TempleCon 2011 aftermath, Post #2: Chaos in the Old World

Chaos in the Old World is a game that a lot of local VTES players (and non-VTES players in the same extended circle) have been raving about for months, and especially recently. They love playing the game so much, they want to start a whole League to play over and over and over and over.
I have been trying to arrange a time to play it for a few weeks, and TempleCon was that time.
After the finals of the VTES tournament on Saturday, at 10-something PM, I sat down to play Chaos.

We got random characters. I was assigned Khorne, the Blood God.
I was basically told "Your job is to kill things. When you kill things, your dial advances, and that's how you win. Ignore all the other rules."

So I followed the advice of the experienced players.

Every turn, I sent out my armies to kill guys. I upgraded my Cultists to be able to fight. I smashed and smashed and my die rolls were awesome and I got Dial Advancements. Phases went by with "Corruption" and "Domination" and I zoned out.
It was basically just following a script, and that script missed a turn because of an Event Card that said "discard this and draw a new Event Card".
So, the last turn started, and I was 3 "ticks" away from victory, and you can only advance 2 "ticks" in a turn. So I couldn't do anything to win.
I passed in the "buy phase", got up, and started setting up BSG (See Post #3).

This was one of the most boring experiences I've had with a game. I don't feel like I made any choices that made any difference.
What was I missing? Comments are welcome.

I'm willing to give the game a second chance, playing a different god, and seeing if those other mechanics improve my enjoyment.

But so far, Chaos in the Old World ranks a mere GR in my book.

TempleCon 2011 aftermath, Post #1: VTES

Ah, VtES. The reason I know about TempleCon, the reason I know most of the people I saw over the weekend, and part of the reason for my little corner of fame in the gamerverse.

First tournament: Friday night

Not much to write home about here.
I got to TempleCon just in time to turn round 2 of the Friday VTES tournament into 20 players. I played my Malabranca Breed-Boon-PallaGrande deck, and got crushed by a Ventrue Law Firm deck (played by Amber). Nothing notable happened. I don't even remember the rest of the table.

Qualifier: Saturday
After a little bit of Glen More and time-wasting Drafting in the morning, we were ready to play the main event. There were 27 players.

I ended up playing a Kiasyd Stealth Bleed But A Little Toolboxy deck, along with at 3 other people playing more-or-less the same exact crypt.

Round 1

Round 1 was a 4-player table.
Me-> Dave C (Gangrel fight) -> Amber (Setites) -> Peter K (!Tremere toolbox?)

Peter got out Valerius (the version who shuts down obfuscate, great defense for being the prey of setites), Antonio d'Erlette, and a few Nephandi.

I happened to be drawing most of my Deflections early on, and Peter was "irresponsibly" firing bleeds of 2-3 down the pipe to "test the waters". In addition to my own Stealth Bleedy Sleaze, Dave really didn't have a chance.
He was ousted before he could say "Raven Spy".
I ended up playing Pentex Subversion on Amber's poor little 2-cap to wipe her out, and then Peter just couldn't handle my obt/myt stealth and all of the bleed action cards I hadn't had to waste yet.
Table sweep for me!

Round 2

Round 2 was also 4 players, which actually worked out in my favor.

Me -> Mark (Tor/!Tor aus/cel gun deck, I think) -> John W (Enkidu) -> Adam (!Tor palla grande something?)

Why don't I know what my prey and predator were playing?
Well, when we sat down, Adam warned us that John was playing Enkidu (they're both from the New York Crew).
Turn 1, my prey disregarded this warning, and played Dragonbound.
As soon as my prey brought out Sheila Mezarin, John dropped a Pentex on her. As soon as Adam brought out any minion at all, Enkidu smushed them.
But Enkidu didn't have any backup friends. Just a bunch of 1 caps.

I decided to sit pretty where I was, and let my prey attempt to rebuild himself.
He was unable to burn the Pentex, and I pretty much could have ousted him any time I wanted, but I preferred the meat-shield.
I sat back and let the Dragonbound pluck at the table (including Enkidu's controller himself) and held back my bleeds, just playing a few cards to cycle, pretty much until I drew into my own Pentex Subversion.
At that point, I contested it cross-table, Adam was ousted, and I still gave my prey a bit of a chance to go forward with un-Pentexed Sheila for a little while. When the time was right (Enkidu low on blood didn't hurt), I ousted my prey, survived Enkidu's last turn as an acting minion, dunked his last 1-cap, and then fired the bleed cannons. Easy 3VPs.

I don't often get 1 Game Win in big tournaments, never mind 2, so I was pretty excited.

Round 3

But then came Round 3.
In Round 3, a 5-player table, it was something like this:
Me -> some prey I don't remember -> Dave Z (same deck as me) -> someone else I don't remember -> Ben P (same deck as me)

I kinda sat that one out. I tried, but I zeroed, and don't remember the details.

Final Round

In the Finals, there were "only" 2 Kiasyd decks; me and Greg W (yes, someone I hadn't played with yet).
But between us was Randy....

An aside about Randy

Randy is a player from Sweden, who recently moved to Florida, and came to TempleCon just because I was talking about it on IRC a few days ago. It's nice to be able to pick up and do stuff like that.

Ahem, back to the finals...

Me -> Randy (deck description below) -> Greg (Kiasyd) -> Sonam (Giovanni Bruise Bleed with Sewer Lids) -> Prescott (Cornelius and Quira and ..?)

Randy was playing a variation on a deck that is apparently "going around" these days: Cybele, Aksinya, lots of other huge vampires with +bleed, and a library with about 75% master cards.

I just couldn't do anything about that.
I could bleed big and get bounced (either by Aksinya's special or Lost in Translation) or Archon Investigated.. or he could just not care because he was bloating so much... or I could bleed small and he still didn't care. Not to mention I was already trying to defend myself against OBF and +bleed upstream...
Suffice it to say, Randy swept the table. And won the tournament, fair and square.
It was totally worth his trip.

All-in-all I enjoyed the event, and am proud of my performance (even if it was sleazy, boring, and just plain lucky).

...and then we played Chaos and Galactica (see future posts).

Sunday: the Free Draft

Matt has a ton of extra starter decks and boosters.
So we got free cards, and drafted. Choice of a large selection of packs.
I played the Ishtarri, added a few things, but maybe made the deck too small.

In Round 1, I ousted my prey (KoT Toreador starter) with the things that Ishtarri usually do (big bleed at 2 stealth as the first action of every turn, etc). But it took pretty much my whole deck to do so.
I was down to an empty deck, but just managed to squeeze in my second oust (!Tremere) before getting combatted and death-of-a-thousand-cutted by the !Gangrel deck.

At this point, people needed to catch flights and stuff, but we cobbled together a set of second rounds... In the second round, I got identified as a table threat, still managing to run out of deck but I don't think I actually got an oust.. we were all getting punchy and not really caring what we were doing now anyway.
And we just didn't do a final round.
Still, the act of drafting and playing even a single round is still something fun...

So that's pretty much it for the notable VTES of the weekend.
Please leave comments here if you want any more details, of course.

TempleCon 2011 aftermath: Post #0

I'm back from TempleCon, and I have decided to break up my posts by game experience, rather than a running narrative of the whole weekend. So, expect more posts throughout the next day or 2. VTES, Chaos in the Old World, Battlestar Galactica, and Glen More might even get its own entry.

Overall, I enjoyed the weekend a lot.
TempleCon definitely reinforced my desire to attempt to make some time amongst the friend-circles to dedicate to random boardgaming. There just wasn't enough time in the weekend to do all the gaming I wanted to do plus VTES, especially with those crazy people who think that 7:30am is too early to wake up!
Here's another brief plug for my "Play Games With Josh" list. Maybe we'll be able to schedule something in February.

Thanks to Matt and Pete for not only showing up, but giving me free crash space on the couch in their suite, even if I barely slept there for more than a couple of hours.

There were lots of notably missing faces from TempleCon this year :(
but there were also some unexpected out-of-towners :)
Good to see Matt and Pete, Dave and Robyn, the New York Crew, and to meet Randy in person (who ended up making his trip from Florida worth it, see the VTES entry).

I don't know if Grant and/or Ximon read this blog, but congratulations and thanks to them (and the rest of their staff) for once again running a smooth, excellent, fun, hassle-free convention.
And thanks to whoever controls the weather machines in New England for at least giving us (and my wife back home) a reprieve from the snowstorms for this weekend.

Alright.. Coming soon, Post #1: VTES (the supposed reason I was at TempleCon in the first place)

It's no longer a very Small World, but it's more expensive and faster.

So, I got myself just enough Really Useful Boxes, of various sizes and colors, to pack up Small World in such a way that you can "just pass the race tokens over" to the person who chooses that race; should speed up the game, or at least cleanup.

All in all, my Small World storage now consists of about 40 Really Useful Boxes, including the 17-liter giant box holding everything, including the original box.
I could post some pictures, but they really won't do it justice.

But for reference, this is how big the 17L box is:
http://www.reallyusefulproducts.co.uk/usa/html/onlineshop/rub/b17_0litreUS.php
External: 18 7⁄8" x 15 3⁄8" x 8"
Whereas the original game box is more like 12 x 12 x 4

It's comically huge, but still very much portable in a single coherent unit.

Galactica has a bunch of smaller R.U.B.s now, too, but everything for that still fits inside the Exodus box.

Play Games With Josh

I felt bad about constantly attempting to schedule gaming nights on facebook and/or exploiting the vtes boston mailing list, so I went ahead and created a Google Group.

If you're interested in ever getting together with me for playing boardgames (currently, I have Wednesday Nights bookmarked for the activity), or want to discuss and overanalyze rules, and occasionally design variants or playtest new ideas, come on over and subscribe:
Play Games With Josh

Really Useful Boxes (yet another thrilling post about storage)

Really Useful Boxes are really useful.
Heard about them on boardgamegeek, found out that they have them at OfficeMax, and bought a bunch.
Not completely abandoning tackleboxes and ziplok bags, but Really Useful Boxes come in small enough sizes that it's great for pieces that get passed around (Small World races, if I really want to buy that many), or need to be "put back in the box" frequently (BSG ships).
They also come in gigantic sizes and lots of sizes in between, and they're nicely scaled. But for now, I'm sticking with the smallish ones.

Battlestar Galactica - a shaky Exodus

First game with Exodus components, played on Martin Luther King Day.
Four players, several mechanical errors, but still a great experience.

The four players were:

Me - Tory - Human + "10 raiders or -1 Population" Personal Goal
Jen - Starbuck - Human
Matt - Caprica 6 - Salvage Their Equipment
Kevin - Gaeta - Final Five (Brig for looking) + Cylon

Mistake #1: I decided to prepare the game so we could get right into it when the guests arrived. I set up the Loyalty Deck for 8 players, not remembering to re-do it after we had a Cylon Leader. So there was an extra card in there.
Which we didn't discover until the sleeper phase.
We decided to leave it alone, and just not add a YANAC card during the first Execution to follow. (There hadn't been any Executions yet, and SPOILER: no successful executions for the rest of the game)

"Luckily", the Cylon card did come up at Sleeper Phase (in Kevin's hands), but the error did cast a little bit of doubt as to whether we had a Cylon at all (other than Matt) for a long time.

I unfortunately discovered Kevin's Final Five Loyalty early on, and was sent to the brig. So later on, even though we suspected him of being a Cylon, it was less than a good idea to check on him.

Post-sleeper phase, there was also an odd skillcheck which I think I spiked with an extra yellow card by accident (although I can't confirm it). It drew suspicion on me, but I pointed the finger at Kevin, saying a clever cylon would spike the check with yellow to draw suspicion to me. Turns out I was right, for the wrong reasons.

As Tory, I ended up drawing quite a bit of Blue cards after Quorum cards got played, and I had to be the grease monkey for some of the game.
But I must say, I still don't really "get" yellow cards, except for Investigative Committee. In all of my games of BSG, I have never played a Consolidate Power.
I think I'm done playing Political characters for awhile.

I should mention that we played this game with the Cylon Fleet option as well as Conflicted Loyalties, but left the Nebula in the box; that's being saved for TempleCon.
Matt spent quite a bit of time sitting on the Basestar Bridge pushing the jump track backwards, which partially contributed to the game lasting nearly 5 hours (!). Also, even without Cylon Attacks, we drew a whole lot of crises without jumps.
We had 10 Raiders on the board a few times, but I never found the right time to reveal my Goal, and Population was never running low.

Pegasus locations, for some reason, didn't get much use, except a few airlock attempts after we were sure that Gaeta was a Cylon.

At one point, Starbuck held all 3 titles.
Starbuck as CAG felt like playing Dominion, with all of her different sources of extra Actions.

Gaeta's Reveal power was "put a Centurion on the track", but he never Revealed. He spent several turns in the Brig (after he had used his OPG and gone back in), knowing he was a Cylon; he had some sort of plan he was never able to pull off.

In the end, with Morale and Fuel at 1, and Food somewhere in the red, but with Population in the blue, we Humans pulled off a win at a cost of 4 Pop. (-3, plus my personal goal failure).
Hooray!

I can't think of any other interesting moments; it was a 5 hour game, and lots of stuff happened (slowly), but I will add to this post if I think of anything else.

I will definitely say, the Cylon Fleet option is way better than the randomness of Cylon Attacks, and keeps both Pilots and Repair Monkeys much busier than they were before.

Exodus gets a GRRRRR for sure!