What a week! Last Tuesday I headed out to Los Angeles for a 3-day business trip. I stayed Tuesday & Wednesday night, and got back to Dallas around 8:30pm on Thursday night. Within 12 hours, I was back on a plane for the other coast - heading to Tampa to visit Karl (my uncle) for the weekend. As I type now, I'm here in Tampa for my last night. I'll be up in about 6 hours, going to the airport again to fly back to Dallas. So in 6 days I've been from Dallas to LA to Dallas to Tampa to Dallas. The good news is, the airline miles should push me over the 40,000 mile limit, enough for a free international flight on American.
Fortunately, I've managed to get some gaming in along the way. In LA, I wasn't going to have the time to hook up with any local So-Cal gamers on Boardgame Geek, but I was making the trip with some of my IT buddies from work who come to my Thursday work gaming nights. They requested I bring some games along, and I was happy to oblige. I managed to pack a lot into just 2 game boxes, but we wound up playing the same game 2 nights in a row. I taught them Taj Mahal, and it was a big hit. In our first game, I decided to try an all trade good strategy, and it worked out perfectly. I got a couple of lucky breaks, managing to score 5x trade good tiles plus 2x bonus tiles. Six of the seven tiles had gems, so I scored 21 points in gems alone! In fact, it worked so well that in our second game, Dan tried to pull off the same strategy and it worked equally well. I saw what was happening, but was powerless to stop it. I was trying a new strategy of collecting as many 2-color cards as possible, ignoring elephants completely. This left me in no position to stop Dan. No one else seemed to want to stop him either, so he won quite handily. I won't take anything away from his victory though - he played it well!
Fast forward to Tampa. As I've mentioned on my blog before, Karl is the one responsible for getting me into gaming. He sucked me in at an early age when he bought me a copy of classic
Dungeon, and I've never looked back. So when I came to visit him this weekend, it was with every intention of playing as many games as we could.
Sadly, we didn't get in the quantity of games we wanted, but that was just because of the games we chose. Friday we never hooked up with any of the Tampa gamers, but we had a great time playing some 2-player games - Chez Geek, 2 games of Battle Line and Star Wars Miniatures. We both particularly enjoyed Battle Line, and Karl said he'll be looking for a copy. I was happy to have tried Star Wars Miniatures. I kept up my record of completely sucking at miniatures games (40k, Disk Wars, Mage Knight, Star Wars Minis), but it was a lot of fun. Karl was playing a clone trooper army with 3 commanders that buffed all his clones into critical hit machines. With as many dice as he had, it was only a matter of time before he caught my main fig, Jango Fett, with a crit. I was impressed with the "deckbuilding" aspect to the game. I wish I had enough figs to try that.
Saturday we headed out in search of game stores. We eventually landed at Emerald City Comics, which really surprised me. They had a decent selection of Euros, with heavy hitters like Tigris & Euphrates, Samurai, Power Grid and Princes of Florence. It also looked like in February they will be moving to another storefront with space for in-store gaming. I hope that's really successful for them. As I had a choose-your-Christmas-present pass from Karl, I finally picked up a copy of Mississippi Queen, which has been on my want list for at least 2 years. I also nabbed a copy of Scarab Lords, as well as a few comics and graphic novels, courtesy of the guy working the store. I'm not a big comics guy, but there are some really cool graphic novels out there. Karl wound up bringing home Arkham Horror, Star Wars Risk and a few boosters / starters of the D&D Minis game.
That night Karl and I decided to try out Arkham Horror with 2 players. The game needs more than just a 1-paragraph description, so I'll save that write-up for later this week. The basic idea is that it's a helluva great co-op game, but it plays a couple of hours too long. More later.
Sunday we had plans to meetup with a couple of other Oklahoma outcasts for an afternoon of Descent. It was my second time playing. Karl had run through some of the scenarios by himself, but the other two guys were new. We started with the second scenario, but due to some poor skill card draws, poor character selection and even poorer tactics, we died quickly. We restarted the game with new characters, but due to the late start we only got about halfway through before calling it. I think everyone agreed we had the strategy and the equipment to win the scenario if time permitted.
I really enjoyed Descent again, but like Arkham Horror it just plays too long. There are a lot of things going on during the turn, so I don't know that it would ever play quickly. But hey, it's still a fun way to spend an afternoon.
So despite all the traveling, it's been a successful week of gaming. Unfortunately, all the time away from home has left me exhausted, so I'm off to bed. After all, I've got a plane to catch back to Dallas in 8 hours.