Dirac Angestun Gesept

We started by declaring the Diplomacy game carried over from last week a three-way draw (the smaller powers didn’t see any real hope, the Big Three were showing no signs of cracking, and England was over playing War of the Ring anyway).

While waiting for more folks to show up, we played the usual 3+ player time fill, Can’t Stop. After that, we wound up with seven folks not playing WotR, so we vacillated a bit and eventually wound up with two games, a 5-player Evo and 2-player Hannibal.

I hadn’t played Evo in a while; I should play it more often. Loads of fun. I should have bid more on those leg genes, though; I got sort of stuck off in a corner where I couldn’t do much, and lost way too many dinos to the vagaries of the climate.

After Evo, on to Puerto Rico! This time, we discovered the origin of the saying “when only one player has any of the bonus buildings, and he has two, the game is over.” (Wasn’t me, either; I managed to build a factory that paid me a whopping one doubloon.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen the construction hut used as effectively as in this game; four of the eight quarries were on one island in a five-player game!

I normally would have headed home at that point, but Carl had brought back one of his designs that I’d played in the past and enjoyed, with some rule tweaks based on that session. Loads of fun even if I did wind up crushed between the two leaders. With that, I headed home even though another round of it was about to start; since unlike the others, I wasn’t T dependent, I didn’t have to stay up until the system started running again.

Picked up Early American Chrononauts the other day. I love the original Chrononauts, so I’m looking forward to playing this one, probably tomorrow night at SGS if folks are interested.

Another week, another SGS. Kevin and I played a game of Awful Green Things (TSR edition) to start while waiting for other folks to show up. Even with a 5-dice-to-kill comm beamer, I couldn’t get enough other weapons together to make a difference…and the robot was taken out in turn 2. Ouch.

After that, we had enough folks together for a four-player Attika. Loads of fun again; I was able to pull off a win through sneaking within 5 spaces of the other shrine, then building three streets, burning an amphora to build the fourth, collecting a replacement amphora, and then building another building to close the gap.

We then played Magic using some of Carl’s pre-built decks in a two-against-two configuration, with Carl and I against Kevin and Richard. I wound up drawing far too few creatures and so we lost fairly quickly as the tide went against us.

Finally, the nightcap was the traditional Can’t Stop, which was close and was finally won by Richard (IIRC). Then home to crash.

Swung by SGS last night for a round of gaming. Aaron was there opening up three new games, including Attika.

We decided to try a two-player game while we waited for additional folks to show up. It’s an interesting building/connection game which has some nice features. The hex board and resources reminded me a bit of Settlers at first glance, but there’s much more emphasis on territory, no trading, etc; it’s not really Settlers-esque at all.

The buildings can be built without resources if you can either find the right spots on the board (pre-printed resources) or for free if you follow the tech treebuild order printed on your card (and have the spaces to put them in).

Two win conditions: build all your buildings, or connect two shrines. The latter seems more likely in most games.

Aaron won, unsurprisingly. By that point, Kevin and Ed had shown up, so we played another game with all four of us; it’s definitely a different game with four, though it tended to be two at each end of the board there was enough going on in the middle to keep it from being two separate games.

I like Attika. I’ll probably want to play it again next week.

Aaron then left, and (after I nixed Funkenschlag due to lack of remaining brain cells from the week) we played a game of Settlers/Cities & Knights/Seafarers, which, despite a fairly rich board, ran slowly. Bad rolls–very few 8s–and an early attack by the pirates slowed us down; we never did get to the other island, or even build any boats, so the Seafarers part wasn’t really involved.

After that, a quick round of Can’t Stop as a nightcap; when that finished, it was time to go home and crash.

The American Museum of the Moving Image has an exhibit entitled BLIP: Arcade Classics from the Museum Collection opening Friday, February 27.

There’s also a Newsday article on the exhibit, including the reactions of a couple kids:

Son Matt is a stranger to most of this stuff. “These games are not from my millennium,” he says, but concedes a soft spot for Zaxxon, which boasted state-of-the-art 3-D graphics when Sega released it in 1982, nearly a decade before he was born. His sister Taylor, 11, prefers Ms. Pac-Man, another game from 1982 that was the cuddlier, yet more complex, sequel to Pac-Man - one of the first games to become popular with women. “It’s fun,” Taylor says, still not quite sure what to make of it all. “It’s a challenge.”

(At least that’s a better set of reactions than these kids had to Pong and other older games, including the infamous Atari 2600 E.T. cartridge, which is classic only in the same sense as fossilized dinosaur crap.)

A similar exhibition, Game On, was shown in London at the Barbican (where I saw it), then went to Edinburgh, and on to Tilburg, Holland after that.