As I slowly dip my toes back into the world of Dice Masters I find out that the online side of playing the game took off.
Now I’m not talking about using platforms like Tabletop Simulator or Board Game Arena. Although I’m sure some are using these platforms to play it. They just ain’t for me. Plus I have other issues with them (maybe I’ll write about that sometime).
I’m in fact talking about the use of webcams.
Back in 2014 when I was really into the game when Dice Masters first came out we were using webcams to play.
I even shared a post or two of mine showing my setup at the time with others wanting to do the same.
There aren’t many games that work really well using a webcam. But Dice Masters is one of them. As long as you can see your opponents play area you are good to go.
Playing Dice Masters this way is how I met my friend Freddy. We moved on to the Star Realms app, where he regularly beats me. But still that’s nearly a ten year friendship that’s grown from first playing Dice Masters via a webcam.
Obviously during the lockdowns this type of play would have become even more popular with fans of the game. As did many other games that were playable this way.
But it’s cool to see tournaments and weekly matches being organised this way now.
I should join some Dice Masters communities online at some point and dip my toes into playing the game again this way. Maybe once my project of sorting my home out is finished.
Epilogue: I did have a Dice Masters play mat. Looking back at the post of my old webcam setup there front and centre in the photos was the play mat. Pretty sure that went with everything when Gav took ownership. So must have been lost at some point. Oh well. At least I’m not going mad.
Belated apology! I should say sorry to those that take the trouble to read the words I put on the internet and these Dice Masters posts. Yes there have been one or two lately on Dice Masters. Like most things on this blog, my blog reflects my current addictions within the gaming world. So I’m sorry for talking so much about Dice Masters lately, and at least for the immediate future too.
Yesterday I had one of those insane starts to a game of Star Realms.
For those interested all 18 expansions are in play for this game.
I’m the starting player, which means I have an opening hand of three cards.
One crazy turn 1!
This may have not been the most optimal play, and as usual against this player I may go on and lose. But that doesn’t matter I managed to do this insane start buying the 8 cost Command Ship on turn 1. That’s just not possible normally.
As I’ve said on numerous occasions it’s crazy cool stuff like this that keeps the game fresh and surprising.
Now I just have to hope my opponent doesn’t see this little clip!
Last night there was another virtual game night for Fenland Gamers.
Sadly it was just Jonathan and myself that were able to virtually meet up to play games. So mirroring one or two of the real life meet ups of yester year.
At Jonathan’s suggestion we played a game of Wingspan. It’s not as if I’m going to say no. We both love the game. So I started a three player game with an AI player taking the third spot.
I should screen shot my opening cards and discuss my decisions about what to keep, etc. I’ll do that for the next game. In the meantime all I can remember about this games starting cards is that I had a bonus card that synergised with the final rounds end of round bonus. That I had two cards in hand that not only counted (if played) towards my bonus card (and by implication the final round bonus) but also allowed the setting up of a tuck engine on the grasslands.
The Wingspan scores and final board state for me
I think I only took the initial draw cards wetland action once, and that was my first action if I remember correctly to grab a bird needed for the engine. After that all my card draw was coming from doing an egg run.
During play I had guessed Jonathan was struggling. He was taking a lot of draw cards actions. Jonathan was hunting for something. Later during the game my suspicions were confirmed when Jonathan posted a message on Discord (and I’m paraphrasing here) that the cards in this game indeed hated him and were conspiring against him.
The final scores did surprise me. Especially Jonathan’s. His claim that this was his worst scoring game ever, was probably right. I don’t remember him doing so poorly.
But that’s the nature of the beast. You see it in every game. Sometimes the stars don’t a line, and everything seems to be working against you. In these situations I think it helps to be the optimist and write the game off as one of those things that just happen, and next time will be different. It’s not fun as it’s happening, and can be frustrating. But you have to play to the last turn on the last round. Things might turn around.
It’s like the game of Epic the Card Game I had last week (lucky for the world the app doesn’t allow you to replay the whole game to record it). Early on in the game I went down to 2 health. Whilst my opponent was gaining life also. It wasn’t looking good.
Life savers!
But drawing into the two cards above I was able to stabilise by removing big threats from attacking, and basically neutralise tokens. This bought me enough time to draw into hopefully solutions to whatever the current threat on the board was.
There has even been games of Star Realms like this. I’ve been on one authority with my opponent in the 60s, and still hung in there and won! That game might actually also be on YouTube. There have been numerous games of MtG like this. Plus just as many that didn’t pan out.
When there is a turn around like the above they become epic gaming moments that you retell time and time again. The boardgaming version of “this one time in band camp…”
I’m digressing from the fact I crushed Jonathan, and had to settle for the fact the only banter was by sharing the above screen shots showing the emphatic victory on social media.
Afterwards we agreed to start up another game of chess via discord. This time it’s Jonathan’s turn to be white.
21 or more days after starting our 4 player game of Wingspan we have finally finished playing today!
Yes that is a long time to take to play a game of Wingspan.
However considering we were all basically only taking one turn a day (I think there was a day when we got to play a second turn). Taking over 21 days to play the game was to be expected.
I’ve mentioned in the past this game was going to take a lot longer than our regular games where we play in real time (with or without discord) so that one of our friends could participate.
So how did the game end? I won comfortably. Which was a bit of a relief after all the round one hype of me playing a raven.
Final scores and my end board state
After you get and play the raven early there is the pressure that you are going to run away with the game. However without cards that combo well with it, it’s not a big advantage.
In this game I got some that worked ok with it. I did have to set up a card draw engine and round 2 was basically me drawing cards looking for cards to work with the raven. So I had a massive number of cards in hand to use through the remaining rounds.
How did I think it went playing a game that went on for so long? It was ok. Not something I’d want to do regularly. The long delay between turns was frustrating. But the fact it allowed a friend who otherwise would not be able to play to join in counts for a lot.
Right now to organise the next virtual game night.
Today Magic the Gathering Arena hit the iOS App Store.
Finally! It’s long over due on the platform. It came out on Android as an early access at the end of January.
Mini rant…
In my opinion Arena should have been on mobile from launch, or failing that within the first 6 months of launching. I really do think WotC fumbled the ball on this. By taking so long to reach other platforms other than PC, WotC really failed to make a significant dent into rival games such as Hearthstone. And that’s despite throwing lots of money at advertising, and “buying” streamers.
Initial impressions…
So this morning after downloading Arena onto my iPad, it had to then download even more data before I could do anything but play the tutorial. Then before the majority of game modes are made available I had to complete the Colour Challenge to unlock them. Which is basically play a mono coloured deck against an “AI” opponent playing one of the remaining colours, then the final game would be against a random real opponent. And you have to do that for each colour type, before you can play Standard or Historic for example.
The “AI” opponents are more logic puzzles than playing against an AI, as the cards drawn are the same each time. So it’s basically about playing the cards in the right order.
The real player opponent was fun. However there were some uneven matchups with obviously more powerful decks, they were not mono colour for starters. I think this for a complete novice to the game could be very off putting.
Being a paper player I have collected more than a handful of Arena codes over the last couple of years. These codes unlock decks, boosters, etc within Arena. You have to enter the code within the in app store to unlock them. However it appears that in the version of Arena released today there is no way to redeem those codes. So if like me you don’t have a PC/Mac you can’t use them, hopefully they won’t expire before WotC sort this out. Which would not be cool.
I knew I’d like playing MtG using Arena. It’s MtG with a slick “modern” UI. What’s not to like?
Another rant…
However it’s all the crap around playing the game that WotC have with their nickel and diming players for every penny they can screw out of them I don’t like.
I’ve seen comparisons online, and WotC are one of the meanest, less generous companies for this type of game. The in game economy is very much weighted in their favour.
Which means building up a collection and being able to build decks requires you to spend a lot of time grinding away, or spending lots of money. Neither is ideal.
Will I continue to play Arena? Possibly. Redeeming these codes is a biggie for me. Maybe a deal breaker.
Last night our game club Fenland Gamers held another virtual game night.
We had a new (not new to the club) member join us for the virtual game night, so I added their Asmodee username to my Asmodee friends list. I do this through the Asmodee web page. It’s easier and quicker that way. It does make sending game invites a lot simpler if folks are in your friends list. Once that was done, it was deciding what to play based on the overlap between the apps everyone owned. Which was either Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride (TTR). There were other overlaps but not for everyone.
Our game for the evening was Asmodee digitals TTR. I’ve not played the TTR app in years, and even then it was just me against the AI. So it was a first for me to be playing it online. I definitely needed to remind myself of the interface. The last time I had played any version of the physical TTR was the New York version in 2018. The original TTR I last played in 2017, and the TTR UK was 2016 on 18th March. Literally a day short of being a full on 5 years to the day!
We started off playing the original base game of TTR because I didn’t know what expansions everyone had. Which I needn’t have taken into account. It was pointed out over discord during play that only one person (the one starting the game) needed to have the expansion.
I wasn’t doing amazing in the first game, I put that down to getting back into the swing of things. Even though I didn’t win, I wasn’t last, and scored more points than Jonathan.
The second game was using the TTR UK map. I think out of the versions of TTR that I have played so far over the years, this is one of my favourite maps to play. I like the having to purchase technology to open up various parts of the map, get extra points for competing routes etc.
One annoying thing did happen right at the end when I was going to share the detailed results for the TTR UK map. It crashed! And every attempt since to go back into the game (not the app) to get those results sees the app crash. So Jonathan kindly sent me the images you see above. Sadly the UK map does not show the completed routes at the end of the game. It’s the board state just as before I trigger the end of the game and the final round. But it does show that I got the New York route that was worth a massive 40 points plus the bonus points I had from the technology cards.
Despite that app crash at the end I think that the combination of using official app versions of a game along with discord for voice/text chat works really well, especially if using a tablet device. My experience with the virtual tabletop apps hasn’t been great. Especially their iOS versions. Nope for me official app version on the iPad, and use my iPhone with headset plugged running the discord app for the chat. Works a treat.
Anyway we all had a good time. That’s the important part.
A bit of a sensational post title, many many other players have achieved this. But this is a first for our group.
But before I go into how that was achieved I just want to sing the praises of one of the Wingspan apps features that I really like. That feature is the Preserve Archive.
When you finish playing a game before returning to the main menu you are given the option of saving that game to the reserve. I’ve been doing that for all the games I have played so far (I only play Wingspan against my friends online). So it’s like keeping a running record of those games, which I really must turn into data that can be analysed and graphs drawn (wish there was an easy way to get to this data). But it really is cool being able to go back and look at the detail of everyone’s final board state.
Yesterday I got to play three games of Wingspan.
The first game of the day was a three player game with Jonathan plus an AI opponent during the afternoon.
For some reason the Switch version of the app decided to play up by crashing. And then once back up and online, deciding to play the background music so it sounded corrupted! Even quitting and go back in didn’t seem to fix it. But I soldiered on through this adversity to tie the game with the AI. Which was given the win on some bs tie breaker.
The second game of the day was later in the evening and saw Jeff joining in to make it a four player game. Having done absolutely nothing between games to rectify the earlier sound issue, it was now fine!
It wasn’t until the later stages of the game that I decided to look at the board states of the others. I was horrified to see Jonathan had both Ravens out. But he was struggling for some reason (He’ll hopefully put his experience and reasons in the comments about this). I still thought the game would go to Jonathan.
So I was pleasantly surprised that I scored more points than him. And I’ve only just noticed I scored the exact same score as I had in the earlier game. Alas thus was not good enough to beat Jeff, who romped home to his first win. I suspect he’s been practicing.
We started our third and final game, after all our first game had taken about an hour. There was time for another. Or so we thought. Jonathan noticed it first. But this third game was taking an age. Despite taking our turns almost instantly (there was no AP going on), the little egg timer would appear and be there for minutes (never timed sadly). Something was up. But we were committed now. It was well over two hours for the game to finish.
The game did finish though, and when the dust settled, scores tallied. Not only had Jeff hit the 100 point barrier, I had smashed through it and got the win with 102 points. Just like buses if I was to use an old tired cliche.
As you can see below I needed to set up a card draw engine to get cards into hand to fully utilise my bonus. So I took the early decision to forget the end of round objectives and try and get as many birds in hand as possible. I certainly got a lot of value out of tucking cards, such as draw another card, gain an egg, discard a wheat to tuck two, gain a wheat. Because I was drawing so many cards I was able to cherry pick cards that fitted in with my plan and deny the others.
This morning I realised I should have scored 103 points, but failed to tuck and draw one more time on my last turn! I was too set on making sure that I had 8 cards in hand to max out my bonus, forgetting the last tuck replaced itself. That slip could have cost me the game. Many a game has been won by a single point.
I did miss out on 2 points from the final turn. Basically if I had the nest space I could have gained a further 2 eggs. But I was 100% full, no room at the inn. So not an option.
Below are the final board states for both Jeff and Jonathan.
As you can see Jonathan was one bird from completing a self set achievement of completely filling his reserve. The next achievement for us all to try and beat.
I’ll leave you with a parting gift of Wingspan tallying up the final scores. While watching this 30 second clip (the Switch is great at creating these) trying and imagine being Jeff and thinking you’d got this. Then it dawning on you that I had a lot of tucked birds as they got added to my score, and you had just been beaten. I can still here the echoes of Jeff screaming “noooooooooooooo!”
Last night saw 5 members of Fenland Gamers meet up virtually to play games.
The clubs discord server was used to host the evening, and made use of its text chat channel and an audio chat channel.
This side of the evening seemed to work really well, especially the audio chat side. Despite a dip in audio quality from time to time, I enjoyed our banter during the game.
Our first game of Carcassonne was just the base game, no expansions. Both games that we played used the following options:
I do like the dead and remaining tiles features. It’s so handy seeing what tiles are left. It offers hope that you might draw the tile you want, or snuff out that hope knowing you will never complete that town. Dead tiles I like as they act as a constant reminder you or your opponent will never complete that town or abbey.
I got screwed by Oli early on with him tying up two of my meeples for the whole of the game. I was playing at a big disadvantage then. So I was chuffed I drew last place. It was the best I could hope for.
Gavin on the other hand I think was a bit shell shocked with the aggressive play and the whole stealing towns off of players. And I can see how it may be seen a bit cutthroat. But that’s how I’ve always played the game, whether against others or an AI.
Jonathan was able to claw out a victory for the first game.
Our second and final game of the evening used the following expansions:
Naturally with the expansions being used the game took longer to play. But I do enjoy playing Carcassonne with them. It’s why I have them for the physical game as well. I didn’t include the Princess and Dragon expansion because I knew Jonathan wasn’t a fan of it. Although with this many players it would become so tactical, and yes add even more playing time.
There were some great battles going on in this game for control of towns and fields. One of those battles involved Jonathan, Oli, and Gavin for control of a field. It looked right up to the last two or three tiles that Jonathan had it. But Oli managed to steal it from him and the win.
We had a great time playing a classic board game using a really great digital version.
Below are the top 5 played app versions of board games for the last 3 weeks.
The first place will always be Star Realms. Having now played over 9700 games now, I’m still loving the game. Regular expansions help keep it fresh. And at any given time usually have 5 or 6 games on the go with friends.
Those that know me on other places other than this blog will not be surprised with Wingspan coming in second. I have been sharing the outcomes of games with Jonathan, and now our games include Jeff as well, on those platforms.
Speaking of Wingspan, last nights 4 player game (the fourth player being an AI) saw me win in style and just miss out on hitting the 100 point barrier.
Epic came in third because I’m currently only playing with one person, and those games are dark drafts. Which take longer to play taking into account the draft stage has to be done first before a game can start. Plus we are playing across time zones.
Naturally the last two positions are taken up by the two games we played last week during the virtual game night.
I know shocked me as well. It shouldn’t have but it did. Especially considering I’m the one that suggested it in the first place!
Last week I posted on our clubs discord server asking if anyone was up for a virtual gaming session, giving a day and time for when it would happen. But there was no response. So I assumed there was no interest.
Fortunately I happened to be on the clubs discord server at the right time last night as two others turned up to play!
After some brief chatting, exchanging lists of board game apps that each of us owned, and finding some games that we all had, we settled on our first game to play.
That first game was Tokaido. I like the game a lot. It’s a beautiful, peaceful, game. Somehow Jonathan won the first game, whilst Oli won the second game.
Our second game of the evening was Love Letter.
I wasn’t sure about this app. I love the game. But could this app capture the whole play experience?
I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t a bad attempt at capturing the game.
Mechanically the app is spot on. It’s Love Letter. The interface took a little getting used to. But that was a quick learning curve. I liked that when setting up an online game you can adjust the number of points needed to win. And you can switch on or off the stars that appear on a card telling you how many of that card you have seen.
I liked the banter it has where you can cause a speech bubble to appear that hurls an insult or praise. And we did that from time to time through out our game. But we were also exchanging banter via our discord chat channel. That helped a lot in the attempt to capture the tabletop experience. Maybe if we used voice it might have helped to get even closer to the tabletop experience.
For the record I had a comfortable victory.
After that win, we called it a day for the virtual games evening. It was a fun time. I’ll have to suggest doing another soon.
A couple of days ago playing Wingspan with Jonathan we hit a first for me in the game. We achieved something that I had not done in the few games I’ve played of Wingspan both physical or digital.
Firstly we drew for first place on all of the end of round objectives.
Secondly, same game, Jonathan and I drew on points after the end of game scoring had been completed.
The app gave Jonathan the win on a tie breaker which was who had the most resources left. He had 1, I had none. Robbed. It should have been left at a draw.
That contested win means Jonathan has the advantage with our current game score line being 3-4 to Jonathan.
