Tuesday, July 27, 2010

VTES auctions

Also, for those who play VTES, I'm starting to put up some auctions of cards.
No specific game-quittery reason, but I am trying to convert some VTES into boardgame budget, in both time and money.

The first experiment in this batch is 2 Jyhad-backed Parity Shifts.
My ebay userid is "jozxyqk", I won't put a direct link here because it's not that kind of blog.

Once that auction ends, I'm going to use its funds towards the listing fees for a whole bunch of other cards.

Meanwhile, just the "excess commons that aren't even worth auctioning" piles are getting unbearably large (maybe like 15,000 just in overflow so far, including from the last cleanup round, and I'm only up to sorting the H's, so I expect at least another 2000 or so "junk" cards) and are either going to want to be donated/cheaply-sold pretty soon or they'll end up being trashed the next time we move or something :/

Anybody interested in a bulk purchase of a huge ton of assorted cards? Shipping costs will be a bitch, so locals are preferred.

As if you care..

Bought Dominion Intrigue last night; can't wait to try out these cards.
I found out I had about $5.50 more in store credit at Pandemonium than I thought I did, so basically my store credit balanced out the $16 in parking fees I have had to pay in the last couple of weeks (I actually found a free space this time).

There's also the storage question, again.. meh. I won't bore you with that, I promised no more OCD.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Previously on Battlestar Galactica...

This Play By Forum game is still going on, in case you were interested...

What I can say is this:
Helo started the game stranded on Caprica.
At the Sleeper Phase, he discovered his loyalty to his wife's people, revealing himself as the Sympathizer, and started to camp out.. back on Caprica.

Why did I even bother stepping on board?

This is going to be a long endgame.
(Although it does seem to be in the favor of the Cylons so far...)

Saturday, July 17, 2010

The last OCD Dominion post.. for now

Just finished sleeving all* of my Dominion cards.

Since I got the 3 promos from boardgamegeek -- most importantly Black Market and Stash -- I had to think a bit about how to "sort" things.

So this is what I ended up with:

1) Put all of the blue-backed "placeholders" aside; don't sleeve them, don't use them.
2) Create a new "randomizer deck" out of 1 of each of the regular-backed cards, to be used instead of the Android program I've been using ...
3) .... except use a blank, with "STASH" written in sharpie, instead of the differently-backed Stash, for total purity in randomization. This is the one case where I'll have to go digging into the box if a card is bought from black market, but I think it's the lessest evil.

I might backpedal on 3, and replace it with an actual copy of Stash, and no tears will be shed about the sharpie marks anyway... but I'll see how it goes for now. It only matters in the case of:
* Black Market in the Supply
* Stash not in the Supply
* Drawing Stash as one of the Black Market choices.

which is a pretty rare event, mathematically speaking anyway.

And my ultimate plan is to eventually put all the cards into a box tall enough to stand up a card vertically (such as the original box with some dividers shoved in), and use the blue-backed cards as dividers.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Power Grid review

(hopefully to be cross-posted to BGG)

Ah, Power Grid.
One of the top 10 rated games on boardgamegeek, it must be awesome, right?

So when my 2-year-old son (with mommy's assistance) got it for me for Father's Day, I was excited and eager to play.
Unfortunately, it's not well-touted as a 2-player game, so my wife and I played lots of Dominion (the other gifted game) and we had to wait until an appropriate time to play this one.

For the July 4th week, we were fortunate to be renting a beach house with another 2 couples, both very gamer-friendly. One of the couples was experienced in playing Grid, so that was good.
So then we all sat down for a 6 player game.

Russ insisted that we play with the "alternate power plant deck" (the official expansion that he brought) because it was somehow better; being my first time playing, I said fine that's OK.

Immediately upon opening the box, I noticed something mildly disappointing: the components.
The board is great, the instruction book is great, the power plant cards are great.
The paper money is annoying and makes it feel like Monopoly, but tolerable.
But the wooden bits were of awful quality.
Aside from one of the Green houses being "flat-roofed", none of the pieces seemed to be symmetrically cut. Houses with uneven rooves, octagonal nuclear fuel which was completely lopsided.. easily ignorable when not looking closely, but sloppy!

Gameplaywise:
The basic rules involve auctioning off randomly-drawn power plants, buying cities to power with those plants, and getting money back from your powered cities. As the game progresses, things get more expensive, and the game ends when a certain number of cities are owned by a single player, but that doesn't necessarily mean that player wins; you count how many cities you are powering instead.

I really didn't know what was going on at first, so I bought too many cities early instead of focusing on better plants. Pretty much as a direct result, I came in dead last.

Overall I enjoyed the game and I would like to play again now that I have a better idea of how it works. And I will try to ignore the poor-quality wooden bits.

From one play, I'll give it a GRRR.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Dominion Promo Cards

My order from the boardgamegeek store has arrived: The 3 Dominion Promo cards, including the dreaded Black Market. We'll see how that goes.

and yes, I know I still need to post my Power Grid review amongst other things...

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Gaming on Vacation.. coming soon..

Over the last week, on vacation with a few other couples, we played some of my games (unfortunately not Galactica).
Watch here and boardgamegeek for when I get around to posting reviews/session reports.
Short version: We played the hell out of Dominion (sleevelessly!) and everyone had a good time, and my first experience with Power Grid was a major loss and disappointment with components, but still fun and willing to play again.