We make a slight change to the power plant market in Power Grid to good effect.
Kindershpiel drops off a couple of versions of Apples to Apples to my house.
Jack played with us once before. It turns out that he has started a weekly gaming group in the center of Jerusalem every Sunday evening aimed at Russian speakers. That's two new board gaming groups opening in the last few weeks. Yowza.
Conventions
Well, it looks like I'm headed to BGG.con in Dallas in November after all, which only means I have to have another game ready by then.
I will also be at Dicecon in Glasgow next month, although only for a few hours.
Many other conventions happening in the near future, such as the UK Games Expo in a few days, where my first published game It's Alive is supposed to premier, if all goes well.
Also this weekend is A-kon, a large anime and comics convention, which a number of gamers I know will be attending.
Other
Static Zombie had the usual comment to make about Microsoft's new Surface computer system, but more interesting was a reply from a Microsoft rep dissing the Entertaible:
The Entertaible's recognition technology is fundamentally compromised. It basically fires IR beams in a diagonal mesh across the surface. If you had, say, four hidden-information visors on top of an Entertaible, there would be a dead zone in the middle where the recongition wouldn't work. Plus it's junky and slow—though that, at least, is ultimately just a solvable software problem. Still, we completely kick the Entertaible's keister.Catch Michael Jordal on television station KSMQ next month talking about board games, and Heroscape in particular. If you don't know Heroscape, it's a toy/game crossover, with lots of customizable terrain and little military and fantasy figures from all time periods. Pretty cool, actually.
But yes, home users need to be patient and wait for the second generation. I can't tell you what that technology will be like—at least not here in public ;)—but suffice it to say that v2 solves all of your concerns.
Stephen Beeman
Yehuda
P.S. I am going on another synagogue weekend starting from this evening, so may not be in touch again until Sunday. Bringing games, of course! Have a nice weekend.
3 comments:
I still wish the game had a few more "Instant" like cards and direct targeting cards; I may need to buy a few more packs of cards.
The corp players can get the feeling of playing an 'instant' when he rezzes an Upgrade or Ice, but I know what you mean - playing base set, particularly as runner you don't really have any surprise tricks to pull out mid run.
The Proteus expansion tried to fix this by giving the runner hidden resources. These are basically variants of Preps, but you play them face down, and reveal and trash them when you want to use them.
For example you can replace Livewires Contact (0-cost Prep: gain 3 bits) with Chiba Bank Account (Hidden Resource - pay 1 bit & trash to gain 4 bits) so that the corp doesn't know exactly how many bits you actually have.
Proteus tried to give Corp decks some other 'options' but they weren't as useful.
However, he had a card that let him take the top card of his discard pile and a card that let him look through his deck and choose any card, As a result, he spent two actions almost every round simply picking any card he wanted from the deck.
Combining Mantis, Fixer-At-Large and Junkyard BBS is a really expensive combo. Where were all the bits coming from?
If your Corp decks can't beat a runner who just sits back doing this kind of thing you need either;
a) stuff like Project Consultants or Chicago Branch, so you can score agendas out of hand; or
b) non-agenda stuff like Expiremental AI or Information Laundering that you can tempt the runner to waste his resources trying to access (then put the agenda down next turn when the runner is short of bits).
PS If you hadn't guessed NR is one of my favourite games ever :)
simon - I noticed!
Owning a single starter box, I can't relate much to your experiences. Obviously I have to find some more cards to play around with.
Yehuda
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