Birthday Games

[ateolf]

Yesterday Mary Beth and I went over to Matt and Genie's for a semi-impromptu birthday boardgame extravaganza. Mattie drove into town and Sarah was there. We played a few games. The first was Rick and Morty: Total Rickall, which is a card game and something of a memory/logic elimination game (finding out which characters are real vs. parasites and shooting all the parasites). It's also mostly a co-op game. There are two modes, regular and "advanced." The regular one is good for an introduction but it's pretty easy. In "advanced" the players also get character cards so they're also real or parasites and being a parasite gives a different objective, but you can be switched from parasite to real. It was a pretty fun game. The next one was Robo Rally. It was pretty awesome. Not a perfect game 'cuz it could conceivably go on indefinitely if everyone's bad at it, but the mechanics are super-fun. Everyone's a robot and each round they "program" five actions in sequence (moving a forward/backward a certain number of spaces, rotating, etc) dictated by cards you draw. There's also things on the board that move you like conveyor belts and obstacles such as lasers and more stuff so I'll stop here before I start writing the fucking manual. It was really fun anyway. It was a pretty long game. It took us two hours (but a lot of it was learning and stuff and our pace picked up as we got along so a game with people who've played before would probably be closer to an hour). We did have a bit in the middle where everyone kept messing up and mostly going around in circles. I had one whole round where I'd taken damage so my card options were limited and I got crap cards and ended up just going in a circle. It can take up to eight players, so if we had the maximum I can tell it'd be super-chaotic and awesome. The last thing we played we Sheriff of Nottingham. It's a pretty cool sort of bluffing game. The bluffing isn't hardcore, but you do try to sneak "contraband" past the "sheriff" (who everyone takes turns being each round). Being the sheriff is the hardest part, trying to determine who's bluffing or not. I kinda sucked at it. We got an afternoon start so it was over pretty earlyish. There was a Nots show last night so we figured we'd go after gaming. We thought it was at DKDC so we went there. Turns out the Nots show was actually at the Hi-Tone. We ended up seeing Jason from Crosstown Arts's band play. He plays sax in a surf band. It was a while before we realized it wasn't the show we came to see (we figured one band was opening for the other). Anyway, that was our brilliant moment for the evening.