Well, nearly another year has passed us by. Hopefully everyone had a good Winter Solstice Day or whatever you celebrate.
Aside from doing the exchanging of gifts with my family, I also flew to Colorado and spent some time with Jrr. We spent the vast majority of our time playing video games and board games while our poor girlfriends whittled away the days by watching what sounded like nearly every Sex and the City episode ever made. (As an aside, I never really liked that show. The characters portray just about every trait I hate in various people, which makes it really hard to watch.) In other words, it was glorious.
Our mutual friend Turing brought over a bunch of board games for everyone to try out. Since there were so many new ones for me there, I figured I would give a quick review for the hell of it.
Arkham Horror: Not new to me or probably any of you, but an excellent, if hard, board game. I think it was one of the first board games to encourage cooperation instead of just trying to kill each other. If you have not played it, do it. You scramble around fighting various sanity-stealing horrors while trying to prevent the Lovecraftian elder god from waking and eating you. Usually ends badly, but is still fun.
Red November: A bunch of gnomes on board a sinking submarine trying to keep it from exploding or imploding or anything else disastrous until the rescue party can arrive. Plays like a simpler version of Arkham Horror, although I think something was lost in the translation. Was not as fun to me, although I won't guarantee we were playing the game right.
Mwahaha!: A board game about being an evil villain. It parodies the hell out of James Bond / Austin Powers type stories. It's mainly about you amassing materials to get your doomsday weapon powerful enough to threaten the world. Along the way you can threaten cities, states, or countries to collect ransom monies. Lots of (sometimes crude) humor and puns and I loved it.
Infernal Contraption: A fun little card / board game about some gremlin-type things making a crazy machine to destroy their enemies. You have a big pile of various parts that acts as both your "deck" and your health. You build your machine by drawing cards from this parts pile and placing them in your contraption where they fit. After you add parts to your machine each turn, you run it in a computer-program type way going from left to right. Since your parts pile is also your health, pretty much all cards involve swapping or stealing cards. Things can get out of hand pretty quick once machines get huge. Can be pretty fun.
I think we played more, but those were the ones that stand out in memory the most. For now, I'm just going to relax and enjoy my time off from work. I might even get some work done on the game if I can find a large enough crowbar to pry my girlfriend away from Dwarf Fortress. Why it requires my computer when she has a computer in the next room is beyond me.