Board Game Day report

Yesterday, two of my DF group and I played board games, since we had nowhere near enough for a good DF session in the current state of things.

Instead we played a few games.


Ogre Designer's Edition - two games here, both the basic rules, since neither of the other guys played before. First game I was the defender, and lost - Ogre marginal victory. Some of it was not terribly efficient defense, but a good part of it was my utter inability to hit treads, period. I was shooting far under 1-in-3 against threads so the Ogre had Move 3 up until only a few turn's move from my CP. I managed to keep it from escaping with GEVs, but lost everything else.

On the next game, the Ogre player went against another defender. His luck turned when he got swamped and chose to stay in place, ramming and fighting, and rolled abysmally on some otherwise easy shots, and then watches as his treads were chipped away rapidly.

We moved on to the next game after that, but maybe another time we'll tackle a full Ogre-and-armor game with multiple units on both sides. I do need to reorganize the box, though - it didn't take storage on edge very well, and the counters were all in a big mess, even the large terrain overlays. Less than half of them stayed in their original slots. The ogres and buildings were fine, but I'll bag the counters for the future.

Munchkin - one very long game of Munchkin, using sets 1-5, 7-8, More Good Cards, and Conan (not that any Conan cards came up.) I got to level 9 and fought a tough monster but someone played Dead and killed it, and the next guy up ran up to level 10 because us other two had nothing left after the previous turn. Happens a lot - the only thing that kept me from winning was expended and couldn't keep the next guy from winning.

Vampyre - So I had this plastic box TSR minigame since 1982 or 3. I know I never played it. I punched out the counters, never read the book until today, and that was that. Today, we read it and played it. In the Basic Game, one of the players won by taking out 3 of Dracula's coffins and chose silver crucifix. He died in the Extended Game as we tried to take out Dracula in his castle. I got a taste of my own medicine when I rolled up 6 Gypsies as opponents, promptly rolled a 6, and then consulted the Melee Table and saw they beat me on a 1-6 on a d6. Sounds exactly like me - "You fail on a 3 or higher on 3d" or "Roll until you fail."

I engaged Dracula and got bitten, but the other player was six moves away . . . and rolled a six, ran up, rolled another 6, +1 for his crucifix, and bang, dead Dracula. Hurrah!

Fun game, although the movement rules are utterly wonky - you roll and resolve movement different based on the worst terrain . . . yet it's a hexcrawl, so it's just easier if you assign movement rates to terrain types. We ended up doing that.

Dominion - Final game, Dominion. Never played this. Deck building game, but since you never have more than a handful of cards, all repeats from ones you picked yourself with your resources, it was easy to get a handle on. I won, 31 vs. 26 vs. 25, with 5 Provinces, 3 Estates, and 2 -1 curses. I had enough of an idea what I was doing that I could compete. I was glad to win something after losing the rest of the time.

All in all, fun gaming. I'd play any of those again - Vampyre after we fix the movement rules a little bit, maybe with a "round down, minimum 1 hex move" approach so there aren't so many optimal movement paths and more choices to make.