Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Massive sale at FunAgain!

Hey all...

Just thought I'd let you know that Funagain is having an incredible sale... they're clearing out their warehouse, and stuff is going at incredible prices... some at 90% off. They are selling out of stuff quickly (they had close to 300 titles on sale, it's down to under 100), so if you want something gotta get it soon.

You can see what they have by clicking right about here.

They have the Settlers anniversary 3-d Edition for only $220!


Maybe I should buy it.


NO! I can't do it. I won't do it.


Oh, man I really want to do it.


Don't let me do it.


"Shop smart. Shop S-Mart."

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Lots of Games.

Hey all. I was just updating the list of games played, and we have well exceeded 130 different games. Craziness.

Sure you can just go look at the list on the left, but here they all are bunched up together... It's a pretty impressive collection...

10 Days in Europe, 4000 A.D., 8 1/2, A-Maze-ing Labyrinth, The, Apples to Apples, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Bandu, Bang, Beer Money, Big City, Blokus, Buccaneer, BuyWord, Cabale, Carcassonne, Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers, Carcassonne: The City, Cartagena, Citadels, China, Cityscape, Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, Clippers, Coda, Continuo, Dante's Inferno, Deflexion, Dicey, Dino Dodg-em, Diplomacy, Dread Pirate, Earthquake, Easter Island, Fire and Ice, Fist of DragonstOnes, Flea Circus, Fluxx, Gang of Four, Gemblo, Girl Genius: The Works, Give Me the Brain, Gnumies, The, Gobblet!, Gold Digger, Grave Robbers from Outer Space, Great Brain Robbery, The, Great Dalmuti, The, Great Wall of China, Guillotine, Hamsterrolle, Heave Ho, Hey! That's MY Fish!, Hive, Ido, Incan Gold (a.k.a. Diamant), Infinity, Ingenious, Intrigue, Isolate, Jambo, Jumpin' Java, Kill Dr. Lucky, King of the Beasts, Labyrinth Card Game, Loco!, Loot, Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, Lost Cities, Mesopotamia, Mexica, MindRings, Monkeys on the Moon, Monsters Menace America, Munchkin, Mystery of the Abbey, Nexus Ops, Niagara, Oasis, Odin's Ravens, Pass the Pigs, Pepper, Pig Pile, Pirateer, Pivot, Point Blank, Poison, Power Grid, Quarto!, Queen's Necklace, Quicksand, Quiddler, Quivive, Quo Vadis?, Quoridor, Rage, Ringgz, Rumis, Samurai, Scarab Lords, Senator, Settlers of Catan (and some expansions!), Space Beans, Spite & Malice, Spy, Star Munchkin, Starship Catan, Subulata, Sunken City, Sword & Skull, Ta Yu, Tabula Rasa, Things... Humour in a Box, Thurn and Taxis, Times Square, Tongiaki, Torres, TransAmerica, Treehouse, Trippples, Tsuro, Turn the Tide, Tutankhamen, Unexploded Cow, Villa Paletti, Wallamoppi, Wayfinder, Wild Pirates, Wings of War, Word Thief, WordSearch, Ys, Yummy, ZERTZ, Zeus on the Loose


The most impressive tidbit is that we've played most of the incorrectly at least once or twice!

Welp, it's been nearly 2 years, and the Game Club is still going strong... it's a good thing.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

More summertime fun...

We had a few more people this week, which was nice! And some old friends, and a new player were here.

The cast of characters for today:
Ashlei (pirate)
Chris (pirate)
Fenwick (pirate)
Joe (pirate)
Nick (pirate)
Rachael (pirate)
Rob (victim)
Sam (ninja)
Sean (pirate)

Onto the games!!




[1:10 pm]

Quoridor


Players: Nick (p), Chris (p)


Nick and Chris bought a few of their own games in to Game Club. Quoridor was one, and they pulled it out to show off its woody goodness. And cuz no one else could decide on a game to play. We get analysis paralysis just choosing a game sometimes...

The result: Chris beat Nick by just 2 squares.




[1:15 pm]

Incan Gold


Players: Rachael (p), Sam (n), Ashlei (p), Fenwick (p)


Incan Gold had become a cult classic in just a couple of weeks here at Game Club. It is very simple, hardly strategic, but packs a lot of excitement into a simple game. It always is accompanied by a lot of yelling, groaning, cheering, and laughing.

Sam has a reputation for doing QUITE well last time he played, and when the game was proposed for play, Ashlei said, "OK! I kinda want to get raped by Sam!" A second of silence was followed by peals of laughter from the rest of us. The quote of the week came out early this time....

Sam did not live up to his reputation...

Ashlei had 14 gems, Fenwick had 26, Sam had 30, but Rachael put him in his place with 38 gems!




[1:35 pm]

Quiddler


Players: Sean (p), Nick (p), and Rachael (p)


Quiddler. Good ol' Quiddler. Nick was DYING to play Quiddler. He managed to rope in a couple undecided folk when the last game of Incan Gold broke up.



In the end, Sean had 217, Nick had 237, and Rachael had 270. She wins again! 2 games in a row... It's possible she's cheating.



[1:40 pm]

Incan Gold


Players: Sam (n), Chris (p), Nick (p), Ashlei (p), and Fenwick (p)


I know what you're thinking. INCAN GOLD?? You already played Incan gold! True, true, but it's a good one, and one we figured Nick and Chris could really sink their teeth into. And every new person added to the game changes the strategy. You can play with up to 8... I can't imagine what that would be like. With 5 explorers, the temple gets kind of crowded, let me tell you.

We played 2 rounds of I.G. with this group...

SamChrisNickAshleiFenwick
ROUND 118111771
ROUND 22536162128
TOTAL4347332829


Chris had the highest scoring game with 36, and ended up winning when we totalled up the 2 rounds.




[3:00 pm]

Continuo


Players: Chris (p), Ashlei (p), Fenwick (p)


Ashlei called out a game of Continuo, and Chris was immediately intrigued by the colorful tiles, so we took a few moments to get him up to speed on the rules (well, rule -- Continuo's tag line is "The one rule game for the entire family"....) and jumped right in.



Early on, Fenwick had a hot move with 30 points, but later in the game Ash and Chris each had a high-scoring play of the game with 32 points.

When all the tiles were down, the score looked like this: Fenwick had 240, Chris had 245, and Ashlei creamed us both with 294!!




[3:30 pm]

Tutankhamen


Players: Chris (p), Nick, (p), Ashlei (p), Fenwick (p)


This is one we haven't played in a while. In my opinion it is classic Reiner Knizia. Main compaint: set-up time. It takes a while to build the long path of tiles to the pyramid. BUT, the game play is engaging enough that, in my opinion, it is worth it. And we did have a nice battle giving our donations to the pyramid...



In the end, Ashlei managed to give away all twenty of her gold first. Nick had 2 left, and was going to ditch those if he had made it to his next turn.... Chris had 3 coins left, and Fenwick had a sad, sad, 11 coins remaining.

Ashlei wins!




[4:10 pm]

Gold Digger


Players: Chris (p), Nick (p), Ashlei (p), Fenwick (p)


Another classic Knizia game came out next. I don't think we've ever played this in Game Club before. As in all Knizia games, timing and trying to anticipate your opponents' effects are critical...

You are each prospectors trying to lay claim to the most valuable mines -- however, a valuable mine will draw the attention of others, reducing the value of the mine for each person. The decisions are painful.

After all the play was done and the mines were divvied up, it looked like this:

Nick had 7 gold, Fenwick had 8, Ashlei had 9, and Chris (with a single value 12 mine! among others) ended up with 16.

Chris wins!!




[4:30 pm]

Space Beans


Players: Chris (p), Nick (p), Ashlei (p), and Fenwick (p)


Space Beans is an occasional favorite. The gameplay can feel awkward at first, but once you get into the flow it can be a real fun one.

First person to 30 points wins...



At that point, Nick had 18, Ashlei had 20, Fenwick had 39, but Chris hit 30 first, winning the game!




[3:40 pm]

Diplomacy


Players: Sean (p), Joe (p), Rob (n/a)


Ah, the granddaddy of sociopolitical war games: Diplomacy. Sean has been itching to play this game for a while, and just got the Gibson's Games version shipped from overseas. Rob is always good for a marathon war game, and he dragged Joe (new player!) in to participate, as well. Chris and Nick kind of wanted to get in on it, but they knew they couldn't stick around for the several hours it would take to play.

The wheeling, dealing, cooperating, and backstabbing did go on for a couple hours. They played until gametime of Fall of 1906, which amounts to 12 turns of the game.

At this point, Joe's England was wiped of the map, and Turkey had a strength of 7. Joe's total: 7.
Rob's Austria-Hungary was 6 strong; his Germany 6, as well. Rob's total: 12.
Sean's had France beefed up to 9, and Russia holding 6. Sean's total: 15.

Even though it was not a 'complete' game of Diplomacy, seeing as they played for close to 5 hours, I think we'll count this one as a full game, in the Game Club logbook...




Until next week.. . .

Monday, July 02, 2007

It's not quantity, it's quality.

We had a small group on July 2. Just three of us -- we got a in a few games before giving up on the rest...

The players:
Fenwick (pirate)
Rachael (pirate)
Sean (pirate)

I think the Pirate team has it all wrapped up today!





[1:17 pm]

Quiddler


Players: Sean (p), Fenwick (p)


Ah. The old standard. Quiddler comes out often, and we pulled it out to get things started while waiting to see if anyone else was going to arrive.


Fenwick had a good 7-card/9-letter word!



Scores: Sean - 317. Fenwick - 288. And Fenwick was leading every hand, except for the last 2... Sean had the comeback of the week!




[2:00 pm]

Power Grid


Players: Rachael (p), Sean (p), Fenwick (p)


"OK. Welcome to POWER GRID!"

This was how Sean began the game... It's a game he likes to play, but it usually takes work to convince me to play. But I hadn't run through a game in a while, so I figured I'd do it. It's strange because I just about always do quite well at Power Grid, but for some reason I don't find it very engaging.



Sort of unrelated to the game, Rachael had a Ziploc (r) bag of Cheez-its (r) that had been cooking in the heat of her car for a couple days. FYI: Cheezits CAN go bad. And when they do, get them as far away as possible. The funky taste of nasty Cheezits will linger with you. It's like coating your tongue with formaldehyde. Blick.



Fenwick triggered endgame buy building a 20th building. At that point...

Sean (p) had built 11 buildings and had $112. He had the capacity to power 19 buildings. He was able to power all 11.
Rachael (p) had built 18 buildings and had $139. She had the capacity to power 16 building, and she did succeed in powering all 16, leaving 2 of her buildings unpowered.
Fenwick (p) had built 20 buildings (you heard that already) and had $190. He had the capacity to power 18 of them, and successfully did so.

Powering 18 buildings gives Fenwick the win... Sean could power more, but just hadn't built the buildings to do it. To be fair, he started on the west coast, which gave him a SEVERE monetary hurdle to overcome.





[3:35 pm]

Spy


Players: Sean (p), Fenwick (p), Rachael (p)


This is a clever little set collection game by Reiner Knizia. The twist is that every time someone makes a set, the next set has to be a bit larger. So the game definitely gets harder as you go along...

There is a mechanism in the game to keep track of the size of the sets -- whenever you make a set of a certain type, you put a token(s) on a card that represents it. The next set has to be greater than the number of tokens. First one to get rid of his/her tokens wins the game.

First round: Rachael won, leaving Sean with 2 tokens, and Fenwick with 3.
Second round: Sean won, leaving both Rachael and Fenwick with 1 token each.

If you sun up the number of tokens left, Rachael takes the total win for this game with only 1 token total.






[4:00 pm]

TransAmerica


Players: Rachael (p), Sean (p), Fenwick (p)


We finished off the day with TransAmerica. It's a quick, fun one.



First round: Fenwick won -- Rachael lost 2 and Sean lost 3.
Second round: Sean won -- Fenwick lost 1, and Rachael lost EIGHT!!
Third round: Sean won, again -- Rachael lost 1, and Fenwick lost 2.
Fourth and final round: Fenwick won -- Sean lost 2, and Rachael lost 3.

That put Rachael off the board.

Fenwick still had 9 points, Sean was down to 7, so Fenwick wins.




Sure it was a small group, and a short day, but it was good fun, as always.