Note: As you may have guessed by the fact it was published at 2am, this post has been in the pipeline for a while. For 'this week' please read 'last week'.
It's been a quiet week for gaming here at Leaflocker HQ, with other important things in life like house moving and weddings taking the front seat, but there's always time for a game or two here and there.
It's been a quiet week for gaming here at Leaflocker HQ, with other important things in life like house moving and weddings taking the front seat, but there's always time for a game or two here and there.
Over the Board
My only chance to play anything face-to-face was at our regular college Monday night board games night. We started off slow with just James and I, so we returned to last week's quest for the perfect game of Hanabi, this time in its two-player incarnation. Two-player Hanabi is an interesting beast. I miss the extra level of *wink wink* information you can pass to other players when you tell someone something that is techincally true but misleading, but in exchange the 2P game gets this interesting back and forth rhythm that adds an extra sense of importance to each and every move. It can also royally just mess you up if you both end up discarding cards that just a moment ago looked innocuous, but thankfully we managed to avoid that pitfall. Instead, we failed by each forgetting pieces of information at the critical time, so it felt a lot like we were defeated by our own mistakes rather than by the game, leaving us frustrated by our own hubris and wanting more, which is always a good feeling.
By the time the fireworks had ended, there was a good gathering of people, and as they kept streaming in the door we began a game of Monday night favourite, 7 Wonders. As always with Monday nights, there were a couple of brand new players, so I again didn't spring the Leaders expansion on them right out of the gate, but we had a good tight-fought base game, with one big science player, a big military build-up -thankfully on the other side of the board from me-, and a good smattering of big resource owners. I drew Halicarnassus, which I generally find to be a generally useless wonder unless you're going big in science or need to fight, so I abandoned building the wonder entirely and just focused on building a lot of yellow and blue cards, ended up becoming fabulously rich and carrying the day.
By this point in the night numbers were still going up, so we split into two groups, with eight people indulging in a couple of games of Captain Sonar while I led a five-player game of Paperback, which I always sell to people as a mixture between Scrabble and Dominion. As usual for a five-player game, this one took a while, but it rolled along at a pretty good rate with a whole host of good words being created, and when we finished I was a couple of points short of winning, with Luisa's high-value letters outweighing my solid card-drawing deck.
We finished the evening with a couple of silly party games of A Fake Artist Goes to New York and Elon Musk's iPod Submarine, which are both essentially the same game as Spyfall, where the players try to secretly communicate information to each other without tipping off the secret plant among them. Not normally my cup of tea, as they require too much creativity, but good fun games with the right crowd.
By this point in the night numbers were still going up, so we split into two groups, with eight people indulging in a couple of games of Captain Sonar while I led a five-player game of Paperback, which I always sell to people as a mixture between Scrabble and Dominion. As usual for a five-player game, this one took a while, but it rolled along at a pretty good rate with a whole host of good words being created, and when we finished I was a couple of points short of winning, with Luisa's high-value letters outweighing my solid card-drawing deck.
We finished the evening with a couple of silly party games of A Fake Artist Goes to New York and Elon Musk's iPod Submarine, which are both essentially the same game as Spyfall, where the players try to secretly communicate information to each other without tipping off the secret plant among them. Not normally my cup of tea, as they require too much creativity, but good fun games with the right crowd.
On the Screen
It's quite literally been a quiet week on the videogames front, as I've been more-or-less restricted to games that can be played without audio and can be easily paused or looked away from so that I can use my sight and hearing organs for important cricket watching activities. I've already talked about my forays into Opus Magnum, but I also played a little bit of Mini Metro and N++, games which I talked about last week.
I've also played and abandoned two different expert-level campaigns of Klei Entertainment's excellent turn-based stealth game Invisible Inc. I've been enjoying this one on and off for a while now, I've finished the campaign on the lower difficulties a few times and I think I've more or less reached my skill plateau, as I don't have the patience to wait for guard patrols that could potentially burst into any room each turn, so I tend to get my agents into sticky situations that I can't extricate them from. I still keep hitting that new game button, though, so even though I've stopped making progress it still has a hold on me, particularly late at night when my body has gone to sleep but my mind wants more.
Not a great week for the online mahjong either, with my Tenhou scores being 2-4-1-4. Though I had slihtly more positive results that negative ones, each 2nd place is only worth a quarter as many points as a 1st placing, so on average over the week I was down one game on aggregate. If it hadn't been for a bit of a resurgence over the weekenf it could have been a lot worse, though, so all hope is not lost yet.
Not a great week for the online mahjong either, with my Tenhou scores being 2-4-1-4. Though I had slihtly more positive results that negative ones, each 2nd place is only worth a quarter as many points as a 1st placing, so on average over the week I was down one game on aggregate. If it hadn't been for a bit of a resurgence over the weekenf it could have been a lot worse, though, so all hope is not lost yet.
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