Ripley, Believe It or Not

This weekend, we played a couple of four-player games of Alien: Fate of the Nostromo. The first time around, a few early xenomorph encounters sapped our morale, and one of our objectives was devilishly difficult: getting all the heroes to the workshop, located in a remote corner of the ship. We had three of the four crammed into that room and the fourth just outside in the hallway when my character, Parker, drew a card that booted him immediately to the medbay. A moment later the alien jumped him and, well, that was that. 

For the second game, I swapped Parker for Ripley, the only character we hadn't used yet. I had poo-pooed Ripley earlier, during the two-player games that Nathaniel and I had played the previous weekend, but I quickly discovered Ripley's effectiveness in a session with a larger number of players. 

Games like this one (e.g., Forbidden Island and its sequels, the Pandemic games, etc.) don't scale well above a certain number of players because the game takes its turn after each player, so a lot of nasty stuff can happen in between your turns and you're powerless to prevent it. That's why Ripley is an essential character in larger Alien games -- her ability is to move other characters during her turn. So, for example, if the xenomorph is stalking closer to Matthew's Brett and his turn won't come up fast enough for him to escape, I can use Ripley's actions to move Brett out of harm's way. 

With a whopping five objectives to accomplish, we spread out through the ship, assembled various items, and brought them to the specified locations. After completing the fifth task, we drew the card for our final mission. It turned out be fleeing the Nostromo on the shuttle, like Ripley does at the end of the movie. (Fortunately, in this version, we weren't dealing with a self-destruct sequence on top of that!) 

We had to gather an incinerator, a cat carrier (for Jonesy!), and one coolant tank per crew member and then all convene at the docking bay. It's always tricky to get multiple characters into a location without the alien crashing the party, but Nathaniel's Dallas was armed with the incinerator and shooed the xenomorph away when it was just outside the door to the docking bay. That gave me enough time to have Ripley drop the fourth and final coolant tank, thereby enabling our escape from the ship!

Spring Training

What to do when there's a pandemic raging outside? Well, I guess we could play Pandemic, but that seems rather on the nose.

At the moment, I'm gearing up for the third season of my nineteenth-century Strat-O-Matic baseball league. And unlike modern baseball, these hardy, mustachioed lads aren't suspending their spring training because of a stupid virus. It takes more than that to bring down the likes of King Kelly! Wait, didn't he die of pneumonia at the age of 36?

I digress.

I have a couple of trades in mind, but first I decided to take a look at the pitching. I admit that I didn't do a very rigorous analysis of the game cards before my first season. Compared to the ginormous spreadsheet I put together to analyze every aspect of my hockey players' Strat stats, my approach to baseball was primitive indeed. Pitching was the biggest area of uncertainty. I have only 15 pitchers in this league (five per team), so I thought it wouldn't be too onerous a task to dig into the numbers and try to rank them with a bit more confidence.

It turns out that the Blue Legs have best collection of pitching talent -- not surprising, as they surrendered the fewest runs in the league last year. The Canaries have two elite hurlers (Tim Keefe and Al Spalding) and three lousy arms behind them, and they ended up allowing the most runs in the league. Cy Young's Haymakers, the defending champs, were smack-dab in the middle. I need to see if I can swing a couple of trades that will be mutually beneficial for each team, but also balance out the pitching staffs a bit. Time to get to work!

Johnny...Gameseed?

I've been on the road this week, and my reputation seems to have followed me. Yesterday, one of the folks at the plant I'm visiting heard through the grapevine that I'm into strategy games, which led to a conversation about different games on the market these days. I provided a quick overview of some of today's heavy hitters -- the Catan series, the Pandemic series, etc. -- but to give them a taste of something easy and fun, I went out to a local Target last night and picked up a copy of Exploding Kittens. This afternoon, I got a bunch of colleagues together in a conference room and we played through a single game of Kittens, which they all enjoyed immensely. The laughter could be heard through the walls of the conference room, and although we might have disturbed some nearby meetings, it was well worth it. I left the game for them to enjoy and share with others. I have no doubt they'll play it again, and I hope it encourages them to look into some of the other games I mentioned. I think I ought to leave a game at every plant I visit, spreading gaming goodness across America!

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulu is a version of the critically acclaimed Pandemic but it's set in the universe of H. P. Lovecraft's horror fiction. Players take the role of investigators who travel to iconic Lovecraft locations -- Arkham, Innsmouth, etc. -- in search of clues to seal portals leading to the otherworldly realm of Cthulhu and his brethren. The object of the game is to seal the portal in each of the four towns before the entire region is overrun by evil or all the investigators go insane.

We picked up a copy of Reign last weekend but didn't get a chance to play until this afternoon. Nathaniel played as the Detective (who requires fewer clues to seal a gate) and I played as the Hunter (who excels at killing cultists and monsters). We found ourselves overwhelmed from the get-go and quickly split up so that Nathaniel could focus on closing gates while I set out to eliminate cultist threats wherever they arose. Despite my initial bleak assessment of our situation, Nathaniel managed to close two of the four gates quickly. Only the gates in Innsmouth and Dunwich remained, and after a bit of card-juggling, Nathaniel found himself ready to take care of the latter. I was at Innsmouth, meanwhile, with horrific monsters called shoggoths closing in on my hospital hideout from two different directions. Naturally, my Hunter went insane from the shoggoth incursion, but Nathaniel activated a relic that restored the Hunter's sanity in the nick of time. He closed the gate in Dunwich, and on the next turn I joined him there to hand over all my Innsmouth clues. He then hopped on a bus back to Innsmouth and closed the last gate, thus saving the world!

Happy New Year!

The boys stayed up until midnight for the first time this year. We played a family game of Pandemic and then I painted Nathaniel's new 40k vehicles while Nathaniel worked on Legos and Matthew got back into Knights of the Old Republic. We didn't get around to playing Star Wars: Destiny -- another gift from Santa -- during our holiday vacation, but we'll put it on the to-do list along with painting...lots of painting. Here's to a 2018 filled with gaming fun!

Holiday Hellblasters

Nathaniel is the board game guru of the family, and he delights in games of all types. This year, Santa is bringing him a variety of gaming treats (including Pandemic, which, somehow, we don't already own yet), but he's mainly excited about a couple of vehicles to add to his Ultramarines army. I can't imagine there are too many seven-year-olds who put Warhammer 40k models at the top of their Christmas lists!