father son gaming, game night, news, rant


So as I continue to explore these fancy picture layouts in LiveCollage that barely show anything unless you zoom in. I might talk about last nights gaming with Nath.

So Nath and I played one game last night and that was Run Fight or Die. 

Despite looking like at several points in our game that he’d be over run with zombies. Each time Nath managed to pull the cat out of the bag and survive. More than once being able to wipe out a completely over crowded zone of zombies. 

While I seemed to be in more control of the waves of zombies moving through the zones in front of me. So much so that I was able to get attacks in on the mutant boss once he had appeared.

In fact the mutant boss appeared very early on in the game. He was our very first location that got drawn in the game!

By the time the mutant boss was sent packing to lick his wounds until his next appearance, Nath had gained a follower. 

As we pushed our luck, found loot, went to new locations and handled new events. Somehow I ended up with a zombie swarm in my zone one I couldn’t take out and deal with three runners sitting in my zone 2. Which ever way I crunched the numbers I was taking damage. In fact enough damage to kill me. Nath had won by surviving longer than me.

The mutant boss figure does look amazing on the table. And adds that something extra to the game that the large cardboard disk doesn’t. It’s a lot more ominous having that large plastic mutant boss figure starring at you from behind the waves of zombies working their way through your three zones. Constantly reminding you during your turn that if you don’t deal with him, some extra bad stuff is going to happen to you. I like my mutant boss!

News and rants

Finally Duncan of trapped North of the border pointed me in the direction of a bgg video from GenCon where CMoN talk briefly about a Zombicide app coming out next year. Basically other than saying they are working on an app there are no other details. I’m hoping its Zombicide and not Zombicide: Black Plague. I like my zombies modern, in modern settings, as they should be. None of this fantasy zombie stuff. That’s just plain and simple wrong. Sadly I fear it will be the later, because original Zombicide has been pushed to the back and being ignored by CMoN. Z:BP is Zombicide 2.0 and by golly you are going to play a fantasy theme if you like it or not! Personally I’d love to see an upgrade kit for original Zombicide accepting the range attack rule update (house rule post), and the improved player boards. That’s all it needs. Doesn’t need a completely new version releasing. Just give us that CMoN.

You can view the bgg video here.

While I’m talking CMoN apparently CMoN are really nice people, salt of the earth, all that shit, according to Rob Oren of Dice Tower fame. They might be “nice” to him, but CMoN leave a lot to desire as a company and the way they treat the customers, especially Kickstarter backers. 

Rob has a point about the free stuff culture he witnessed. Some are just in this for the swag.

In some ways I have some common ground with Rob. I don’t go round asking for stuff, I buy my stuff. When I went to the UK Games Expo, I never mentioned once I wrote a blog to anyone. Not even to Tom and Sam when I bumped into them. 

I don’t write reviews, my readership isn’t nearly large enough to interest a publisher. While it would be nice to get a game I wanted free from time to time, I’m very very happy not to have that pressure of having to review the game, and have the review up in a certain time period, etc. Oh plus I don’t write reviews! If you are reading this blog regularly you know that already.

I like the freedom I have here to rant and rage, but also praise. But also to write bits about gaming I enjoy reading, that it seems very few out there do. Most are into reviewing. That’s not me I like personality, and my little niche.

There are other areas of common ground also but I’m not going to go over them. I’m bored of this now! Plus I suspect you are also. 

Hopefully this little rant won’t irk Rob too much I don’t want him to “bury me” also!

You can watch Rob’s rant here.

PS sorry for this long out of control post!

Father son gaming – making memories

father son gaming, game night, Uncategorized


I look forward to my visits with Nath. They are not nearly as often or as long as I’d like. Oh they are way too brief.

Despite being a young man now, and taller than me by a good four or five inches. Nath will always be my little boy.

I have plenty of memories of him as a little one. From the time he threw up on me and laughed afterwards when he was but a baby, or when he read to his mum and me for the first time, or our walks up Welsh and English mountains, or swimming in swimming holes in the Brecon Beacons, to us watching the whole of Prison Break together one Summer.

But how much does Nath remember of those times? Does he see them as good times? 

I love video games, I grew up playing them. As I aged and grew, so did video games, we grew up together. Not surprisingly Nath too is into video games. And for a while on our visits we’d play a couple of Nath’s favourite games, FIFA and Call of Duty. Two games I hardly play. So I was nothing more than a more random opponent for Nath to beat up on.

But I wanted our time together to be a higher quality. And that’s how I got back into playing board games after an obligatory long gap. I started getting games that played well for two players that would both interest Nath and myself.

Last night after making that first Vlog (I’m sorry if you watched it for stealing three minutes of your life you won’t ever get back), doing that washing up and cooking tea, we sat down and played some games.

We started off with 7 Wonders Duels. The first game went to me when I grabbed a military win. After recording the victory in the app I use to track my plays, I decided to try out the apps social media sharing abilities. So the world at large got to hear of my win.

We played a second game. This time I was trying for a science win, but also doing well on the military front. Nath had been building up a mass of blue victory point cards. If it got to victory points I’d have no chance. It was all down to the third age. Nath managed to block my science path to victory. It was down to the military route for me. But that too proved to be another dead end when Nath got rid of what was to be the last military card. It was down to counting victory points. Nath had a massive 41 points on blue alone. I had nothing to answer back with. In the end my final score was less than this opening score for Nath. I was well and truly schooled.

Our next game was The Manhattan Project Chain Reaction. Time to teach Nath how to build an atomic bomb! This is such a quick and easy game to teach, and quick to pick up. Nath played this game abit more aggressively than my previous opponents. Instead of drawing cards when he had the cards that allowed you to draw more cards, he mostly used their other ability to force me to discard cards instead. An interesting tactical decision that paid off. Nath won both games we played. The second game he destroyed me. I had scored a three point bomb, and I only made it to 4.5 points thanks to my uranium! 

Our third and final game that we played was Odin’s Ravens. Once again a fairly simple game to teach, and easy to learn. Our first game I won. But it was like my game with Jonathan at the weekend, if I hadn’t won that turn, Nath would have on his next turn. Our second game Nath romped home with some great plays of his Loki cards. I was at best 3/4 of the way home, at least two turns card wise from finishing.

Our limited time together on visits is I feel of a higher quality now, more social. I’m hoping these visits and our time together playing games are giving new memories. So that in years to come Nath will look back on our time together as adults with fondness, and remembering the time he played 15 cards in one go to wipe out my health and get the win with a smile as he does the same to his own kid.

Victory at last

father son gaming, game night, Uncategorized

Last night Nath and I got to play a single game of 7 Wonders Duel after he got home from work, ate and showered. 


I’d started gathering science cards in the first age, and Nath managed to get a couple of military cards, while I’d grabbed one to counter that threat.

It was the second age that our individual plans started to take shape. 

Nath was definitely going for the military win, while grabbing blue victory point cards. I was grabbing science cards, and more or less pinning my hopes on that. 

I got two of the same science symbols so had my choice of the progress tokens. I took the one that added take another go to all my wonders. My next turn much to Nath’s amazement and I think disgust I completed all my wonders! Nath hadn’t done one yet and was now limited to just completing three.

I was pretty happy with my position. I had five science symbols, and I was building up a nice cash reserve. Nath had been chipping away on the military front, and despite a little push back on that front by me, was now sitting within four points of winning that way.

The third and final age, the science card I needed was out, plus a duplicate that could give me the win (allowing me to grab the progress token that acts as a science symbol). But there was also the military cards that Nath needed to get the win.

Nath managed to stop me getting the science cards I needed. My win condition was blocked. I started grabbing blue victory point cards in a desperate attempt to catch Nath up on that front.

Then Nath built the only card he needed, the one that gave him the pick of the progress tokens not used in this game. He chose the one that gave military cards one extra attack. Then he got to take the last military card a three pointer, which was now worth four to get the win.

We had two cards left before we went to points. Which I think Nath would have won also. 

A great first victory for Nath.

Father and Son Two Player Gaming Sunday

father son gaming, Uncategorized


With a snappy post title like the above I bet you guessed I’m down visiting Nath. Which means Father/Son gaming (well when he’s not working).

Our scarce time together means we have to have to be “selective” in what we play. No epic marathon games here. We are talking a maximum of an hour to play. So I’d bought Imperial Settlers, Roll for the Galaxy, Run Fight or Die, 7 Wonders Duel, Epic, Magic duel decks, Qwixx and Star Wars Timelines, with me.

While Nath was working Kate popped round with a spare house key for me to use. In return I introduced her to Pokemon Go (we even visited a couple of local poke-stops), followed by teaching her Qwixx.

Qwixx is proving a great popular gateway game! It really has been enjoyed by everyone I’ve shown it to. Kate was no exception. I should point out Kate is not a gamer, Nath taught her Star Realms once. But that is about it as her experience of “modern” hobby gaming goes.

After playing our introductory game of Qwixx, Kate asked if she could borrow it over night. That’s a “I like this” if ever I saw/heard one. And yes I let Kate borrow Qwixx.

After Nath got back from work, and we scoffed some food, Nath’s copy of Star Realms hit the table. We were playing basically everything that had been released thrown into one deck – excluding the majority of the year one promos (but the Hero Realms Kickstarter is closing that gap).

Our first game was a fairly easy victory for Nath. Nothing memorable about except he kicked my butt.

Game two saw my come back. One of my gambits allowed me to get rid of my vipers on turn one, so I was just drawing econ cards.

I had a nice bases strategy going. I had two copies of one of the Colony Wars Trade Federation bases that each gave me two gold to spend each turn. However get a third base out with them and each gave me four authority and allowed me to draw a card. Tie this in with an Embassy Yacht you can be drawing four cards on a turn, plus getting eleven authority, and six gold to spend! That’s insane!!! And I got that combo firing more than once during our game.

In the end I was in the eighties for my authority when I destroyed Nath to go even on wins.

A tie breaker was needed.

It all started so well. Nath had the black market gambit card which gave him exclusive buys at a reduced cost. Boy did that work for him. It kept filling up with one cost cards, which meant they were free! I just thought “great, keeping spamming your deck with cheap cards, that will water his deck down nicely.”

It wasn’t long before I had Nath on the ropes and down to seven authority. My bases were doing a good job protecting me, I was keeping his bases out of play, my authority was in the sixties. It was looking good. If only I had been able to deliver that killing blow of seven authority, but the cards had decided against that.

In fact the cards had then decided to be kind to Nath, his authority crept up, while mine plummeted down. In the end Nath was able to destroy my galactic empire. But it had been an epic struggle. My bases and outposts had posed a formidable wall that had held off the onslaught for a long time. But once they crumbled it was over.

That victory gave Nath the over all win also, beating me 2-1.

After that draining third match we had a short break. A break really was needed.

Time to teach 7 Wonders Duel. We know what I think of this game, but would Nath enjoy it?

We used the suggested starting wonders for a first game. It made sense, Nath wouldn’t know what is good or bad in a draft.

Our first game actually went to points. The first time I’ve had a game get to this. It actually finished pretty close really, with me winning 52 points against Nath’s 46 points.

“Can we play again?” Nath asked. Wow a sure sign he liked it I think.

Some games just turn on one moment in time during the game. Our second game had such a moment. In the second age I was three points of being defeated by Nath with a war victory. Two cards left, the last one being a war card that I couldn’t stop Nath getting. If he got it, game over.

I had the wonder that allowed me to install a card from the discard pile for free when completed. Early in the round Nath had discarded my glass production card and I’d been planning to use this wonder to fish that back. But now I had to complete it and hope I could find a solution to save my skin in the discard pile. As luck would have it there was. A two shield thingy war card was in the pile. I installed that, moved the counter back two spaces. That was all I needed to do, I couldn’t die now when Nath took the remaining card.

From there Nath wasn’t able to recover in the final age. A points victory for me was assured.

“Another game?” I’m beginning to think Nath likes the game as much as I do.

Our third game saw me win with a scientific victory. Nath hadn’t spotted I had built up a nice collection in the first age. At the end of the second age I was one science symbol away from victory. I had no other plan, if it went to points I’d lose, and Nath was pushing a military win.

I dealt out the cards for the third age, the final science card I needed was in the first row dealt, so would be reached last. More than enough war cards were coming out to Nath’s delight.

The last two cards were placed. One of the the science cards I needed was one of the two cards. But who was going first? It was my choice being the weaker military side. Oh I think I’ll go first then. Science wins!

Phew that could so easily have gone Nath’s way. Luck if the draw again!

Nath wanted to play again, boy is he living this game. Sadly it was late now and being an old man I was really tired. So we called it a night there.

But some great memorable games played this evening.

A mid week father son gaming day

father son gaming, game night, news, star realms

I'm down visiting Natha at the moment. I had to come down to make sure he got to the dentist. Let's just say that his track record of attending has been poor. So yesterday he went to his second appointment to sort out some tooth ache he'd had a couple of weeks back. Which resulted in the pain inducing tooth being extracted! So even more pain for Nath.

We followed the dentist visit up with a trip to the Farnborough cinema to see Deadpool (such a great movie) and London Has Fallen (an average at best sequel). This is something that I haven't done in a long time, back to back movies. Between films we grabbed a quick guilt loaded bite to eat at McDonalds.

But that was our Tuesday. What about today though?

Well once Nath was up, and I had fed him breakfast (American pancakes) we played our first game of the day Eminent Domain. A game I have been wanting to get to the table since getting it second hand off Facebook.

I liked playing Eminent Domain a lot. The game did not disappoint. Setup was fairly easy, and quick. Always good. I like the turn structure a lot. It's simple, but does the job. At the start of your turn, you can play a card from your hand if you wish to perform its action. You then have to select a role from the middle and play that role ability. This builds up your deck, allows you to get resources for the path you are following, explore planets, research new technologies. The other players also have the option of also following that role or dissenting (which is basically draw a card from your draw pile).

Finally the turn is ended with a tidy up phase for the current player where played cards go on the discard pile, a player can discard unwanted cards in their hand, and finally draw back up to five cards.

I ended up taking an explore colonise path, while Nath went down the more aggressive war route and conquered his planets.

Neither of us tried the produce/trade route, and Nath was the only one out of the two of us who did any research to get those more advanced technology cards for the deck.

There is very little interaction between players, but you are still involved between turns, trying to work out whether following the others role phase is useful in advancing your own goals, or is it better to draw that extra card?

I ended up beating Nath 39 victory points to 27.

Next up was what must be Nath's favourite card game or even modern board game, Star Realms.

It felt like we were playing with everything plus the kitchen sink in the cards we were using. Base game, Gambits, Crisis (minus heroes cards), Colony Wars, plus Cosmic Gambits. That's a hell of a lot of cards. We had the draw deck for the trade row split into three piles.

There was

In the end having done superior scrapping to give him the edge he needed, Nath delivered the killing blow of 21 points of damage to remove my 19 points of authority.

Our final game of the afternoon was Discoveries. This game is on my list of ones to try and play this first quarter of the year.

Once again a very quick game to setup. There was a bit more referring to the rules for our play of this compared to Eminent Domain.

However once you get used to the turn structure this is a nice little dice allocation game. The part of American history this is set in is neither here or there for me. The look of the game is nice, and subdued. They have gone with wooden dice for the game, that do feel “light”, but look and fit in with the theming.

Once again there is very little interaction between players. Being limited to the grabbing of your dice back from another player, or grabbing a grey tribe dice from the player with the most of them. Between turns you are mainly planning how best to utilise the dice you have available to achieve your goal.

As I said I liked the game, it will be interesting to see how this plays with three or four players. Will it feel different?

Oh and as the score pad shows I won ^__^

Finally some news!

Coming soon to a Kickstarter near you I believe (can't remember where I saw this Kickstarter reference) from Albino Dragon is The Goonies Adventure Card Game. Once I know more details I'll post them.

When I mentioned to Nath about this, all I got was “what is The Goonies?” He hasn't seen the movie!!! I never thought I'd fall into that group of bad parenting that also includes having not shown their kids Star Wars, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones. How did this happen? I've made a point of making sure Nath has seen the modern classics.

I'm going to have to rectify this ASAP.

 

More Father Son Gaming

father son gaming

Yesterday after providing what can only be described as a token gesture of help (I wish it could have been more but I had already made a more important commitment which is the subject matter of the rest of this post) I made my way South to see Nath for the weekend.

For those that know me on other social media outlets would have seen the messy little piglet Nath can be a lot of the time.

After nagging him about this, we popped off to the nearby Sainsburys following up a lead from earlier in the day from my Scottish doppelgänger about reduced Lego. When we got there the evidence left (empty space on the shelf and the red reduced sticker) did indeed that there had been some cheap Lego to purchase. Sadly I was not one of those benefactors of Sainsburys generosity. Although I did snag four Star Wars The Force Awakens stackable mugs for four gold coins of the realm.

After some father son time watching Amazon Prime (the last Wolverine movie and the first episode of the new US police procedural show Lucifer) I set up Formula D ready for some gaming in the morning. I shared a photo that Celtic doppelgänger pointed out was a spoiler for the new Star Wars movie! Oops, that was unintentional.

This morning once Nath had resurrected himself saw us racing at speed round a race track. I gave Nath pole position, which I would come to regret. We played the beginner rules for this game. I love this game despite Nath taking an early lead that I was unable to close. I thought I had going into the final corners. But Nath just shifted up a gear and zoomed off across the finish line while I was going round the final bend.

Nath enjoyed playing Formula D, thought it was very thematic, and captured the gear changes etc with the dice really well.

Our second game of the morning was a learning game of Seasons.

Because this was our first game ever, so instead of drafting our nine cards for the game we used the suggested preconstructed nine card lists in the rules.

It really did help with this game having seen some YouTube videos before hand. I was able to set up without referring to the rules, and explain most of the game to Nath.

Like Bomb Squad Academy when we thought it wishful thinking to use the 100 point tokens, when we looked at the scoreboard and saw a 200 point marker, we were sure we wouldn't achieve those heady heights of scoring.

This game looks amazing. It's bright and vibrant. Wow. Game play wise, the turn order is so easy to learn, but hides the tactical depth. It starts with which dice to pick, to which spell to cast, to managing your reserves and the max number of active spells you can have in play. Plus we hadn't even touched the drafting and deciding which cards go in which pile. Then you have to decide whether you take a point hit at the end to get the use of one of the four abilities you can choose from. Add in card effects on played spells, and a turn can get very tactical.

Nath and both enjoyed the game a lot. It worked very well as a two player game. Now I'd like to play it with the drafting and more players.

Oh and Nath narrowly beat me by four points.

As always my time with Nath was way too short.