July Game Day

Hey only a four day delay for my post about this month's Game Day.  I'm getting better at this.

This last Saturday, July 21, we got together at Gamer Utopia for some RPGs and board games, as we are wont to do.  This game day felt a little bit sparsely attended in comparison to the last couple of them, I believe the numbers were somewhere in the low 20s.  Now the fact that a gathering with around 20+ people is something that I consider to be a sparsely attended event is in my opinion a very good sign.  That means that we are getting into a trend of successful and very well attended game days, and that makes me happy!

I did not fully put on my reporter hat for this particular day, mainly because I was quite engrossed in an awesome game of Dresden Files, and because as usual I was very tired.  Emily did a great job of keeping a list of the various games played though.  Here is what she recorded:

Dresden Files, Alien Frontiers, 2 games of 1812: The Invastion of Canada, 2 games of Pandemic, King of Tokyo, Kittens in a Blender, Elfenland, 2 games of Jungle Speed, Tsuro, Chris Colbath's Pirate LARP Playtest, Pentago, Mythic Iceland RPG, Chupacabra: Survive the Night, and Last Night on Earth.

A good listing of games.  As usual I feel there should be more RPGs, because I love them so much, but with many of the normal GMs not able to make it or playing instead of running it was bound to be a little RPG light.  Which is fine, everyone very much seemed to have a ton of fun with a wide variety of board games.

So here are my impressions on the things I both played and just watched.  I'll go mostly in order, though I'll put Dresden near the end in order to give it more space.

First off, Alien Frontiers.  This is a wonderful, quick playing, space themed board game that has been brought to us by the magic of Kickstarter.  You roll dice, and then based on the results on each individual die you spend them like a currency to achieve various outcomes.  I find the game to be very simple to learn, and to have some fun strategies.  The randomness of the die rolls means that you can't think ahead too much and just have to let the game play; which usually gives it a more laid back atmosphere.

1812:  The Invasion of Canada looked interesting.  I always enjoy historical board games that abstract the events and conflicts, and from my brief viewing of the game that looked like it might be the case in this game.  I could be completely wrong of course, but it intrigued me enough that I will look into more details on it.  Plus the ability to beat up on Canada, always a plus.  We must stop their evil from oozing down on us like so much maple syrup.

Pandemic is very much a well loved staple of the cooperative board game roster.  Who doesn't love trying to save the world from horrible cubed shaped diseases?  Communists, that is who.  So if you hate this game you are a Communist.  Science says so.  The only flaw with the game for me is the common one among many cooperative games, strong personalities like myself have a bad tendency to try and play every one's turns for them.

King of Tokyo is a fun giant kaiju monster fighting game.  Great theme, fun game.  Lots of luck because of dice rolls, but not a serious game so I am okay with that.  Kittens in a Blender is another good, short game where you use cards with cute kittens on them; and try to save as many of your own while blending your opponents into delicious kitten smoothies.  Elfenland looked like an abstract fantasy themed game with a Euro feel to it.  Will have to find out more about that.

Jungle Speed is the type of game that I am terrible at, but that I enjoy messing with people in.  Everyone in turn order flips over square cards with various shapes and patterns on them, and you are looking for a match between the card on your pile and the one on someone else's pile.  If a match is seen, the two people involved in the match must race to grab the plastic idol token from its place in the middle of the table.  Quick recognition and dexterous movement are not my forte.  Drawing out my plays to annoyingly increase tension is.  I'm a bad man.

Tsuro was a fun, quick abstract game where you control tokens that represent Chinese style dragons.  You play tiles with lines that represent paths on them, and you are trying to keep your token on a path that does not go off the edge of the board or impact another token.  If you manage to be the last dragon flying, you win.  Wil Wheaton showed everyone how to play it on an episode of Tabletop.

.Chris Colbath's Pirate LARP looks really cool.  It is still being developed, but it should be featured at GlitchCon.  I hope to participate.  The Mythic Iceland RPG looked like a fun setting; but it used the Basic Roleplaying system, and I HATE BRP!!!

Pentago seemed to be on of those abstract, "ancient Chinese" games like Go.  I'd play it, but I don't think I'd be good at it.  Chupacabra: Survive the Night.  I know nothing about it, did not watch it being played, only saw the box.  But man the name just sells itself doesn't it.  Just make sure to have a sacrificial goat on hand.

Last Night on Earth will get its own post.  So more on that there.

Finally we come to the Dresden Files RPG session that I played in.  We had a group of five players and a GM.  The experience with the Dresden source material ranged from having read all the books to having just seen the show to no experience.  A good mix that makes for a different type of interesting game, IMO.  Our characters were all young teenagers of minor magical talent.  My character was Sean Barnes, a teenage metalhead werewolf.

The plot was fairly straightforward.  We had heard about an interesting meeting at an old abandoned circus ground on the edge of town.  We went and attended, meeting a few of the local supernatural types and making a few interesting deals and purchases here and there.  After a bit of chit chatting it was revealed that the group was some sort of organization that seemed to have the agenda of pushing the world of magic out into the open so that no one could deny it.  Seems like a dangerous idea to me, but hey to each his insane own.

As the meeting progressed each of us got an opportunity to ask a single question of a fae spirit trapped in a magical mirror.  We all asked various interesting questions (though Emily saved her question until the conflict arose and wisely used it to get some helpful information then.  Well played.) with my character surprising the GM a bit by asking the faerie "What do you want?"  I had by then decided that my guy was a bit of an "eco-nerd" and did not like seeing a wild thing locked up like that.  So he resolved to do what he could to get the faerie free.  Unfortunately the attention of a demon was called down upon the party via another person's question, so things heated up quickly.

The calamity was helped along by a couple of Warden's rushing in and trying to arrest everyone as well on violations of the Laws of Magic.  Silly overzealous wizard police.  A really fun an challenging battle ensued, in which my character was constantly getting into trouble by accepting compels from the GM to do bad things, and just straight up acting without thinking.  Being a frenzied teenage werewolf is fun!

After defeating out foes, and me forcing the release of the faerie from her new prison in another player's faerie catching bottle, I gave her spirit a lift in my body and ran off to find a way to get her back to the Nevernever before sun up.

Overall I thought the session went really well.  Our GM, Josh, seemed to have a very good grasp on the rules, and he sure did a much better job of moving the FATE economy along that I ever did when I ran Dresden.  The other players were great and for the most part really did a good job of getting into their characters.  Out of character I balked a little bit in my own head at the caution shown by other's actions (hey we are teenagers here folks!) but it wasn't even remotely on a level that could be labeled a "problem".  Also I sure let me leap to the forefront and both take tons of risks and push my agenda, so that was nice.

The whole thing went so well that it looks like we are going to start a twice a month Dresden game with the same group.  I can't wait to play it.  And to build the Dresdenverse version of Seattle, which will be our setting.

July's Game Day was a great time as usual.  I played a smaller number of games than I usually do, but each one had a good amount of quality fun in it.  I'm really looking forward to next month's.  Hopefully I'll both get to play some more good games and get to run a full on play test session of my Mecha RPG.