Christmas comes early with the festive, bloody Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
While it’s set during a Christmas Eve party, and celebrates the traditional holiday values of family, unlikely friendships, perseverance in the face of hardship, and the simple joy of throwing bad guys out of windows, there has been significant debate about whether Die Hard actually counts as a Christmas movie. With its festive red and green color scheme, USAopoly’s Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist board game lands squarely in the Christmas camp, delivering all the cheer that comes from shooting, punching, and defenestrating your friends.
Like the Bruce Willis classic it’s based on, Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist takes place over the course of three acts, as heroic underdog John McClane tries to foil the plans of Hans Gruber and his gang of hostage-taking thieves. One player controls McClane, who must complete a series of objectives during each stage based on beats from the movie, like acquiring a machine gun (“Ho ho ho”) and getting support from LAPD Sgt. Al Powell. Up to three other players control the thieves, who are trying to crack the locks to get their $640 million while also working to kill McClane.
The game is jam-packed with references. There are movie quotes on every card, and the thieves can stymie McClane by breaking windows, which will litter the floor with shards of glass. The objectives nearly recreate the movie scene for scene, except that McClane is much more likely to die before he can achieve his final goal of throwing Gruber out a window. McClane is fighting a war of attrition, playing cards that primarily let him move and shoot, shove or punch thieves while he scrambles around the board trying to pursue his objectives by flipping random tiles. Whenever he gets hurt by a thief, he discards a card from his deck. If he ever runs out of cards, he loses.
McClane’s cards get more powerful as the acts progress, eventually allowing him to increase his likelihood of attacking or sneak past thieves without being assaulted. But that’s barely enough to make up for the increased number of perpetually respawning thieves and higher complexity of the goals found on later maps.
While the thieves have numbers on their side, their lack of communication manifests in the form of limited control over their actions. When just one player controls them, they have one randomly selected card they don’t know about, one they do know about, and one they get to choose to try to guess the best options for taking a good turn. When multiple players are working together, they all get to see some of the cards but can’t communicate with each other, making play a bit more strategic but still imperfect.
The result is that the intensity of the action varies wildly turn by turn. Sometimes the thieves can just focus on drawing the random cards needed to crack the safe codes, and don’t interact with McClane in a meaningful way. Other times they can stack up around the game spaces indicating his goals and unleash a barrage of draining attacks, forcing him to expend precious ammo and cards to clear them away. Because of the randomization, it’s much harder for them to actually win by getting the money than it is for them to just wear McClane down through tactically maneuvering their superior forces.
Like the movie that inspired it, Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist is entertaining, fast-moving, hyper-violent, and doesn’t require too much thought to appreciate. There’s just enough crunch to the gameplay to make it feel satisfying while providing tension through die rolls that can sometimes mean the difference between McClane getting gunned down, or making a daring escape to the next floor. When it’s over, you can swap sides and play again, putting aside the Christmas movie debate in favor of fighting about whether the thieves or McClane has the mechanical edge.
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That game sounds pretty darn cool. But I still want a Die Hard Monopoly entry.“Now I have a Get Out of Jail Free Card. Ho Ho Ho.” Salutations~!
Shinigami’s Favorite Games of 2019:#01. Telling Lies [Solid A]
#02. Eliza [Solid A]
#03. Untitled Goose Game [Solid A]
#04. Shenmue III (Yes, really. I swear this is not here ironically) [Solid A]#05. Resident Evil 2 Remake [Solid A]#06. The DEMO for The Crimson Diamond [Solid A]You can play it for yourself here, /cheer! ^^ 2019 EGA Text Parser game!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1098770/The_Crimson_Diamond/ (I love EGA Text Parser games and am extremely biased).#07. Whispers of a Machine [A-]#08. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night [A-]#09. TIE- Life is Strange 2 + Judgment [B+]#10. TIE- Erica/She Sees Red [Solid B]Honorable Mentions: Neo Cab, Night Call, + We. The Revolution. tri-Ace Award for Flawed Masterpiece: Death Stranding.Biggest Disappointment: Dark Pictures Anthology—Man of Medan. Actor/Actress MvP: Logan Marshall-Green, Telling Lies. Erica Harlacher, AI: The Somnium Files.Theme of 2019: Variety! Something for everyone! /cheerHere’s to another crazy year of gaming. Spring 2020’s looking to be quite the match up of titles to boot. Who knows how it’ll all pan out. But I’m looking forward to seeing what surprises are in store. That’s for sure. What are your favorite games of 2019? Thanks for your time reading all of the above.Take care and have a fantastic weekend, everyone. Be safe.
Thank you for reminding me that I need to finish Bloodstained
Bloodstained was a better game than it had any right to be. After all of the delays, the concerns over the look, the shit job on the Switch port, it ended up being one of my favorites of the year. And that’s more than Kickstarter bias in play. Solid soundtrack, fun action and boy you could break the hell out of that game later on, but in a good way.
Reason is dead, everything will be ashes and the stupefied masses march gleefully toward destruction.To take my mind off that, I’m gonna play some Dark Souls 3. Stymied by the gank squad in the great archive and the Storm King at archdragon peak, I decided to take on Ariandel: but either I’m underleveled, or I’m just not good enough, because the enemies here are ridiculously tough.There’s a new CTR event too, and honestly I’m hoping that’s it for events (or they’ll loop round), because this game’s turned into a goddamn job.
Fallout 3
Last night I “celebrated” another five years of Tory government by wrapping up my time in a different post-apocalyptic wasteland by blowing up the Adams Air Force Base*. Started this playthrough in 2016 and took a couple of long breaks from it. I’ve been everywhere on the map and done everything other than the Tenpenny Tower quest and a couple of the DLC packs (The Pitt and Mothership Zeta), clocking in at just shy of 200 hours. (Which is about 150 less then my similar “go everywhere, do everything playthrough of New Vegas).So now I’m going to comfort myself by retreating to the warm bath of another Dragon Age: Origins playthrough.*…aaand now I’m on a watchlist.
On this incredibly depressing evening, I’ll think back to the few bright moments in what has otherwise been an incredibly shitty year, for me personally and for the world as a whole. I actually played a ton of games this year, more than in many years previously. I managed to get sucked in to three separate games this year, whereas that hadn’t happened once the whole previous year. There is probably some connection between the two parts of this paragraph.
These are the games I played and particularly enjoyed, at least enough to remember. NOTE – they are not necessarily new. They are also in no particular order, but they are grouped by tiers.
1 – Disco Elysium (Most Impressive!)
1 – Total War : Three Kingdoms (Most likely to be played again at some point next year)
1 – BATTLETECH (Playing NOW! Less for the Mechatude, more for the fantasy of visiting strange and exotic inhabited worlds)
1 – Yakuza 0 (Most embodiment of Best Life)
2 – Heaven’s Gate (Good story and Archaeologist Fantasy, but Translation Bleah)
3- Slay the Spire (for Nostalgia!)
3 – Wizard of Legend (for sense of actually improving at a hard thing)
3 – Fortune 499 (Story was surprisingly touching)
3 – Warhammer 40k : Mechanicus (Most MOST!!!!!! But funny)
3- Crying Suns (Most Kickstarted but good)
Backlogged: Spelunking on SR388 EditionThis week in my ongoing quest to experience all of the games I’ve missed out on over the years, I fell just short of successful genocide and beat up a bunch of barbarians with my sweet side kicks.First up, I descended into the depths of Metroid II: Return of Samus. I’m actually a fairly big fan of the Metroid franchise, so unlike most of my retro list gaming, this was more about filling in the gaps than experiencing something new. I’d never quite got around to playing Metroid II though, probably because of its status as an OG Game Boy release (and as the black sheep of the franchise). As it turns out, I was fairly impressed by Samus’ sophomore adventure. It really nails the claustrophobic, isolated Metroid atmosphere, and the minimalist soundtrack is quite effective at maintaining tension. It’s clearly a game that’s straining at the limits of the platform it runs on, perhaps most apparent in the repetitive layout of its many caverns (which makes the lack of map all the more glaring), but the way it milks four buttons and a D-pad to create a versatile moveset for its heroine is impressive (I was particularly impressed by the implementation of the Spider Ball). The game gets a little repetitive as it goes on, and for all Samus’ upgrades, combat isn’t especially rewarding (I found that the initially scary Metroid encounters became somewhat rote once I’d figured out their patterns), but the sense of progress as you tick Metroids off your list is satisfying, and it was nice to finally experience the twist ending and connect the dots with Super Metroid. This isn’t the only Metroid game that’s managed to evade my attention over the years, but the next gap I need to fill doesn’t come until 2004’s Metroid: Zero Mission, so it’s goodbye to Samus Aran for now.To cap off my week, I also managed to find time for some good old fashioned hack-and-slashery with Sega’s Golden Axe II. When I played the first game a while back I found it to be a fun but repetitive experience, and sadly, the sequel seemed content to deliver more of the same. Felling barbarians and skeletons with a beefy warrior has a certain appeal, and the return of enemy mounts that can be comandeered and turned on their masters once again injected some variety into proceedings, but at the end of the day, most fights turn into repetitive juggling acts that focus on knocking opponents down as quickly and reliably as possible. Having played as Ax Battler in the first game, I decided to switch things up with a bit of Tyris Flare this time around, and abused the hell out of her running side kicks to get the job done. Still, like the first game, this one was another short experience, which should count for something. But given the franchise’s diminishing returns (critics supposedly applauded Sega’s decision not to bring Golden Axe III to the US, fearing its release would damage the Genesis’ reputation; yikes!) and Sega’s apparent failure to resurrect it in the modern age, this will presumably be the last time Golden Axe appears in my posts.Anyway, that’s it from me this week. Next up I’ll be fighting my way through my first Neo Geo title: SNK’s Fatal Fury: King of Fighters. See you folks next time!
Re: Golden Axe, yeah, /comfort, a lot of brawlers hit a plateau in terms of design imagination pretty early on in their years and then settled there far too long. That’s probably a big reason why, sans the occasional River City Ransom/River City Girls homage or Dragon’s Crown or that blessed The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa, said genre hasn’t really made a huge comeback. It’s just far too easy to be repetitive, slow paced, and pay the bills with your gameplay; no more, no less. My favorite brawlers from that era: River City Ransom, Final Fight (II has better gameplay by far; I just love the music and charms of the first game so darn much), Streets of Rage II (“Only Trust Your Fists; Police Will Never Help You”), Knights of the Round, TMNT: Turtles in Time, X-MEN (“WELCOME TO DIE!”), Alien vs. Predator (Arcade), and Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara. My favorite brawlers from THIS era: The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa’s essentially the deconstruction title for this genre, River City Girls is the go-for-broke love letter to its pluses and minuses, and Dragon’s Crown is Diablo + Shadow Over Mystara with a new hat on (not necessarily a criticism). So if you ever get bored seeing the same brawler design in your journey through the ‘90s, those are some highlights you might best enjoy, along with some refreshers in the modern age to signify where this genre COULD have gone had it possessed higher spunk and ambitions. I’m guessing since a lot of brawler designers segued into fighting game devs that’s the other death knell for that genre at the time. 2D/3D Fighters just encapsulated the brawler’s virtues better for lovers of the twitch joys and highs to be had, /cheer. Totally understandable. All the positives, none of the awkward control schemes or arcade stacked deck BS or slow paced gameplay. Win-win. Have fun with King of Fighters. “Feel the storm? It’s coming.” RISING TACKLE~!
Turns out most of your ‘90s brawler recommendations are already on my list, so it’s encouraging to know that the genre has more to offer than the Golden Axe franchise would suggest (the only one I’ve played so far was Final Fight, and I recall enjoying it).And it makes sense that fighting games would have evolved out of the brawler genre, in a way. As an aside, fighting games are possibly the biggest hole in my gaming repertoire; I’ve played a few rounds of Fatal Fury so far, and all signs point towards there being a fair bit of a learning curve ahead of me. But the rounds are short, and I’m enjoying it so far, so I’m willing to go through a training montage if that’s what it takes to be the King.
Yeah, fighting games aren’t really my thing either. From my limited perspective as a veritable outsider to the genre, I can only wholeheartedly recommend Street Fighter Alpha III once you hit the late ‘90s because there’s a pseudo adventure mode that lets you RPG up your stats to your liking, and the ‘isms boosts possible for your characters opens up a ton of stellar variety to battle approaches. That + its sheer exuberance and personality is very charming. But again, beyond that title, I’m a total fighting game neophyte. Best of fortune to you.
One of the best of all ‘90s brawlers is in 3D; it’s Sega’s Die Hard Arcade. That game has “scenes” rather than levels, meaning you progress through shorter, unique set pieces, with lots of crazy weapons and a fairly expansive moveset. It’s a pure arcade experience. The Dreamcast sequel (Dynamite Cop) is good too, but not quite as good. Streets of Rage 1, 2 and 3 are all great. Also on the Genesis, Splatterhouse 3 is a beat-em-up with early survival horror elements, as you explore a large mansion in a non-linear fashion. It’s basically a classic.The Punisher is Capcom’s best due to the variety of enemies and weapons and the constant mayhem. You want to play the arcade version, though. Konami’s best are Vendetta (also lots of weapons, short levels so it doesn’t get boring) and Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time.Finally, since I’ve already typed way too much, almost all of Technos’ beat-em-ups are really solid. They have a more physical, brutal feel to them. I’m partial to Combatribes on the SNES because you can bash heads on the ground to finish enemies quickly, and the PC Engine CD version of Double Dragon II.
Cool, thanks for the recommendations. It seems my list is fated to grow ever longer.
You’re right to prefer the original Final Fight! Final Fight 2 has some of the worst pacing in the genre, with levels that absolutely never end, and 3, while better than 2, has very, very passive enemies, which makes it kind of boring. The first game might have fewer moves, but it’s just better designed. It’s also much more intense, since it’s an arcade game and the SNES’s weak CPU couldn’t handle many enemies at once (most SNES beat-’em-ups max out at 3, some reach 4). Beat-’em-ups are at their best when they force you to be everywhere and fight nonstop to keep from getting overwhelmed; that’s also what separates them from VS fighters.
That’s an excellent synopsis of the brief period where 2D Brawlers were in vogue, along with a valid reasoning for their obsolescence and decline. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the last renaissance of the genre, where they cribbed from Diablo:In the early 2000s, Snowblind Studios was making Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance & Champions of Norrath, and Raven Software was making X-Men Legends 1 & 2 along with Marvel Ultimate Alliance.Nowadays, we live in an era where nearly every single major action game has RPG elements tacked on to it, but at the time I thought it was genuinely novel to mix the old-school base of using your A+A+B combos to juggle enemies with the new-school resource management of spending your mana on crowd-control/DPS spells. The simple short-term thrill of “let’s mash buttons and beat up all these dudes!” was combined with the long-term hook of “I wonder how much damage I can do if I spend my skill points and equipment slots wisely.”The lineage of Diablo 2 is still going strong to this day, in games like Path of Exile and Grim Dawn, but I have a powerful nostalgia for the period where it was combined with the Brawler genre into a hybrid that brought it into the third dimension.
Golden Axe III is far better than II. It’s got more interesting levels, new moves that actually matter (you can block and use low attacks), and there’s a very fast and mobile character who can double-jump. Plus there are multiple paths through each stage. It’s a really good beat-’em-up. Critics were just down on the whole genre by then, but I’ve never heard or read anyone say that it was a good thing it wasn’t released in the West or whatever. The real sequel to GA was an arcade-only game called The Revenge of Death Adder, which used technology too advanced to port. The Genesis GAII was a quick cash-in rehash by the team that ported the first game rather than the team that created the arcade original, which is why it’s so useless.
Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in. But thanks for the recommendation; guess I’ll be completing the trilogy after all.
Sometimes I wish Mrs Funkhouser and I liked other people enough to play board games that are most fun with more than two people.
I started playing Indivisible, the game from the peeps who made Skullgirls and I’m really enjoying it. The combat is a fun sorta real time/fighting game rpg thing but it’s also a Metroid type platforming game. The game was initially on Kickstarter or indiegogo and you can kind of notice it. The story is pretty generic but the main character is well written and the voice acting is solid. I love the art too. It’s like those early 00’s style flash games that drew heavily from anime, but in a good way. There’s also a ton of guest characters coming later on. I’m excited to finish it this weekend.
I’m so bummed the Switch version isn’t out yet, as that’s what I want to play it on.
Yeah I was initially going to wait for the switch version but it was down to $15 on black Friday so I went for it. This game really does seem perfect for Switch.
I’ve played quite a few games this year, though most of them weren’t from 2019.Out of those that were, I really liked Luigi’s Mansion 3, was utterly disappointed by Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 and loved some other indie stuff like Untitled Goose Game and Cadence of Hyrule (I also started -and loved- Ori and the Blind Forest, but it’s technically from 2015 so there’s that).
I’d go on but yesterday’s elections have left me a bit tired. Lots of love to the Brits on the commentariat.
Oh boy it’s been a busy, busy time. Sadly The Witcher 3 has suffered, getting no new time in since before Thanksgiving. On top of that, seeing FFXIII on so many decade lists (OK, mostly Lightning Returns) has me wanting to dust that off for another try since my processor upgrade. I fell off of it when the PC performance went to crap in terms of framerate, but I tested it in the same zone and it seemed to hold a solid 60 fps with no problems. Most of my time has been dedicated to Rocket League with a new season, which brings me to the bullshit portion of this post. I used to chip in a few keys every so often to open some crates after the first year of playing the game because hey, I only paid $15 and I’ve gotten so much out of it. I got into the pass because yeah it could pay for itself. I fell off the crates because holy shit there were so many of them, so they just took up space in my inventory. All of that was prelude to the big news from last week: Crates are dead. Blueprints are the thing. Crates would give you a random chance at an item and keys ran about $1. Blueprints will give you the item on the blueprint … but for a price. Last week, Psyonix (recently acquired by Epic) pulled a classic stunt by putting out a ton of overpriced items right off the bat. Blueprints cost more than the game itself in a lot of cases. As you’d expect, people lost their shit, memes were made, and on Monday Psyonix did something that was clearly planned all along … they dropped the prices on most of the items. Notably the super-rare items are still topping $20 each (we’re talking cars, wheels, even goal explosions). There’s also no way to earn in-game currency other than through the pass. There’s no conversion or Steam Workshop support for trading or selling items, so there’s just this pile of (in my case 200+) blueprints sitting in inventories, waiting for someone to drop a couple of hundred bucks to convert them all, or just collect dust.After four years of playing, I’ve assembled enough stuff that I can put together cars I like and not worry too much about the shop. But it worries me to see this kind of ridiculous market plan come as their first big move since the Epic deal. I’m not one of those idiots who piled on Epic Games exclusives or any of that bullshit over the summer—I lucked out that nothing I wanted to buy outside of Control was an exclusive and just didn’t want to deal with another launcher. But it’s not a good sign to see such a blatantly ridiculous stunt baked into your first big move under a new owner. And as a final note, fuck Ramuh.
/comfort on Ramuh. 3,500,000 HP, comes with his own radiant shield that hits on every action (including defend), LOVES to spam -1 En-Earth, AND he can debuff your own heals by 50% in a key moment. At least everyone says he’s the toughest one of the 6* magicite bunch. That’s somewhat reassuring. But hey, how about that 6 month+ news about the Japanese release updates to FFRK? Historia Crystals, HP% being visible, Limit Break actions ala FFXIV, Crystal Waters in the Gysahl Greens store, and a very strong case for late January/early February Kingdom Hearts III event? Plenty of opportunities to zoom on to bigger and better things in the future. Best of fortune with your Glory Festival pulls, /salute
Oh definitely. Power creep comes for all content at some point. The biggest issue is not only does he like to -1 EnEarth, but he has two big moves that get stronger with each EnEarth that’s not present. It’s clearly a Butz tax. Making steady progress, but man that last phase is a pain in the ass.
After splitting my comments into video games and board games for the better part of a year, I feel so validated seeing a board game as the feature game in a “What Are You Playing This Weekend?”I like asymmetric games, and I like the idea of having a game that doubles as another argument for the, “See? Die Hard is a Christmas movie. And don’t you forget it!” debate. Seems a bit simple, but then, I’ve also been saying I need more simple games so we don’t scare more casual players away from our more casual nights. And Die Hard!I’ll keep my eye out for more reviews.Video GamesI haven’t been doing anything too hardcore on this side. I dusted off my RetroAchievements account to play through Bart vs the World (NES). There are a handful of really scary jumps over bottomless pits in the game, so I stopped short of beating the game without dying, but I think I could probably do it some lazy morning where I have no agenda for the day and I’m not tired from work.I’ve also been poking through the Phoenix Wright trilogy for a few weeks now. I already went through the original three games around 2008 or so, so these aren’t first-time solves, but I still feel attached to these characters after all this time, and it’s genuinely fun re-experiencing the story. I expected everything to be rendered in DS-sized blocky pixels, but it was given the full HD treatment, and everything’s gorgeous. Last night I finished case 2-2, so I guess I’m approximately halfway through the game/bundle. I’m occasionally baffled by situations where I have to use other evidence to make baby steps toward dropping the really obvious “you’re the murderer!” evidence which seems to fit every other prompt along the way, but those are only small stumbling blocks.All the best cases are ahead of me still. I’m excited to hit the third game.Board GamesI have a problem.Oh, I’ve been terrible to my budget this year. I wonder how much more expendable income it’s going to feel like I have in 2020 when the game closet is full and we have more than enough games to play something different every day of the month. But who am I kidding? I already have the last 4 expansions of Eldritch Horror on my Amazon wishlist, and the whole lot looks so affordable, even with my vacation coming up in 3 weeks. Gotta remind myself that 2020 is the year of getting a new couch, coffee table, desk, and desktop PC. Slow down on those board games, IK.I started out the week finally burning through the pack-in scenario for Arkham Horror: The Card Game, which I’d picked up at the end of September, had a rough time with unclear setup instructions, and then played with an uncomfortably drunk Andrew. I decided to play the campaign solo, forgetting that, unlike Eldritch Horror, this game gives you three actions per turn. The game’s pretty well impossible that way. There’s not enough time to do anything, even if you draw all the right cards and succeed every chaos token draw, ON EASY. I knocked the game off the table after even the combat-heavy character couldn’t handle combat on easy, read reviews to see what I was doing wrong, and felt fairly embarrassed by my completely un-witnessed outburst. I cleaned up, started over, burned through the first two act with a much greater sense of control than my previous half-dozen attempts, and got an ending where I had to sacrifice an ally to appease an Ancient One, survive, and prevent dark forces from exerting their control beyond Arkham.I sat on the ending for a while. If I’d had two more turns to work with, I could’ve gotten a better ending that didn’t leave my character scarred mentally and physically for life, but this was very appropriate for the source material. So it wasn’t the ending that I got that left a bad taste in my mouth; it was the lack of control, the way the game constantly undercut your decisions and said, “No, you failed to do the action you planned to do.” This is fine in Eldritch Horror when you can improve your stats and get more dice and at least see yourself failing 4 rolls at a skill test before the action fails. AH:TCG has you pit your skill rating against a difficulty and draw tokens from a bag of (usually) 16. If you fail once, you wasted your turn.You’re fighting an enemy with a battle rating of 3. Your fight skill’s a natural 4, plus a weapon that adds 1 and does double damage when it succeeds? Well… you just drew the eldritch symbol. You fail regardless of your skill and take the two damage you would have dealt. Spend another action to try again? Eldritch symbol. Your last action of the turn, where this fight is a prerequisite for moving on with the act. Fight again? Cool. Cultist token, which lowers your skill rating by 3, and if you fail, you take horror damage (plus the two health for missing and… somehow stabbing yourself).So in one turn as the combat-heavy character trying to succeed in a fight against a minor enemy, I’ve gone from my max 9 health to 3, my sanity (which can rarely be recovered) has taken a hit, and now the enemy gets a shot at me, for which he does not need to pass a skill check, which further lowers both my health and sanity, and THEN I draw a new scenario card to see whether a second enemy spawns on my space or an event makes me do a skill test to see whether I lose health/sanity.ON EASYI made an executive decision that I was overruling the chaos bag because I was playing on a setting that was described in the documentation as “I want to experience the story.” So that ending where I was scarred for life after sacrificing an ally’s life to save the town of Arkham? Playing by the rules as written, I didn’t even earn that.ON EASYI’m going to stick to games where a sufficiently brilliant strategy can overcome a moderate amount of bad luck. I gave the game away to a board game/Lovecraft enthusiast I work with, whose week has been negatively impacted by my work. She’ll enjoy it more than I did, and it feels like a decent implicit apology for creating more work for her.With that game out of the game closet, I moved onto creating a better organizational system for my now FIVE BOXES of Eldritch Horror cards and tokens and boards and bags and instructions. It turns out all the cards are exactly the right size to fit in a silverware organizer Andrew’s mom gave us that didn’t fit in our kitchen drawers. And the sides pull out to form two new compartments, in case your kitchen drawers are gigantic, which means we have room four the other four expansions later on. This game is getting dirty.Andrew and I played a game against an Ancient One we’ve never defeated to try out the new organizational system, but the highlight of the night was when we got into a heated argument about whether Magic: The Gathering rules apply to Eldritch Horror. This comes up in frequently. Andrew has played MtG for two decades, which makes him an expert at MtG, but it also makes him want to apply the logic from that game to every game we play until I prove that the game rules for what we’re playing specifically don’t allow him to, say, retcon a bad event that has already been revealed by saying he’s playing one of his cards before the text takes effect. So far zero games have allowed us to do this, but I am forced to dig through instruction manuals to establish that game that are not Magic, in fact, have their own sets of rules.It just hit me especially the wrong way this time. “Not every game goes by the rules of Magic: The Gathering! There were, in fact, board games before Magic: The Gathering existed!”The ire over this issue kept creeping into the conversation, and at the end of the game, I finally cooled off enough to build an airtight argument and win the debate for good.“Do you remember the clause in the rules that states that if two rules seem to contradict each other, we go with the interpretation that is least advantageous to the players?”
“Y… yeah.”“Then if two cards seem to prevent one another’s effects, the one that hurts us takes precedence.”q.e.d.In the end, we lost the game because Andrew got scared of a zombie (which, left unattended for a short while, becomes a zombie horde) and opted to take a crippling condition to wipe it off the map, which came back to haunt him repeatedly. Eventually he made a dark pact to prevent himself from dying from the original condition, and when the forces that be came calling, he had to choose another investigator of his choice to kill to fulfill his end of the bargain. And in a 2-player game, “another investigator” is… me. He was left with hallucinations, paranoia, despair, and zero desire to play out the conclusion, see Ithaqua awaken on the next turn, and possibly die from sanity loss before we could really see how scary Ithaqua was.And if I want to feel like it’s legitimately a two-player game and not me just telling Andrew what to do with his turns, forcing him to stay seated at the table while I play the game for him… I have to let Andrew get scared of zombies every once in a while. I have to watch him overestimate the utility of his character’s abilities and make decisions that paint us into a corner.We’re going to play another game with Amanda on Sunday, finally introduce her to our dark, corrupted, five-box world, and then we have a really big game of it planned for next Saturday. I would love to have all interested parties show up and get 8 investigators, the max for the game. I would love to run out of chairs. I want the game to get ugly, and I want to overcome the worst it can offer through well-coordinated teamwork. We’ve played this as a 2-player game for far too long.Throughout the week I got a couple calls that Everdeep and Elder Sign have arrived at the game shop.Our collection continues to grow.I have a problem.
This isn’t playing, I guess, but very much game-related (and tabletop game) at that. This weekend I’ll be pulling hair out as I try to wrap up writing/layout for a D&D 5e convention adventure. My co-author kind of vanished, and the first round of playtesting—while super positive—seemed to indicate that the final section needed a complete re-write.
Ground Control plus Dark Conspiracy went on sale on GOG the other day for two bucks, so revisiting that is very high on this weekend’s activity list.
I have finally started playing Baba Is You! It’s very charming and brain-twisting, and addictive. There are multiple puzzles I may want to revisit because I’m not actually sure how I solved them in retrospect.Also got into a bit of a turn-based strategy hole- I’ve been reading Glenn Cook’s Black Company, and that made me want to go back to Battle Brothers, a game of fantasy mercenaries. Had to savescum with regards to some of my biggest mistakes but you take your losses now and then. Progress is kinda slow, I don’t know when I’m finally going to be able take on anyone in not-shitty armor.Similarly I have X-Com 2 on PS4 from when it was a PS+ game, though I kinda screwed things a little by forgetting how to recruit new people and ignoring some alerts because I didn’t have enough folks. I may have to backtrack on that one. (Also the console port is REALLY janky.)
“There are movie quotes on every card, and the thieves can stymie McClane by schießen die Fenster…”FTFY