Rex: Final Days of an Empire

How did I miss this?

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/104363/rex-final-days-of-an-empire

This is FFG's remake of the classic Dune game.

I remember playing Dune once in college and really enjoying it, although I couldn't tell you anything about what the mechanics were :)

But it's definitely on my radar..

Oh, the Horror!

OK, I guess I lied about that Risk Legacy update. I will eventually write a big thing about that, but not yet.

So.. I'm in the process of selling a bunch of VTES cards, but that isn't important. What is important is that as payment for some of the cards, someone gave me a copy of Arkham Horror.

Now, of course I had heard of this game before. But I wasn't interested in it. While I do like Pandemic, the "pure co-op" aspect of Arkham was a turn-off. I'm a BSG fan, I like a game with a traitor. And without ever playing Arkham, I assumed that the game would fall flat without a "bad guy" player representing the Elder Gods.

But hey, a new game is a new game, so I gave it a shot.

We were 3 investigators: Ashcan Pete the Drifter (me), Darrell Simmons the Photographer (Max), and Bob Jenkins the Salesman (Mike).

Our adversary was Azathoth, which means that I wasn't going to get a chance to see the "end battle" no matter what.

Ashcan Pete somehow ended up being the Mage of the group. They were dumping spells on me, and I was collecting Clues preparing to close some gates.

I felt like I was actually making a difference, and knew what was going on, which is rare when I'm the newbie to a game. :)

The game ended up being pretty fun and it made for a cool story.

Monsters started popping up all over the place, and the atmosphere was tense. No real need for a traitor.

In the end, 7 gates opened, Azathoth awakened, and the game instantly ended.

I'm willing to try again...

Now I just have to resist the Completist Urge to buy an expansion or two or seven.. :)

Risk Legacy "teaser" update...

We played Risk Legacy, twice, last night at PGWJ.

I want to write a big report about it, with pictures, and blatant spoilage... and I'll try to do it soon.

Earth #6730 definitely changed significantly last night, and we will see the full extent of the changes soon...

TempleCon 2012

I'm back from TempleCon 2012, and it was yet another successful and fun year at the Con.

I should have prepped this blog post while I was there, but I'll try to remember what happened...

I arrived Friday evening, earlier than I expected.

I hadn't been planning to play the Friday VTES tournament, but after finding my way down the secret elevator to where the VTES room was, I noticed that the group was small, and I didn't really know what else was going on, so I sat down with my Chaundice deck (unmodified and un-looked-at for a year) and played 2 rounds.

It didn't get me anywhere in the tourney, but I didn't expect it to. I had some fun playing VTES for the first time in awhile, and that was OK.

Afterwards, we played some other games -- I think this was when we got a game or 2 of 7 Wonders in. Great fun.

I still had very little clue where I was going to sleep -- next year I will spring for a room and beg for roommates instead of the other way around -- but thankfully I got a sofa in a fellow player's room to crash on for a few hours, and then got up, my usual early self.

I'm a very early riser, and that doesn't mix too well with a convention like this. In the morning it was kind of quiet, and after trekking across the street to Dunkin's, I camped out around the boardgame room until it opened.

I was invited to a game of Diplomacy... but passed. That's not exactly a pickup game :)

I sat around in the boardgame room wondering what to do. And then some guys got out the library copy of BSG and were puzzlingly looking at the components.

I couldn't resist.

Long story short, I sat down to play with these strangers; a 4 player game with some Pegasus and some Exodus components.

I was Admiral Helo, with President Baltar, Tyrol, and CAG Boomer around the table.

Interestingly, the Exodus loyalty rules left the Sympathizer card as the "extra"; Baltar was on his own as the lone Cylon (as he usually is).

He didn't even need to Reveal; Boomer was brigged, I was brigged, and Tyrol was frakked. We resigned when there wasn't much we could do.

By the time that game ended, Round 1 of the VTES Qualifier was well underway. So I got in at Round 2.

Unfortunately, my Round 2 was not really much of a round. My predator was Ben Peal, with Kevin Mergen's Una deck (40+ Freak Drives), and I basically got a chance to take 1 action all game before I got smushed.

Round 3 was a little bit better. My deck got to Do Something. But I still ended up with zero VPs (or maybe I squeezed out one, I honestly forget; will update this entry after I see Matt's report).

Somewhere during the tournament, I tried out the game "Atlantis", and I actually won. Not sure it's a game I'd pick up, but it was interesting..

And then that night, there were *two* games of BSG.

In the first (7 player!) game, I was Starbuck and became a Cylon at the sleeper phase, sitting next to Prescott as Leoben. Cally (Tony) was the other Cylon. We won due to a forced march of Centurions, one of the classics.

Prescott didn't meet his goal (he wasn't in the brig and hadn't been executed), and that actually led to a question (can you Infiltrate directly into the Brig?) which we ruled as "no" but I haven't looked up an official answer.

In the second game (5 of us), I was in a silly mood so I chose Ellen Tigh.
Once again we had a lone Cylon (Matt M, but I don't remember which character he was), but we agreed beforehand to use the house rule "if the last card in the loyalty deck is a Cylon, lose 1 of each resource", which I may continue to use.

This was a pretty brutal game and the resources dwindled down into nothing. A third Cylon victory.

At about 2am, I had a floor to sleep on in Kevin+Pete+Matt's room, and we found Kevin very drunk and awake in bed. A short conversation about the backstory of Huang, Blood Cultist (he was apparently a Subway employee who liked to play Mario Kart), and I got about 2 hours of uncomfortable floor-sleep (see my earlier comment about a hotel room for next year).

Once again I was an early riser. But Sunday, the VTES draft started at 11, so there wasn't much time to do anything between room-opening time and VTES time. I could have skipped VTES but I was feeling like hanging out with those guys.

This gave me the idea that maybe next year, I will volunteer with TempleCon as an "early morning gaming liaison", to keep the boardgame room open and running for the morning people like me.

In the actual draft -- where we got Free Cards -- we played 2 rounds with no final; the Sunday draft usually fizzles out like this.

I drafted a halfway decent Lasombra deck out of a bunch of random packs.

I was happy that, in both rounds, I got to use Paulo's ability on the first turn of the game (move 1 blood from him to an uncontrolled Lasombra when he comes out).

In the first round, a combination of Pentex Subversion and Consignment to Duat locked me down after a strong start (draftferiors make dom/obt even better!), and I died without a VP.

In the second round, my stealth-weenie predator (Ira) "allowed me" to get 1VP before he obliterated me.

Overall it was fun.

And I gave away most of my free cards, knowing full well that I'd otherwise probably just be selling them which isn't fair.

Hoping to get back to the con next year, whether I play VTES or not (I don't think I'll be building any new decks, either way ...)

BONUS FACT: Throughout several plays of 7 Wonders during the weekend, I happened to notice that one of the cards looked 'marked'. There was some sort of grey blob on the back of the card.

When I got home, I posted something on boardgamegeek about card replacing, and I got contacted directly by the North American publisher of the game. A replacement is on its way. Cool!

Also, this morning (I'm home from work for unrelated reasons), I went through my set of BSG. To my surprise, it's still complete! Not a single lost bit or card!

Anyway, see you next year at TempleCon!

Windows 7 problem solved (?)

I know this is mostly a gaming blog, but I really wanted a place to make something publicly searchable, for people experiencing the painful issue that recently happened with my wife's Toshiba laptop.

I have been working on this problem since 4pm yesterday; it is now 10:30am, I haven't slept, and I'm fairly confident that I found the answer.

The symptom:

Her machine was acting strangely and slowly...

So what do I do, but go over to Windows Update and see if I can install a patch.

I saw Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) had not been installed yet, so the genius that I am I chose to install it.

Boy was that a bad idea.

The machine wouldn't boot; it got caught with some Fatal Errors failing to install some patch.

I tried rebooting to a recovery partition. I tried running the standard Restore tools; they did not work. I tried 'sfc /scannow', and it said it couldn't fix everything. Obviously I also did not have a good Restore Point to go back to.

Rebooting, I got either "Fatal Error C0000034", or some other Fatal Error number, or the machine would simply stall at the "Starting Windows" screen and then go black after about 20 minutes.

This was so frustrating...

Eventually I must have found the magic search terms.

After booting with a Linux LiveUSB and backing up the whole drive to a server, I finally found THIS:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-system/fatal-error-c0000034-on-boot-after-service-pack-1/5f7127e8-9887-4f01-aaa5-9729b69544b7

It involves what is basically a System Restore of registry entries back to the very original state.

Somehow, this "just worked"! The machine booted, it's happy (so far) and all of the programs and data are intact (so far).

I still don't really understand how it fixed things without breaking other things...

...and I'll be damned if I try going back to Windows Update any time soon; my wife is graduating at the end of this semester and needs a working laptop during that time.

So maybe in June or July we will find our install discs and reinstall from scratch just in case. But for now, so far so good.

If there is any other detail (or failure) that I need to add, I will post it in the comments. Please read.

I hope that people of the future get some use out of this post. Please comment if you found your solution here.

I leave you with the wisdom of XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/979/

TempleCon..!

I should mention TempleCon here, if I haven't already)

I'm going to it. February 3-5. (still not sure where I'm sleeping, at least on Friday night)

I've been at TempleCon every year since its inception, and have played in the major VTES tournaments there.

But I haven't played VTES since last TempleCon, and I did preregister for a "full-priced, not secret-VTES-code" badge.

While I'm planning to participate in VTES -- at least the Saturday tournament -- I also want to get some boardgaming in.

Obviously, it isn't the best venue to bring Risk Legacy to (...or is it? we might have 3 or 4 of our original 5 there hmm), and I probably don't want to play in anyone else's Legacy game if they've opened up stuff I haven't seen yet.

But I will definitely be up for games of Dominion, 7 Wonders, Cosmic, random-game-I-haven't-played-yet... with strangers or with friends.

Who reads my blog and is going to TempleCon -- for VTES or otherwise?

7 Wonders for 7 Players

Happy (belated) New Year, Team Grr!

Over the Holiday Season, one of my gifts was the game "7 Wonders". I've been waiting to play it for weeks.

At the most recent PlayGamesWithJosh™ meeting, we were scheduled for 5 people, in which case we were going to continue our Risk Legacy game.. but then a 6th piped in, and a really-last-minute 7th.

Aha! 7 Wonders takes up to 7 players. Perfect!

Some of us were passingly familiar with the rules but hadn't really played; most of us hadn't played before at all.

Just around 7:45pm:

We assigned one person in charge of the rules (I'm a terrible game teacher), went over them a little bit, and decided to just start playing. We used all 7 wonders (obviously) on their "A" sides.

As soon as we had our first hands of cards, there was an immediate screech to a halt, questions popping up everywhere about what symbols meant what, how things interacted, etc etc.

Oh crap, this game is going to take all night!

Not so..

A few rounds in, a few mistakes made, we started getting the hang of things (except Science).

We finished the first game in under an hour, even with our slowdowns (including the inevitable part of the Third Age where everyone has to look up symbols again) and the arrival of pizza.

Then the Rules Guy actually explained how Science was scored, and that made a bit of a difference.

So, we went on to Game 2, wherein we would start with a fresh understanding of the game.

Of course, some of us decided to go more heavily into Science in Game 2 (especially me), and it showed.

After Game 2, "wow, that went fast."

We played a third game, this time with everyone using Side B.

This game really flowed well, and felt solid.

I can't wait to play again.

Specific personal opinions:
I like the fact that you can "do your own thing", but still have to be aware of what the guys on your left and right are doing. What resources they have, how much military they've got, and (to some extent) "hate-drafting" (taking a card just so the guy to your left/right doesn't get it).

I like the fact that it is a FAST game with SEVEN players. Damn, dude. A 7-player game of BSG could take 6 hours :)

I like the fact that the meanings of the icons are intuitive, after you've seen a few. The colors, the arrows, the numbers, you could easily see a new card and immediately know exactly what it does.

The rulebook could use some work. When questions came up in the game, we eventually did find the answers in the rulebook, but they weren't always where you expected, and sometimes were in "aside statements". (Like whether you could build 2 buildings of the same name, or whether you could build multiple parts of your Wonder in the same Age, for instance).

But 7 Wonders gets a GRRRRRR (that's good) on the arbitrary Ossian Rating Scale :)

Plans for next time:
I think I'll try to make "starting player packs", a ziplock baggie with 3 coins and 2 of each positive military point, to make setup faster. (Unfortunately there aren't nearly enough "-1" chips to give everyone the potential maximum of 6 for their own pool).

Need to figure out a smooth way to randomize "side A/side B". It doesn't seem like it would work really well to rely on the facing of the Wonder cards; I don't know how to fairly randomize that. Some ideas out there?

One burning question:
Why is Science listed before Guilds in the rulebook, but after Guilds on the scoresheet?

Also:
Should the game get exercised several times before buying the Leaders expansion, or is it worth diving straight in?

Any other commentary?