&games

Has it been a week since I last updated the blog? I guess so.

Went down to Anchorage this weekend. Checked out a couple campgrounds along the way for the inaugural Alaska family boardgame weekend. I'll post more on that in a couple days, stay tuned.

I met a fellow gamer and his family. I met him originally on BGG and he contacted me after reading the "Alaskan Gamers" entry on the blog. Dean is a nice guy with a nice family, he just moved to Alaska a couple months ago. Unfortunately, we only had one evening to play games. I look forward to playing with him in the future.

We started with Doom: The Boardgame. It is a game that I own that he was considering buying for his 10 year old son. I played the invaders, Dean and his 2 kids played the marines. Unfortunately, we were unable to finish the game before leaving for the miniature club, but Dean tells me that his son is asking for the game.

Got to the miniature club and what were they playing? Space Hulk. I have seen many comments that it is the inspiration for Doom: The Boardgame. I had never seen Space Hulk before, but watching the guys play I was able to see the similarity.

I was finally able to get Twilight Imperium 3 to the table. Played a 6 player game with Dean, his son, and 3 guys from the club. It was a learning game for all of us. Two of the guys had to leave at midnight, so we weren't able to finish, but I am pretty impressed with the game.

The original Twilight Imperium was a basic war game with lots of dice rolling. It had a political system, trade system, and technology tree tacked on to the basic war system. It worked well as a game, but it was basically just a standard wargame. The new incarnation of the game integrates the aspects that just felt tacked on in previous versions, and makes the game feel rather "euro".

Players choose "roles" similar to Puerto Rico. If a role isn't chosen it has a bonus marker placed on it for the next round. The player who chooses the role gets to use the primary ability and every other player has the option to use the secondary ability. Players also move fleets around, and conquer new planets separately from the role aspect of the game. The game is played over 7-10 rounds, so length issues have been addressed, without hampering gameplay, in my opinion. To win, players must collect victory points. There are various ways to collect VPs.

I will post a more complete review after I've had a chance to play an entire game. My initial impression is that it is a good game.

Other than the trip to Anchorage it's been an odd week. Been missing political chatter on Boardgamegeek. Where else on the web could you go to talk politics (intelligently) with people who were there for completely different reasons? I posted a geeklist trying to get some discussion going on the front page once more. There were nearly 200 comments posted in two days none of which were flames. I thought it was a rather successful experiment.

An administrator did contact me privately to express his displeasure with the list. I wrote him back pointing out the everyone was behaving well. Didn't help, if anything it made him madder. The list got removed and relegated to the back page. There were two or three comments added in the 3 days since, and one was mine.

I did try to steer the list from the topic of abortion, mainly just to remind people that we were under scrutiny. Abortion is a flame waiting to happen. I did contact one poster privately. He was drawing the ire of a fellow who seemed rather irrational. I figured I would contact the guy who seemed rational so I wouldn't be accused of trying to censor a whiner. That worked out well.

Oh well, I'll let someone else carry the torch to lighten up the moderation on BGG. More likely, I'll try again in a couple months. Thanks to everyone who participated and behaved.

Good gaming,
Coldfoot