Friday Night at the Mania:
I was one of the first few people to show up, and the five of us who were there sat down for some Keythedral. It has a modular board (which I luvs), some funky artwork and a resource management/action auction mechanism that I liked. Pretty quick game between turns, pretty nasty Law cards that are either useless or ridiculously powerful. I enjoyed it and would play again.
After that broke up, I taught Innovation to three other guys and we played two rounds of it. I’m not entirely sure this game shines in four players because the win condition is pretty quick. If one person gets a powerful card there’s not a whole lot of time to shut them down. In the four player games I’ve played, we barely get into the eighth age. I do enjoy it, though, and if it goes quick it can be a fun screw-with-your-neighbor game.
Then there was a half-hour before the Lost Cities tournament was supposed to start so the same four of us played Ascension. I’ve played plenty of this in person and again, I don’t think this is a game that shines with four, or maybe I just prefer the electronic version because it’s faster. I got murdered as I kept drawing terrible hands (and probably had some terrible strategy to boot) but the decisions in this game are so uninteresting that I will probably never play it again unless it’s all that is at the table.
Then the Lost Cities tournament fired up. I won the first match with a huge third round—our first two were very middling performances on both sides (with losses from me) in the 30-40 point range—somewhere near the 140 point range. Second match was the reverse except I still lost the first two rounds—huge first rounds in the 100 point area and then I had a pretty big third round compared to his, but my opponent basically swung his score from -30 to +30 with the final card play and I lost the match. In a sense, I probably would have dropped out of the tournament because they were taking a break and I wanted to get to Nate and Jake’s for their birthdays!
More tomorrow.
