It's time for a new feature here at the Leaflocker, a rundown of games that I've been playing lately. I've been racking my brain trying to think of a more interesting format, maybe with some kind of running theme or tracking numbers or something, but I haven't come up with one, so if you have any ideas, do drop me a comment.
Over the Board
The week's boardgaming started with a tonpu of Sanma Mahjong with Ariane and Eric. The three player variant is dearly loved by certain members of our college mahjong club, but has a tendency to get a little bit ridiculous, since the reduced number of tiles often results in very fast, very high scoring hands. I tend to use sanma as a chance to practice playing defensively, but to be honest, the proportions are so out of whack that playing any amount of it must surely have a negative effect on your four-player style. It turns out it was my week to be lucky, so I went on a bit of a tear during my dealership and our quick game ended up stretching a little longer than any of us had planned. Still, good company is always a lovely way to start the week, so I'm not complaining, and I hope that those with a longer walk home that I had afterwards aren't either.
/pic4389137.jpg "Hanabi")
Monday night college games night started small, with just myself, James and Callum, a big pile of hummus and snacks and a game of Hanabi. This little co-op information management game, which used to be a mainstay of our little group, has fallen a little out of favour of late, but James is keen to relive the glory days and attain a perfect score one day, so we gave it a try. It didn't end well, but in our defence, it was a pretty awful start. I think we're going to have to spend more time playing this one together if we're going to get there.
Once the crowd trickled in, we stayed with the cooperative vibe and went with Mysterium, which is a blast, especially at the full player count, but is definitely an emotionally intense experience if you're playing as the ghost, since the whole thing leans on your ability to try and convey information to the media through a limited hand of inevitably unuseful abstract dream cards. Despite my efforts to give someone else that job, I ended up as the ghost again, and while as always I had a good time doing the job, I ended up utterly exhausted at the end of it, especially when I had five of my six media still searching for their murder weapons during the last hour of the night.
We finished up with a something a little more relaxed, a game of Codenames, whose flexibility with player count and consistently different experience makes it an enduring Monday Night favourite. When I leave the common room, at least I know that people will still be playing Codenames there. At least until someone nicks our copy, anyways.
On Friday I made a pilgrimage to my friendly local board game store, Thirsty Meeples, and played a game of Terra Mystica with Paddy and Daniel. We didn't quite get the whole learning from scratch and then playing thing done in our three hour slot, but we did get pretty close, which I thought was a pretty good effort for a game whose rulebook has six appendices.
I'd steered clear of this one in the past because it looked like it just had too many moving parts, but was pleasantly surprised by how intuitively the whole thing flowed once we got the basics down. Of course, I could have just liked it because I happened to have won -a pretty rare experience against these two opponents-, but under the intimidating skin and the piles and piles of bits, this felt like a pleasantly Thomish game. It had the opportunity to play your own game but necessitated an awareness of your opponents without giving you chance to directly outright mess with them. Very Euro but with a flexibility that reduces the famine feeling one often gets when playing this sort of game. I've provisionally given it an 8/10, and hope to get a chance to play it again sometime. I'm tempted to try and give it a longer-form review, which is something I've never tried my hand at, is that the sort of thing that people around here would be interested in?
On the Screen
It's been a relatively quiet week for computer games, which is a little unusual for Blaugust, as normally other people's gaming blogs are infectious and I end up either purchasing something new or loading up an old favourite. So far this week the only things that have really grabbed me were EVE Online posts, though, and I know better than to get sucked into that wormhole.
I've only played a couple of games of Counter Strike this week. CS has functioned as my go-to winding-down game for years now, and I can't see that changing any time soon. This week I ended up in servers which some Germans who gave good information, as well as a game on a North American server, which always have excellent comms, probably because they always have a good chance of having a shared language, and both games reminded me of why I like the game and how it's supposed to be played.
I also took a few tentative forays into Paradox Interactive's Surviving Mars, which arrived in my humble bundle this month. I keep telling myself that I won't get sucked into another Paradox game, as they always feel incomplete without piles and piles of expensive DLC, but I downloaded this one before I saw the word Paradox on the cover to warn me off, and do far it seems pretty solid. We'll see if it turns into a real grind in the midgame, as I generally find their sim games do unless you play them exactly as intended, but so far I'm tentatively impressed. I'll let you know if I'm still happy with it after the first time I get all my settlers killed by doing something inane like forgetting to give them oxygen or something.
I also managed 13 games of online Mahjong, with a 4-3-4-2 record, which is a slightly better than average week for me, but I'm still lurking around the middle of 2 Dan ranking on Tenhou. More importantly, though, three of those games were played with friends from home, complete with trashtalking, and streamed by Ale, which was a weird and wonderful experience. There's still a lot of kinks to work out with the stream arrangements, but I think banter mahjong is both a good chance to catch up with friends and actually not the worst viewer experience, so I hope we can pursue that possibility a little further in future.
