Sunday!
Sunday was a visiting day, stopped by mom’s place early and then on to the Consortium for Food, Drinks and gaming goodness…finally. Randy, Bruce and his friend Mark, Jackie, Doyce, Kate, Lee, De and all the associated kidlets.
First there was random noshing of items as they were ready to eat, kibitzing and Marchmas (the giving of gifts that not been distributed since Christmas, Dave’s Birthday, My Birthday and Jackie’s Birthday). I am very happy with the DVDs that I received and am busily working my way through them (The Vicar of Dibley, Two Eddie Izzard DVDs, and Carnival :) )
Then came time for some actual game playing, and first up was Turbo Cranium in which it was found that having an actual artist was a handy thing….or constently hitting red ( Trivial Pursuit-esque) questions. Also a handy thing is figuring out that all question cards are themed, so if you get one question, the others will follow suit. It is a silly game and drinking (possibly heavily) is advised.
Next up. One group wanted to play something called “Jungle Speed”, which looked like a $19.99 version of the old two card deck ($2.99) version my step-sisters played inscessantly as teenagers (Yes, just like how Balderdash is Fictionary for folks that do not own Dictionarys, Jungle Speed is Speed for folks that do not own two card decks)….so I passed. Lee brought an old game that I remember seeing, but never played called Cosmic Encounters which I dubbed “Flux with Recource management”. And one thing that I did notice during game play is that a great many of the card games that I play now a days use the same game machanic system that Cosmic Encounters uses, but that the card games have a built in time limiting factor, where as Cosmic Encounters has the possibility of going on forever. I did love that it does not have the standard zero-sum victory outcome that most games have, so I was really working toward a two or three person joint “Victory”, much to the dismay of some of the players. ;P
So, maybe next time we can finally play Gloom or one of the two “B” movie card games.
Also, Dave and Margie’s friend Bruce mentioned that there were a couple of NPR bits on the Death of Gary Gygax, so I had to go out and find them. One is from Weekend Edition and the other is from Talk of the Nation, both are worth listening to.
Comments
I had a lot of fun with Turbo Cranium -- and the fact the three teams were so close was pretty cool (and though we kept going for the reds, we also missed two or three of them).
You are correct that CE is an open-ended game. As such, it's probably not a good Game Day game, unless that's all you're planning on playing.
I think trying some of the smaller games would be fun. But I'm glad we did an en masse game for starters.
Posted by: ***Dave | March 25, 2008 8:50 PM
Yep, and I think we had the bare minimum for TC for ti to be a fun crowd type game and it was anice way for folks to meet and greet and get in the mood to game.
CE was a fun game (currently $75 on amazon for just the box version and no expansions) and I really think that Lee's two power home rule was a great idea since it really makes things a bit more interesting and varied.
That said, the "B" movie games use the same play mechanics BUT have an absolute time limit of once the deck has been gone through, the game is over, thus for more playable since it only lasts 15 to 60 minutes per game.
Posted by: Boulder Dude | March 25, 2008 11:13 PM