Geekend in review

[I originally posted this in the "What Board Games Are You Playing" forum thread, but it was really long, so I'll post it here, too. You know, for posterity's sake. And I can add pictures!]

Alright folks, here is my accounting of last weekend's Geekend (as I decided to call it). As a birthday present my wife flew me out to California for a weekend of gaming with my brother. Here's what we played any my thoughts.

Saturday

Twilight Struggle
We'd gone through the rules and a turn or two several years ago but never got a full game in. We decided to make this our first game played to make sure we finally got it in. I played Russia and he played the U.S. I crushed him with a 20 to 11 victory in the 3rd or 4th round. We probably got some rules wrong which let me win, but I won't complain. Definitely a game worth further exploration.

Race for the Galaxy (x2)
My brother had gotten the second expansion, Rebels vs. Imperium but hadn't had time to go through the rules so we just played with the first expansion and I got my butt handed to me both times.

Space Hulk - Mission 1 and 2 (once each as Space Marines and Genestealers)
My brother had been promising me a "big surprise" in the week or so running up to Geekend. I was totally thrilled to give this classic a shot. The 3rd edition is definitely a thing of beauty. The cardboard is THICK and glossy. The miniatures look fantastic even unpainted. Games Workshop has really come a long way with its plastic miniatures. The plastic minis I got in my 2nd edition 40K starter set were pretty awful.

The first mission is a blood bath for the Space Marines and on the second mission I got slaughtered too as the Terminators but my brother figured which hallways to set his auto cannon and other marines on overwatch. He shredded every single genestealer I could throw at him.

My complaint with the miniatures though is that the genestealers are 75% nonfunctional. They fall over and they don't fit in the squares.

Netrunner (x2)
My brother won both of these games as the runner, but with my coaching. It was a close game and I was close to winning. He wouldn't have made the final run on my deck in game 1 if I hadn't encouraged him to not give up. He pulled an agenda.

Sunday

Pandemic
Played along with my sister-in-law while their 6-month-old twins were napping. We lost. Typical.

Can't Stop
Everybody's favorite dice fest!

Pocket Battles: Celts and Romans (x3)
This was the surprise delight of the weekend! I haven't heard anybody talking on here about this game but you should all check it out. It's by Z-Man Games and it retails for $15. It is more than worth it. It is a small and quick-playing ancients wargame. One side is Celts, the other Romans.

Each side has a variety of troop types you combine to form units. You pick a number of points to play and create your army. 60 points was the smallest we played. We followed some suggested army lists one of the designers posted on BGG. I took the Celts and my brother the Romans.

You divide the table into three sections, right flank, center and left flank. Then each side has a back row and a front row and between the opposing front rows is the engagement zone. Each player receives 1/10th of the army points total in Order tokens, so we had 6 Order tokens each. Players alternate turns spending Order tokens to activate a unit. To activate a unit place an order token on it, if the unit already has an order token on it, you can activate it again but at the cost of 1 order token + 2 for each token already on it (or something like that it ended up being three to activate a unit that had one token). It's expensive, but some units gain benefits on them for having multiple order tokens.

Once activated a unit can charge into the front line of the section in front of it and engage a unit, attack a unit it is already engaged with, shoot with missile units or make a tactical move into another section of the board.

Several units on each side have a variety of special abilities. These may let you make a tactical move before your turn and still be able to attack or roll extra dice in combat or deal extra wounds or have long range in missile combat. There are quite a few.

In combat your unit rolls 1 die, but 2 if you charged that turn. Each troop lists some dice across the top of its tile. If it is a black die you can engage in melee, if it is white it can shoot, if it has both it can do both (shocking!). The dice on the tile also tell you on what roll you score a hit on. So you roll the die, get a 3 and look to see which troops in that unit show a 3 on its tile. You score a hit for each tile that has a 3. So there is a benefit to have a nice spread of numbers on your unit but it is nice if a unit has two dice that show 4s because they are heavy hitters. Then the unit you attacked makes a counter attack if it survives.

One of the interesting things is on the backside of the order tokens are the wound tokens. So if one of your multi-wound troops takes damage it is going to eat up one of your order tokens. There a few more rules of course, but you get the gist of it.

This was the surprise delight of the weekend. You get a nice army creation buzz that you would from a miniatures game but it plays in about 15 minutes. The back of the box says more editions in the series are to come featuring different armies from historial eras and genres. And you'll be able to mix things up with Romans vs. Elves or WWII vs. Napoleon or whatever. I'm already thinking about picking this game up for myself and salivating at the release of future armies.

World Cup Game
I wanted to play out a 2010 World Cup following some files on BGG, but my brother's printer wasn't working to print out the materials, so we just played the 2002 World Cup instead. Narrative gaming gets talked about a lot here, but for me no game weaves together a narrative like World Cup. Because it was just the two of us we decided to play the group round one group at a time to help give the game some focus, which I think worked great. It kept the tension up throughout the entire group round which can feel like a major slog to work through.

We had 8 teams each going into the Round of 16. I had Germany and South Korea and he had Brazil and Turkey. Germany fell but so did Turkey and I came out with 3 teams and he with 5. All 3 of my teams made it into the semis and the World Cup was played between Brazil and South Korea which came down to penalty kicks. I knew I was in trouble as I had lost both prior penalty kick showdowns we had had. And yep, S. Korea failed to win me the cup.

I really like this game and I'm looking forward to The World Cup 2010 Card Game which should be released next week.

Netrunner
My brother played his first game as the Corp and got totally bogged down only drawing ice cards. I managed to win but it was a long and dull game.

Monday

Space Hulk - Mission 3
I played Genestealers and my bro played Space Marines. Easily the best mission out of the three we played. I managed to take down the Space Marines and my brother bitched about not understanding the rules properly when he realized he didn't have enough command points to fire the heavy flamer on the genestealer turn. Any game that can make you that upset is a great one.

Smallworld
Not bad. Light. Fiddly, though.

Ghost Stories
And we wrapped up Geekend with a co-op victory over the Nameless incarnation of Wu-Tang or RZA or Method Man or whatever the bad guy's name is.