Magic the Gathering is really the epitome of collectible card games. In the past, I've bought intro packs just to play for fun with my brother or friends, but have never taken the game seriously. The result is that I've accumulated a fair amount of crappy cards over the years that get very little use.
Last week, some friends invited me over to play some Magic. I quickly threw together a pretty disjointed Red/Black deck just to have something to play with. There were 4 of us playing at once. It was pretty wild.
But hey, I won a game! It was way too much fun. We also were drinking. That helped too.
The real problem here is now I'm hooked and want better cards. I already have a boardgame problem. I don't need another hobby to eat my money. Though I guess Magic counts into my boardgame hobby, so it's really the same thing. But even more expensive.
In this past week, I've spent over $200 on singles to help me make a couple new decks. I know maybe this isn't a lot of money at all for cards, but it's like 4 boardgames for me. That's pretty significant.
Luckily, my CoolStuffInc discount on card singles is up to 6% so I saved like 5 bucks!
Anyway, this is a super addicting hobby. I've been spending a lot of time looking at cards and deck ideas online (and I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of what I'm doing!), which is a great way to spend that downtime at work when you're done eating but still "at lunch."
I may keep you updated on my Magic shenanigans as I begin this fun and addictive journey.
It's my blog, I can write about whatever I want. This post is not about board games.
But it is about food. And I need food to live. And I need to be alive to play board games. It's the circle of life and it rules us all.
One of my non-boardgames hobbies is cooking. In fact, I love a good boardgame night that involves a big meal with friends.
For more on these meals I refer you to one of my favorite blog friends. Lots of food, much of which was shared during board game nights. This post in particular I hold near and dear to my heart. It was also a fabulously successful attempt at duck l'orange.
But onto the main event. Here's some plates I've made up over the past month or so.
Pan-seared venison with a red wine reduction and brussel sprouts:
Braised pork neck bones in marinara with pancetta alfredo pasta
Luganega sausage with red wine reduction, artichoke, and garlic cheese bread
Simple burger with fried egg and pico de gallo
Panko breaded chicken breast with beurre blanc sauce and a spring mix salad
Shrimp and mussel paella and brussel sprouts
On a less classy note, today I decided to see if I could eat a whole taco 12 pack from taco bell.
Turns out I could. But not worth it.
I hope I made you hungry. Happy gaming and happy eating!
Arabian Nights is a very catchy opening song from the Disney film Aladdin.
That has very little to do with anything. It's just a fact.
Five Tribes was a game released around the time of our Gen Con trip, though we never test-played it because the table was always way too crowded and I didn't have a super great interest in it. But it looked fun anyway and I eventually received it as a birthday present, which was pretty cool.
The guy on the right is DEFINITELY the merchant guy from Aladdin who sings the song.
In the game, players take turns moving meeples around an Arabian desert-themed set of tiles by picking up all the meeples on a single tile and dropping them off along a path of adjacent tiles (mancala-style). The only rules there are you can't go backwards and the last meeple you drop has to match in color with at least one other meeple on the tile you stop on.
Meeples meeples everywhere.
When you are done, you grab all the meeples of the same color on that tile as the last meeple you dropped there.
If your taking of the meeples clears a tile completely, you get to place you little camel dude on the tile. That tile is yours. You get its points and all the points associated with its palm trees or palaces built on it. And no one else can ever claim it again. It is yours. Because your camel is sitting there.
Guard camel.
Camel meeple. Cameeple. Hangin' out at the market.
Regardless of whether you claimed the tile or not, you then take the action associated with the tile AND the action associated with the colors of meeples you took.
Tile actions include buying treasure cards, summoning Djinns, and placing palm trees or palaces.
Royal cameeple chillin' in the shade of a palace.
As for the meeple "tribe" actions:
Yellow viziers you just get to keep (they are worth 1 point each and whoever has the most at the end gets bonus points).
White elders you also get to keep and can spend to buy or activate Djinns (also worth 2 points at endgame if you still have them).
Green merchants let you take treasure cards.
Blue builders let you get money for blue labeled tiles surrounding where he landed.
Red assassins kill meeples on other tiles or kill opponents viziers or elders. If you want to be mean.
Most of these abilities are more powerful the more of the meeples you pick up. More greens means more cards, for instance, or more reds mean longer killing range.
Treasure cards and worker cards (which are meeple substitutes, like tofu)
In this game, money is points. Just like real life.
You want both things that score you points (like tiles and Djinns and certain meeples) but you also want lots of money which are also points. Got it? Money is good. You got it.
At the end of the turn you always have the option to trade in sets of different treasure cards for money. The more different types of cards you have, the more money you get and the scale rewards those who wait until they have them all rather then spending small sets early.
Another complication is turn order. You bid for it. With money-points. Turn order is important, because sometimes there is just a great move sitting on the board and everybody wants to go first. But you have to pay for it. Going earlier means spending more money-points. Hopefully it's worth it.
In a 3 or 4 player game everyone takes one turn per round. The 2-player variant gives each player two turns per round, which introduces an extra bit of strategy into the bidding, as taking two turns in a row is incredibly powerful for using the first move to set up an amazing follow-up move.
The two-player tokens only come in "argue with my mom over whether it's green or blue"-teal and "bubblegum-flavored antiobiotic"-pink.
Bidding track. Going first costs you money-points.
Finally, the Djinns. If you land on a magic lamp tile, you can spend elders to buy Djinns, each worth some amount of points while also having some sort of Phenomenal Cosmic Power (and itty bitty living space) that is either ongoing or can be activated once a turn.
Hmm. Which scary looking dude do I choose?
Less ripped Incredible Hulk Djinn
This Kumarbi guy above, for example, lets you spend a worker card during the bidding phase to pay less for a higher spot on the turn order track. He's cool. Saves you money-points with his menacing sword, creepy yellow eyes, and titanic tummy.
You play until one player runs out of camels or until there are no legal moves left on the board. Then you tally up points on some really pretty score sheets.
I won this one. By quite a bit.
There's a lot to be said about trying to make good solid moves in this game. You want to help yourself or set yourself up but not leave anything good for you opponents. That's really hard. And if you try to consider all the possibilities, you are in for some serious analysis paralysis. In the end though, it may just be more fun to not stress over it and just move. There's too many possibilities and I'm not patient enough to look at all of them, especially having no idea what my opponent is going to do.
This game is a lot of fun. Not a game I feel like I can ever "be good at" because it's just too hard to know what to do. Maybe if I play it a ton. But the mancala movement mechanic and the colorful components make this game pretty great even if it doesn't feel like any sort of heavy euro game of the type I prefer.
One downside to complicated Euro style games is that it's hard to learn the rules. I know this turns off a lot of people to them, but it is totally worth it.
Still, some games just take forever to learn, and trying to teach them to other people in a clear way without forgetting anything (man, they really get mad when you forget something) is a really intensive process.
No one hates learning rules more than our good friend Mozzie the bear. Here is a list he and I have compiled of "Games I Hate to Teach." He was kind enough to pose for all the pictures:
Terra Mystica rules come pretty easy to people who had played a lot of heavy euros. But there is a lot going on, and bringing newer players in can take a while. I taught this to my gaming friends in probably under 15 minutes, but at a boardgame meetup we went to it took a whole hour to teach to a less euro-centered player. So not the worst game to teach but definitely a lot of stuff and symbology to go through.
The Great Zimbabwe is a great game by Splotter Spellen. They are known for incredibly complex games printed in small print runs that cost about $120 per game. The Great Zimbabwe is actually one of their simpler ones, I feel. But it is the only one I own and still very complicated.
This game is the definition of fiddly. Trying to remember what needs to be shipped where and how far it can be shipped and wait do diagonals count and what's a hub and does your hub count as my hub and what are we doing?!
It's actually not bad once you learn the rules, but teaching is tough. And I couldn't play this right now without reading the manual a few times again.
Played ZhanGuo not too long ago. It was really really good. The rules aren't actually that tough either, but the rulebook is pretty disorganized, which isn't surprising as there does not seem to be a logical streamlined way to glide through teaching this one. You just got to plug and chug and this rule and that rule and this thing and that thing. Took an hour to teach it. Worth it, but still...
Luna's rules aren't even hard. But there are something like 14 different actions you can take! And each one comes with it's own little set of details! And there's a supposedly handy guide to all the actions, but you have to interpret all that symbology, which isn't clear the first time you play.
Did I mention 14 DIFFERENT ACTIONS! And some of them are similar and I can remember how the boat action is different from the wave action. Ever.
Ugggh. Asgard... I saw this for $18 on amazon, read somes reviews and thought "Hey this seems pretty heavy and interesting and the theme is pretty cool and it's sooo cheap. Why not?." The idea and mechanics are quite interesting, but none of it works as well as I had hoped. Worst of all, It took forever to set up and forever and a day to teach it. Another poorly organized (and in some cases unclear) rulebook, with lots of little rules to go over. Lots of work to learn a mediocre game. Not worth it this time.
Gen Con is approaching. Sadly, we aren't going this year :(
Hopefully we can get the time off work for a big adventure next year.
(For our big adventure last year, see this: Day 1, Day 2 and Days 3 and 4)
Last year, we got these awesome game bags for free. They aren't super special or padded or anything, but they hold 2 games nicely. I use it when the games get cooped up and I need to take them out for a walk.
Panda not included.
I used it just the other day. When I got home and pulled the games out, though, I also found these.
Not my socks
These are not my socks. They are all that's left of a gamer who had to move away :'(
A few days ago, my air conditioning went out. So I did the only logical thing: turned on a fan, cracked a window, and played a solo boardgame. Follow the logic. It's there.
This time around, it was Nations. Nations is a civilization building game, much like Through the Ages. The concept and theme of these two games is basically the same, but Nations is quite a bit less complicated (admittedly not quite as fun, but easier to teach and play quickly).
When time periods collide. Abe Lincoln's face is that of a man who is judging you.
A bonus to Nations, though, is it comes with a Solo Variant. Even better, it comes with specific pieces that are used solely for the solo game and not the multi player game. So the solo variant is not just a random add on for kicks, it was actually planned out. Kudos to Abe Lincoln and friends.
Solo game special tile and a die!!
The solo variant replaces event cards, which make randomizes things a bit in each round of the multiplayer game, with event tiles (which are chunkier) which determine what the imaginary friend fake faceless opponent gets each round. It also tells you how bad the famine is this round that takes your wheat away, how many architects are available for constructing Wonders, and stuff that happens on certain dice rolls.
The imaginary friend fake faceless opponent rules the die every time it is his/her's turn and stuff happens.
As you may recall, I don't like playing solo games against imaginary friend fake faceless opponents. Mozzie was kind enough to stand in again and help me out.
Mozzie calls this his "Warmongering hat". And his "juice bottle."
Mozzie, as always, likes hats and drinking. That's why we get along.
The game lets you select a difficulty level that determines how many resources you can obtain during a maintenance. I chose the easiest difficulty.
Chieftain/Easy Mode is still really hard.
The whole game setup looks like this.
Game start
There a personal player board, that determines your starting buildings and resources and is where you will build later buildings, military units, colonies, wonders, and store your leader/advisor.
Then there's a card drafting board, where new cards come out each round, and get stronger over the 4 ages (each with 2 rounds) of the game. You buy cards with gold (1, 2 or 3 depending the row the card is in). Some cards are buildings/leaders/wonders/military while others just give you stuff.
In the solo rules, there are 4 columns of cards, and whenever Mozzie rules a 1-4 that numbered column gets taken away, so you want to prioritize card buying before he steals the good ones.
Quite the selection.
Mozzie stole 2 columns already.
Finally there's a main board, which keeps track of military strength, nation stability, player order, round number, and score.
Leaders and manned buildings produce stuff each round. Buildings are manned and military units are produce by taking free workers and paying stones. Some military units require wheat to be fed each round, in addition to famine costs. You can produce more workers at the start of a turn, but at a price of paying extra wheat every round or losing nation stability.
Your manned buildings, wonders, and colonies score points at the end of the game. You also earn (or lose) points throughout the game through various cards, having more stability than Mozzie (+/- 1 point per round), or having more books than Mozzie (+3 per age).
I invested heavily in staying ahead on books and stability to accumulate points during play.
I also had a pretty strong military, which is required to take over colonies, but got there too late to buy more than 1.
Endgame score looked like this.
There is no winning or losing. You just get a rank based on how many points you get.
Apparently I am at "Pericles" rank with my score. I have some work to do...this game is hard.
I like this a whole lot as a solo game. Multiplayer is ok, though it falls short of Through the Ages in terms of the complexity that I like (though wins in taking half as long). But this is my go-to solo game for lonely nights when the air conditioning is broken (it totally makes sense in my mind still). I highly recommend it for that purpose, especially if you like civ games.
My game table was kinda a mess after the game. Mozzie was also a mess.
So back in January, I started playing in an online Go tournament on the Dragon Go Server. This is a turn-based server, so instead of sitting down and playing a game from start to finish in an hour, each player plays one move then waits for the other with some long time limit so the players just play a move when it's convenient in their day.
This tournament, for example, had time rules that required you making 14 moves within 14 days, after which it would reset and you'd have another 14 days to make 14 moves.
I entered the tournament ranked as a 10 kyu (rankings go from 30 kyu to 1 kyu then to 1dan to 6 dan typically, that is from weakest to strongest. You count backwards first then up again. I don't know why).
The first round just ended. It took almost 7 months to complete, during which I was super impatient. But, I won all 8 of my games and gained a couple ranks. The number one player from each group advances to round 2, after which the top 3 from each group go to a final group to decide the tournament winner.
Here's a graphic of my group stats summary. Names have been changed to protect the identities of people. My info (the guy in first place!), however, is actually legit (for once) in case anyone who reads this blog happens to also play Go. Hit me up for a game on DGS sometime, I appreciate your readership.
