MassiveAssBoardGameDay

Saturday we finally got to our MABGD. Me, DaveE, Shaun, and Dan got together at Joe's in swanky NH. We got 4 games in (and yes, apparently 4 qualifies as "massive") and had a blast.

Outdoor Survival


Where you're stuck in the wilderness and you can't always travel the way you want (e.g., towards food/water). Your own food and water is just about non-existent. You pretty much win by dying last... I think Joe won. I know I died first, but I believe I got the farthest from the starting cabin. Shaun on the other hand managed to circle the cabin, never venturing farther than a handful of hexes. He died about 2 hexes from the starting point.

Puerto Rico


DaveE is, hands down, the best gaming instructor. He managed to explain the game from top to bottom in the most straightforward, logical way that was both clear and concise as I've ever seen. I like this game a lot. There's a lot of options as the turns come round and I freely admit that most of the "jobs" I choose were random, without any real sense of what I was doing. In fact, only once did I specifically take something -Crafting- on my turn to hopefully generate some profit down the line.

A Game of Thrones


I did not really want to play this one. Mostly because it's based on a series of books that appear to turn readers into R. R. Martian-worshiping, pod-people. But it didn't really look that interesting on top of that. Once it got going, I found I liked it more and more. A randomness of cards dictated what major events would happen each turn. You couldn't muster troops until the card came up, so each turn you were stuck with what you had before and so forth.

The best part of this game is the simultaneous planning of orders. Tokens representing orders are place in territories with units, then revealed all at once. This was rather neat, because the orders were somewhat generic. Marching/Attacking could mean that unit attacks any of the adjoining territories. Likewise Support could mean supporting any units in any adjacent territory. Overall, pretty neat.

Betrayal at House on the Hill


Our last game, sans Shaun (l o s e r), was the haunted house game. Which I think takes a dedicated front to play. This is the second time I've played it and the second time we got it wrong. We used most of the tiles to uncover the whole house and Joe turned out to be the traitor, by letting loose the madman who opened windows to let specters in. We managed to banish 3 of them with exorcisms (which turns out to be incorrect, as we were supposed banish them all at once with a series of exorcisms).

But in the end, Joe won by killing us all. He seemed to extract great joy in killing my little girl character.

Overall it was a pretty good time. I was disappointed that we didn't get to play Pirates of the Spanish Main, but that probably needs a specific event, because there's multiple games to be had with it. I think A Game of Thrones took the longest, I'd guess about 4 hours. A good chunk of that was the learn-and-play ritual. Strangely, I think Outdoor Survival stayed with me the longest. I even went so far as to look on eBay for a copy. Weird, because the game appears to have only one outcome: You die. The excitement comes from not knowing exactly when and by what means.

The rest of the pics are here.

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