State of Play

The League of Extraordinary Nobodies

2011-01-11T10:03:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not insulting you. It's a song title. Look it up.

It's been so long since I've posted here that my shareholders are totally up in arms and random people on the street keep spitting on me as I pass them. I've never heard the words "pariah," "outcast" or "unclean" so much as I have in the last four months or so. I probably need some time to warm up before heading back into the deep end of the usual nonsense, so this post will be relatively brief. I won't spend time boring you with the details of why I haven't been keeping this place clean and evergreen (hint: videogames), so let's get down to it, boppers.

Over on his saucy Torn Signpost blog, Josh outed me for thinking of trying to start up a Chaos In the Old World league night. (Details of the league rules and how it plays out will follow here, if it actually comes together.) Why create and run a league, he asks, given that there's a potential downside of people playing against their own best interests in a given game in order to improve their overall standings within the league?

First, a word about how scoring in the game works, since it'll become important later. Players can win either by scoring the most dial advancements (a kind of experience point track, earned by fulfilling special conditions unique to each god) or by accumulating the most points (scored by placing mans to achieve area control). Victory conditions are checked at the end of each turn. If more than one player has achieved victory, dial advancements trump points, tieas on dial advancements are broken by points, and ties on points are broken by a three-round spitting contest or something. I don't remember what that last tiebreaker is because it never comes up in actual play - the point values have enough granularity that they're never that close, if they matter at all.

The winner of the league will be whomever has the most game wins, regardless of how they came by them, with ties being broken by total dial advancements and point accumulations per god. It sounds complicated, but it's really not. The takeaway here is that since game wins are more important than dial advancements or points, and since most gods aren't able to successfully win if they spend all their time messing with one specific other player, I don't foresee having to worry about the kind of "thrown game/eventual victory" scenario that Josh brought up as being detrimental to league play.

So why organize a league for CItOW?

1) Leagues are fun. Even without prize support, the narrative of underdog and reigning champion is one that has a lot of appeal to people, and the nervousness of having to defend your top doggery or struggle to rise through the ranks adds a bit more frisson to individual sessions. And that thrill can be...

2) Incentive to show up. My main motivation for running the league is to try to establish a weekly or bi-weekly night of playing Chaos, which is difficult to do if people aren't showing up with the expectation of playing the game. Not because people don't necessarily want to play it - in my experience, CItOW is second only to Battlestar Galactica for creating the most first-play converts - but because the game can only be played with four players, no more, no less. If the league never forms or collapses before being completed, I'm fine with that if we can still consistently get people together to play. I've played it hardly at all in recent months, and I'm more than happy to take on the duty of league organizer if that helps to rectify this glaring oversight.

3) Establishes a group of experienced players. As with most games that have any depth of tactics and strategy, CItOW tends to be a lot better if everyone playing it has at least a basic grasp of not only the rules but the ways that the game mechanics tend to create certain tendencies of play. When a given game isn't played very frequently, it's easy to forgot how all its parts interlock, and for a game as asymmetrical as CItOW this tendency gets aggravated quickly. You not only have to remember how your god plays, you've got to remember how the other three play as well, and there's really no viable substitute for regular play to accomplish that.

4) Excuse to say, "It's a league game, Smokey." This should be self-explanatory.

Monodiscipline Deckbuilding Challenge #3: Obtenebration

2010-09-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

This latest entry in the NWWYP series is a bit more adventurous than previous efforts. Obtenebration is a support discipline rather than a meat-and-potatoes affair, providing stealth and a pretty wide range of effects which are reasonably good but which aren't particularly useful for any one function. Light intercept, combat defense, one of the few combat payload cards in the game, some mostly crappy offensive combat and a few weird outlier effects are all available to vampires who sport the tentacley shadows, but most of that stuff never sees the light of day (marvel at that thematically deployed cliche!).

That's because Obtenebration is one of the better stealth disciplines in the game, and it usually comes packaged with Dominate, and in Ye Olden Dayes, was most often spotted on a hefty selection of titled vampires who often sported Presence for additional vote-related antics. Obtenebration's heavy blood cost keeps it from being a Tier One stealth discipline - accept nothing less than Obfuscate if you want to go for the top-shelf stuff, because no other discipline in the game can compete with it - but it's certainly a solid contender for second-best. Being so good at stealth, and being so closely tied to bleeding and voting, means that there haven't been many occasions for people to bother dusting off their copies of Darksight or Summon the Abyss.

Today, that changes! We're going to put an end to the tyrannical stranglehold stealth has had on the history of Obtenebration, you and I. Together, like we used to. Like a family. So step into the shadows with me, etc.

Deck Name : Shadows Fall
Author : John Eno
Description : Obtenebration intercept/combat. Test version to mine for workable ideas.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 1 max: 8 average: 4.83333
------------------------------------------------------------
1x Conrad Adoula 8 DOM OBT POT ani cel Lasombra:4
1x Henri Lavenant 7 DOM OBT pot qui Lasombra:3
1x Onaedo 6 DOM OBT aus pot Lasombra:4
1x Otieno 6 OBT POT ani dom Lasombra:4
2x Andrew Emory 5 OBT aus dom pot bishop Lasombra:4
2x Ermenegildo, The R 5 DOM OBT pot Lasombra:4
1x Leila Monroe 4 dom obt pre Lasombra:4
1x Hester Reed 3 obt pot Lasombra:3
1x Lucy Markowitz 3 dom obt Lasombra:4
1x Margarite 1 obt Pander:4

I thought about including a copy or two of Dame Hollerton in here, as she's as cheap as superior Obtenebration gets. But thinking it over a bit more, I decided that it was better to make sure that my non-nerd vampires were Lasombra, so that they could reap the benefits of Drink the Blood of Ahriman (see below). Dodge/additional strike/hands for two is a lot more menacing than "well, I could dodge or strike hands for two," after all. Theoretically, keeping the focus mostly on one clan despite there being one and a half clans available with Obtenebration as a primary discipline also means that I can utilize more clan-specific cards in the library, but it turned out that there really weren't many that I wanted to use.

Library [80 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [16]
1x Barrens, The
4x Blood Doll
1x Channel 10
1x Elysian Fields
1x Giant's Blood
3x Jake Washington (Hunter)
1x KRCG News Radio
1x London Evening Star, Tabloid Newspaper
1x Rumor Mill, Tabloid Newspaper, The
1x WMRH Talk Radio
1x Wall Street Night, Financial Newspaper

Obtenebration really isn't meant to be a frontline intercept discipline, so I the methuselah am going to have to do some helping out on that score. I had wanted to run some Therbold Realty in here to offset the cost of the locations, but even including Club Zombie (which got dropped for its massive expense), there would have only been eight other cards for the Realty agent to encheapen, and the likelihood of drawing it late in the game and it not having any effect loomed large in my mind. Noting that the only source of bloat in the deck is by pulling blood from my vampires, and also that rather a lot of the minion cards cost blood, I decided to drop the Realties and instead put in a bunch of Jake Washingtons. He's solid bloodgain in any deck, of course, but I hope that the Drinking the Bloods will synergize well with his sometimes difficult timing window.

Action [11]
3x Abbot
1x Aranthebes, The Immortal
2x Black Metamorphosis
5x Drink the Blood of Ahriman

Having standing intercept that you don't need to tap to use is critical to decks that want to block but don't have good access to transient intercept, just like this deck. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of options for that if your vampires don't have Animalism, but Abbot should help to fill that gap a little bit.

The Drinks are both combat offense and better than Paths of Night, hopefully. I'd been collecting Drinks for a while without any real idea of what use they'd have, and it seems to me that using them in a reactive deck is probably the way to go, as that should hopefully allow me to get some use out of them before I even need to pay for them (ie, by blocking people and fighting them on their turns). I also think that they'll be hot with the Nocturns, since that combo allows me to get a free Nocturn and untap to do something else.

I'm not sure about the Black Metamorphoses, not because they lack a strong effect, but because I'm doubtful that I'll be able to successfully complete the action to get them. They're a zero-stealth action, for some reason, and I don't expect that my combat will be scary enough to deter blockers early in the game, which is when I'd like to get the Black Mets. On the other hand, these provide some much-needed combat offense for the guys with inferior Obtenebration, who can't make use of the dodge/additional/hands for two combat package that's the focus of the deck. These cards might be better as Shades, which are much less likely to get blocked since they're at stealth to acquire and because they're not so threatening as to automatically make people want to block, and which are also half as expensive.

Action Modifier [2]
2x Leverage

My sole ousting tech. Also playable by Nocturns.

Ally [9]
9x Nocturn

As mentioned above, these guys should be really good with the Drink the Blood of Ahrimans. They're also handy for getting in cheap bleeds of one while I've still got vampires with Dominate untapped, at least until people twig to the fact that I'm not using Dominate in this deck. But that's really unlikely to happen in a blind environment, given peoples' expectations of what Lasombra decks do.

Combat [20]
10x Arms of the Abyss
4x Darkness Within
2x Entombment
2x Target Vitals
2x Weighted Walking Stick

Arms of the Abyss/hands for two sounds like a pretty good combat package, so that's what I'm focusing on here. Entombment and Darkness Within are good cards that I don't think are normally worth their cost, but they should shine when played by a vampire who's Drunk. The Target Vitals are for the Nocturns, and the Sticks should work well with the rest of the combat options.

Equipment [3]
2x .44 Magnum
1x Sport Bike

I dream of having a vampire with a Black Metamorphosis and .44, though it's unlikely to happen. I may need more intercept equipment here, like more copies of Sport Bike and possibly some Phased Motion Detectors.

Reaction [18]
5x Darksight
5x Eyes of the Night
4x Forced Awakening
4x On the Qui Vive

I know that this is awfully wimpy for a deck whose supposed main function is to block stuff, but you go to war with the army you've got. Darksight is another card that I'd normally pass over due to its cost, so this is partly an experiment to see if Drink makes it worthwhile. I may want more wake tech, particularly On the Qui Vive if I find that Nocturns are surviving past the end of my minion phase and could also wake and block something. Most of the intercept locations are usable by allies as well as vampires, so getting double duty out of free Nocturns would be great.

Retainer [1]
1x Mr. Winthrop

Well, duh.

I can already see the blueprint for a Kiasyd deck along these lines beginning to unfold in my head, one which is better thanks to more reliable intercept and combat, as well as some Dominate for bloat, bleed and bounce. But for now I'll try out this little weirdo and see what works.

It lacks any real ousting power, so I'll have to try to be Johnny-on-the-spot with regard to blocking the bloat actions of my prey. Stealth-vote will likely murder me. Real combat decks will probably have all kinds of trumps that I'll have no recourse against, except to attempt puppy dog eyes. Stealth/bleed decks will probably sneak by me, though I may be able to run them out of stealth if I get lucky, except that they'll likely turn me into their bitch if they're my initial predator. Other than that, I'm not sure what could go wrong with this masterpiece.

Monodiscipline Deckbuilding Challenge #3: Dominate

2010-09-09T10:57:00.000-07:00

The third entry in the NWWYP series. (I guess it could be considered sort of the second entry, since Karl pointed out that the Potence deck disqualified itself via use of the prince/justicar "discipline.")

Deck Name : Guns Don't Kill People, Dominate Does
Author : John Eno
Description : Weenie Dominate with guns for combat defense and some "stealth."

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 1 max: 5 average: 3.41667
------------------------------------------------------------
2x Banjoko 5 DOM obt pot Lasombra:3
1x Isabel Giovanni 5 DOM NEC pot Giovanni:2
1x Kurt Strauss 5 DOM aus tha !Tremere:2
1x Gloria Giovanni 4 DOM nec Giovanni:2
1x Ingrid Russo 4 DOM for !Ventrue:2
1x Ember Wright 3 aus dom !Tremere:3
1x Saiz 3 aus dom !Tremere:3
1x Christine Boscacci 2 dom vic Pander:2
1x Mustafa Rahman 2 dom Tremere:2
1x Samson 2 dom !Ventrue:2
1x Royce 1 dom Pander:2

Standard Dominate/Govern chain here. The six guys who have inferior Dominate can all Govern down to the others who also have [dom] once they receive a skillcard. I put in two copies of Banjoko to keep as many Sabbat vampires in the crypt as possible, since I want to use Abbot and Hungry Coyote, and it's unlikely to make a difference that one guy is doubled up. As a side benefit, Banjoko prevents Fall of the Sabbat from ever being played! That's quality crypt-building right there.

Library [80 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [14]
2x Anarch Troublemaker
3x Dominate
1x Humanitas
1x Hungry Coyote, The
2x Jake Washington (Hunter)
3x Life in the City
1x Misdirection
1x Police Department

A good amount of bloodgain, some combat defense, and a light selection of minion-tapping tech. Originally I considered using a bunch of the intercept locations and Therbold Realty, but as I figure I'm going to be putting those cards into the ridiculous mono-Obtenebration deck I've got on the back burner, I don't want to build too many decks at the same time which are similar to each other.

As is the case in every deck which doesn't have at least one, this question needs to be answered: Why is there no Pentex Subversion here? In this case, I felt like using cheaper alternatives, and I hope to have enough combat defense to not worry too much about getting blocked. The advantages of Misdirection over Pentex are that it's cheaper, has about the same effect if you don't run into something like an Earth Meld wall as your prey, and forces someone using lots of bleed bounce or reduction to play a wake for each of those cards that they play. Since I've only got bleed as offense here and might be able to take down the unwary with my combat, I'm more worried about that last part than I am about needing to shut down one superstar.

It's a gamble to choose not to use any blood-to-pool reclamation tech, and something along those lines might very well be better than putting Dominate skillcards onto dorks in order to turn those dorks into poolgain machines via Govern - those Governs can be pretty easily blocked, after all. Since this is a prototype deck, though, I'll stick with the unconventional choice for the time being.

Action [11]
1x Dominate Kine
1x Far Mastery
8x Govern the Unaligned
1x Graverobbing

Bleed, bloat, and some miscellaneous stuff. I'll be able to play Dominate Kine every game, of course, even if at inferior, but Far Mastery and Graverobbing are the kind of cards that I like to throw into something untuned and not really tournament-worthy like this deck. I fully expect to discard them, but if circumstances come up that they turn out to be useful, they tend to turn out to be really useful.

Apparently the Abbots I mentioned above got dropped somewhere along the way, so now the only Sabbat-only card in the deck is the Hungry Coyote. I may end up putting them back in, so I'll keep an eye out for situations in which it would have been useful to have them. The Coyote is another card that I'm really not sure of, and might very well be something better. If it turns out to be the case that it's not worth the investment it requires, I'll also change out the second copy of Banjoko for Catherine du Bois.

Action Modifier [21]
5x Bonding
2x Change of Target
2x Conditioning
3x Foreshadowing Destruction
4x Seduction
1x Sleeping Mind, The
4x Suppressing Fire

If this were your daddy's weenie Dominate deck, there'd be at least twice as many bleed modifiers and probably far fewer Bonding (which is good stealth for a discipline that doesn't provide stealth, but not a good bleed mod for a discipline that's got loads of them). But I like to have the Power of Truth on my side when I say, "But it's not that kind of deck!"

The Sleeping Mind is total pants, of course, but I'm curious to see if it ever comes in handy should I find myself in a corner of the case. It would also be a funny finisher against a deck that relied entirely on Second Tradition, though I seem to be the only person who makes such decks, locally.

Is Suppressing Fire any good? Probably not, but it might mess with someone's math enough to allow me to squeak an action through now and again. Originally I thought I was going to use a giant pile of these, but their effect seems so wimpy that I just couldn't bring myself to. Should I go for what seems to be a totally nutpunchy exercise anyway? I'll put the question to the audience, and if there's a overwhelming response I'll retool the deck before playing it.

Combat [18]
4x Fake Out
6x Target Vitals
8x Zip Gun

The original plan here was to run seven or eight each of Concealed Weapon and Saturday Night Specials. The deck should play in such a way that I'll need to hang onto a lot of cards for what might be a long time - I don't have enough serious bleed mods to throw them around willy-nilly, for example - and so I didn't want to put another two-card-exclusive combo* into the deck and foul up the slow cardflow that I'm already expecting to be working around. This decision is what led to putting more bloodgain into the deck than I normally would, since the Zip Guns essentially have a cost every time that they're used. It may end up being less work to simply pay the pool upfront for the guns and save master card slots for something else, like maybe hand-management tech to make sure that I get the Concealeds and guns together.

Reaction [16]
6x Deflection
2x Delaying Tactics
3x On the Qui Vive
2x Redirection
3x Wake with Evening's Freshness

Nothing particularly special here. The low number of actions, combined with the need to not make myself very busy until it's time for a lunge, means that I can lowball the number of wakes a bit. Redirections aren't very popular, for a reason that should be clear, but I like to throw a few into decks which are looking to conserve blood.

*What I mean by this is a two-card combo in which the cards aren't playable, either usefully or at all, without each other. Concealed Weapon/Saturday Night Special is a good example of this, as the former isn't playable at all without the latter, and if you take the action to acquire the latter, it wastes the action (compared to if you'd used a Concealed to get it) and has a tendency to mess up cardflow later in the game, when you're drawing Concealeds for which you don't have any accompanying gun.

The Failure of Strength In Arms

2010-09-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

We were hunkered down around a pile of beads and two decks each, one short and one tall, just like our ol' grandpappies used to back in the days when you couldn't get white onions because of the war. Josh's last-minute arrival to our gaming night bumped us up to the dreaded six players, but we'd already sat down and begun our first turn of a game of V:TES, so we agreed to try to play fast and set a time limit to see if we could get through a six-player game.

Game One: When Combat Decks Collide
me (Potence princes) -> Scott (Menele CEL/dom) -> Josh (Marconius vote) -> Chris (Unnamed Cog bleed) -> Greg (? barons) -> Matt (Synesios + Setites)

For this game I decided to play The Only Study of a Prince, my mono-Potence entry in the NWWYP project. Lady luck was grouchy and so sat me down next to the only other deck with offensive combat out of five other decks, meaning that Scott and I would expend a lot of effort beating each other's minions up and fail to achieve anything like victory. Joy.

On the other side of the table, Chris was had a hard time getting anything going with the Unnamed, whose bleeds of one vanished into the maw of endless bleed reduction that characterizes most of Greg's decks. Since the bleeds weren't successful, the Unnamed wasn't untapping after his Flurries of Action, meaning he wasn't able to take whatever follow-up actions he'd planned on. Greg wasn't doing much better, having drawn a lot of vote push but no Fee Stakes or political actions. Matt attempted some forward movement, but couldn't seem to scare up the stealth required to get past my Second Traditions, and I beat down his vampires enough to keep them scrambling for blood. Josh was sitting pretty thanks to Scott's deck not doing anything and me occasionally molesting his vampires. I wasn't able to get out more than one guy with superior Potence until late in the game, so my combat wasn't particularly effective, and though I did manage to deal some pool damage to Scott via my votes and twisting Josh's arm in order to give him my vote support, Matt also began landing enough bleeds of three that my pool started to look rather droopy.

It had been some time since I'd played an Anathema deck, so I made the idiot mistake of choosing Menele rather than Synesios once I'd passed one of them. Ten pool seemed so much better than eight, but I'd forgotten that Menele could fight and this incarnation of Synesios couldn't, that I needed Menele around to try to keep Josh somewhat reined in, and that I'd have been much safer stripping Matt of his primary offensive weapon than trying to take down Scott's best fighter. I wasn't particularly invested in this game, which led to a lot of mistakes, most of them revolving around Menele.

After Anathemizing him, I also put a Haven Uncovered on him, figuring that if Nikolaus's rush failed, I could follow up with some of my less fighty dorks. Nikolaus's rush did fail, and then Scott played Taste of Vitae to undo all my hard work. Soon after I got out Murat and sent him to Menele's apartment, but Murat managed to get himself knocked into torpor during his first action and only reduced Menele to two blood. I was focusing on trying to get my pool to one lower than Scott's so I could call the two Parity Shifts which had piled up in my hand, so I failed to press on to kill Menele. That turned out to be a huge mistake, as our big fights had stripped all the combat cards out of Scott's hand, so when Marconius realized that he could just stroll on over to Menele's pad and slap him into oblivion, he promptly did so.

Josh ousted Chris, and then Matt ousted me because I'd tapped out for two turns in a row without much pool or any wakes in hand. I supposed I'd been trying to cycle into some wakes? Probably the combination of waiting to clear space off the table so I could eat the Thai food I'd ordered and not thinking that I had much chance anyway caused me to slack off. Matt then ousted Scott, Greg ousted Matt, and Josh squirmed through Greg's bleed reduction to finish him off. I wasn't paying any attention to the game at that point, as Chris had broken out some Mesna shape-recognition game that he was mocking Scott and I with. Apparently I'm even worse at shape-recognition than I am at placing workermans.

Conclusions: If I want to win, I should pay attention to the game and also not play like a total gump. Getting ten pool and burning your predator's primary vampire for the cost of one action and one blood is a pretty good deal. Lowering your pool to puny levels and then not bothering to defend it doesn't make for a good path to victory. The Only Study of a Prince might actually be a good deck with some tweaking, if I take the time to learn how to play it. Warsaw Station should be doubled up in it, and I should put some more bloodgain in.

Game Two: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Matt (Helo) -> me (Cavil) -> Scott (Kat) -> Josh (Ellen) -> Chris (Cain) -> Greg (Zarek)

After briefly considering the merits of playing another six-player game of V:TES, we decided instead to break out Galactica. Greg hadn't ever played before, but Josh didn't have his set with him and none of us felt like taking the Pegasus expansion stuff out of Matt's set, so we threw Greg into the deep end, though we decided to ship him off to Kobol rather than New Caprica to keep the game from getting too complicated. We gave him the barest rendition of the rules possible and launched into choosing characters. I picked Cavil because I didn't want to mess around with any sympathizer/sympathetic cylon rules and he's the one cylon leader whom I hadn't played yet.

We'd decided to play with a houserule that I'd first encountered at Origins whereby the allegiance of the cylon leader's agenda card determines how many hidden cylons are infiltrating amongst the humans. My agenda was The Illusion of Hope, dictating that the cylons had to win but not before the humans first reached six or more distance. Since I was playing for the cylon team, I built the loyalty deck to contain only one You Are a Cylon card.

The game started out smoothly for the humans, who assumed that I was full of hate for them since I drew Treachery during my first few turns. They got through their first jump cycle without any real excitement, in spite of me using Cavil's power to add a basestar, some raiders and civilian ships to the board. Chris chose a three-distance destination card, and I knew I had no time to dilly-dally around. I couldn't seem to find anything useful to do with Cavil's skillset and special abilities, as I was now convinced that taking an action to summon a basestar wouldn't be of too much use if the humans were cooperating well enough to skip through their jumps without much infighting. It seemed clear to me that the hidden cylon hadn't shown up yet, or was too afraid to risk exposure to really be doing much to help us win, which meant that the humans were working together so well that there was little I could do to sow distrust amongst them.

The humans skated through another jump cycle, during which they had so little to do that they threw me into the brig. I used Cavil's OPG ability to take three actions during my turn, shedding a body in order to return to the Resurrection Ship and then farming two supercrises, which seemed to be the best way to directly impact the game at that point. Chris chose another distance three destination, which meant that the other cylon had figured out his origins but also that we were pretty much sunk. Earlier in the game, Greg had assigned Chris to be his arbitrator, and it didn't take long for us to figure out who had received a coded message, as Chris's first action after the sleeper phase was to head over to the Admiral's Quarters and then use the powers of the Arbitrator to hustle Kat through a quick court-martial. He dumped his entire hand of skill cards into the check, resulting in a high enough result for him to use Cain's power to force Kat to skip the brig and head directly out the airlock. Scott revealed that he was human, surprising no one, and chose Tyrol as his replacement character.

Another jump cycle was completed while Chris was still admiral, in spite of him being an obvious cylon, but he was presented with two-distance and three-distance destinations. He picked the three, in order to tax human resources unnecessarily. Everyone's hand of skill cards was really thin, so I revealed that I'd set up a bomb on Colonial One and the humans weren't able to figure out how to defuse it before it took a chunk of their morale away and dumped Zarek into Sickbay. Morale was a bit low, and was really the only dial which had any chance of hitting bottom, but Greg made a successful speech and also used Zarek's ability to turn people into happiness. Chris revealed and joined me in cylonville, and we rejoiced to see a pair of cylon attack crises show up. I activated the raiders from the Cylon Fleet and they destroyed no less than four civilian ships, but two of those ships turned out to be decoys and the others only removed a few points of population. Sneaky humans! They ended up having plenty of people left and made an early jump, leaving us cylons wondering where the hell Kobol was and shaking our fists impotently.

Conclusions: Cavil is as bad as I suspected he'd be, at least in a six-player game. He might be good in a game with fewer players, but cylon leaders have so little power over what happens during a game that using movement abilities is critical to their success. That lack of agency is a direct result of regularly receiving fewer actions than humans and unrevealed cylons, since no one is likely to give you an XO even if you're infiltrating. Unlike Leoben and Six, Cavil's movement ability is a OPG rather than a daily special, and his daily special is generally too dependent on luck to be a worthwhile use of one of those precious actions, in a game featuring enough players (ie, five or six) that it's entirely possible that a jump cycle will be completed before your next turn.

That everyone assumed I had an anti-human agenda because I chose to draw Treachery early on was really a mistake on their part, even though they turned out to be right, due to the pro-human agendas generally containing some kind of "...but also screw over the humans in some way" clause. At the same time, it's not really worthwhile to draw Treachery rather than Engineering when playing a cylon leader, both because of that suspicion on the part of the human players (appropriate or not) and due to the low strength of the Treachery cards as compared to the Engineering cards. If you want to spike checks, it's quite likely that Engineering will allow you to do so as often as Treachery, and the value on those blue cards is higher.

The humans played well, but I think luck was definitely smiling upon them this game, to such an extent that the cylons didn't have much chance of winning. That only two of the four of the humans needed to use their OPGs is a pretty good indicator that the game never developed much in the way of tension, and they also made several self-admitted mistakes which nevertheless didn't seem to turn the tide against them. One of Galactica's greatest strengths is the way that every game plays out so differently within the same framework of rules, but the downside to that high variety is that sometimes it's possible to have games which are something of a turkey shoot for one team or the other. After the game was over, a few of us discussed the cylon agenda houserule, and came up with some other variations of it that I'd like to try out. Matt's idea was to keep two hidden cylons in a six-player game, but have the allegiance of the cylon leader determine when one of them is placed into the loyalty deck - pre-sleeper if the leader is pro-human, post-sleeper if the leader is pro-cylon - and leave the distribution of the second cylon loyalty card up to chance. I really like that idea, and I think I'll use it next time circumstances warrant.

Eli Con 2010

2010-09-04T21:34:00.000-07:00

EliCon 2010 was a one-night gaming gathering hosted by Feuerstein the Mighty, probably as part of one of his many nefarious schemes, but it was a great time regardless of how it fit us cogs into his diabolical machine. His son Eli was good enough to give his dad the night off, mostly sleeping soundly in spite of the excited nerdery taking place just downstairs from his room.

Games played included Dominion, which I successfully managed to avoid, Ben Swainbank's prototype superhero card/boardgame hybrid, and a game called something like We Didn't Playtest This At All which totally lived up to its name. (It was like Fluxx, but even more random and less interesting. It was basically a series of cards that invented the kinds of rules that get laid down during a game of Asshole, which aren't really any fun if you're not drunk and looking to get drunker.) In addition to these appetizers, the main courses involved overt Norsemen and covert robots, so all in all a delicious feast was had. Hopefully a small beer spillage and my abuse of Eli's plates and sippy-cup won't be enough to dissuade Josh from hosting again in the future.

Game One: Drunken Fortress-Building and Snowball Fights
I haven't got much to write about the first non-warmup game I played, as I'm still so bad at worker-placement games that I can't understand their basic rhythms well enough to really get a sense of the overall shape of the game. Suffice it to say that it seemed like a lot of other people gathered materials without needing to resort to the axe, whereas I didn't seem to get anything for free unless I happened to accidentally have one of the surviving vikingmans in an area which had been cleared of hostile forces by other hostile forces. I did pretty well at the card-playing aspect of the game, winning at least as many fights as I lost and mostly losing only the fights that I didn't care much about anyway. But while everyone else's forts grew pretty substantially, my own didn't amount to much more than a circular dog run and adjacent outhouse.

By the end of the game, I'd officially had my pants beaten off. I had no pants! Very embarrassing, especially in mixed company. Not only was I dead last, the folks who were vying for the top two spots had more than double the amount of points I did. Any general advice on how these kinds of games play, or if I'm overthinking the whole affair and ascribing skilled play to what might turn out to be randomness, would be greatly appreciated.

Conclusions: I really don't know what I'm doing. My inability to correctly figure out the placement of workermans is shameful.

Game Two: Man, This Show Is Brutal
Josh (Apollo) -> Matt (Roslin) -> me (Tigh) -> Ben (Adama) -> Kevin (Tyrol) -> Jen (Starbuck)

Since Kevin had never played Galactica before, we stuck with the basic game. We chose to use the No Sympathizer variant, which meant that our resource dials began the game slightly reduced from their normal starting positions. After Josh and Matt picked their characters, I was left with the hard choice of picking a military leader or Tyrol, none of whom really excite me. Helo is pretty good by my reckoning, but picking him as the third character in a six-player game meant that I'd be spending a lot of time shooting up antirad meds rather than participating meaningfully, so I discounted him as a choice. I've found playing Adama to be boring, and Tyrol as well. Saul Tigh is probably the weakest character in the game, but given my choices and the fact that I had a bottle of beer in my hand while looking over them...well, I let destiny decide. Looking at my loyalty card revealed that I was a human, meaning that I'd be drunkenly muttering under the aegis of the first definition of "Cylon Hatred," at least until the sleeper phase.

As the game began, I suggested that Matt give up the presidency, since Roslin's a pretty terrible president and works much better as a kind of back-row artillery character, lobbing lots of Investigative Committees and Executive Orders around the table rather than trying to take a more active role. Matt wanted no part of that suggestion, and though I briefly entertained the notion of telling him to go frak himself and declaring martial law, that seemed like just a bit of a hasty play.

The matter was mostly taken out of my hands by a succession of three cylon attacks, and everyone spent their time ordering the two pilots to get themselves in gear and go kill some raiders. Unfortunately, Starbuck didn't live up to her reputation as an ace pilot, and she managed to get herself shot down twice before we made our first jump. We also took some hits to civilian ships and the resource dials, both from all the excitement in space and from some failed crisis cards. Further darkening our spirits, Ben picked a Tylium Planet as our destination for the jump, ensuring that we'd have more fuel than we'd know what to do with but leaving us woefully distant from reaching Kobol.

The second jump cycle was uneventful in terms of Explosions In Spaaaaaace, so we got right down to the business of accusing each other of being cylons. This didn't bear much fruit, as nobody seemed to be sabotaging the crises, and we blew through this jump cycle so quickly that we didn't have much time to get our bicker on. Once Admiral Ben picked another one-distance destination, though, there were a lot of groans and furrowed brows and at least one instance of the phrase "cylon admiral" being muttered.

It seemed that our allegedly cylon admiral had called ahead to his buddies in the cylon fleet and told them where we'd be heading, and they'd spent that time traveling there while we were mucking around with limp-wristed accusations during our second jump cycle, because oh my sweet bottle of ambrosia did they show up in force during our third jump cycle. We got hit with a total of four cylon attack crises during this period, and after the game was over, Matt said that he'd used Roslin's ability to bury a fifth one. Evidence suggests that the cylon One True God has a thing for statistical improbability.

During this relentless assault on everything humans hold dear, at one point it became clear due to a spiked crisis and the associated card draws that either Kevin, Ben or myself must be a hidden cylon. The indicting color was purple, of which I drew the most, so I came under some suspicion. I'm sure that this was intentional on Ben's part, but his poor choices of destination still kept the majority of suspicion on him, with me as a good second choice should he prove himself to be trustworthy. Matt decided that there wasn't any reason to take more chances, and Encouraged Mutiny to make Starbuck our admiral.

Not too long after, Ben revealed and left me with the parting gift of two handgun rounds to the chest as a reward for my decades of friendship. Thanks, buddy. That was actually a mistake on his part, since Kevin and I were the only people on Galactica at the point that Ben revealed, and he would've been better off choosing Kevin to send to Sickbay since Kevin's turn came next. It ended up not mattering much in the end, though.

Our morale had been taking a beating - the crisis that made it mostly obvious that Ben was a cylon had been caused a morale loss after several other crises that he probably spiked, in retrospect, had done the same, and the first of many civilian ships that we lost to the swarms of raiders on the board was the party barge - and was critically low at this point. President Roslin received an Executive Order to make a speech with my Strategic notes to back her, and we got a little happier, but she then started muttering about how she knew our species was doomed anyway without realizing that the microphone was still on. In spite of my providing Strategic speechwriters a second time, the human journalists had a field day with her hypocrisy and we didn't gain any more morale.

It was all over but for the task of breaking out the cylon champagne stores at this point, and humanity got too sad to bother trying to continue shortly afterward. We all sat around for a while and bitched about the fact that the crisis deck apparently held a grudge against Josh, and assured Kevin that while the game is somewhat predisposed against the human team, it wasn't normally so one-sided as this game had been. Sadly, there hadn't even been a second hidden cylon amongst us, and Ben said that he didn't really do much crisis-spiking until near the end of the game, which meant that extremely bad luck had been our worst enemy. I cast back and tried to remember if I'd ever seen a game finish before the sleeper phase and couldn't remember any instances of that happening, so we'll put this down as my Official First Time that the game ended before the sleeper phase.

Conclusions: Well, our group selection of characters kind of sucked. Characters in Galactica are designed to be balanced internally rather than against each other; Boomer's special abilities are much stronger than Zarek's, for example, but at the same time she has a crushing disability and a skill set that's not so great. It's therefore possible to have groups of characters that are weaker or stronger than others, though there's not a huge amount of variance. Three of us picked characters on the low end of the power scale (Adama, Tigh, Tyrol). Roslin was prevented from being powerful due to refusing to give up the presidency, though the president is most useful during times of peace and we didn't have much of that, so that probably didn't make a huge difference.

Having two pilots should have helped a lot, due to all the cylon attacks that came up, but there were so many raiders in the air that our pilots had to hold onto their Evasive Maneuvers just to try to stay alive, which meant that unmanned vipers were being torn apart like tissue paper. During the last attack crisis that came up, for example, Josh wanted to launch Apollo in a viper in order to get out of Sickbay, but we told him that he couldn't because there weren't any vipers left. He explained to us that the rules have been clarified to explain that pilots can take a viper off the board in order to launch in one, and I replied that I knew that, but that we only had a single viper left, and Starbuck was already in it.

Ultimately, though, I don't think that there's really anything that the human team did wrong. Even if we'd chosen better characters to play, that dense clump of cylon attacks which came up would've likely still ended us. Maybe we should've been Launching more Scouts, even in the midst of the heavy fighting, but I think those of us able to do so were assuming that probability would smooth out and we wouldn't get hit with yet more attack crises. Still might have been worthwhile, to ensure that we got jump icons and could leave the damn party already, but it can be difficult to rationalize doing so when there are actions that can be taken which provide more immediately concrete benefits. I've yet to play Dualla in a game, so perhaps next time we're playing with the Pegasus expansion, I'll choose her and see if keeping the raptors in heavy rotation in spite of what's happening elsewhere on the board is a sound strategy or not.

Monodiscipline Deckbuilding Challenge #2: Potence

2010-08-31T17:17:00.000-07:00

While watching Thirst and contemplating how it isn't very vampirey for a vampire movie, for some reason it suddenly occurred to me that I had been needlessly conflating "mono-Potence" with "weenie Potence," and that it wasn't necessary or desirable to do so. To this end, I started casting about for ideas that could use Potence as their primary engine but not rely upon weenie vampires, and I remembered reading something about Nikolaj Wendt building a deck that was all about princes who have Potence. I also recalled seeing Dave Pennington play a deck that seemed to be built around the same core concept, so I opened up ARDB and got to work.

This is the second entry in the NWWYP project, which will probably take me the rest of the year to complete, at the rate that I actually play V:TES these days.

Deck Name : The Only Study of a Prince
Author : John Eno
Description : "War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans."
-Niccolo Machiavelli

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 2 max: 8 average: 5.5
------------------------------------------------------------

2x Selma the Repugnan 8 OBF POT ani for prince Nosferatu:1
2x Nikolaus Vermeulen 7 POT ani for obf prince Nosferatu:2
1x Donal O'Connor 8 CEL DOM POT prince Brujah:2
1x Murat 7 OBF POT ser prince Nosferatu:2
1x Calebros, The Mart 5 ANI obf pot prince Nosferatu:2
1x Volker, The Puppet 5 CEL pot prince Brujah:2
1x Hector Sosa 4 POT pre Brujah:1
1x Duck 3 obf pot Nosferatu:1
1x KoKo 2 pot Nosferatu:1
1x Lupo 2 pot Brujah:1

Group 4/5 was very tempting, featuring the awesome combo of Tara and Karen Suadela, but it doesn't have much in the way of other midcap princes with Potence, particularly at superior.

Since I've only got fairly good defense in the form of hurting people (don't want to do it as it wastes my resources), the threat of hurting people (doesn't usually work in my playgroup), and Second Tradition (good), I also need to include some bloat. Parity Shifts are good but risky, plus I only own three copies that have grown-up backs, so I'm going to use a bunch of Fourth Traditions to get vampires on the cheap. To that end, I've created a staggered chain of vampires so that, hopefully, I'll be able to continually bring out fresh vampires as the game continues.

I went with an all-Camarilla crypt even though a lot of the cheapest vampires with superior Potence are Sabbat, because I want to be able to play Judgment: Camarilla Segregation without hurting myself. This will be a deck that won't have a great deal of aggressive offense and will want to knock people off the table as quickly as possible, making J:CS is a good choice.

Nosferatu not only have good midcap princes with POT (and a good special, in Nikolaus's case), they've got access to some pretty good clan cards, so I focused much of the crypt around them.

Library [80 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [14]
5x Blood Doll
1x Creepshow Casino
2x Fame
1x Giant's Blood
2x Haven Uncovered
1x Labyrinth, The
1x Papillon
1x Warsaw Station

This should be largely self-explanatory. Some people might question the addition of the stealth locations in a fighty deck, but I've found that smart players know enough to block really evil actions (like Parity Shift or a rush targeting an Anathema'd vampire) even if it means that they'll lose their blocker. Having the option to add stealth to those actions is a good investment, as long as you don't have to leave the stealth card sitting in your hand until you need it.

There may be too many Blood Dolls and not enough bloodgain in here. A second Warsaw Station might also be nice, since the card is so boss, but this is a good starting point.

Action [12]
8x Fourth Tradition: The Accounting
1x Judgment: Camarilla Segregation
1x Rampage
1x SchreckNET
1x Third Tradition: Progeny

Mostly nuts and bolts stuff. Probably could use another two Segregations if I want to get serious about ousting people. Rampage often isn't great, but the ability to punch, say, the entire city of Chicago into rubble with a single action is too funny to pass up.

Combat [34]
10x Immortal Grapple
4x Taste of Vitae
4x Thrown Gate
2x Thrown Sewer Lid
9x Torn Signpost
5x Undead Strength

Again, nothing particularly thrilling here. I apparently traded away more Signposts than I'd realized or else there'd be a tenth one here instead of one of the Undead Strengths. Though I've not no way to play them without a little help from my friends, I like having a few Sewer Lids in any Potence deck just to have an answer for people who get all smarmy about out-maneuvering me. The Gates are less good for that, but can deliver a fair amount of damage while possibly keeping my minions safe from harm.

Political Action [12]
2x Anathema
2x Archon
5x Kine Resources Contested
3x Parity Shift

I don't have enough available actions or any vote push to justify playing any more votes. Realistically, this is probably already too much, since I've got no other means than getting out more princes to try to push votes, though many of these are sellable enough that I might be able to talk my way to passing them.

Reaction [8]
8x Second Tradition: Domain

Probably just enough defense, though the largish number of actions makes me wonder if a few more wouldn't help.

Monodiscipline Deckbuilding Challenge #1: Celerity

2010-08-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

Here's the deck whose genesis kicked off the NWWYP project.

Deck Name : Juggernaut's Folly
Author : John Eno
Description : Gunless weenie Celerity.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 2 max: 5 average: 3.58333
------------------------------------------------------------
2x Dodd 5 CEL dom pre !Brujah:2
1x Rigby, Crusade Van 5 CEL PRE aus pot !Brujah:2
1x Jimmy Dunn 4 CEL POT for Pander:2
1x Parmenides 4 CEL qui Assamite:2
1x Scarlet Carson O'T 4 CEL pro !Gangrel:3
1x Victor Tolliver 4 CEL pot !Brujah:2
2x Sarah Brando 3 CEL !Brujah:2
1x Carter 2 cel !Toreador:2
1x Jesus Alcala 2 cel !Gangrel:3
1x Kanya Akhtar 2 cel Assamite:2

With these kinds of weenie decks, the question always arises as to whether it's better to smallify the crypt as much as possible and use Master: Discipline cards, or increase the average capacity a bit and use mostly vampires who have the discipline in question at superior and fill out the crypt with a few support nerds. The answer to that question will usually depend on how good the discipline in question is at basic. It's totally possible to coast along on basic Dominate or Obfuscate until you start drawing into skillcards, for instance. Celerity at basic, on the other hand, is possibly the worst discipline in the game, and I figure this deck is going to struggle mightily to accomplish anything in any case, so I don't want to gimp my chances extra by needing to wait to draw master cards to make my minions effective (or as effective as mono-Celerity can be, at any rate).

The crypt is staggered so that I can make the most use out of Powerbase: Zurich. I'm not sure if this will actually work out in play or not, and I might need to add some Wider View later on in order to make sure that my larger vampires can gain me some free pool during my turn, but this looks like a reasonably solid starting point from which to gather some actual play data.

The cheapest vampire with basic Celerity, Antoinette DuChamp, was cut out of the crypt after I finished building the library for two reasons. The first is that there are enough Celerity actions and strikes in the deck that I worried that her disability would cripple her more quickly than the one pool she'd save me over using one of the two-caps was worth, and the second was that her basic Celerity means that she can't use Sideslip as damage prevention, and would quite likely end up having to hunt every other turn even if her special didn't trigger.

Library [90 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------

This is a significantly bigger library than I normally run, even for combat decks. I'm not entirely sure why it ended up being so big, though I strongly suspect that the reason is me overcompensating for what I perceive as Celerity's inability to deliver the goods in combat, so my combat card selection probably got overzealous. I'll try it like this, but I expect that I'll probably end up cutting the library size down by about ten cards.

Master [10]
1x Barrens, The
1x Dreams of the Sphinx
1x Elder Library
2x Fame
2x Frontal Assault
3x Powerbase: Zurich

A fair bit of hand-tuning tech here, required stuff for any deck packing as large a combat module as this one. Some light offense in the form of Fame and bloat from Frontal Assault and Zurich are probably all that the deck has room for, given that it intends to play quite few cards during the course of the game.

Action [20]
8x Bum's Rush
12x Flurry of Action

Here's the meat of the deck. The plan is for my minions to bleed with Flurry, hopefully without being blocked, and then untap and do something else - hunt if they're low on blood, get a +bleed permanent, bloat via Zurich, rush someone, or possibly call a vote if the political situation looks favorable. Staying untapped to block might also be an option if the deck sits down with a non-sneaky predator. Flurry's basic option also provides more hand-tuning potential if it's needed.

Combat [52]
4x Infernal Pursuit
8x Psyche!
4x Pulled Fangs
8x Pursuit
8x Sideslip
8x Target Vitals
4x Taste of Vitae
8x Weighted Walking Stick

Whole, whole lot of cards here. As I mentioned above, this is probably overkill on my part, but I do feel like Celerity has so little to offer in terms of combat payload that these are all going to be needed. Pulled Fangs is good tech to work with both Fame and Dragonbound, and with the extra damage I can inflict, dodges and damage prevention, it shouldn't be too difficult to play them.

Equipment [2]
2x Laptop Computer

Event [2]
2x Dragonbound

Political Action [2]
2x Perpetual Care

Retainer [2]
1x J. S. Simmons, Esq.
1x Tasha Morgan

The rest of the deck is ousting tech, which feels too light to me. The Perpetual Care seem especially fringey to me, but Darby Keeney has assured me that they can do plenty of damage in a rush deck, even if that deck lacks titles of its own. I'll give them their day in court and see what verdict comes back.

Never Whistle While You're Pissing

2010-08-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

Or in other words, focus on one thing at a time. (I can't think of an equivalent phrase that works for women as well as men, but NWWYP has countercultural cachet, so I'll stick with it.)

I've been due to make a new batch of V:TES decks for a while now, but haven't had any incentive to do so since I've not been playing V:TES. Some recent changes in my work schedule have made it so that I'll at least be playing occasionally, so it's time to actually figure out what to build. Unfortuntely, all of the ideas that I stormed up last go-round have been sitting unbuilt in my head for so long that I'm already bored with them. Aksinya Daclau's cover band takes on the Deep Song tap-and-bleed? Weenie !Salubri swarm with 30 copies of Hide the Heart? Weenie Obfuscate vote? !Ventrue bruise/bleed? Shattering Crescendo trophies? (Okay, I did build and play that one once, but it was a weird game and the deck needed so much work that it was basically still a first draft.) All bored with them already, without ever having played them, due to having spent too much time thinking about them during slow periods at work.

But then a couple of weeks ago, Juggernaut made a statement on the newsgroup that gunless weenie Celerity is a tournament-viable deck, and I pointed out to him that I'd never heard or seen such and that what he was saying sounded dumb to me. Not wanting to be a total jerk and call him out on something without checking it out for myself, I drafted a decklist of exactly what he was talking about, though I haven't played since then. But the process of drafting that deck got me thinking.

I haven't played a lot of monodiscipline decks. While I can understand the allure of having a deck that knows what it wants to do and does it very well at the expense of allowing itself broader options, I'm not often interested in playing such a deck for any longer than it takes me to learn how it works. And since those decks are generally pretty simple in terms of what they do, that's often just one or two plays. But there are a lot of disciplines out there, and a lot of them don't get much in the way of spotlight time all by their lonesomes. So what I'm going to do is put on my best Uncle George impression and act like a sleazy producer who's giving these young hopefuls their shot at fame. I don't expect much out of them, but then that's the fun of surprises, right?

I'm just going to skip right over the fancy bloodlines disciplines, as their crypt options aren't usually good enough to allow the weeniefication that's necessary for just about any monodiscipline deck to have a hope of functionality. As for the rest, I'll go through the list of disciplines and consider which are viable candidates for this particular experiment.

Yes
Abombwe: This is kind of a fancy bloodlines discipline, so it might seem like I'm already violating the rules that I just set out for myself three seconds ago, but since it's got a discipline card that can be used to give it out (one which is a trifle, no less), I'll give it a go. It's toolboxy enough that I'm not immediately sure what route I'll take with the deck. Due to the restriction on who can learn it, the crypt will probably end up largely laibon, which gives me access to more funky tricks.

Celerity: See the introduction above. I might even make two of these, the crappy rush one and another try at weenie !Brujah breed/boom, which by random chance doesn't use any disciplines other than Celerity.

Dominate: I've tried weenie DBR (which also happens to be mono-Dominate) before, but found that it really wasn't to my liking. Too much need to aggressively attack people cross-table in the early game, which doesn't suit my playstyle or my wish for the people I'm playing with to have fun. Aim&Chain has been looking enticing to me for a minute now, though, as has trying out something silly with Zip Guns and Suppressing Fire, so that seems like it could all come together here.

Protean: For such a toolboxy discipline, it still seems like making a working deck using just Protean will be nigh-impossible. Hark! A challenge! The 1/2 crypt for this is very solid for the weenie angle, so that's a good starting place.

No
Animalism: I've already done this one, several different times actually, which is enough to disqualify it. For what it's worth, I also found it less interesting to play than !Nosferatu, Ahrimanes, or Gangrel/!Gangrel, any of which can do all the same stuff that weenie Animalism can but also adds spice and options on top of that basic build.

Auspex: Never played it, but it's generally so one-dimensional that I already know how it would play. It's certainly a discipline I like and play a lot of, but I've got no desire to see what happens when it goes solo, especially since weenie Auspex is already an established tournament-viable deck archetype.

Fortitude: See Auspex.

Obfuscate: I like stealth, but I can't think of anything not boring to do with it if it's not coupled with some other discipline. I could make a deck with Heidelburgable bleed permanents and use lots of Night Moves and Powerbase: Zurich! Just writing that sentence had me reaching for a blanket and pillow, though, let alone building the deck or playing it.

Potence: See Auspex, minus the part about me playing it a lot.

Presence: Already played it quite a bit, and also see Auspex.

Maybe
Chimerstry: Hmm. Seems like it might be fun, but every time I've made a Ravnos deck I couldn't bear to play it more than once. I'm not sure what that's about, given that individual Ravnos and Chimerstry cards certainly have the capacity to get me excited to play them, and Ravnos have so many good clan cards that it seems like I ought to keep a deck built just to use them. I'd been wanting to make an Edged Illusion deck for a long time, but that desire evaporated once Shattering Crescendo was printed, and mono-Chimerstry doesn't offer much other than stealth, light bleed, and "haha your guys can't untap" tech. I've long thought that David Cherryholmes' Red Herring deck looked interesting, so maybe I'll give that a shot. Even if I don't, I should probably buckle down and try to do something with that giant pile of Chimerstry cards I've had laying around for so long.

Dementation: Pretty unlikely. I've got zero desire to play the "Jackie taps to attempt Kindred Spirits, add Confusion, repeat" weenie Dementation bleed deck that would be the most obvious choice. And while there are a lot of amusingly janky Dementation actions that mess with other peoples' minions, they're all removable by an action which Dementation weenies are going to be neither willing nor able to block. I've considered using a bunch of Passions to make a Dementation tap-and-bleed deck, but that turns out to just be weenie Presence without access to S:CE, so no thanks.

Necromancy: This discipline has a few good cards, a few more middling ones, and then quite a bit of garbage. What's more, the good and okay stuff doesn't really mesh very well - how do I work Divine Sign, Puppeteer and Call of the Hungry Dead into the same deck? The only mono-Necromancy deck I've seen was one in Ben Peal's series of amazingly annoying "get one million permanents so that no one sitting near me can play and then bleed for one a lot" decks, but I've been meaning to do something with Baleful Doll and Jar the Soul for a long time, and I need to build something to give Sennadurek a home while I'm still working out what's the best deck for her to be in.

Obtenebration: See Obfuscate. The thing to do would be Shadow Twins, but I've played that deck already and it was just as dull as Cryptic Mission, surprise surprise. There are enough combat options and crappy intercept cards for Obtenebration that an intercept/combat thing might be unexpected and funny, but it sounds bad enough that this is close to the bottom of the list of potentials.

Quietus: I've tried this before, with a really bad Baal's Bloody Talons deck that I made just to have an excuse to make terrible jokes about Sticks and Baal's, but maybe I'll try something that's a little less juevenile. Some kind of bleed/vote thing using the good Assamite clan cards but eschewing their one good discipline and instead using Quietus might be the way to go here.

Serpentis: Serpentis has one very good card, a small number of decent ones, and then a whole swath of complete crap. Part of the point of this exercise is certainly to dust off some crappy cards that wouldn't normally see play, but so many of the low-end Serpentis cards are so cost-intensive and situational and yet still have no appreciable effect on the game that they've gone beyond bad to become intimidatingly bad. These cards are the kids hanging out in the back of shop class and sticking safety pins in their forearms just because they're bored, the kind of cards that'll say, "you knew I was a snake when you picked me up" as you lose while playing them. I'm not even talking about the truly unplayable cards from the drug-addled WotC days of Ancient Hearts, either, but some of the more recent stuff. I don't think I've got the werewithal to walk this path.

Thaumaturgy: I've done the Cryptic Mission thing and it made me yawn. That was a while ago, though, and Thaumaturgy has gotten a lot of interesting tricks in the interim. It's got even more cards than it deserves to since so many of the Visceratika outferiors are Thaumaturgy. Combined with enough copies of Spirit Summoning Chamber to get what I want when I think it'll have the most humor impact, I think this might be leading the pack of the maybes.

Vicissitude: Seems like it would make for a good monodiscipline deck, since it offers a fair number of different effcts. Unfortunately, Vicissitude is one of those disciplines which barely has any effect on the game at the basic level, the crypt for weenie Vicissitude isn't very good, and I'm already signed up to build what will probably turn out to be two "aggpoke with light bleed elements" decks (Abombwe and Protean), so I'm really not sure that a third is going to be any better or more interesting than those. The other obvious route to take would be a War Ghoul deck, but it's already an established tournament deck, etc.

I'll be going through the process of making these decks in future posts, or if I'm feeling lazy I'll at least post the decklists and some explanation of how I arrived at the decisions to build them the way I did. Stay tuned.

Friday Night Gaming Pre-Season

2010-08-23T21:52:00.001-07:00

(Note: I've gotten bored with posting the creamy hot reportage that's made up the bulk of this blog so far. Since I'm not gaming as much as I was when I started State of Play, I've got less raw material to write about, but that comes bundled with more time to think about the games that I do play. As a result, I'm going to shift the focus of these posts to session-summary rather than -storytell, and focus more on strategy and musing about the games played.)

The New England Chowdah and Cahdboard Society hadn't met all summer long, since one of our inaugural members has a very busy schedule and has had all of his free time consumed by being half of the organizational committee of the brilliant Sub Rosa Drive-In. But I've been jonesing for some gaming, and the threat of my stealth/attack cyberdrones makes for a very convincing argument, so I convened an early meeting of the Society, minus our fifth associate. This was unfortunate in that it meant there was no point in playing Galactica, but it did mean that we had the correct number for playing Chaos In the Old World. So gangway for evil deification!

Game One: Blood Fever Sex Magik
Larry (Khorne) -> Richard (Nurgle) -> Kiarna (Tzeentch) -> me (Slaanesh)

Khorne hit the ground running, and the other three of us didn't do enough running of our own to prevent him from getting double-ticks on his advancement dial during the first turn. That enabled the blood-god to continue to harass us everywhere we set up camp, though he took a long time to get to Tzeentch's northern stronghold and was delayed a turn further when the magic god teleported his expeditionary daemonmans back to the south. Nurgle wasn't able to hold Khorne off enough in Bretonnia and Slaanesh suffered just enough casualties in the southern three regions for Khorne to continue to double-tick. He managed to get two dial advancements every turn except for the last, giving him a win by turn five with the rest of us not particularly close to ending the game via victory point win. It certainly didn't hurt his chances that Khorne's dice were as bloodthirsty as he was, giving him at least one kill every time that he rolled dice during the game except twice, but I blame our failure to derail his progress on our own tactics rather than chalking it up entirely to bad luck.

Conclusions: Khorne needs to be stomped on early. But "stomped on," in a game in which fighting usually only helps him, doesn't have anything to do with combat. Instead, it seems to me that the other three gods need to dance around a bit on that crucial first turn, which should be easily accomplished since Khorne's daemonmans cost twice as much to summon as everyone elses' cultistmans. So everyone else should deploy next to the territory that they actually want to occupy, moving to the one that they want only after Khorne has dropped one of his three daemonmans into the region that they currently occupy. If possible, somebody should also play chicken with the initial cultistmans that Khorne normally starts his game with: by placing a cultist of your own in that territory, you either tempt Khorne into also dropping a daemonmns there (and thereby limiting himself to three starting territories, rather than four) or else you'll get to safely wreak your own havoc there. Since Khorne normally airdrops his first mans into populous country, Nurgle is probably the best bet to start staring down that first Khornemans, since Nurgle can just as profitably decamp to an adjacent populous region free of fighting or stay there and reap the rewards. Whether or not Tzeentch or Slaanesh would want to get in on that action will situationally depend on where the nobles and warpstones are, but they might want to try this if they decide early on to play for a victory point win.

With a little luck, this strategy will prevent Khorne from being able to roll any battle dice during the first turn, meaning that it'll be at least one more turn before his cultistmans gain the ability to attack and all hell breaks loose. This will make it nearly impossible for anyone to get more than one dial advancement on the first turn, but since I've only ever seen Khorne to get two on turn one anyway, this doesn't seem like much of a disincentive to anyone else.

For turns following the first, anti-Khorne tactics are going to be a bit more difficult to employ. Since Khorne will already have daemonmans camped out in three regions, those regions won't be safe for anyone else (barring a lucky Slaanesh draw of one of his Fields of Sextacy or Tzeentch zapping somebody away via Teleportation), and Khorne can easily expand from there if no one is crazy enough to come to him. Given that I haven't had a chance to harangue people into trying the first-turn strategy outlined above, I'm not really sure what the gameboard will look like if it's a success or what those of us who aren't trying to killkillkill should be doing to try to keep the skins of our mans intact. I've begun to wonder if Nurgle shouldn't throw some of his daemonmans into regions in which Khorne is attacking cultistmans, even if those cultistmans aren't necessarily Nurgle's. This seems counterintuitive - Nurgle doesn't want Khorne to win by dial advancements, but he also wants to spend his power points to further his own agenda of winning by victory points rather than helping Tzeentch or Slaanesh - but since the dial wins tend to happen more quickly than the VP wins, it might be worthwhile to slow Khorne just to ensure that the game goes on long enough for Nurgle to have a chance to scoop up those late-game VPs that he tends to start accumulating in the last few turns.

Games Two and Three: The Sheriff Isn't Checking His Email

Kiarna had to leave after we were done with our game of Chaos, and none of the rest of us had the mental fortitude to start a game of Fury of Dracula. It's supposed to be a good game for three players, but it's got a playing time of two to three hours and none of us have played it before, so it would of course end up running even longer. Richard had brought his copy of Bang, which is one of the old-school ones that has no English text on the cards, and the expansion Dodge City, which has rules for three players.

In three-player Bang, rather than having hidden roles, everyone knows who everyone else is. Each player is trying to kill one other player, and if he does so, he wins. If his target is killed in some other way (accidentally blows himself up with dynamite, or gets indiscriminately mowed down by a Gatling gun, &c.), the remaining two players duel it out. Distance isn't really an issue, though it can turn into one if somebody gets sassy and tries to ride off into the sunset before the final reel.

In our first game, Richard blew himself up with dynamite and I got thrown in jail in spite of being the deputy. Due to a mysterious* confluence of events, I was shot up really badly while trying to hide behind a barrel inside my cell, even though the jail itself was hidden away somewhere in the wilderness. Unsurprisingly, death.

During our second game, Richard blew himself up with dynamite again, but this time the explosion didn't prove to be fatal. I got thrown into jail again and then shot repeatedly until I died. Apparently, jail is a bad place to be when people are shooting at you.

Conclusions: Bang isn't much of a game with only three players. It's the hidden roles that make the game interesting, and without that it's mostly just a game of who draws the most beer and bangs, with a small side helping of who draws the character with the best special ability. The distance mechanic isn't really a crucial part of the normal game - it seems to be there to keep people mostly in their own corner rather than going cross-table all willy-nilly, rather than fulfilling some more elegant function - but even the loss of that made the proceedings less interesting. I'm not sure if there's some kind of house rule that could make things feel less predetermined, like maybe making a stack of six roles and keeping them secret somehow until characters get killed, but as the rules are written I think I'll keep looking for some other short three-player game. I've been hearing good things about Death Angel, and FFG is good enough to give away their rulebooks for free, so I'll probably have a gander at that.

*Okay, not so much of a mystery: I'm a doofus. Even though I'd made the exact same mistake last time we played, and then recorded it here, and then was told what the mistake was and looked it up, I still managed to make it again. Twice more. Maybe I'm just secretly illiterate.

We Conquer the World Three Times, and Then Get Bored

2010-08-12T20:30:00.000-07:00

Game One: Nobody Likes Wagner
At my request, Dan dusted off his copy of Ideology, which I'd seen people playing but hadn't played myself. Apparently no one else had played it since that initial game I'd watched the second half of, so we made a few mistakes that we didn't pick up on until Chris happened to scan the rulebook after the game was over. If nothing else, that gives me an excuse to play the game again in the future, maybe this time playing the game that the designers intended us to play.

Ideology is a game in which each player attempts to sway the world to his particular, well, ideology, in a kind of ahistorical vacuum that seems to assume that WWII never ended but that the sociopolitical fallout from the end of WWII did happen. This lack of historical fidelity isn't any big deal, as Ideology is a mostly abstract game and isn't trying to model any particular conflict in detail. Each player begins play with a single nation under his control and attempts to gain sway over other countries that turn up randomly in a sort of poker pot in the middle of the table, as well as build up the countries which he controls. This ownership is established by using the military, cultural and economic influence which is generated by countries already under a player's control, creating a snowball effect whereby the players who control more countries gain more influence with which to gain control of other countries. The three types of influence can also be used to increase the value of nations already controlled, which also generates more influence on subsequent turns.

The three kinds of influence aren't inherently any different from each other, though all of the abilities which players can purchase create differentiators between them. Additionally, each ideology has a set of advantages and disadvantages thematically linked to the nature of their philosophies. Facism, for example, is very good at attacking other countries, but finds it very difficult to export its culture. Apparently, aesthetic appreciation of Sturm und Drang is difficult to force on people who didn't grow up with it. This combination of a simple base mechanic which becomes variably more complex during individual plays is an excellent way to create replayability, and Ideology feels like it can create enough distinct iterative sets of these complications to hold up to many plays.

There's another set of limitations on how influence can be used to interact with other players, a matrix of diplomatic stances which are tracked with regard to how each ideology is currently able to interact with each other ideology. Being at Peace, Neutral or at War with another player governs which types of influence you can use to mess with their control of both the countries they own and those they're still vying to take over. This is an interesting experiment in mechanically-induced negotiation that didn't bear any fruit for our group, but that might very well have been due to our inexperience rather than the weakness of the mechanic. As it played out, there seemed to be little reason for anyone to do anything other than simply go to war with everyone else. In games played by a people who have a better handle on the flow of the game, maybe a less hawkish group demeanor emerges.

I played bloody-minded Facism, Kirby polished his monocle and represented tea-sipping Imperialism, Dan prepared to exploit the underclasses as Capitalism and Chris followed in Dan's footsteps (but with fewer pairs of blue jeans) as Communism. At the beginning of the game, everyone mostly spent their influence improving their home countries, with only a few expeditionary feelers being sent out into the initially independent countries.

Chris took an early lead in Russia, building it up to its maximum capacity and also buying quite a few of the abilities granted by progressing up the game's tech tree. Similarly, I concentrated my efforts on improving Germany, but instead of buying tech I invested the rest of my influence in Italy, thinking that drawing extra influence cards would be more helpful than developing tech, most of which is either defensive or allows you to mitigate the extra costs involved in influencing nations which aren't near the ones you control.

My thinking was that getting the extra cards would be just as good as not having extra cards but not needing to spend as many, and that the extra draws would be advantageous in allowing me more flexibility in what I drew rather than locking me into a given type of influence like the tech trees do. In retrospect, that seems like such an obvious choice that I'm not sure why anyone would develop tech early, unless there's some subtle reason to do so that we missed in our headlong rush to misinterpret and sometimes ignore the rules as written.

There wasn't much interaction for the rest of the game, aside from a few feints and headgames that I won't go into in detail here, because we later learned that they weren't legal due to us misunderstanding the rule on how influence is placed on independent countries during the Foreign phase. Oops! Eventually, Dan and I were each at almost twelve points, the number needed to win the game. On the last turn of the game, we each went back and forth buying tech, which is the way that tiebreakers are determined in Ideology, but then Kirby successfully screwed me over by removing one of his influence cards from my controlled Italy, thereby preventing me from being able to maximize its point potential and keeping me at eleven points. That was a hilariously painful blunder on my part, as this was the third time during the game that someone had successfully outwitted me in the exact same manner. Who knew that fascists can't learn from their mistakes?

Kirby didn't mess up my plans out of mere spite, but rather as part of a grand plan concocted with Chris to prevent Dan and I from winning so that Kirby and Chris might be able to make comebacks from behind and snatch victory away from us. Alas, we all know how well the Imperialists and Communists honor their agreements with each other, and almost immediately after Kirby knocked me out of my winning position, he and Chris ran afoul of a massive communications error, the end result of which was that they were unable to free Cuba from the cruel yoke of capitalism. Dan won the day and Capitalism ruled us all; I'm waiting to see how that turns out, but my hopes aren't high.

Game Two: Khorne Has a Mid-Eternity Crisis
me (Khorne) -> Kirby (Nurgle) -> Chris (Tzeentch) -> Dan (Slaanesh)

Chaos In the Old World! It's totally my favorite game right now, so if I gush too much, somebody should remind me that if I love it so much then I should marry it already. In CItOW, four players take on the roles of the gods who govern the four most evil things possible in the Warhammer Fantasy world: hurting people, card tricks, sneezing on people and sexing people. Each of these gods is competing with the others to dominate the world, spreading their own gospels of Bad Stuff via their cultistmans and also summoning daemonmans to act as fighting units to kill other players' mans.

Each of the four gods has a very different set of powers and weaknesses, but somehow the playtesters managed to iron out the very real potential for power imbalances between those differing sets of abilities and create play experiences for each of the four gods which are quite asymmetrical but also well-balanced against each other. Each player also has two ways to win, either by gaining points for dominating and ruining the regions on the map or by advancing their experience track via a method particular to each god - Khorne, the blood god, advances his track by killing mans; Nurgle, the disease god, advances his track by spreading disease in highly populated areas, and so on. The end result is a game which is part area control, part political maneuvering and part resource management, with enough randomness thrown into the mix that no strategy can be entirely relied upon in the face of the changing environment. It's about the perfect storm of mechanics which I like in games, and has a great theme to boot, but unfortunately it's only playable with exactly four players, so I agitate to play it whenever a group I'm with has achieved that magic quorum. On this day I was successful in that crusade twice, which isn't uncommon if I can convince people to play it once, since CItOW doesn't take long to play and because people who play it once usually get hooked and want to play it more.

Khorne had been unimpressed with the amount of blood I'd shed in our previous game, to put it politely. (The actual expression of his displeasure was like something out of a Cannibal Corpse song, obviously unfit for reproduction in a polite venue such as this one.) Apparently the big guy saw some hidden promise in me, though, because he arranged to have me champion his cause by having the other three players choose the other gods available. Normally, Khorne plays to win by advancing his experience dial, because he's not particularly suited to winning via points. I'd been thinking about how to get him to win with that alternate victory condition, though, and since the chance came up I decided to take it.

The first Old World card we got was Dark Elf Corsairs, which was nothing but gravy for the newly open-minded Khorne. I promptly plopped down my greater daemonmans in the Empire and all my cultistmans in Kislev, allowing me to scare everyone away from the highest-scoring region on the board and also begin accruing victory points elsewhere. Unfortunately, the next card placed a hero token in the Empire, forcing the Bloodthrister to hop on a BloodGodCall Airways plane with one of his Bloodletter buddies, landing in Tilea where there were a few Tzeentch and Nurgle cultists hanging around. Those few mans quickly scampered away, and the Bloodletter chased after them, but the poor Bloodthirster spent the rest of the game vacationing in Tilea with nothing but his upgrade card to keep him company. Nobody even wrote, in spite of Khorne's insistence that it's a beautiful vacation area this time of year, what with the seaside being there and all. It's a sad tale, so let's turn our focus elsewhere before we get too choked up.

Nurgle was having a difficult time in the west, having his mans killed by the hero there and having his corrupting influence slowly stripped away by their graduation to witch huntery. The dark elves were still hanging around there too, somehow undetected by the Estalian witch-o-meters, making it even more difficult for the green guys to spread their love of the gout. On top of all that, since he kept piling mans in there, everyone else was doing the same in order to try to claim second place once the area was ruined, with the result that there was a lot more bloodshed than there probably should have been.

Everyone wasn't concentrating entirely on Estalia, of course. Tzeentch hunkered down with a nice pile of warpstone in the frigid north, scooping up the cheapie point areas there and accumulating steady dial advancements. Slaanesh hung around the eastern fringe of the board, putting sexy thoughts into the heads of the nobility and occasional witch hunter, hosting a rave when I got too ornery and tried to kill off some of his mans (but tactically! not wantonly) and generally messing with my plans to grab points for dominating some regions and then push east. For some reason we started thinking that The Border Princes was important, and a bunch of Tzeentch cultistmans piled in there accompanied by their Lord of Change, but just as quickly scurried away when the upgraded Keeper of Secrets offered to show them some websites that they decided they really didn't want to see. The two greater daemonmans had a couple of slapfights, as neither Tzeentch nor Slaanesh wanted to bother to pay the points to move them elsewhere, but neither of them had their hearts in it and they weren't able to hurt each other significantly.

At around the same time that Nurgle dropped the Great Uncle into the Empire, making this the first game in which I've ever seen all four greater daemonmans on the board at the same time, Tzeentch was about ready to end the epic Norse saga that he'd been working on and ruin the lives of the Vikings there. The rest of us wanted in on that action, of course, but it was down to whether or not Slaanesh or I would end up with second place. Tzeentch teleported away one of the cultists I needed to grab second place amidst the trolls, and then Slaanesh totally outwitted me by taking over one of the two cultists I'd placed with sleepytime perfume, thus giving him two cultists in Norsca to my one and the right number of corruption tokens to beat me by one.

As a result of his wiles, Slaanesh carried the day. The end scores were much tighter than I'd expected them to be, though. Tzeentch pulled ahead into second place, but only beat Khorne by a single point, and Nurgle managed to grab some points right at the end of the game as he always does, bringing him in last but not far behind me. I had a really fun time playing Khorne for victory points rather than going for a dial win, as it required a lot more strategic thinking than just, "There's something moving over there KILL IT." The payoff for that extra strategery was a much-enriched tactical game, as using Khorne's powerful offense to prune away threats to my attempts to gain VPs was unlike playing any of the other three gods for VPs, since they normally play so defensively when it comes to combat.

Game Three: Khorne Reads Some Sun Tzu
Chris (Khorne) -> Dan (Nurgle) -> Kirby (Tzeentch) -> me (Slaanesh)

The first Old World card drawn added two Nobles to the board, which Nurgle decided to stack on top of the two already present in the Empire and the Badlands. It's just like the nobility to not want to mix with the lower classes, but Nurgle's plan to screw me out of the chance to gain extra dial advancements backfired when Khorne decided to crash the party in the Empire in force. He moved all four of his cultistmans and a warriorman there and then played Field of Carnage, a one-point card which had no effect on the game except to grant him enough domination value for him to score seven points. Yikes. Nurgle set up shop in Estalia and Tzeentch poured cultists into Brettonia. I stupidly decided to eschew trying to get dial ticks at the moment and instead go for points, putting all my cultists into Kislev to dominate there and hopefully ruin it quickly to grab an early lead. Everyone dominated their chosen region and dumped a bunch of corruption tokens into it as well, leaving Khorne in the lead on points. As a result of our turtling, neither Khorne nor I received any dial advancements, and the other two gods each got one.

On the second turn, Khorne summoned his greater daemonmans to the Empire and played The Skull Throne there, planning on moving his cultists out to nearby regions in order to scoop up some second-place ruiner points. Tzeentch began to play a Changer of Ways on the region to cancel the Throne, but Khorne made it known in extremely explicit terms exactly what the consequences of such a card play would be. The words coming out of Chris's mouth were so foul that he was practically roleplaying. The clean version is that Tzeentch's stock would plummet for the remainder of the game, in a variety of unpleasant ways. Tzeentch was convinced by Khorne's vehemence and put the card back into his hand.

And apparently the awesome power of Khorne's threat blew out my mind. I'm not going to lie to you - I don't remember much of the rest of this game, and I foolishly waited quite a while to get this written up. It's a habit I really need to break! I'm getting my local group together tomorrow night to play, so afterward I'll break out the electrolysis machine and autohypnosis projector so as to not make this mistake again. The thing to take away is that Khorne did win on points this time, and fairly handily at that. It' was good to see that Ol' Killy is more versatile than I'd previously realized.

Game Four: I Still Don't Get It
I had just enough time for one more quick game before I had to get on the road, so Chris ran off to see if he could find his copy of Cthulhu500. Chris moved fairly recently and isn't as unpacked as he thought, so on that day Cthulhu would have to remain not dead but dreaming rather than climbing behind the wheel of an Unspeakable Olds. Our backup plan was to play Dominion, which I hadn't been a fan of when I'd played it in the past, but I decided to give the game one last shot to redeem itself.

In Dominion, everyone builds a deck. You start with a small deck containing cards that allow you to buy more cards to put into your deck, which are used to buy more cards to put into that deck, or which occasionally mess with other players' decks. Some of the cards that you buy are worth victory points, which are added up once three of the card types available for purchase run out. And...well, no, that's the whole game, actually.

Every time I've played Dominion, there really didn't feel like there was anything happening. Everyone plays their turn with no interaction with anyone else, aside from sometimes playing a card which affects the other players but which they can't interact with except to be hopelessly victimized by. People who like the game often tout its speed of play as a feather in its cap, but playing fast doesn't mean much if that play doesn't involve actually doing anything with the people around you.

The most disheartening example of this that I saw was that Kirby, whose set we played, who owns every expansion for it, and who likes the game enough to have played it in sanctioned tournaments, was playing a game of Civilization Lite on his iPad during the other players' turns. I don't blame him for doing so, since there wasn't anything happening during those turns that he ought to have had any interest in paying attention to, but it strikes me as a pretty harsh indictment of a game if nothing is lost in the play experience even when you spend 75% of it doing something else. I'm not sure why people like a game that's so uninvolving as much as they clearly like this one, but I'm aware that I'm in a small minority here, so I'll turn my gripe engine to its "cooldown" setting.

I don't feel like there's anything to write a report of, based on our session. Chris played some cards, got some more cards, and then shuffled his deck. Then Dan played some cards, got some more cards, and then shuffled his deck. Repeat for Kirby and I, and then repeat for the table again. Sometimes people weren't able to do much of anything on their turns. Then the game was over and we counted points. That seemed to be all of it. Chris at least had a good time, playing a bunch of copies of a card called Wishing Well that opened up the option of a guessing minigame that he really liked playing, and the game finished quickly. That's too short a list of virtues for me to think that the game is worth my time, though, so I'm going to mark this as my Last Game of Dominion and never speak of it again (unless someone actually wants to hear my thoughts on it, which I recognize is entirely unlikely.)

Origins Reportage #5: Faster, Presencecat! Oust! Oust!

2010-07-24T14:08:00.001-07:00

(Sorry for the delay in getting this report up on the blog. I just moved to a new apartment, and wasn't able to find my notes from this tournament until yesterday.)

Experience has taught me that by the time the last day of Origins rolls around, my brain will be the consistency of a poached egg and I won't be capable of maintaining the coherence of any long-term game plans required by an even moderately complicated deck. I don't find weenie bleed (or stealth/bleed, for that matter) to be as simple to play as a lot of people claim they are, but weenie Presence certainly burns a lower-octane brain fuel than something like Brujah bruise/vote or Assamite toolbox. I've also been curious to play it in a tournament, as it's not the kind of deck I normally play in a competitive environment. On top of all that, I had a fairly early flight to catch after the tournament was over, and figured that even if I did make it to the finals, the finals would probably end quickly for me, because I'd either win quickly or been ousted early.

Round One: Love Conquers All
me (weenie Presence) -> Pete (Chaundice) -> John (Blood Brothers) -> Will (Tremere with Presence) -> Bob (Setite toolbox)

For years, Pete had lamented the fact that he and I had never gotten to play a tournament game of V:TES with each other. (I assume he'd been laboring under the woefully incorrect belief that I'm fun to be around?) This year we got to play in not one but two games together, but in both of them, he got squashed before he had a chance to play much. There's probably in lesson in there somewhere, a lesson about how trying to be friendly with other humans inevitably leads to crushing defeat, and it would seem that I'm just the kind of heartless jerk to teach it.

Which is to say that I was extremely worried when Pete's first minion was a Tupdog, assuming that I'd sat down upwind of a deck which would effectively auto-trump my own, and which he would sensibly have to oust upstream once he saw what I was playing. After a few turns of no !Tremere appearing and landing some vicious bleeds in Pete's lap, I became less worried. After Chaundice appeared, it was too late for Pete to be able to fend me off, and he was ousted soon after.

John didn't do much all game, taking a while to bring out his first Brother, presumably because he was also wary of the 'dog horde. That didn't work out too well for him, because the end result of this don't-smash-my-guys strategy was that my minions completely outnumbered his by the time I was his predator, and he was quickly overwhelmed. Will and Bob had been playing their games, with Will building up a bit and Bob bleeding into me. I pretended that if I didn't look at Bob, he couldn't oust me, and that seemed to work out pretty well. He removed a bunch of my pool, but my cardflow was impeccable due to an early-game Bitter and Sweet Story, and it didn't take too much longer for me to clean up the table. A filthmonger is me!

With our game over so early, I had plenty of time to scout around to see what other people were playing, and saw both Una and Cesewayo wearing, as Jay put it, "hats bigger than Abe Lincoln's." Both of the decks looked pretty fragile at a glance, and I had plenty of ways to deal with just a single vampire who thinks he's buff enough to take on a whole table, so I didn't think that I'd see either of those decks in the finals and was confident that I could handle them on the off chance that one of them made it. I failed to remember how Aye interacts with Cesewayo, which might have been important, but I got a chance to see it close-up during my next round as a reminder.

Round Two: PTW Isn't Enforced In the Deckbuilding Phase
me -> Brad (Dmitra the Alastor) -> Matt (Cesewayo wall) -> Corey (Ferox multirush) -> David (Revenge of the G1 Primogen)

David's deck was awesome because it featured Appolonius as its star, with Helena Casimir and Natasha Volfchek as backups. This is why Villein is such a great card: it can make any deck good. Brad got out Dmitra and made her an Assault Rifle-toting Alastor, then proceeded to help me by playing four Psyches in a row so that I could alchemically transmute all the S:CE clogging my hand into bleed cards. Matt tooled up and prepared to weather my assault, and Corey bled for one a lot and discarded a combat card every turn. David beat on my pool pretty well with a bunch of bleeds (and I think a vote or two?), but I assumed that as soon as Corey drew into the rush he obviously needed, David would cease to be as much of a problem.

I ousted Brad around the time that Corey drew into some rush actions, simultaneously coming to a set of realizations which had me wondering if one game win would be enough to get me into the finals. The first realization was that Corey had no actual plan for how to win the game, instead relying on the hope that entering combat with vampires and burning them with a combination of Raking Talons and huge Potence strikes would somehow oust his prey. I had thought that everyone had realized at this late hour in the game's history that combat isn't an end in and of itself, but apparently I was wrong. I feel a analytical article about combat decks in V:TES beginning to coalesce in the basement of my mind, but I'll keep those thoughts tamped down until I've had time to sort them out more completely. Stay tuned for it.

The second realization, that Corey had decided that I should be ousted, came to me in a thunderclap of insight when Corey tapped Ferox and announced that he was Rushing the Bum of one of my vampires. This would have been a completely reasonable course of action for him to pursue, had my prey not been playing a deck specifically designed to block every action ever directed at it. When I pointed out to Corey how unlikely it was that I would be able to oust Matt, he shrugged and said that he didn't want to see my deck in the game. That struck me as a...let's be polite and say "questionable" motivation if Corey was actually playing to try to win, but I really wasn't up for the back-and-forth that would surely ensue if I bothered to call over a judge, so I shrugged it off. I'm not sure why anyone would enter a competitive event if they aren't interested in competing, but I decided to file that in the Inexplicable Primate Behavior folder and not investigate it too closely.

Corey crushed all my vampires and David ousted me shortly thereafter with the power of Group One vampires. Every last one of them had +1 bleed, proving yet again just how totally overpowered those guys are. Matt then wisely waited for Corey to finish vaporizing David's vampires before doing the only rational thing possible when facing down a ravening lunatic with a face like a character in a Ralph Bakshi film seen in the depths of an acid frenzy, putting him down from a great distance with a ridiculously overpowered whale-hunting rifle. Corey exited the stage shortly thereafter, and Matt then deployed Smiling Jack to put David into a chokehold which he wasn't ever able to squrim out of.

Final Round: The Gun Pointed at the Head of the Unaverse
me -> Dave (Una) -> Bob (Setite toolbox) -> Merlin (Nehemiah vote) -> Matt (Cesewayo wall)

I was coming back from refilling my water bottle when I heard from across the room that seating was being chosen. I hadn't seen where anyone had chosen to sit or if it was my turn to pick my seat, but I yelled, "I'm preying on Litwin (ie, Dave)!" and headed for the bathroom. Apparently people thought that I was being my usual goofy self and making a little joke, because when I got back from the bathroom, they were all still waiting for me to pick my seat.

No, really, I wanted to prey on Dave. Thanks to a quick sweep and a quickish instance of being ousted, I'd seen what everyone at the final table was playing, and I didn't think any deck other than mine had the fast ousting power necessary to take down Una before she became insanely annoying. Also, I wanted to oust Dave before he had a chance to take a 45-minute turn with his deck, because I had a plane to catch.

Dave went first, which meant that we had two turns before Una hit the table and one more before she acted. I drew a Pentex in my opening hand, so I was confident that we could knock Dave off the table and then proceed with a normal game of V:TES. Unfortunately, Matt played his copy of Pentex on Merlin's Nehemiah, and I had to go into verbal overdrive to convince Bob to remove it, since I was spending all my actions hammering on Dave's pool as hard as I could. Happily, I was able to convince Bob that this was the right thing to do, and Una found that there was a van outside her apartment before she was able to take any actions.

Bob and Merlin and Matt all played their games while I was busy making mistakes that would prevent me from ousting Dave with the speed that I should have. Bob stole Merlin's Shawnda Dorrit with a Form of Corruption, which was bad because it took votelock away from Merlin. He was having enough trouble getting past the wall of Cesewayo as it was, and now he had to also come up with vote push in order to actually pass the votes that didn't get blocked. Bob stripped away most of Merlin's pool, but a timely pair of Villeins put Merlin back in the game with a fat pile of beads.

Dave had brought out three Pander, one of whom was Feo Ramos, which was just enough blockers to keep me from being able to oust him. I got Dave down to one pool, but then failed to remember that I could tap Feo using his card text and so played a Mind Numb on him instead. By the time the Mind Numbs had worn off, I remembered that I had access to a much easier way to tap Feo, but thought that I had to do so during my untap phase, so I missed another opportunity to oust Dave. Dave then convinced someone to remove the Pentex from Una, pointing out that being on one pool meant that he wouldn't be able to get the Ivory Bow and thereby oust the table. He did get a Shadow of the Beast and a Wolf Companion, which were enough to erase all of the vampires from my ready region except Dirk. Eventually I managed to land a bleed with Dirk and oust Dave.

Bob hadn't thought that I was the kind of person to play with two copies of Pentex in my deck, so I Pentexed his only untapped vampire and ousted him. Merlin then called a Reckless Agitation, and in spite of Matt being at five pool, chose to make me lose five pool and Matt one. I assumed that Merlin was attempting to backoust me and then take his chances with Matt, fearing my much-reduced horde of bleeders more than Matt's Cesewayo. I later emailed Merlin and asked him if that had been the case, and he admitted that what had actually happened was that he hadn't drawn the vote push to pass the vote without Matt's help. Damn you and your inconstant ways, Shawnda Dorrit!

The boys in my mental Planning & Strategery Department had already gone ahead to the airport to clear the way for me, but being top seed, I figured I'd try for a tactical self-oust to see if I could wrangle a tournament win from a 2-2-1 VP split. I told Matt that I wanted him to oust me, and he obligingly bled me down to one pool. I then proceeded to entirely screw up my next turn. I had a hand full of bleed cards, one Mind Numb, and some S:CE. Merlin had an untapped Melinda Galbraith, and neither of Matt's vampires was untapped. I should have bled Merlin and cycled as many cards as I could, hoping to draw a superior Majesty out of him so that I could repeat the process, all in the hopes of drawing my one Daring the Dawn for Aimee Laroux to burn Matt's Smiling Jack with, so that Merlin had the best chance of ousting Matt in the endgame. Failing that, I should have tapped all my vampires to attempt to take out Smiling Jack anyway, to at least tap as many of the Aye on Cesewayo as I could.

Instead of either of those correct choices, I played Mind Numb on Melinda at superior, thus ensuring that Merlin couldn't block, I wouldn't cycle more than one card, and Merlin would have an even harder time in the endgame than if I had done nothing at all. I also didn't bother to take any other actions before spending my last pool to look at another vampire and oust myself. That was extremely poor play on my part, so bad that Robb Dudock understandably wondered later if I was even playing to win.

I scrambled out of the convention hall and was given a ride to the airport by a disconcertingly polite team of Canadian men. While waiting for my flight, I bumped into Matt Morgan and Pete Oh in the airport, and both of those fine gentlemen were kind enough to keep their mockery of my ineptness friendly and gentle. I later found out that Matt won the tournament, surprise surprise, though I haven't yet heard a detailed enough account to know if not making my blunders would have turned the tide in Merlin's favor. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize for my lack of skill, but also to blame Dave for playing an Una deck that he didn't even want to play, and Kevin Mergen for building it for him to borrow. Kevin gets a pass, because he goes to the trouble of making sure that the Origins tournaments are awesome every year, but shame on you, Dave! Next time I see you, you're going out an airlock.

Decklist
Deck Name : Pretty Vacant
Author : John Eno
Description : Weenie Presence bleed, with a very few tricks.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 1 max: 5 average: 3.25
------------------------------------------------------------
1x Shasa Abu Badr 5 PRE cel for Ishtarri:4
1x Antoinette Dubois 4 PRE for mel Daughter :4
1x Bethany Ray 4 PRE aus Toreador:5
1x Loonar 4 PRE cel !Toreador:4
1x Lumumba 4 PRE ani Guruhi:4
1x Marla Kenyon 4 PRE ser Follower :4
1x Reginald Moore 4 PRE primogen Brujah:4
1x Reverend Adams 3 PRE aus Caitiff:4
1x Aimee Laroux 2 for pre Daughter :4
1x Jayne Jonestown 2 PRE !Brujah:4
1x Justine Chen, Inno 2 pre !Toreador:4
1x Dirk 1 pre Caitiff:4

Library [75 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [12]
2x Anarch Troublemaker
2x Antediluvian Awakening
1x Coven, The
2x Jake Washington (Hunter)
3x Life in the City
2x Pentex(TM) Subversion

Action [35]
1x Aranthebes, The Immortal
8x Enchant Kindred
6x Entrancement
5x Legal Manipulations
7x Mind Numb
2x Public Trust
6x Social Charm

Action Modifier [10]
6x Aire of Elation
3x Change of Target
1x Daring the Dawn

Action Modifier / Combat [3]
3x Force of Personality

Combat [14]
5x Majesty
9x Staredown

Event [1]
1x Bitter and Sweet Story, The

Pretty basic stuff.

The Antediluvian Awakenings are great tech for keeping pool totals around the table low and for encouraging people who aren't my prey to go forward, both of which are exactly what this deck wants to see happen. If a vampire happens to get burned in order to kill the Awakening, that's great too.

The Legal Manipulations and maybe Social Charms should all be Public Trusts, as that way I can spend my transfers digging for new vampires rather than having to spending transfers to bring them out.

I would totally put a second copy of Bitter and Sweet Story in here if I owned one. It's a very powerful card for any kind of deck that intends on pressing the gas pedal to the floor for the entire game.

I think I'll throw a copy of Leverage into the deck, just to mess with peoples' maths. Also, Leverage allows Jake Washington to oust someone every once in a while, and that's really the key to winning with any deck.

Requests From the Audience II

2010-07-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

Ricardo Marta, the prince of Lisboa, asked if he could see Robb's decklist from Origins Reportage #3. Robb was kind enough to not only furnish the decklist, but to provide extensive comments as well. Without further ado...

Deck Name : Some Girls: Track 10
Author : Robert Dudock (Robba Yaga)

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 1 max: 5 average: 3
----------------------------------------------------------
1x Celeste Lamontagne 5 ANI PRO for !Gangrel:4
1x Mowgli 5 FOR PRO ani cel !Gangrel:4
1x Alessandro Garcia 4 pot pre pro !Brujah:4
1x Charlie Tyne 4 obf pro ser !Gangrel:4
1x Scarlet Carson O'T 4 CEL pro !Gangrel:3
1x Bill Butler 3 pot pro !Gangrel:4
1x Calvin Cleaver 3 for pro Gangrel:4
1x Lula Burch 3 for pro !Gangrel:4
1x Leo Washington 2 cel pro !Gangrel:4
3x Anarch Convert 1 Caitiff:0

Library [90 cards]
----------------------------------------------------------
Master [15]
1x Anarch Free Press, The
1x Anarch Railroad
1x Campground Hunting Ground
1x Club Illusion
2x Dummy Corporation
1x Garibaldi-Meucci Museum
1x Hospital Food
6x Path of the Feral Heart, The
1x Twisted Forest

Action [34]
20x Shattering
14x Skullduggery

Action Modifier [13]
10x CrimethInc.
3x Monkey Wrench

Action Modifier/Combat [5]
5x Rapid Change

Combat [7]
3x Form of Mist
4x Leathery Hide

Equipment [8]
6x Anarch Manifesto, An
1x Laptop Computer
1x Palatial Estate

Reaction [6]
6x Friend of Mine

Retainer [2]
1x J. S. Simmons, Esq.
1x Tasha Morgan

Deck Comments: This deck is an attempt to deal with three problems.

The first problem is bounce. Bounce is terribly strong, but usually everyone is packing about the same amount and the person that comes up short becomes the bleed sink.

The second problem is an overly aggressive predator. There is only one thing worse than not even getting a chance to play one's game because one has been mugged from behind almost immediately and that is...

Cross-table interference. This is the third and worst problem. Votes propping up one's prey, Eagle Sight's, etc can make an all but guarenteed VP feel like trying to blow out those "magic candles" on a birthday cake that keep relighting. You just want the damn cake, but everyone is forcing you to keep wasting time blowing out the stupid candles!

So, the idea is simple. Get out small minions and get them to be Anarch quickly. Becoming Anarch used to be an issue, but the Converts generally appear often enough to alleviate that problem. Once the deck has some Anarch minions on the table, some building might occur (getting Manifestos or bleed retainers), some small, stealthed bleeds may occur to move cards (Skullduggery), or some Shatterings may be dropped on important minions that cannot defend themselves.

At Origins, I had the curious situation that almost all my predators (for the entire tournament) were running vote decks. Nevertheless when I played the deck correctly, I got a game win. Shattering bouncers is a must, because with Club Illusion, a retainer and a Monkey Wrench, a 4 cap minion can unload a bleed of 6. Shattering key predator's minions can buy the deck time and Shattering cross-table interference (Maris Streck or Anneke as examples) can simplify life in general.

In this version of the deck, bleed is the oust mechanism and not the Shatterings themselves. I tried a version online with Tension in the Ranks, Dragonbound and Fame with not as much success. Fame tends to backfire and losing a card to Dragonbound is unacceptable. Tension tends to go away when people are sick of it.

Problems/Thoughts: I added some bleed reduction, which seemed good in our local metagame, but almost no one bled me at Origins! These may need to be removed in favor of something else. Stealth was never an issue generally and neither was blood on the vampires, even without the Path. Pool gain is the biggest problem. The only pool gain in this version is an oust and that's obviously not enough. However, taking blood from small minions is not a great choice. I also think there are too many expensive Master cards in this version, draining too much pool. The next version will have some minimal blood gain, less costly Masters and maybe a couple Delaying Tactics.

I welcome any comments, suggestions or feedback. I like this deck a lot and I hope to use it in a revised form in the future.

Robb Dudock

Origins Reportage #4: I Hear Dominate Is Good

2010-07-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

This was the big qualifier event, so I knew that I had to do my best if I wanted to screw with other peoples' chances to qualify. Also, because I hadn't yet gotten into the finals of any of the previous tournaments, I knew it was time to buckle the hell down, flex some steel, and spout some other tough-guy phraseology in order to go home with something more substantial than disgrace in my pocket. Nothing's tougher than a pissed-off lawyer with a gun and some Dominate, so it was time to let the Ventrue off the leash. (Also, I figured I'd have a good time watching peoples' reactions when they figured out that I wasn't playing just another Law Firm deck.)

Round One: Contestation Is a State of Mind
me (Lawyers, Guns and Money II) -> Darby (Jeremy MacNeil and friends) -> Evan (Ventrue Law Firm) -> Bob (Kindred Spirits stealth/bleed) -> Dave (Ventrue)

Before this round began, I related a story that's been floating around the Boston playgroup for years now, about a game in which Dave had a Monocle of Clarity on his vampire, asked a question of his prey during his untap phase, waited for an answer and then followed that up with, "And now for my Monocle of Clarity question..." Good stuff, made even better when the first turn that Dave's Graham Gottesman took was to Govern at superior, Freak Drive, and then equip the Monocle of Clarity.

After Dave got out Graham, I told him that we'd need to have a chat in order to avoid a very embarrassing game, at which point Evan said, "Yeah, about that..." Miraculously, we were able to work out a three-way agreement so that each of us could get out two vampires without any of us contesting. Dave got the slightly shorter end of the stick on that deal, ending up with Juniper while Evan and I got princes and justicars, but at least we were all able to play the game.

Darby decided early on that me having vampires with Dominate wasn't cool, so Jeremy MacNeil swung by Mustafa's place to say hi, drop off some really nice herbed focaccia he'd made, and oh yeah also crush Mustafa's face. I played three damage prevention cards and kept Mustafa out of torpor, which I thought was a pretty good deal for me, given the amount of Potence-hate which had just been thrown my way. The upside was that Darby had worn out Jeremy pretty well by spending a bunch of his blood and getting whacked with a cane a few times, and he seemed to think that the amount of damage prevention I'd just shown off would be par for the course during the entire game. The downside was that I didn't have any prevent left when Mustafa blocked one of Juniper's bleeds, got smacked with a Molotov Cocktail and had his Fangs Pulled. Mustafa recovered quickly enough, and one of Bob's vampires was even nice enough to drive him to the dentist for his first appointment, but those two turns were a good reminder that I'd need to be very careful about picking my combats during this game.

Darby mostly left me alone after that, squeezing a new "I won't bleed you next turn if you don't rush me" deal out of me practically every turn. I know it was cowardice, but I wanted to have ready vampires! History will exonerate me. As a result of those filthy deals, Evan was getting beaten down pretty badly. Evan tried some moves against Bob, but his bleeds were bounced and he didn't seem to be drawing much in the way of votes. Ruth McGinley did get her Ra Kissed for blocking a KRC with Telepathic Misdirection, but she came back to the ready region next turn.

Darby's deck was built to bleed and rush, but he was wise enough not to begin bleeding until both Mary Anne Blaire and Johannes Castelein were in torpor. Once they were, he unleashed a tonne of Presence actions and mods, all at about the same time that Dave apparently ran out of bounce and Bob's bleeds overpowered Dave's Govern-based bloat. Once he was knocked out of the game, Evan revealed that he did have a hand full of bounce, though whether or not Darby would've been better off throwing some bleeds down the pipe to slide leftways is open to debate, since he immediately had to begin bargaining with Bob once Evan was ousted. Darby wanted me ousted, since he knew that my Deflections were doomful for him in our current three-way position, but at the same time he couldn't allow Bob to get too much of a lead on him or else he'd be ousted during the endgame before he could destroy all of Bob's minions. Enter the Haggling Phase.

I just keep my yap shut during this phase, usually, and this time was no exception. This is because what I often see happen during this phase is this: two or more smart people try to convince one another to do a dumb thing. This thing will help the do-ee, but not the do-er. Repeat this attempt at persuasion one or more times for each person in the conversation, and then move to end of line when everyone just goes ahead and does what they were going to do anyway.

Now, I've got no issue with negotiation in this or any other game. I encourage it, completely. But I find that I'm not ever able to convince anyone to do anything that's not in their best interests anyway, and people aren't able to convince anyone else to do stuff that's not in their best interests either. That's why my form of table talk is almost always suggestions about how someone can improve their position, and by the way improve mine, rather than suggestions about how they can screw themselves over to help me. That's why, during the Haggling Phase, I tend to eat that apple I brought along or glance around at what people at other tables are playing or whatever.

The point of all this is that I don't remember what Darby and Bob eventually settled on. I do recall that Bob said he had a Spying Mission that he could play on a bleed if I bounced it, which he'd done once already. That seemed okay to Darby, so Bob charged forward with a bleed, leading with the vampire who already had the Spying Mission on him. (You can see why Bob was doing that, though I think he should have spread the Spying Missions out to one of his other minions so that all his bleed-eggs wouldn't be wrapped up in one rushable basket after he'd ousted me.) I tried to block the bleed, and Bob apparently ran out of stealth cards, because he played the Spying Mission, all right...but at basic. Whoops.

I "let" him stealth past me and Deflected, which Bob canceled with Touch of Clarity. I shrugged, played On the Qui Vive with my other vampire and played another Deflection. Darby experienced a instance of red vision and cordially expressed his opinion on the overpoweredness of Dominate. I was worried about him having an aneurysm, but not so worried that I didn't redirect another stealthed bleed into his pool. Shortly thereafter, I ousted him, and since I knew that Bob was out of stealth, it was easy enough to catch his vampires and destroy them. Once he had no vampires, a few bleeds were all it took to take home the game win.

Round Two: The Most Generous Infernalists
me -> Robyn (!Toreador breed/boon) -> Hugh (Nakhthorheb Purge) -> Jeff (!Salubri combat toolbox) -> Cameron (Unnamed bloat)

Years of playing with a certain V:TES superstar have forced me to learn the advanced techniques of AntiPealjitsu, the martial art devoted to shutting down breed/boon decks, so I wasn't terribly worried about having Robyn as my prey. I played smart and blocked the Embrace actions, knowing from long experience that those people who tell you that you should allow the Embrace actions and then block the Embraces when they hunt? Yeah, those people are wrong. Don't make the assumption that the breed/boon deck doesn't have sources of bloodgain other than hunting.

Hugh did an early Purge, but picked small guys for his cross-table buddies to send to naptime, and no one blocked me rescuing Joao, so no harm done. Cameron bled into me many, many times, but his deck seemed to be built to make a lot of pool rather than take a lot of pool away from its prey. Bleeding with the Unnamed, using Greater Curse at the Daimonion level, and then playing I Am Legion gains you a bunch of pool every turn, but not adding Sense the Sin or other bleed mods means your prey can pretty much ignore you.

I ousted Robyn, which I've felt bad about doing on the few occasions that I've done so due to her becoming so despondent when it happens, but this was no time for empathy. This was time for cruelty of the most atavistic kind, the sort of knife-edged ruthlessness that cuts through even the strongest compassion. From that point on, Hugh couldn't achieve any successful Purges, leading to a hilarious turn in which he declared, "I can't do Graverobbing. I mean, I don't have Graverobbing in my hand. Uh. Discard Graverobbing."

The most fantastic play of the game was when Jeff, low on pool, had his Famed Uriel with one blood step in front of a bleed which would have ousted him. Uriel's nosiness showed us all the contents of Hugh's hand, and then Uriel accepted a punch from Hugh's vampire in order to empty himself down to zero blood, so that he could blow himself up and have two pool rain down into Jeff's lap from the resultant explosion of Heaven's Unforgiving Eye at basic. After that bit of climatic action, we all knew that we couldn't live up to Jeff's precedent, and decided to futz around doing nothing until the judge called time.

Round Three: That's What Happens When You Don't Know Your Lines
me -> Mark (Carna wall) -> John (weenie Auspex) -> Jen (Kindred Spirits stealth/bleed) -> Pete (Zombo Combo)

The week before I left for Origins, I'd considered changing up the combat package of my deck in order to work in more guns and get them via Concealed Weapons instead of taking actions to do so. Getting the Shotguns the hard way hadn't ever been a problem for me before, though, and I was wary about changing the ratios of a deck I knew so well without adequate time to test out how the changes would affect the way that the deck played, so I decided against it. Sitting next to Carna, who mocked both my attempt to get a gun and my damage prevention, has made me think that the next iteration of this deck is definitely going for long trenchcoats and concealed weapons permits. At least I got to trigger a look of surprise on Mark's face when he realized that I wasn't playing a vanilla Law Firm deck.

Mark and John and I didn't do a whole lot for the first chunk of the game, other than watch Jen pile into Pete and idly discuss whether or not John would try to save Pete with an Eagle's Sight. We had a lot of discussions about what we would and wouldn't let each other do, with the consensus mostly being that hunts were okay and everything else was out. Mark did manage to use the Magic of Will Smith to craft himself an Ivory Bow, but I was a lot less concerned with that than his ability to Theft my Vitae away.

Pete struggled mightily to get The Baron's bloat mechanism running, but he couldn't keep up with Jen's relentless attacks on his pool. He sent Shambling Hordes over to wreck some Spirited Kindred, but they were too slow with their rushes to take Jen's vampires down in time to save him, and even with the existence of vampires Unmasked on national television they only helped Jen cycle to more bleed mods when they tried to block, so Pete was ousted fairly quickly. Suddenly I had a stealth/bleed predator behind me, and suddenly I was in the game again. Oh, stealth/bleed decks, how I love you when I'm prepared for you.

A couple of Jen's bleeds went flying around the table, and a few of them landed in Mark's pool, which was totally okay with me. Around this time I had a bunch of Governs and Conditionings in my hand, and I couldn't Govern at superior because the only vampire I had in my uncontrolled region was Lodin, who was also in my ready region. In order to get those useless cards out of my hand to get to more of that sweet, life-affirming bleed bounce, I cycled them by using them to bleed into Mark. He apparently hadn't studied his script for this scene, though, because even though he had out Neighbor John and Carna (who, as we all know, do nothing but block and redirect bleeds all day long), he just accepted my bleeds and was ousted. I was so shocked that I didn't even realize he was ousted until he reached out to shake my hand, because I hadn't been paying any attention to his pool up until that point. Go me.

I played as smartly as I could against John, not taking any actions at stealth and using maneuvers and presses to put his vampire with a Deer Rifle into torpor. From that point on, I took actions to diablerize that vampire until he'd lost about half of his ready region, and then I was able to bleed him out. Jen ran into the exact same issue that Bob had in round one, where my permanent intercept and Second Traditions ran her out of stealth in hand and library soon thereafter, so I cleaned up this game and wandered off to find something to eat before the final.

Final Round: A World of Teflon
me -> Connor (Giovanni powerbleed) -> Bob (Kindred Spirits stealth/bleed) -> Karl (Black Hand Coolers) -> Rodd (Tremere vote toolbox)

I was top seed going into the final, which didn't help because I didn't know what anyone was playing. Oh, sure, Karl had told me his deck choice before the tournament had begun, and I'd actually played my first round with Bob, but I somehow managed to totally forget both of those facts. I had seen that Rodd was playing Tremere when I'd walked around a bit earlier, so I figured that sitting in front of him was probably a relatively safe place to be. While it's totally possible to make a very speedy Tremere deck, in theory, in practice I've never seen anyone try it. This turned out to be the perfect choice, so apparently my mojo is strongest when I'm tired, having a good time, and not worrying too much about winning. Make a note of that, self.

The final was over quite quickly. We were all playing with bleed bounce, so there was a point when Connor admonished Bob to be more responsible with his bleeds, to which I replied, "That's not usually something you need to say to your prey at a five-player table." Unfortunately, Rodd didn't really get to play. He got out Troius, who attempted to call a Kine Resources Contested but got blocked by my Carlton Van Wyk. On Bob's next turn, two bleeds were Deflected to Rodd, and he only blocked the first one. Sensing weakness, Karl uncorked a bottle of unblended 16-year Dominate bleed, shredding through something like 14 pool in four actions, thereby leaving Rodd with nothing but a peaty aftertaste.

I didn't do much except get a Shotgun and bleed Connor for one a lot, largely because my hand was full of Second Traditions and Deflections, which was a pretty good hand to have with all the oust-power behind me. Bob was ousted next, but in order to do so, Connor's vampires had to get pretty low on blood. Karl held out for a while but with consistently less and less pool, and just as it occurred to me that I should tell him to bleed into me with everything he had so that I could at least unload the Deflections I'd been hoarding before the game ended up with only two players, Connor ousted him. At this point, his vampires had almost no blood, and one of them was in torpor from when I'd blocked a hunt. At this point the game got dull quickly, as I simply bled for one with all my vampires each turn and blocked everything Connor tried to do. He wasn't ever able to make a recovery in the face of my implacable barrier of Second Traditions and Carlton, and eventually I torporized all his vampires and bled him out, winning the tournament due to my seeding. Most importantly, as Matt Morgan pointed out, I'd trampled the dreams of a child underfoot, and the opportunity to pull that off is the number one reason I play V:TES. (The number two reason being to have chances to spend time with Hugh so I can make fun of him, of course.)

Decklist
Deck Name : Lawyers, Guns and Money II
Author : John Eno
Description : Second iteration of the Ventrue prince Patience deck. More bleed, less combat.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 3 max: 10 average: 6.91667
------------------------------------------------------------
3x Lodin (Olaf Holte) 8 DOM FOR PRE aus pro prince Ventrue:5
2x Mary Anne Blaire 10 AUS DOM FOR PRE ani pot justicar Ventrue:5
2x Graham Gottesman 7 DOM FOR obf pre tha prince Ventrue:5
2x Mustafa, The Heir 6 FOR PRE cel dom prince Ventrue:4
1x Jephta Hester 5 DOM FOR aus !Ventrue:4
1x Joao Bile 5 DOM FOR pre Ventrue:4
1x Ulrike Rothbart 3 dom for !Ventrue:4

Library [80 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [15]
2x Anarch Troublemaker
5x Blood Doll
1x Ephor
1x Giant's Blood
1x KRCG News Radio
1x Papillon
1x Pentex(TM) Subversion
1x Smiling Jack, The Anarch
1x Ventrue Headquarters
1x WMRH Talk Radio

Action [9]
1x Aranthebes, The Immortal
8x Govern the Unaligned

Action Modifier [8]
2x Conditioning
2x Foreshadowing Destruction
4x Freak Drive

Ally [1]
1x Carlton Van Wyk (Hunter)

Combat [23]
3x Hidden Strength
3x Indomitability
4x Resilience
4x Rolling with the Punches
2x Taste of Vitae
2x Unflinching Persistence
5x Weighted Walking Stick

Equipment [4]
1x Bowl of Convergence
2x Sawed-Off Shotgun

Political Action [2]
1x Anarchist Uprising
1x Banishment

Reaction [18]
8x Deflection
2x On the Qui Vive
8x Second Tradition: Domain

Retainer [1]
1x Mr. Winthrop

I think this deck is actually slightly better than the !Ventrue deck which it's based on. The titles and Headquarters mean that you don't need to worry as much about cross-table voters taking you down or even getting pinged with the tail end of damage from KRC votes, and being able to pass votes of your own adds a bit of needed variety to the offense. Being able to diablerize without fear of a blood hunt is very handy, too. I think that all these benefits outweigh the fact that this deck doesn't block quite as well as the !Ventrue do, since the only Auspex here is that used to power the Bowl of Convergence (and that usually just as a free Sport Bike, since Mary Anne doesn't often come into play).

I'm going to try another iteration of this, minus the Sticks and plus more guns and Concealed Weapons, as I mentioned above. Just to keep experimenting with what can be done with this crypt, which I love, I'll also reduce the permanent intercept in favor of more multiacting and offensive votes.

Bonus Round One: Like Son, Like Father
me (Apollo) -> Scott (Tyrol) -> Dave (Boomer) -> Hugh (Ellen) -> Karl (Adama) -> Darby (Zarek)

Ah, Battlestar Galactica. Not only the best translation of pop culture to boardgame ever designed, but a wholly wonderful game in itself. Its nearly limitless replay value is an especially strong selling point for me, given how many times I've played it. It's also probably the most immersive boardgame I've ever played, consistently giving me the feeling that I'm actually playing through a season of the show.

Battlestar Galactica is based on the most recent version of the television show of the same name, a show about the apocalyptic conflict between humankind and the robots they've created. In this new take on the show, the cylons have created a new breed of robots who are human in everything but name, and it's this concept that the boardgame centers around. Each player takes on the role of one of the characters from the show and is given a loyalty card that determines whether the player is a human or a cylon secretly posing as a human. The humans try survive the frequent cylon attacks and deal with logistical and political issues within their fleet, all handled by the game itself rather than being controlled by any of the players, while the hidden cylons try to sabotage the human efforts to avoid destruction. To complicate matters further, a second set of loyalty cards are handed out at the midpoint of the game, meaning that it's entirely possible for one or more players who had thought they were human to be activated as sleeper agents and switch sides to the cylon team. The result is that gameplay is very tense and paranoid, as everyone tries to suss out who's human and who isn't.

I made sure I got to play in this game, fearing that otherwise my life would have been worth nothing in Darby's eyes. At one point he had mentioned that the whole reason he was attending Origins at all was to play Galactica with me, and I still don't know if he was joking or not. What can I say? He's fierce, and I'm easily cowed. Scott, whose tidy DIY travel set we were using, was pleased to finally be playing the game with people who had some experience with it, and wanted to try out the New Caprica expansion, an alternate endgame scenario that comes with the expansion to the base game. I'd played the expansion a bunch of times, but never with the New Caprica module, so I was more than happy to see how the game would play out after the humans made planetfall.

My initial loyalty card told me that I was a cylon, which meant that at least I wouldn't get any nasty surprises regarding my heritage in the middle of the game. In order to keep me from feeling like I was getting short shrift in the nasty surprise department, the game was kind enough to give us a turn-two Legendary Discovery, the only way that the humans can get closer to their goal by actively trying. (Excepting this one particular event, the speed of the humans' progress is effectively random.) I hoped that the skill check would fail and the humans wouldn't gain any distance, given that almost no one had a full hand of skillcards yet, but Hugh was smart enough to play an Investigative Committee on the check. This forced everyone to bid on the check openly, meaning that I couldn't even provide a gentle nudge in the direction of failure, and the humans managed to pass the check. Insolent little hoo-man cockroaches!

I flew off toward the small pack of cylon raiders in space, and got shot down out of my viper. Fine by me: a show of bravery immediately followed by failure seemed like a useful way to begin implementation of The Plan, even if I had no idea what the overall shape of The Plan might turn out to be. (I still don't, even after having watched the entirety of the television show.) I also convinced Karl to play an Executive Order on me so that I could get out of Sickbay before my turn began, but someone pointed out that it would be much more resource-efficient to launch two vipers and have me jump into one of them using Apollo's special ability. I couldn't hang out with Doc Cottle all day without raising suspicion, so back out into the void I went, this time hanging out back by the civilian ships in order to "guard" them. At least being in space prevented that hag Ellen from trying to get into my pants in order to give me a card and try to use her discount cylon detector on me.

Not long thereafter, we made a hyperspace jump. Our admiral informed us that we'd jumped three distance, thereby already moving us to the sleeper phase. Great Holy Ones and Zeroes, these humans were quick. Something was going to need to be done to stop their little romp, and in a hurry. Scott outed himself as the sympathetic cylon and gave his loyalty card to Karl, which I guessed meant that Scott had probably gotten a pro-cylon objective. Putting extra suspicion on the admiral or president by giving them an extra loyalty card, particularly when both cylons are still undercover, isn't something that generally helps the hoo-mans win.

I drew the second You Are a Cylon card. That meant that I'd have to reveal myself as soon as possible, because otherwise I didn't have a teammate. I spent some time thinking about who to recruit to my cause during the other players' turns, knowing that I couldn't hesitate to give my loyalty card away once I took the action to reveal or else everyone would figure out that it was a team-switching card. Just before my turn began, I decided on Karl, whom I was hesitant to pick because he already had a bonus loyalty card, and having yet another card would generate a lot of suspicion. However, Dave was in the brig for having chosen to play Boomer, Ellen was too busy cozying up to the boys in power to be much use to me, population wasn't low enough for Zarek's ability to be useful to a cylon, and I needed to slow down the humans to prevent them from getting another three-distance hyperspace jump.

Once my turn came around, I revealed that I wanted nothing to do with the talking monkeys and shot their president in the chest just to show how serious I was about my scorn. Darby wasn't a great choice of target in terms of the turn order, because I knew he'd get back out of Sickbay via an Executive Order before his turn came around, but he also had the most skillcards in hand at the moment and I figured that making him discard five of them was a pretty good deal.

Karl kept his head down, which was good, since I was more than happy to draw attention with my antics. Probably because Darby wasn't letting Dave get out of the brig, Dave decided that Darby must be the other hidden cylon and suggesting airlocking him. Karl was smart enough not to have suggested this himself, but immediately backed Dave's play and pointed out the many ways in which the president had not conducted himself in a manner befitting a hoo-man. Remember this, fellow cylons: people who suggest radical courses of action always draw suspicion, but those who support those causes of action appear loyal.

Apparently Karl and Dave had Hugh convinced that Darby was a no-good toaster, so out the airlock he went. Well, dang! Turned out that he'd been born of a woman and not a milkbath after all. Zarek was replaced by Baltar, despite the fact that post-sleeper Baltar can't use his once-per-game special ability even if his previous incarnation hadn't used it, because Darby knew that Roslin is a crappy president and didn't want Hugh to be in charge of the government, for some reason that I didn't catch.

The untimely demise of Zarek made the fleet sad, and morale was starting to look a bit worn out, so I moved on over to Caprica in order to camp there and try to manipulate crises so that morale would continue to be hit. Karl came home to the cylon fleet around this time, and we worked together to kick puppies, broadcast The Swans over the human fleet radio, do snarky standup comedy routines to mock the humans' chances of success and otherwise lower morale. Our efforts to sad-make paid off big dividends, as the humans got too depressed to bother trying to continue and ran out of morale before they even made it to New Caprica. Scott revealed that his agenda had been to help the cylons win but salvage all the human equipment - apparently Tyrol continued loving his machines even after he found out that he was also a machine - but I seem to recall there there were still some holes in the hull from the bomb which Karl had thoughtfully armed and hidden before resigning as admiral.

Bonus Round Two: Who Thought Colonizing This Planet Was a Good Idea, Again?
me (Six) -> Darby (Tyrol) -> Dave (Boomer) -> Scott (Baltar) -> Karl (Helo) -> Hugh (Cain)

Once more unto the breach, dear friends! Given the poor hoo-mans' inability to even make it as far as their new colony during the last go-round, I decided to take pity on them and play a Cylon Leader, who would most likely be sympathetic to the meatbags' cause. Also, since I was choosing my character last in the order, and since no one else had picked a Cylon Leader and I'm not a big fan of the sympathetic cylon mechanic, choosing a Leader was the most painless way of sidestepping that mechanic.

Scott uses an ingenious houserule which makes sure that a six-player game featuring a cylon leader doesn't end up with three cylons versus three humans, which is almost always a nightmarish loss for the humans. My agenda was pro-human, so that meant there would be two cylons hidden amongst the humans. My goal was to help the humans win, but be infiltrating among them and not in the brig once the game ended. In the past, when I've played without the New Caprica board, this agenda has been trivially easy to complete, so I was disappointed that I'd received a goal that wasn't at all challenging.

Initially, this round was much easier on the humans than the first one had been. I infiltrated the fleet almost immediately and did what I could to help them, knowing that I'd need to earn their trust early to keep them from throwing me in the brig or out an airlock. It quickly became clear that if there was a hidden cylon, he wasn't doing a particularly good job at undermining the humans, which meant that everyone probably still thought that they were human. Good use of the Pegasus guns meant that our lack of ace pilots didn't matter much, and none of our resources were running particularly low, though morale had taken a few hits.

By the time we reached the sleeper phase, I was in full Jane Goodall mode and had been accepted amongst them. Boomer marched off to the brig, as she always does, and no one wanted to let her out until we knew whose loyalty she now espoused. Scott helped pass a critical check by using a combination of Investigative Committee and his special ability, so we knew he was human, and on his next turn he fired up Ol' Baltar's Cylon Detection and Fruit Juicer and informed us that Hugh was also human.

Human president and admiral? Check. Smooth sailing for the most part, with a few bumps in the road probably thrown up by a hidden but not particularly effective cylon? Check. Blind Jump at distance six to make sure that we didn't get screwed on the last leg of the trip to New Caprica? Check. We moved everyone to the new board and prepared for the showdown.

Karl had revealed shortly before we made planetfall, and he moved amongst the occupation forces, quickly throwing me into Detention. Crap. Somebody had forgotten to lock the door on the brig when we landed on the colony, so Boomer was hanging out with the other humans in the Resistance HQ. She decided that now was as good a time as any to show why we'd been smart not to let her out of the brig, and set up Hugh to be executed. He was obviously human at that point, so we got hit with a morale loss and Hugh lost a bunch of skillcards. We retaliated by executing Boomer, to prevent her from using her auto-scout ability more than anything else, since Dave had played so many skillcards on Cain's execution that he didn't lose many for being executed. Hugh picked Adama so that we'd have some slight help passing skill checks drawn on his turn, but got thrown into Detention with me shortly thereafter. All the other humans camped out in the Shipyard and started sawing spaceship keys out of blocks of soap, which seemed like the only useful action to take at that time.

I had been feverishly scheming to get myself out of the pokey. I was so close to victory that I could taste it, and I did not want to be left behind on New Caprica to be executed when the humans jumped away from the planet, as that would violate my win condition. I saved up my hand, making sure that I had a Declare Emergency since the colors on the check to escape Detention didn't include green, but unfortunately I didn't draw either yellow or purple, so I was at the mercy of the humans as to whether or not I escaped. I assumed that they wouldn't help me much, if at all. Even though I'd proven myself useful, they could just as easily leave me behind during the endgame and suffer nothing for it.

While Adama and I were in Detention, our morale was suffering critical losses. It seemed like every other crisis card had a tough skill check with a morale loss as the penalty for failure, and we just weren't able to play enough cards to pass all of them. It was like some bright light in the Colonial administration had thought it would be a great idea to loop Come and See on a movie screen big enough to be seen by everyone in town, and everyone was getting increasingly depressed as a result.

Galactica returned to orbit, and I made a huge mistake. I forgot that I now had a very simple way to get out of Detention and walk amongst the humans again. I could have simply bashed my head into a wall until I stopped moving and then woken up on the Resurrection Ship, using my next turn to head over to the Human Fleet to begin infiltrating again. Instead I made the check to try to escape from Detention, and to my initial delight all the humans helped chip in to free me. That delight turned to horror when I saw that we'd overshot the amount needed to pass the check by nearly twice as much as necessary.

That was a lot of wasted skillcards for my mistake, and though we were able to continue stealing ship keys and evacuating civilian ships, we didn't have any pilots to fight off the cylon raiders in space. A bad roll on one of the nuke launches meant that one of the two basestars was still floating near the Galactica, and a Broadcast Location played on a reckless skill check meant that another basestar showed up not long after the first one had been destroyed. We sent Tyrol up to the battlestar to launch unmanned vipers to try to defend the civilians. The vipers made a valiant effort, but the huge swarm of raiders eventually punched through their defenses and destroyed our vacation ship, fatally dropping our morale down to zero. I thought it was fitting that the humans had lost because of their noble sacrifice in order to save someone who wasn't even a member of their species, but then, it was easy for me to be philosophical about it, since my race wasn't the one which had just been erased from the cosmos. Sorry, guys.

Requests From the Audience

2010-07-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

Ishvalan over at the Ishvalan V:TES blog asked if I had any decks featuring Shattering Crescendo, and it just so happens that I do.

Deck Name : Louder Than a Bomb (Trophy Variant)
Author : John Eno
Description : Hit the high notes and earn some trophies for it.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 3 max: 8 average: 6
------------------------------------------------------------
3x Scout Youngwood 8 MEL OBF PRE for qui 2 votes Daughter :6
3x Hillanvale 5 FOR MEL obf Daughter :6
2x Benjamin Rose 7 AUS OBF ani pot prince Nosferatu:5
1x Bloody Mary 8 AUS DEM OBF pre primogen Malkavian:5
1x Arthur Denholm 5 AUS DEM obf Malkavian:5
1x Janet Langer 3 MEL pre Daughter :5
1x Veejay Vinod 3 AUS Nagaraja:6

Library [75 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [15]
4x Blood Doll
1x Charisma
1x Command Performance
1x Elder Library
1x Fame
1x Giant's Blood
1x Jake Washington (Hunter)
1x Paris Opera House
1x Trophy: Diablerie
1x Trophy: Hunting Ground
1x Trophy: Library
1x Trophy: Revered

Action [20]
4x Red List
16x Shattering Crescendo

Action Modifier [16]
3x Cloak the Gathering
3x Faceless Night
3x Lost in Crowds
4x Siren's Lure
3x Spying Mission

Action Modifier/Combat [3]
3x Swallowed by the Night

Ally [6]
4x Caiaphas Smith
1x Impundulu
1x Ossian

Event [1]
1x Dragonbound

Reaction [14]
2x Eyes of Argus
3x On the Qui Vive
7x Telepathic Misdirection
2x Wake with Evening's Freshness

There's a lot of theoretical goodness here that didn't actually work out very well the one time that I played the deck. Using Caiaphas Smith seems like a great idea, since he can either block stuff or else travel right, at which point you've got a guaranteed target for a Red List. If Ossian gets stolen, as he inevitably will, that's another guaranteed target for some trophy-hunting.

There were some issues that came up during play that I hadn't foreseen when building it. The Siren's Lures were pretty worthless, because I usually didn't have a second Daughter out, and the non-Daughter actions aren't generally the ones that I care about definitively making happen successfully.

The main problem is that the deck is actually too focused. There were a number of times during play when I had enough stealth and Crescendos in hand to torporize two of my prey's minions, but iddn't want to because it would prevent him from going forward. It was the classic rush deck dilemma, but given how much more card-efficient Crescendos are than rush, I think just dialing back the number of Crescendos will solve that issue. And those card slots can then be used to add more ousting power to the deck, which was its other issue.

I don't plan on playing this again - trophies are still too much work for how much they pay off - but hopefully this might serve as a useful blueprint for a decklist.

Origins Special Report: US Championships Final Round

2010-07-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

As promised earlier, I pulled some strings, called in some favors, and cashed in some markers in order to get a special guest writer to give us the account of his journey to success in the US Championships. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm extremely pleased to present to you: Jay "The Way" Kristoff, our newly-minted US Champion!

Championship Perspective
by Jay Kristoff

It was the date of the US Championship that made it so important for me to try to win. My first child was expected in early July. That meant the US Championship in late June would likely be the last major V:TES tournament I could participating in for quite some time. I wanted to win it, so I chose to use the deck with which I have had the most success in casual play this year. The deck that is now known as "Father To Be" surprised me with how well it had performed in numerous plays against strong, local competition.

About one month before the US Championship I stopped playing it locally, but spent a lot of time with it at my thinking table. Many, many trial draws of the library and crypt shaped the final card ratios. I knew as the Championship drew nearer that the deck was finely tuned and primed for victory. I was concerned that my child would arrive early, and force me out of the Championship. I spoke with my friend and Columbus playgroup member James Messer, who agreed to play my deck in case I was unable to do so. I also spoke with the Queen of the Nosferatu, Robyn Tatu, to see if she had Nos plans for the US Championship (to avoid contesting). My enthusiasm and eagerness to play my deck in the Championship betrayed my usual policy of secrecy about my deck choice before tournaments.

Each preliminary game of the Championship was amazing. In round one, I was decimated before I could take an action with my first vampire when my predator, Matt Green, used Spirit Marionette/Heidelberg Castle/Daring the Dawn to torp and empty my Cock Robin. I was able to rebound from that awful start, oust my prey, and finish with 1.5 vps. That was the first time my deck had ever not won a game. Even with that recovery, I knew that would be my worst game of the day.

Round two was a four-player table with Connor Bell as my prey, John Bell as my predator, and Eric Chiang as my cross-table "ally," playing his Tupdog deck. Eric destroyed Connor (playing DEM bleed with lots of Sudden Reversal) first. He then smashed John (Toreador-anti breed/boon) next. I was soon to follow when Eric torped and then Graverobbed my Josef von Bauren. Connor was wise enough to stay in the game (rather than transfer out, despite my request). His decision to persevere gave him the chance to play S.R. on Eric's Fame that would have allowed Eric to sweep the table. That gave me an extra turn to assemble Eric's oust (with a combo of vote damage, bleed damage, and Cam. Seg. pool loss).

Round three was extra crazy when my cross-table "ally" Kurt Kopp called a Justicar Retribution after a Cryptic Rider. Kurt thought that he would take vote control by burning the two Inner Circle members at the table: Mindy Bell's Stanislava, and my Josef von Bauren. Neither Mindy nor I were Kurt's predator or prey, but Kurt felt it was in his best interest to ruin the games of both of his cross-table allies. Shortly after no blocks were declared on the J.R. vote, I pointed out that my I.C. member only has +1 bleed, and therefor isn't concerned with Justicar Retribution. Later in that game I felt it was time for Kurt and his Renegade Garous to leave the table, so I bled into my prey, Pete Oh, knowing that Pete would Deflect to his prey Kurt. It is rare that I assist my prey in earning a VP, but Kurt was a special case. Following Kurt's ouster, I slipped my deck out of neutral and into drive, raining pool damage down on Pete Oh. I ousted Pete and then John Pattie for the Game Win.

Word travels fast after two Game Wins at a V:TES tournament. Long before all of the round three tables had concluded, I had learned that I was the top seed at the final table. I also learned that James Messer (Lutz/Maris vote), Hugh Angseesing (EuroBrujah), David Tatu (Tzimisce) and Pete Oh (Black Hand AUS/DOM) were the other finalists.

James and I sat down and cautiously spoke. Though he and I are friends and members of the same playgroup, we have a history of betraying each other at the V:TES table. I told him I needed a vote-buddy, and that he should be it. I also
told him that my number one goal was to win the Championship, and that my number two goal was to make sure an American won it. Hugh's two victories the day before were already too much. I think I would have been sick if our British friend had won the US Championship. Despite my great dislike of Lutz von Hohenzollern, James and I agreed to be political partners at the start of the final round.

Being able to pick my seat was a big advantage. When it was my turn to choose, the players were arranged like this:
Pete->James->Hugh->David. I knew that James and Hugh had titled vamps, and would be immune to my Judgment: Camarilla Segregations. I had just finished earning a Game Win with Pete Oh as my prey in round three, so my choice to sit in between Pete and David was an easy one.

Before the round started, I gave several speeches to my tablemates. I congratulated them on reaching this ultimate game. I also thanked them for knocking out several nasty decks that I was happy to not have to deal with again. Finally, I requested an opportunity to play cards during their political actions after terms were set, and before votes were cast. I had been making that request at my preliminary round tables as well. It was a line that I thought important after I decided to include Confusion of the Eye. I like the idea of making that request at the start of games for two reasons. Most obviously, because I would like a window in which I can play Confusion of the Eye, as it is easy to skip past that window when taking political actions. Also, just beyond the surface of that request is, "Hey, I am playing with Confusion of the Eye. You should think twice before you try to screw me with your political actions because I can screw with them".

I did not like getting only one transfer on the first turn. Having no Info Highway in my opening hand was also no fun. All of that was made up for by the fact that my opening hand included two Villein and Giant's Blood. I was so pleased with my hand that I choose to secretly reveal it to the Queen of the Nosferatu who had stopped by to root on her husband. I don't know what she thought, but I saw it as a sign of good things to come.

At the end of turn four I had influenced my first vamp out, Josef von Bauren. My slow start wasn't so bad because my predator, David Tatu, took a while to bring up his first vamp; Lambach. James had told me that David was playing Tzimisce. However, I was surprised to learn that David was playing huge, titled Tzimisce. His slow start minimized the pain of mine, but those fat flesh sculptors were sure to be a nuisance later in the game. My turn five had me Villein Joseph v.B. for 11, trifle: Giant's Blood, followed by Joseph rescuing Lutz from torpor after Hugh's Theo Bell had been mean to my fellow Inner Circle member.

Hugh again torped Lutz on his next turn. He asked me if I planned to rescue him again. I told the entire table that my plan for my next turn was to call Honor the Elders. At James' request, this time David came to Lutz's rescue. James' now ready, empty Lutz meant that Hugh was no longer interested in me calling Honor the Elders. I debated with myself for a while as to whether I should call that vote. In the end I decided to do it because it was the action available to me that helped me the most, and because an American should win the US Championship.

Everyone but my prey benefited from Honor the Elders. I concluded my turn by bringing out Cock Robin. All of the effort that David and I had put into rehabilitating James was soon shown to be for nought. Pete conjured up an onslaught of Dominate bleeds that ousted my vote-buddy. James' departure really altered my game. I said aloud, "Hugh, I need you now." I was down to one partner, the guy I least wanted to win.

James' oust also brought on a mid-game section of the final round that I don't remember very well. Here are some things that happened in that section of the game, in no particular order: David played Powerbase: Montreal, I borrowed it, Hugh borrowed it, then I burned with Conceal. I passed a Political Stranglehold that helped everyone but Pete. We all knew a lot about each others' hands. Pete Oh was making good use of Sennadurek's special ability, I had SchreckNET in play, and David had an Owl Companion on Lambach. At one point Pete Oh called out the contents of my hand, and revealed that I was out of stealth modifiers. David used that info to Eagle's Sight block my next D-action against Pete. In the resulting combat, David burned my Gustaphe Brunnelle with combination of Carrion Crows and some aggravated strike.

My immediate response to the death of Gustaphe was to rescue one of Hugh's vampires from torpor (on whom David had played Rötschreck). David continually bled me for several pool each turn. I blocked only once, when Lambach was bleeding for four with Govern + Enkil Cog. I played my No Trace in the resulting combat. Hugh was not able to do much to David for fear of the agg. combat. I was able to get my Judgment: Camarilla Segregations into play. Pete burned the first one by bringing up Piotr Andreikov and sacrificing him to the J: C. S. Later on, I was able to put the other two in play, and they stayed. Hugh perfectly timed his lunge to oust David. He played Pentex Subversion on the only untapped Tzimisce, and uncorked with Dominate bleeds. The first bleed landed in Pete Oh's lap thanks to My Enemy's Enemy. The next two bleeds hit their intended target and were enough that David was ousted on his untap phase by my 2x Judgement: Camarilla Segregation.

As I untapped at the start of my turn, I realized that David's departure was great for me. Gone was the looming permanent intercept to my right, as well as the fat, titled vamps to which it was attached. I passed a vote to lower Pete's pool, then SchreckNET told me my bleeds were good, and I was able to oust my prey with about ten minutes remaining in the game.

The US Championship had boiled down to Mr. Angseesing and myself. He seemed intent on bleeding me for a lot with Dominate and initially I let him. On my turn, I was able to Banish one of his Princes, steal his hunting ground, and take the edge. Hugh then loaded up for what I knew would be his final onslaught. He pushed as much blood as he could to his two remaining vamps via Blood Dolls. He opened with a Theo Bell Govern bleed, which I chose not to block, but rather play Confusion of the Eye on to reduce it to a two bleed. My replacement for Confusion of the Eye was the the only copy of Second Tradition: Domain in my deck.

I needed that card on Hugh's next action as he bled with Constanza Vinti. I tried to block with Cock Robin, he played Resist Earth's Grasp for stealth, and I responded with the 2nd Trad. and successfully blocked. Hugh later told me that I was dead without the 2nd Trad. because he was holding Foreshadowing Destruction. In the resulting combat, Cock went to long with Aid from Bats, pressed, and torped Constanza in round two with hands for two damage. On my turn I was able to reduce Hugh's pool to zero with a combination of bleeds and votes. The final round had needed nearly all of its two hours. I raised my hands in victory, having successfully completed my first and second goals.

Origins Reportage #3: Overcrowding At the Polling Booths

2010-07-02T21:01:00.000-07:00

Bonus Round: Tribalmans
I arrived at the convention hall several hours before the VTES tournament of the day was to begin, having arranged the night before to participate in a game of Battlestar Galactica in the morning. Apparently there was some kind of miscommunication, because when I arrived there were already five players ready to accuse each other of being cylons and I had a sixth with me, Karl. He hadn't ever played the game before, and I'd been pimping it to him for the past few days, so I figured I'd sit out and let him play. I sat near him and Eric, who was also new to the game, and did my best to give impartial advice and rules tips to the two newbs.

The Tatus arrived, as they always do, in a corona of perfect light accompanied by an seraphic chorus, and asked if anyone wanted to play a game. I did, so I left the Galactica to her fate and joined Robyn and David at another table, where they were already setting up Stone Age. I'd never played before, so Robyn and David ran me through the rules. We'd gotten about halfway through our second turn when an extraordinary event occurred: the very atmosphere around us suddenly hummed with classiness. Startled, I looked behind me at the other table, but I was astonished to see that Hugh hadn't suddenly left the room. (Zing!) I then realized that the quiet dignity in which I was unexpectedly awash was emanating from a well-spoken young gentleman whom Robyn introduced to me as Matt Green. I knew of Matt Green from the internets, where his reputation is that of a...well, a Mind Raper, not to put too fine a point on it.

In spite of that infamy, Matt threw a monkeywrench into my cultural assumptions about Britsh players of V:TES. Previously, I'd only met Hugh, and I'd assumed that all of his countrymen would be the same kind of leering reprobate whom I'd gotten to know all too well, that this was some kind of Musashi-esque affect all Brits had adopted in order to unnerve their opponents with their vile, capering antics. Yet in Matt I immediately detected the reserved confidence of a man licensed to operate any number of automobiles, mopeds and lorries, the kind of person you instinctively know you can trust. I was surprised, albeit in the best possible way, to find him so affable when I made his acquaintance.

But enough of this pointy little diversion. You're here to read about games, not my process of judging the character of foreign visitors to our proud American soil. Stone Age is a worker-placement game in which each player is attempting to make their tribe of mans better than the other players' tribes. This betterness is judged via recourse to a somewhat vague system of points, which can be gained from a wide variety of sources. They're "my tribe is cooler than yours" points, I suppose? There are four different resource-gathering spaces on the board, which can hold a limited number of mans, and a few spaces on the board which can only hold mans from one tribe at a time. I can see why nobody would want anyone else in the sexy times hut while they're in there, and I guess the toolmaker and farm-maker are just overbooked? There's also an eats-gathering space, which can hold all the mans in the world.

I got excited when I saw the stone axe tokens, thinking that I might be able to inflict bodily harm on other players' mans, because I'm a jerk like that. Turns out that those aren't axes but Swiss Army tools, able to help with everything from gathering food to quarrying stone, but as this game is apparently set in the time before violence had been invented, you can't use them on the members of other tribes. Unlike other worker-placment games, there's randomness involved in Stone Age, in that you roll dice to see how successful you are at harvesting food and resources. You can use your tools to slightly modify those dice rolls, making it a bit more likely that your lackeys understood when you were trying to explain to them the concepts of "wood" or "gold." I appreciate this bit of randomness, and the accompanying mechanic to mitigate it, as I'm not a fan of games which lack an element of chance, since their math phases always seem to last forever during play.

Gameplay involves trying to balance the your mans' need for eats against getting them out there to partake in activities which can earn you points. Since there are so many different ways to gain points - using resources you've gathered to build huts, buying artistic objects, improving your tool technology, increasing the size of your tribe - it seems like your path to victory will usually be determined somewhat haphazardly, as the big points at the end of the game are earned via multipliers which appear randomly. There's a lot of strong interaction between these different elements of the game, as you need to balance your eats-gathering with the number of your mans and what you do with those mans. There were some choices that seemed very obvious, such as building farms, which I think every player did when they got the first option to do so. Many of the other options are murkier, given that the higher-scoring resources are also more difficult to gather, which leads to interesting choices about whether or not tools are worth making, babies are worth having, and whether it's better to take a chance on the more valuable resources or bottom-feed the cheaper ones.

Though I enjoy this style of game, I'm usually terrible at them, so I was surprised to come in second once we'd tallied all our points. I had been maknig tools every opportunity I got, and also managed to pick up a number of tool point multipliers, though I'm unable to judge how much of that was my successfully following a strategy and how much of that was the luck of those modifiers being made available to me, both due to coming up in the deck and my opponents not choosing to buy them when they did. I quite liked Stone Age, though not quite as much as Eketorp, and would definitely give it another play. Once we'd finished the game, the V:TES tournament was going to start soon, so we packed it away and prepared ourselves for much more cutthroat competition about to ensue.

Because this was the big day! The US championships, moved away from GenCon where it was poorly attended and lacking in prestige, and transplanted to glorious Origins, where the creme de la creme of VTES society hob their nobs while starry-eyed spectators scream for autographs. Or something.

I knew I was either going to play my !Brujah breed/boon deck or my Ventrue princes for this tournament, since they were the two best decks I've got. I'd seen very little in the way of vote decks in the previous two tournaments, and since this was supposed to be the Big One, I thought I'd encounter mostly stealth/bleed and weenie swarm bleed. The !Brujah deck bloats like yo mama and generally builds its ousting ability as the game goes on, meaning that if my metagame guess was right, I'd be able to get my first prey around mid-game and then overwhelm my opponent in the endgame duel. I really should learn to start ignoring my instincts and just roll a die to pick which deck to play before any given tournament.

(Note: I should have pointed out in the first chunk of reportage that all of the Daves you see in these reports aren't the same person - the Archon wasn't falling asleep on the job. It's just that there are a lot of different guys playing V:TES whose parents all had the same idea.)

Round One: My Strategy Begins When I Cut Your Deck
me (Cornbread, Earl and Me) -> Bob (Lasombra bleed and vote) -> Connor (Kindred Spirits stealth/bleed) -> Hugh (Eurobrujah) -> Dave (!Brujah bruise/bleed)

When Bob asked me to cut his deck, I saw that there was a Jyhad card on top, so naturally I cut the deck so that it would be on the bottom. If he's been playing with the card for 16 years, it's probably pretty good. To make light of my cruelty, I told Bob that I'd cut his deck in such a way that the Homunculus ended up on the bottom, and he looked at me like I was a complete weirdo. Well, he wasn't wrong, I guess.

My opening hand contained three Unexpected Coalitions, which isn't necessarily a terrible thing, but then my predator's first vampire was Sela. The upside was that this development freed me from having to expend any strategy-think during my discard phase for most of the game. The downside, apart from the obvious, was that Dave was playing a bruise/bleed deck which apparently relied on hope as its primary defensive mechanism, and Narrow Minds as its weak secondary layer of protection. This meant that Dave spent most of his game bleeding me for four or six with each of his vampires, being unwilling or unable to rush Hugh's minions, and then eating a lot of pool damage during other peoples' turns.

My bloat was able to keep pace with Dave's bleeds, after a somewhat scary opening game during which he got me rather low before I was able to start seriously gaining pool, but the relentless assault combined with Hugh's three princes meant that I wasn't much more than a plaything for that savage trans-Atlantic brute. It occurred to me that the kind of bruise/bleed deck which Dave was playing acts like a playground slide for its predator, in that it initially generates very little friction and then actually speeds you up as you near its end.

Hugh decided that he should share some of Connor's bleeds with Dave, and once he saw what a good time Connor was having making Dave pick up and throw away beads, he decided to join in on the fun and bled Dave himself. Dave had an untapped Jacko who attempted to block, whom I was really hoping was going to mess up Constanza's day something fierce, but Hugh had developed this technique whereby he added stealth to a bleed that his prey was trying to block. It worked so well that I was amazed no one had ever thought of it before. I'm sure it'll become all the rage, now that I'm making it common knowledge.

Bob ousted Connor and used the bonus pool to buy a new vampire. That new vampire was Tabitha Fisk. I pointed out that she has Protean, because I've got some kind of weird OCD whereby I always point out the useless disciplines on vampires that people bring out. I dunno what that's about, but it seems like I thing I can't help but do. After bringing Bob's attention to Tabitha's worthless waste of a design point, without considering what we'd talked about before, I said, "That's why she's so good, the Protean. That's what makes your deck work." Without missing a beat, his face fell into weary despair, and he replied, "Yeah, but you put the Homunculus on the bottom of my deck." I was laughing so hard that I barely noticed when Hugh ousted me. I don't remember who won the endgame or if the table timed out, but I'm assuming Hugh won since he made it into the finals.

Round Two: Armin Brenner Gets Laid Off
me -> Jeff (Lasombra and Marcus Vitel vote) -> Dave (Kiasyd stealth/bleed) -> John (Sergei Voshkov and friends)

I brought out Armin and Jeff brought out Marcus Vitel. I'd already Villein'd Armin for something like eight blood, so I didn't want to take the chance of contesting the DC title if Jeff didn't Tap or Villein Vitel. I assumed that Jeff was playing Obfuscate Ventrue, and that Hektor's priscus title would be enough to beat the prince title of whomever else Jeff brought out. (I assumed he wasn't going to influence out Arika, as he would've done so as his first minion for the Govern chain.) Imagine the way my face fell when Jeff's second vampire was Gratiano. That made it two games in a row where that snide super-priscus had made Hektor feel totally underdressed at the priscus convention. What an arrogant prick that guy is.

John had brought out Sergei Voshkov, presumably just to change my worries from "what will I do once I reach referendum during my political actions?" to "will I even reach referendum during my political actions?" He's just thoughtful that way. He's a giver, John is. Luckily for me, Dave was unafraid of what The Eye might do to his elves if he managed to catch the twisty little buggers, and kept the pressure on. Stone Travel goes a long way toward alleviating the kind of fear that The Eye generates, even once he's Heroically Mighty.

This was a tense game. There were any number of times when it seemed that the table might fall in any direction. John was low on pool but had a lot of permanent bleed, fight and intercept, as well as some bounce. I had three vampires, but one of them had no title and another had a title that didn't matter. Jeff was making forward progress into Dave, but had to fight for every inch, thanks to my attempts to vote down his offense and some Covincrafts that Dave wisely held onto for vote defense. Dave had the least worries of the four of us, but he was concerned that pushing forward too hard would oust me via redirected bleeds.

Eventually Jeff discarded a Minion Tap, because there were six Villeins in play at that point, explaining that his other copies of Villein were scattered throughout his other decks. I Golconda'd Armin Brenner, which gave me a enough pool to bring out a new copy of Armin. Having accepted Jesus as his lord and savior, this time around he possessed the inner strength to hang on to his title. Vitel had almost no blood left, so suddenly Jeff's votes were unable to pass. Dave's Omme and Hektor were enough to nullify Gratiano's sneer, and Vitel's title was soon to be handed over to Armin, so Jeff went for a third vampire. He brought out Alvaro, but the Scion didn't have time to abstain in even one vote before I ousted Jeff. I was able to mop up the rest of the table shortly thereafter, as Dave didn't have any way to stop my damaging votes and John had run out of transient defense.

Round Three: And Lo, The Table Did Groan 'Neath the Weight of Their Beads
me -> Darby (Daughters anarch vote) -> Rob (!Gangrel Shattering) -> Matt (Zombo Combo) -> Brian (Assamite anarch vote)

Wow. The amount of pool gained during this game was unreal. There were times when I wanted to just stop and start a new game, because trying to do the math was killing my brain. A lot of that was just low blood sugar and sleep deprivation, but...damn, there were a lot of beads on the table.

I did a lot of saving during this game, calling Con Boons for !Gangrel and Assamites to try to keep Darby from gaining six more pool and to keep zombies from ruining my neighborhood, respectively. I also Golconda's Matt's Baron when Darby was about to oust him. At one point I got faux-exasperated enough to yell, "I'm not Jesus! I can't save all of you!" It was that kind of game.

Early on, Rob Shattered a lot of Darby's Daughters, and I was fully expecting to hear a Crescendo echo back at the !Gangrel, but Darby wasn't playing that kind of deck. He was playing another of his decks where all of his minions take lots of actions every turn, so I got to trot out my tired old joke about how long imbued decks' turns take. Matt got out a lot of Corpses that bled into Brian, who was mostly ineffective because I kept being a fascist and removing his baronies before he had much chance to do anything with them. There was a lot of math during each of my turns as I counted how many of Darby's Daughters were untapped and therefore singing extra-loud thanks to their Conductor, but I was too much of a moron to come up with the idea of making a deal with Rob for him to Shatter the Conductor into torpor and then eating her.

I realized that Brian had out enough minions that a successful Revolutionary Council would vaporize me, so I stopped keeping him afloat and Matt got a victory point. Darby was now at ten pool and effectively unable to stop me from doing whatever I wanted. He turned to look at me and said, "Ah, okay, I'm ousted now." While I appreciated this vote of confidence in my manly virility, I wasn't actually able to close the deal. He gained a bunch of pool during his turn, closing the window on my chance of gaining a VP, and then ousted Rob using bleeds boosted by Rob's own Club Illusion. It seems that Rob forgot industry rule number four thousand and eighty: record company people are shady.

Darby kept grinding away at Matt's pool, and ousted him in spite of my attempts to keep him around. While this was going on, I stopped worrying about how much pool Darby had left and learned to love the bomb, instead just doing my best to make as much of it go away as quickly as I could. I did oust him eventually, somehow, but with the way the table had fallen that didn't give me a game win, and I didn't make the finals.

I hadn't had a chance to eat much of anything all day, and the fine beer, finer food, and even finer ladies of Barley's Brew Pub were calling to me, so I grabbed some folks and slipped away before the finals. I've squeezed a promise out of a very special eyeball witness to write up a report of that final round, but it's not prepared yet, so I'll add that to the blog once I get it. Watch this space.

Decklist
Deck Name : Cornbread, Earl & Me
Author : John Eno
Description : !Brjuah breed/boon, with some help from their pal on the other end of the political spectrum, Dmitra. Bleed me all you want, I'll make more.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 9 max: 10 average: 9.33333
------------------------------------------------------------
4x Armin Brenner 10 CEL FOR POT PRE ani obf archbishop !Brujah:4
4x Dmitra Ilyanova 9 CEL FOR POT PRE obf justicar Brujah:5
4x Hektor 9 CEL POT PRE QUI for priscus !Brujah:4

Library [72 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [12]
1x Creepshow Casino
2x Dreams of the Sphinx
1x Giant's Blood
1x Golconda: Inner Peace
1x Monastery of Shadows
1x Powerbase: Madrid
5x Villein

Action [6]
6x Creation Rites

Action Modifier [20]
6x Forced March
4x Forgotten Labyrinth
2x Freak Drive
2x Iron Glare
2x Perfect Paragon
4x Voter Captivation

Action Modifier/Combat [5]
5x Resist Earth's Grasp

Action Modifier/Reaction [6]
6x Unexpected Coalition

Combat [6]
4x Majesty
2x Pushing the Limit

Political Action [17]
6x Consanguineous Boon
7x Kine Resources Contested
2x Neonate Breach
1x Political Stranglehold
1x Reins of Power

In the past year I peformed a bunch of experiments with unusual crypts. With this deck, I knew that these were the three vampires I wanted to have in play, so I figured I'd eliminate any chance of not seeing them. The crypt has worked just about perfectly in that regard, but this deck tends to end up with a great stonking pile of pool in the endgame, which it can't find any use for since it's literally got its entire crypt in play already. With that in mind, it's time to send the findings from this experiment off to the Scientific Crypt Draw Society and diversify the selection of vampires in the deck.

Mostly, this is The Armin and Dmitra Show, so I definitely want to keep at least three copies of each of them. Hektor's main use is that when people see him, they often assume that they're going to see me play cards that have words like "enter," "combat," "with," "a," "ready," and "minion" on them and plan accordingly. While that's amusing, I don't think it's nine pool worth of amusing. Well, much less pool than that thanks to our friend Villein, but you get the point. There are enough other vampires in this pair grouping with decent titles and similar discipline spreads that I'll likely use one copy of Hektor and one more of some of those guys, which will in turn result in the knock-on effect of forcing the library to be much less of a breed/boon affair, since few of the vampires I'll be using will be !Brujah any more.

After the third round was over, Darby said, "If that was my deck you'd been playing, you'd have ousted me that turn that I was down to ten pool." True, but ouch. This was the second year in a row that I'd played this deck in Boston, felt like it had plenty of ousting power, and then took it to Origins and felt like it didn't have nearly enough. Darby mentioned adding more Iron Glares, which I initially didn't want to do because I want to avoid having my bleeds of three hurt my grandprey. He pointed out that they're easy enough to cycle on votes that I call if that's something I'm concerned about during a game, and that for games when I need the bleed boost that's might handy as well. He's totally right, of course.

Origins Reportage #2: All The Flavor of Real Victory, But With None of the Calories

2010-06-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

After the first Thursday tournament, Karl and I had time to run across the street and get some lunch at the North Market, a dense cluster of high-quality takeout eateries all under one roof, featuring just about every kind of food that I like. I grabbed some bowtie pasta in a thick chipotle sauce that's making my mouth water just to think of it, as well as a tall bottle of Shakespeare Stout, a favorite beer of mine which isn't currently available to buy in New Hampshire. Thus fortified against the rage and regret I'd had churning in my gut after the first tournament of the day, I returned to the convention hall to try to salvage a bit of my self-esteem.

After my comprehensive lack of victory point gain during the first tournament, I decided to switch gears as much as possible. Imitation Keeney is a deck that's all offense, relying on speed and some light bloat to not be ousted. Nunsploitation is the most heavily defensive deck I've got built at the moment, so I pulled it out and sat down to see how I'd fare with something that proceeds at a much more stately pace than the frenetic Black Hand aggression.

Round One: Double-Barreled Rant Blast
me (Nunsploitation) -> Brad (Brujah Alastor) -> Mark (Shadow Twins & Nocturns) -> Jay (Multi-Taskamites) -> Thomas (Imbued with Stakes)

Thomas had just barely had time to influence out his first imbued before he launched into a heated tirade directly into my face, loudly decrying the claims I hadn't actually made that the imbued are a natural table threat which need to be ousted before anyone else can play. I tried to explain to him that I'd nearly worn through the fabric of the newsgroup with my own ardent defenses of the imbued, back when debating about them online was all the rage, but Thomas was too busy scolding some nonexistent persecutor to have time to listen to me. He brought out The Unmasking on the first turn, which struck me as a potential problem. I brought out Antediluvian Awakening on my first turn, which probably struck the rest of the table as an actual problem.

Thankfully, Thomas dialed down the vehemence a bit once the game got going and no one other than Jay was actually trying to oust him. I blocked a couple of Thomas's attempts to get Vigilance on his imbued, knowing that said power is generally the kiss of death for its prey, as well as one Alastor vote that Brad attempted to call. Thomas rushed my vampires a few times, but his imbueds' Stakes failed to penetrate the rocky crust of my damage prevention. Unfortunately, this led Thomas to believe that he had no chance of ever ousting me and gave up on trying to bleed me, which wasn't conducive to my plan to oust Brad by bouncing a lot of bleeds for two at one stealth.

Jay bled with some stealthed Flurries of Action, and Thomas was now totally convinced that he was condemned to be ousted, in spite of the fact that Jay wasn't doing much else to him aside from a single damaging vote, so he started rushing Jay. Jake Washington blocked a rush which Thomas had attempted under Second Sight, proving yet again what a versatile minions he is. Unfortunately, the computer nerd with no legs wasn't able to hold off Thomas more than once, and a combination of Thomas's backrushing, Mark's vampires Shadow Twinning the Assamites, and a bunch of shadow-demon-ninja peppering Jay's pool with little bleeds led to Jay's oust.

Brad attempted to call Alastor again, and I let him have it, worried that Mark would get away with the table otherwise. I'd come to the conclusion that Brad wasn't going to be able to affect Mark in any kind of substantial way without giving Dmitra a big gun and a built-in rush. Brad obliged my prescience and began shooting up Mark's vampires. One of them got Famed and Rambo'd into torpor, but Mark wisely burned him to blow up the Antediluvian Awakening, thereby removing most of my offensive power.

Thomas had apparently given up entirely on ever trying to oust me at this point and simply turned himself rightward, doing his best to clear out Mark's ready region before he was ousted. He failed. I was the next to go, done in by some stratagem of Mark's that was so clever that it surged forward through time and erased my current memory of its existence. My notes say that I was ousted next, but my brain refuses to acknowledge that it happened, indicating a truly guileful play on Mark's part. I'm not surprised. That guy is sharp. He wasn't canny enough to stop Brad from torporizing all his vampires and taking the last two VPs after he ousted me, but as the mathematicians in the crowd have already figured out, that didn't matter in terms of who got the table win.

Round Two: Damn Those Spaniels!
me -> Karl (Karl's Got a Key In His Pocket) -> James (Assamite Black Hand combat toolbox) -> Dave (Potence Princes) -> Bob (Presence/Protean)

Spaniels? Okay, I'll freely admit that I don't know what a Papillon is. Wikipedia tells me that it's a breed of dog, as well as a restaurant in California, and that it's also French for "butterfly." I can't see what any of those have to do with James Dean or vampires, though. I do know that the damn thing cost me a game (and almost certainly won me several more, two days later, but keep it in your pants and wait for those reports) which might have gotten me into the finals, and that in spite of the fact that I had ghosts. Ghosts which I could have retrieved and sent on another mission. After getting them back from the morgue. V:TES is weird when you try to make sense of it in terms of a coherent narrative.

While we'd been arranging our travel plans to the convention, Karl had asked me if I had any interesting decks which he could borrow. For a while he used to write the Kiasyd newsletter, and he'd mentioned that he hadn't picked up any of the new Heirs set, so I told him about the Kiasyd bruise/bleed deck I'd played in our storyline tournament. He wanted to borrow it but thought it was too toolboxy, so I tightened it up a bit, honed it down to be more straightforward and handed it to him to borrow. As a result, I had a bit of what you might call an unfair advantage during this round, since I knew better than my prey did what the contents of his deck were.

James's Joe Hill had no use for a vampire with superior Dominate on his right, so he immediately put a Hand Contract on Isanwayen and rushed hir. Xe maneuvered to long range and Joe puked death on hir, sending hir to torpor. This set the precedent for what would be a long string of violent elf-bashing incidents that continued throughout the game. Karl spent as at least as much time rebuilding his ready region as he did taking any other actions, though some of his bleeds did manage to land, making James want to engage in even more hate crime against elves.

Bob brought out Nehsi and tried Enchanting some Kindred at superior, which actions I cycled my intercept against. Weirdly, the card cycles turned into successful blocks, and Bob was soon on the ropes as a result of me possibly not paying as much attention to his deck as I should have. His second vampire was Boss Callihan, and I told him that I appreciated his efforts to make Protean/Presence work, and then later confessed that I was confused at to why I hadn't seen him play any Obfuscate cards. Not the brightest kid in class, me. Dave also blocked a few of Bob's actions with Second Traditions, but for the most part left his prey alone in order to focus on building up his own position.

Bob Joseph has a long-running joke with me, which is that all of my decks are combat decks of one kind or another. Or maybe he doesn't think it's a joke. I don't remember which decks I've played against him, which is part of the reason that I wanted to start recording my plays and began writing this blog. In any case, there was a great moment during this game when one of Karl's vampires pulled off a successful Arms/Swords combo and sent the opposing Assamite to torpor, and a light suddenly came on above Bob's head as he said, "Of course it's got combat! It's one of John Eno's decks!" I really need to oust that guy with Choirs some day.

Karl kept fighting the good fight, and I didn't do much to him aside from occasionally bleeding for one and sometimes Lazarenely Inquisitating his Blood Doll. The Arcadian got a hot bleed of five past the Assamites, who weren't playing a whole lot of Ministry, but then Archons Investigated him for cheating at Galaga and Karl's game was about done. He'd beaten up James's pool pretty well, and had tapped out to burn my Lazarene Inquisitor, so I decided to try for the lunge. Two Trochomancies later, he was gone, and I was able to remove James's last pool during the same turn.

Dave finally decided to get around to taking out Bob, and we faced each other down in the heads-up. He had out quite a few more vampires than I did, and he managed to successfully Dispute my Maabara Territory, stripping me of my recursion tech. I thought I might have a chance of beating him anyway, as his vampires were pretty low on blood and blood denial is what my Harbingers do, but he drew into a run of Second Traditions and I wasn't able to successfully recruit any zombies. Dave's Papillon kept his vampires just healthy enough that I couldn't round the corner and achieve minion superiority, and before long my only remaining ready minion was Solomon Batanea. He held out against five of Dave's Potence vampires for quite a long time, but eventually he was made Famous. I was down to three pool and one blood on Solomon, and had to block a KRC that Dave's Preternaturally Strong Nikolaus called. I played a wake and Enhanced Senses, hoping to draw into more damage prevention, but didn't see any. Dave ousted me just as he ran out of library. It was an extremely intense endgame, and the first game I've gotten to play with that particular Dave in quite a while, so I was happy with the game in spite of not getting the GW. At least I managed to score a few victory points before the day was done, thus salving my ego a bit.

Decklist
Deck Name : Nunsploitation
Author : John Eno
Description : Harbingers blood denial/prey grinder, with plenty of defense. Now with Shambling Hordes for added minion control. Don't plan on getting more than three VPs.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 5 max: 8 average: 6.5
------------------------------------------------------------
3x Mordechai Ben-Nun 8 ANI AUS FOR NEC Harbinger:5
3x Babalawo Alafin 7 AUS FOR NEC ani Harbinger:4
3x Sennadurek 6 AUS NEC dom Nagaraja:4
3x Solomon Batanea 5 AUS FOR nec Harbinger:4

Library [78 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [15]
2x Antediluvian Awakening
3x Blood Doll
1x Fame
1x Giant's Blood
2x Lazarene Inquisitor
2x Maabara
2x Parthenon, The
2x Perfectionist

Action [5]
1x Haunt
3x Restoration
1x Well-Marked

Action Modifier [8]
4x Call of the Hungry Dead
4x Trochomancy

Ally [8]
8x Shambling Hordes

Combat [16]
2x Hidden Strength
2x Indomitability
3x Resilience
3x Rolling with the Punches
4x Spiritual Intervention
2x Weighted Walking Stick

Equipment [3]
1x Bowl of Convergence
1x Kevlar Vest
1x Sawed-Off Shotgun

Event [1]
1x Scourge of the Enochians

Reaction [22]
4x Enhanced Senses
6x Eyes of Argus
2x My Enemy's Enemy
3x On the Qui Vive
7x Telepathic Misdirection

Jay Kristoff took a look at this deck after the tournament, and told me that he wants me to defend Mob Connections here. He's the master of this kind of deck, and I wouldn't want to let him down as my friend, so I plan to give that a try. I think the Maabara/Parthenon tech, while fun, is just slowing the deck down at this point, since I've played it enough to not need the extra MPA handicap. A bit more fight is needed, and I'm going to ditch the Spiritual Interventions for more damage prevention and Stick tech. The Interventions were a holdover from when the deck was more focused on the laibon Harbingers, who would get an Elephant Guardian and play the Interventions at basic for hilarious elephant-stomping good times, but I'm jaded to those simple pleasures now and that day has come and gone.

The crypt just isn't working, unfortunately, as every time I see Sennadurek come out, I get excited at first and later disappointed when she doesn't pull her own weight. She's a great vampire and I aim to find a good deck to feature her in, but this isn't it. I'm going to replace her with some appropriate Auspex/Fortitude vampires. The worst part of the crypt change is that I'll now have to make the hardest decision of all when it comes to tuning decks: coming up with a new name for it.

Origins Reportage #1: Inauspicious Beginnings

2010-06-28T20:48:00.000-07:00

This year, I didn't make it to Columbus in time for Jay Kristoff's traditional pre-Origins tournament. I was a bit relieved, since I've never gotten even a single victory point in the previous three such tournaments I attended, and I've got just enough of a superstitious streak to begin to suspect that I might be cursed to suck in those Wednesday night tournaments. I thought that starting on Thursday morning would work out better for me. Hmm.

Round One: Well, That Was Fast
me (Art of Memory stealth/bleed) -> Mark (Ventrue tap and bleed) -> Connor (Kindred Spirits stealth/bleed) -> Dave (Vignes)

Once we all had our first vampires out, Mark said, "At least we're not going to time out." Dave commented that this was possibly the most boring table of V:TES he'd ever played, and I agreed. Aside from attempting and failing to start a conversation about whether Luccia Paciola was a better vampire with +1 strength or the two hand damage listed on the copy Mark was using, I don't remember a lot about what happened during this game. The game went so quickly that I really didn't have time to make notes, but I suspect that there just wasn't anything noteworthy going on.

I was ousted first, in about fifteen minutes. Dave bled out Mark next, and then Connor, and we walked away from the table with our faces burning in shame. Twenty-four minutes had passed since the judge had started the tournament. No one said it out loud, but in my heart I know that we four players had made a tacit agreement never to speak of this game again. I only feel that I can write about it now because people need to know. People need to know.

While I wandered away from the playing area to get more coffee, I began to wonder if my formulation of the method by which I suck was wrong. With another game to go, though, I figured that I could at least get one VP, given that I was playing an extremely aggressive deck. Ahem.

Round Two: The Black Hand Gives Me the Finger
me -> Darby (Dancing In Kiev) -> David (Lasombra anarch toolbox) -> Dave (Twelve Models of Saqqaf and Allonzo) -> Hugh (Kindred Spirits stealth/bleed)

Apparently, the Black Hand decided to punish me for allowing them to be disgraced with such ease by Edward Vignes's pals. I started the game with the worst crypt draw that I could get, literally - one Black Hand vampire and the other three non-BH guys. When Darby brought out one of the new Blood Brothers, I thought I'd be able to oust him quickly and then use the oust-bonus pool to cycle my crypt to get to more Black Hand vampires and get them out cheaply via Reunion Kamuts. Once Hugh brought up one of the standard Kindred Spirits vampires, I knew that I was doomed no matter how much I chastised the wily Brit for playing such sleaze. I launched into haranguing him anyway, figuring that I might as well get in some cheeky comments before I was ousted and forced to remain silent, lest I secretly coach one of the remaining players via an elaborate system of coded insults and snark. Or have I said too much already?

I have no idea what Dave's deck was supposed to do. He got out an Edge Vitiation and didn't do much else. I'm sure he had a plan, but like the cylons, he didn't seem to be able to execute it in any meaningful way. I thought I had a pretty good chance of ousting Darby, but his bloat dance was both mysterious and powerful, the kind of artistic statement that both beguiles and entrances, and I didn't seem to be able to make his pool go away in any fashion that he chose to regard as permanent. David tried to help out, at one point torporizing one of Darby's guys and giving him the Hell-for-Leather treatment, but Darby just kept putting those pool beads back.

Hugh ran out of bleed cards, presumably because he was choking on stealth since I never tried to block him, but since my deck foolishly didn't have any bounce, I had to eat every bleed up until that point. My Reunion/Freak/recur Reunion engine wasn't working, due to my awful crypt draw. Darby was taking so many actions with each of his four vampires every turn that David started using counters to keep track of which vampire had performed which action, just so that we didn't accidentally violate NRA. Fortunately for him, keeping tabs on who was up to what didn't prevent David from ousting Dave, which meant that I had bounced Dominate bleeds to look forward to, in addition to the other troubles I was encountering as a result of being snubbed by the Hand.

All in all, things were looking grim. I got Darby down to a lowish amount of pool, so he shifted to a more aggressive choreography and began rushing me during the dreaded Oppugnant Night. After diablerizing poor Marge Khan, my only Black Hand vampire, Hugh's priscus decided that the Blood Brothers were good little tools and didn't burn the diablerist. Though I pleaded with him to do so, David wasn't able to save me from my own sorriness, and Hugh kindly put me out of my misery by ousting me. Hugh then proceeded to oust Darby and David.

After the second round, I realized that it's my first game at the week of Origins that will go horribly and result in me gaining zero VPs. I bemoaned my scientifically unavoidable fate to Will Kristoff, who is a smart lad and conceived of the notion of a five-player invitational tournament the night before Jay's tournament, in order to work the stagnant mojo out of my system before the rated events begin. Evan apparently has about the same track record as I do for his first Origins tournament each year, and agreed that this was a fantastically out-of-the-box idea. We just need three more takers. Are you going to Origins next year, and do you expect to be an easy VP during your first tournament there? Let's work this out together.

Decklist
Deck Name : Imitation Keeney
Author : John Eno
Description : Stealth/bleed with Art of Memory for hand management.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 5 max: 8 average: 7
------------------------------------------------------------
1x Bloody Mary 8 AUS DEM OBF pre primogen Malkavian:5
1x Persephone Tar-Ani 8 AUS DEM OBF cel pot !Malkavian:4
3x White Lily 8 DEM OBF cel dom for !Malkavian:4
3x Marge Khan 7 DEM OBF POT aus for !Malkavian:5
3x Hagar Stone 6 AUS DEM obf !Malkavian:5
1x Apache Jones 5 DEM aus for obf !Malkavian:4

Library [80 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [10]
4x Ashur Tablets
1x Giant's Blood
1x Pentex(TM) Subversion
4x Villein

Action [19]
11x Kindred Spirits
2x Restructure
6x Reunion Kamut

Action Modifier [40]
11x Art of Memory, The
4x Confusion
4x Elder Impersonation
5x Eyes of Chaos
4x Faceless Night
5x Freak Drive
4x Lost in Crowds
3x Spying Mission

Action Modifier / Reaction [3]
3x Touch of Clarity

Action Modifier/Combat [8]
3x Deny
2x Hide the Mind
3x Swallowed by the Night

Darby wanted to have a look at this bastard child of his after the tournament was over, so I spread it out on a table and he gave it a going-over. He said that it's probably not significantly different from his, though he mentioned that the Ashur Tablets (a new addition) aren't really useful, and I totally agree with him. We also agreed that the Restructures are a bit iffy - it's nice to be able to steal every single War Ghoul or Nephandus or Shambler that hits the table, by recycling Restructures, but whether or not the Restructures come up in time and whether or not it's better to spend those actions ousting preys are certainly open for debate.

I think this deck's time to be retired may have come for me, though, so I doubt I'll be making any changes to it. It's fun to play and is both more interesting and less matchup-dependent than most stealth/bleed decks, but it generally needs to be very aggressive during the whole game, and that doesn't suit my normal playstyle very well. On the other hand, I like to keep a variety of deck archetypes on hand, and I don't have any other use for that many Arts of Memory, so maybe this deck still has a reserved parking spot in my decks box.

A Time Warp, An Apocalypse or Two, and A Meditation On Transcience

2010-06-18T08:25:00.001-07:00

Game One - Temporal Anomaly
me (Harbingers blood denial) -> Raquel (Malkavian stealth/bleed) -> Greg (!Salubri rush) -> Mike (Giovanni ?) -> Max (Gangrel with guns)

V:TES is a game with a vicious learning curve, Raquel is very new to the game, and most of us were playing decks that grind their opponents down rather than going for quick ousts. I was glad I'd gotten to the store early.

Raquel got out a couple of small vampires with somewhat mismatched disciplines, Greg started with Langa and added Dela Eden, Mike produced Stefano and Gillespi, Max went extra old-school with Gitane and those nameless little Gangrel who always hang out with her, and I got Mordechai and Sennadurek. That latter was a mistake, an especially stupid one given that Max had basically told me before we started playing that he was going to be rushing vampires a lot, and I could've brought out Solomon instead. Solomon's Fortitude would have served as much better combat protection than Sennadurek's Necromancy, and she suffered quite a bit for my error.

Mike's vampires got to take exactly one action before Greg, noticing a distinct lack of pressure coming from Raquel, puffed out his chest in a manly fashion and smashed Mike's guys. That meant that Max had nobody holding him back from sending his Gangrel on some Most Dangerous Game nonsense in my ready region, rushing me every turn and only bothering to bleed when his hand was out of rush cards. That meant that I didn't have time to do much, as I mostly spent my turns recruiting Shambling Hordes and trying to keep my vampires out of torpor. My zombies proceeded to stand around and look confused as they were picked off one at a time by Gitane's Deer Rifle, but at least they were standing between my vampires and Max's rushes. Needing to keep the Hordes on get-off-my-lawn duty did mean that they weren't able to go de-brain Raquel's Keller Thiel, whom I'd put a Fame on a while before. Aside from Lazarenely Inquisitating her vampires a couple of times, I really hadn't done much of anything offensive, hoping that she'd put a dent in Greg's pool or get mauled by his guys while attempting to do so.

That plan didn't come to fruition, as Raquel's bleeds were reduced or eaten by Greg, and weren't all that hefty to begin with. Mike asked me for a rescue, but with Langa standing over the fallen Giovanni and Mike not having shown a lot of combat defense, I assumed that Langa would simply walk on over to any freshly rescued vampires and punch them back down. Greg also deployed the fearsome talents of black metal superstars Dragonbound at this time, so I was more worried than ever about keeping my vampires from being all riddled with bullets, courtesy of Max's hunting trips. Mike did manage to get out Gloria, which brought him down to one pool, who did a valorous job of defending what little Mike had left in the world.

Max finally ran out of rush cards in hand, which left me some breathing room at last. Without rush, he bled me a few times for one, hoping to get into some more fights, which allowed me to finally play some of the bleed bounce which had been clogging my hand. Raquel neutered those bleeds with reduction, but it seemed like a good time to take in the slack in my relationship with her pool. Mike sacrificed his torporized Stefano to the Antediluvian's Snooze Button, thus saving him from both the pool loss of that card and Greg's Dragonbound, so I knew that I'd have to take a more active role in Raquel's demise if she was going to be ousted. It took an embarassing amount of work (who knew that Malkavians could block +1 stealth actions without even needing to play Telepathic Misdirection at basic?), but I convinced my zombies to quit hanging around the Monroeville Mall and go stave in Keller's skull. On her turn, another of Raquel's vampires rescued Keller, and I blocked his hunt and put him down again, ousting Raquel.

Greg had finally broken through the Wall of Gloria, at least in part due to an error on Mike's part during the deckbuilding process ("What do you mean, Eluding the Arms of Morpheus forces me to block?"). I spent my profits from ousting Raquel to finally bring out Solomon, just in time to act as a replacement for my beaten-down Sennadurek. After a few unsuccessful attempts, Greg curbstomped Max's Roman Alexander, who happened to be Famous at the time. Combined with Dragonboud's epic metal ballads, Max ran out of pool shortly thereafter. Greg's lunge at Max left him tapped out and lacking wake tech, though, so I was able to hit him with some hefty bleeds, using the same Trochomancy that I'd been recycling for the last few rounds.

Greg played Fame on Solomon and nearly ousted me with a final lunge, knocking Solomon into the torpor garage while I had only four pool left. He didn't any more vampires with whom to bleed, though, and I still had the edge from the round before, so I wasn't ousted. Greg conceded at this point, since he only had one ready vampire and two cards in his hand, and I had Shambling Hordes who could bin his last guy, at which point he'd be ousted on his turn from a combination of his own Fame and Dragonbound.

Conclusions: The Maabaara/Parthenon tech worked about as well as I'd hoped it would, though I really need to train myself to actually play it correctly: First put a card on Maabaara, then use the second MPA to play a master from hand, thereby drawing the card you just recurred from the ash heap [cue "Eye of the Tiger" during a montage of me repeating this sequence of actions]. This is also the first time I played the deck with Shambling Hordes rather than the generic blood denial allies, and I think that they're better for the deck, but I need to work in better blood management. I might just ditch the Blood Dolls from the deck altogether, as I never used one for poolgain during this game and could use those slots for better bloodgain.

Game Two - Government Waste In the Face of Imminent Disaster
While waiting for the other game of VTES to finish, we decided to pull out Pandemic. Pandemic is an entirely cooperative game in which the players take on the roles of CDC agents who are having a work week that's more Roland Emmerich than it is Robin Cook. Four different diseases pop up across the globe, and it's the players' job to find the cures for all four before humanity is wiped out. Every turn, players take actions, draw player cards, and infect more cities. The player cards are used both to move around the board rapidly and to devise the cures, so players need to balance their need to move to hot spots and contain the disease there versus their ability to accumulate enough cards of the same color to cure the diseases. There are a number of ways that the players can lose - if they run out of the wooden cubes that represent disease vectors, if any disease reaches a critical mass eight times, or if the players run out of player cards, it's the cockroaches' time to shine.

Our game ran fairly smoothly, though it seemed like we were usually one step behind the various diseases. We cured one of them fairly quickly, but then ran into a situation in which none of us were drawing cards of the right color to cure the other three. We managed to cure two of them in quick succession, and were only a few turns away from curing the last one and winning, when we ran out of player cards. I think we probably used too many cards to move around the board which we should've held onto in order to create cures more quickly, but as this was only the second time I've played the game (and the first that wasn't using the training-wheels beginner's rules), I've not yet sussed out which strategies work and which don't. I was glad that this game was more of a challenge than the first, as it had been so easy that it was mostly devoid of any tension at all.

Game Three - 28 Seconds Later
We set up Pandemic again for another try at saving the world. The distribution of starting disease was much less even this time, with a heavy concentration of blue cubes in North America. That didn't seem like an insurmountable problem, given that all the characters start in Atlanta. We'd just have to concentrate our efforts on our home turf, which was at least better than needing to travel a long distance to deal with a consolidated cluster of diseased cities halfway across the world.

On the first turn, we got hit with three outbreaks in rapid succession, all in North America. This was nothing more than the evil of raw luck, but it put us in a really poor position right off the bat. There's no way to accelerate the method by which you can devise a cure, since there's no way to draw extra player cards in a given turn. Still, the situation wasn't entirely bleak, and as long as we didn't get hit with any more heavy action in the US, we could probably pull ahead of the rapidly spreading disease.

On our second turn, Max drew an Epidemic card and we got hit with four more outbreaks, as so many of the cities in the US were already overrun with disease that the first outbreak led to a nasty chain reaction. By the end of that chain reaction, we'd reached a total of seven outbreaks. Since you lose automatically as soon as you hit eight outbreaks, and since there was no way for us to substantially reduce the number of cubes in the US in order to prevent another outbreak, we decided to call this game off. We were simply no match for whatever weapons-grade bioengineered virus had obviously escaped from an Army lab out in the desert, and we couldn't do anything more than witness the devastation as Randall Flagg strolled past with a wicked grin on his face.

Game Four - The Hungriest Coyotes
me (Cornbread, Earl and Me) -> Greg (Hermanas toolbox) -> Max (old skool Malks) -> Josh ("It's Not Vignes, Really") -> Matt (Guruhi Are the Orun)

We began to set up another game of Pandemic, one that would hopefully have a less humiliating ending, but we decided that we had just enough time left before the store closed to squeeze in another game of VTES, so we packed Pandemic up and put it away.

Greg played a hilarious Hermanas deck that I called the Buddhism deck, because it can teach a valuable lesson about how nothing in this world is permanent. The Hermanas lose all or some of their blood as soon as they appear, and continue to throw it away every turn immediately after gaining it back from hunting. They arm themselves with Sticks, which fall apart in short order. I don't know what an Oppugnant Night is, but it sounds like the kind of event that might result in enlightenment, which itself fades away shortly after it arrives. Greg also plays Agents of Power in the deck, which of course fade quickly, just as all temporal power slips away in the face of the infinite. About the only thing that sticks around for these ladies as they quest for bodhi is their Abbots, and even they have a religious connotation. There's also the Spontaneous Power which comes from within, but at a heavy cost to one's worldly resources. Yes, I just turned your toolbox into a theme deck, Greg. You're welcome.

Josh contributed to the hilarity by bringing out Edward Vignes and immediately denying that he was playing a Vignes deck. His next vampire was Ranjan Rishi, so naturally I proceeded to give him the standard harassment routine about playing a tournament deck in a casual game. However, he'd discarded enough Spirit Marionettes at this point, as well as eaten a bleed of six from Max's Didi Meyers without bouncing it, that I believed him. That his third and final vampire turned out to be Ingrid Russo made me feel a bit bad for him. Apparently Blanche Hill had turned down his invitation to the dance.

Greg bled Max for six, and again there was no bounce to be had. Shortly thereafter, the Hermanas celebrated a traditional Mexican night of Punching Didi In the Face, and she went to take a nap after being tired out from the festivities. I brought out Armin Brenner and thought I had vote lock, being the only person on the table with a titled vampire, so I attempted to call a Kine Resources Contested. Matt's Urenna Bunu didn't like the look of the vote, so she made herself the Guruhi Kholo and also played King's Favor, shutting Armin down. Though it sucked that my vote had failed to pass, I've never been put in my place by a king before, so at least it was an interesting experience.

Max brought out Greger Anderssen, but it seemed that none of his other vampires appreciated the earlier visit from Elvis and he was stuck with only two minions for most of the game. Matt brought out Eze and I got out Hektor, leaving the vote situation just dicey enough that I was in full wheel/deal mode. Josh did a lot of Mind Numbing of Matt's vampire in order to land his bleeds, which meant that I didn't have a lot of pressure on me. I also got quite a bit of pool from Villeining and Giant's Bloodening Armin, so I was all set not to be ousted. I offered to call a Con Boon for Guruhi if Matt cast all his votes in favor, as Matt was getting quite low on pool from Josh's not-Vignes-at-all bleeds. After lamenting about being in the position of giving free pool to his prey, Matt agreed to my terms, but Josh Delayed the vote.

Greg continued to stealth/bleed/untap/hunt, dropping Max's pool totals to dangerously low levels. I tossed a couple of bleeds for one in Greg's direction, mainly to move stealth cards out of my hand, but the third or fourth time that I did this, I noticed that Greg had almost no pool left. Apparently he'd spent a bunch of it while I was hypnotized by the snake on Eze's arm. Josh had the play of the night when Matt was down to three pool. Though Josh obviously had no bleed cards in his hand, he sent Ingrid to torpor by Daring the Dawn when Matt, tapped out, attempted to block a bleed of one. Much derision followed, but was quickly hushed when Josh's next two bleeds of one landed without Matt playing a card.

I ousted Greg soon after, now that I could call and pass votes without any real interference. Max had influenced out Aleph shortly before, an addition to Max's ready region that my Neonate Breach was all too happy to see. With two ousts on one turn, I had over twenty pool left in addition to Dmitra, Hektor and Armin, and Josh had two minions with only a little blood between them, so he conceded the game on the condition that I agree that he wasn't playing a Vignes deck.

Conclusions: My deck, which I've been playing on and off for about two years now, is probably about as good as it's going to get. I should maybe find room for another Iron Glare or two, as the surprise bleed can be very helpful, but I like having a deck that's mostly bounce-proof. The deck likely needs a new name.

V:TES On V:TES Night

2010-05-28T13:35:00.001-07:00

Mike had been agitating for our V:TES group to actually play some V:TES on V:TES night, which seemed like a reasonable request, so we capitulated. While we were arranging seating, Max asked if anyone had a six-sided die that he could borrow. I thought that was odd, since Max is one of our newer players, and I didn't think he owned six different decks from which he'd want to choose randomly.

Game One - Crazy Go Nuts University
me (Art of Memory stealth/bleed) -> Mike (aus/dem/obf stealth/bleed) -> Max (aus/dom/obf stealth/bleed) -> Tony (the weirdest Ravnos) -> Ben (Kiasyd toolbox)

Three decks featuring Malks and Malk antis! Five decks capable of generating non-trivial bleeds at stealth, four of which also featured bleed bounce! Almost zero combat or intercept! I felt like I'd been taking crazy pills. It was particularly strange to be the only deck at the table which couldn't redirect bleeds, given how much I love the wu wei involved in that particular jujitsu trick, and how often the other people in my playgroup don't play with bounce.

I started the game with three Effective Managements in my hand, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, since the deck I was playing has some definite crypt issues. After playing the first one, I had all three of the vampires I cared about in my uncontrolled region, so I just discarded the others. Mike brought out some aus/obf nerds and Max brought out J. Ozzy White, explaining his need for a die. Tony brought out Gwen Brand, Ben put Isanwayen into play, I influenced out Hagar Stone, and we were all ready to get the bleedfest started.

Tony's deck was noteworthy for how confusing it was for us to figure out what it was, exactly. First he brought out Gwen Brand, who attempted to put a Nightmare Curse on one of Ben's elves. This led me to think that Tony was trying out the new Ravnos with Auspex, but I was thrown off the scent when he later played a Dominate skillcard on Vassily Taltos. Some time after that, he discarded a Magic of the Smith, reducing me yet again to a state of bewilderment. In terms of its functioning, it operated like most other stealth/bleed decks, with the Dominate giving it access to bounce and somewhat more bleed punch than the Ravnos can usually generate. But surely there was more at work here?

The game proceeded as you might expect, with a lot of stealthy bleeds getting tossed around the table. I managed to nullify a few of the redirections and reductions with Hide the Minds and Touches of Clarity, recycled via Arts of Memory. Ben bled into me fairly hard, depleting four to six of my pool each turn, much to Tony's consternation. I went the eco-friendly route and recycled all of my Reunion Kamuts, and then used Villeins to move the blood on those discounted vampires into my pool, which allowed me to stay a step ahead of Ben's bleeds while I chipped away at Mike's pool.

At about the same time that Tony put Week of Nightmares into play and my pool was starting to get low enough for me to be concerned, Matt (who'd been waiting in the other room for someone to be ousted so that he and some others could start a new game) wandered in and said, "Hey, Ben, are you playing a starter? Yeah, let's see, all your cards have the same expansion symbol on them, and that just happens to be the same expansion that had the starter for this clan. You playing a starter?" My worries that Ben might oust me via expedient use of Tony's bleeds were gently lifted from me, as the cool breeze clears the fog after a heavy rain.

Max transferred out a surprise late-game Helena just before I ousted Mike, and as expected, Ben folded shortly thereafter. Max laid into the six pool Tony had just earned, putting him near ousting just before I took out Max. Tony got in one more turn of heavy bleeding and sewed up Hagar's face, but all for nought as I snuck past him to grab the last two VPs.

After the game was over, Tony revealed that he hadn't been playing a Ravnos deck at all, but an Aidan Lyle deck, which suddenly made the game we'd just played make a whole lot more sense. Oh, perfidious Chimerstry! It had fooled me into perceiving Tony's dashed hopes as a group of Ravnos. Truly, Sigfried and Roy would've been proud of these masters of illusion. Using Aidan and Ankara Citadel to put out a bunch of cheap Sense Deps and Nightmare Curses is actually a pretty great idea, and hopefully Tony will get it working with a little more reliability.

I told Tony and Max about the insight my deck's godfather, Darby Keeney, had revealed to me when I'd asked him about it. The deck looks less sleazy than vanilla stealth/bleed, because it's doing extra tricks and has more cogs in the machine than just Govern/stealth/Conditioning, but it's actually more sleazy because it's so much less reliant on lucking into good matchups. Tony agreed that it's as sleazy as a used-car salesman, so we talked about putting a copy of Well-Aimed Car into my deck, as the deck does have a smattering of incidental maneuvers and presses, and a third of the crypt happens to have Potence as well. While waiting for the other game to finish up, we killed some time marvelling at the high prices of boardgame expansions and lamenting the twin sadnesses called Potence and Celerity. Eventually, the other guys completed their chapter in the Grand Jyhad and we re-convened for another game.

Game Two - Sticking Rocks In the Meat Grinder
me (Harbingers blood denial) -> Ben (Gargoyles) -> Tony (Nosferatu fightin' royalty) -> Max (aus/dom/obf stealth/bleed) -> Matt (Gargoyle Laboratory)

Ah, this was more like it. Whatever conditions had caused the weird dimensional warp which had landed me in what appeared to be a French tournament metagame were apparently dissipated by this point, so there was plenty of combat to be had. Being squashed between the two gargoyle decks made me very happy that I'd chosen to play a deck packing S:CE on top of both permanent and transient damage prevention.

Ben brought out some new school Gargoyles, Tony brought out Cock Robin, Max brought out William Biltmore and J. Ozzy White, and Matt brought out Erinyi and a bunch of Tremere. I had Solomon Batanea and Babalawo in play just in time to block Matt's first Create Gargoyle action, so he switched focus to building up Erinyi instead. She got a Dominate skillcard and was twice Experimented upon with great Biothaumaturgicality. Since she wasn't a slave, though, I could safely block the bleeds of the Tremere and just bounce hers to Ben.

Ben and Tony got into a couple of tussles, which inevitably ended badly for Tony, in spite of his Preternatural Cock Strength. Ben taught us all a valuable lesson in how you can play a combat deck, sit next to another combat deck, and not automatically self-destruct, and the theme of that lesson was Damage Prevention. This was a lesson I've already learned, so I managed to keep all of my vampires out of torpor in spite of being surrounded by a bunch of strength increasers, Razor Bats, Lead Fists and a whole shedful of Raking Talons.

I got Mordechai into play and managed to make him a laibon for the first time ever. He also got Well-Marked during the same turn. That's about it for how extensively my actions affected the table; I did some building up and messing around with my vampires, but didn't impact anyone sitting next to me very much. In spite of the fact that I've never gotten anything short of a game win when I've played this deck, almost every time I play it, there's a period during which I feel like I'm out of sync with the rest of the table, which is moving more quickly than I am. This always fills me with worry. As an example of how the rest of the table was doing stuff while I fiddled and futzed, Matt spent himself pretty low by bringing out more vampires, so Max did the obvious thing and ousted him. That was fine with me. Since my Harbingers have a lot of bleed bounce, I didn't mind one or two girthy bleeds at stealth coming at me every turn.

I put an Antediluvian Awakening (a card I've recently fallen in love with) into play, which finally made me feel like I was generating some forward motion. Ben chewed through all of Tony's vampires and finally managed to land an ousting bleed, but he'd spent so much blood doing so that most of his vampires had to hunt. Morechai had successfully completed Operation Dumbo Drop by this point, and he was able to block those hunts and introduce Ben's minions to Mr. Stampy. My Ossian also hit a few of Ben's guys with a hearty GRRR before one of them fought back and crippled him, but he'd done his job and Ben's ready region was a shambles. I re-gifted Ben with several of the bleeds that Max gave me, and then managed to squeak one through myself to oust him.

Max was apparently low on stealth, as I managed to catch two of his vampires who attempted to bleed me and smacked them around a little bit. I had also finally drawn into a Lazerene Inquisitor and began stripping blood from his guys. Max decided that his chances of climbing over the top of my intercept before I could take his vampires down weren't reasonable and decided to concede.

Maabaara was once again my MVP card. I had assumed it was garbage before I threw it into this deck, and I'd only done that because the deck used to have one copy of each of the Harbinger clan cards in it. It's proven itself to be highly valuable every time I've drawn it, even in spite of the fact that I usually use it in a boneheaded fashion to retrieve master cards, which is much less efficient than using it to recur minion cards. (As further proof of how smart I am, it happened on three separate occasions during this game that I put a card on top of my library and then was amazed two minutes later that I'd happened to draw the exact card that I needed, before remembering that said draw wasn't such a miracle after all.) This deck needs a fairly significant overhaul, as the abundance of laibon tech isn't working out as well as I'd like for the amount of effort I put into shoehorning it in, and I'm seriously considering adding a second copy of Maabaara and a couple of Parthenons to maximize my use of it.

Who Let the Bridge Troll In Here?

2010-05-26T08:46:00.000-07:00

Here's the deck which I played at our V:TES storyline tournament.

"I've Got a Key In My Pocket"
Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 5 max: 8 average: 6.75
------------------------------------------------------------
3x The Arcadian (DOM MYT OBT, 8)
1x Pherydima (DOM MYT obt, 8)
2x Omme Enberbenight (dom MYT OBT, 7)
1x Roderick Phillips (DOM MYT obt, 7)
3x Isanwayen (DOM MYT OBT, 6)
2x Dame Hollerton (DOM myt OBT, 5)

This crypt is built for MYT/OBT, a discipline combination that was difficult to obtain before Heirs was printed. Specifically, Arms of the Abyss/Earth Swords always looked like a tight combat package to me, but without a crypt to support it, there wasn't much point in trying to make it work.

Heirs was a really great set for the Kiasyd, in a quiet way that nobody seems to have really blown their trumpet about. It might just be that since Kiasyd have always been one of the best bloodlines, the new tech that they got wasn't remarkable. Contrast that with the !Salubri, for instance, whom everyone got excited about as a direct result of them very suddenly going from "special needs" to "hey, wait, are these guys actually good now?"

Library [82 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------

This used to be a smaller library, but the largish combat module cycled quickly enough that I ran out of cards regularly enough to increase the library size. I didn't ever get close to running out of cards during the tournament, though, likely because I had a hard time keeping my hand moving during most of those games.

Master [14]
5x Blood Doll
1x Giant's Blood
1x Great Symposium
1x KRCG News Radio
1x Pentex(TM) Subversion
1x Perfectionist
1x Storage Annex
2x Wash
1x Wider View

Not much to comment on here, as this is mostly wrenches and hammers rather than anything fresh and exciting.

The Storage Annex seemed like a good idea, as there are a lot of cards in this deck of which there is only one copy but which may not be useful as soon as they're drawn, but it didn't really work out in play. Would've been better as another Perfectionist.

This was the last of my Wider View experiments, and my conclusion is that having just one Wider View is useless in a deck. Either use a lot of them or don't bother at all.

At one point during the finals, Dave asked me if I had any rush in the deck, and I just laughed. I really don't play many decks that use action cards which say anything about entering combat on them, but some Haven Uncovereds might be a good idea for this deck.

Action [9]
1x Abbot
1x Dominate Kine
4x Govern the Unaligned
1x Graverobbing
1x Gremlins
1x Riddle Phantastique

A bit of a grab bag of options here. Never managed to make a Graverobbing happen, and I don't remember Abbot ever being useful. If I wanted to make this deck better, obviously there should be about twice as many Governs.

Action Modifier [4]
2x Conditioning
1x Foreshadowing Destruction
1x Threats

Again, to improve the deck, some of the toolboxiness should be stripped out and more bleed mods should be added here. I'm a firm believer in the school of thought that it's better to have fewer bleed mods and make sure that they land where you want them to, rather than using a lot of them and just hoping that they stick, but even with that frame of mind there's not enough offense here.

Action Modifier/Combat [6]
6x Fae Contortion

In theory, these are great with the Arms/Swords combo, allowing you to shrug off Immortal Grapples, slink away from your opponent's strike and then stab them with dirt. In practice, they give you a fairly solid plan B for ousting, allowing you to sneak past preys who don't have any intercept and land some bleeds.

Action Modifier/Reaction [3]
3x Murmur of the False Will

No good, these. The number of times that I was bled by a vampire older than all of my guys while staring at one of these cards in hand has convinced me that Murmur is only worth using if your average crypt size is rather large. For those decks, I think Murmur is quite good, as it gives you something useful to do with your bleed bounce during the two-player endgame, but for other decks, it's all too likely that a sadness will ensue.

Ally [2]
1x Draeven Softfoot (Changeling)
1x Mylan Horseed (Goblin)

Draven was great, acting as a floating Flak Jacket for times when I didn't want to commit combat cards (like when blocking bounced bleeds). Mylan is theoretically great, but I didn't ever get him into play during the tournament.

Keep these guys in mind if you decide to do the obvious thing and add some Songs of Pan to this deck. A Song will kill both of these guys dead, as they're very unlikely to land a bleed (particularly when you announce that the bleed is for two).

Combat [22]
9x Arms of the Abyss
2x Darkling Trickery
9x Earth Swords
1x Oubliette
1x Shadow Body

This worked out very well, when it worked at all. It would be quite possible to play with discipline and only fight when it's opportunistically useful to do so, in which case you could cut down on the number of Arms and Swords.

The two S:CE were escape hatches from combat which I never came close to needing. They could easily be cut or replaced with Tastes of Vitae.

Equipment [3]
1x Sport Bike
2x Tinglestripe

Tinglestripe seemed like a good, cheap, efficient combat permaent to back up my combat transients, which is always useful in a toolboxy deck like this one. Since I wasn't having any luck getting into useful combats, though, the Tinglestripes were worse than useless. I still haven't decided if that's because of the specific circumstances of those games or if the card just isn't worth playing in general. I'm leaning toward the latter.

Event [1]
1x Scourge of the Enochians

I knew this wasn't going to matter during our tournament, but as I mentioned in the tournament report, I didn't change this deck at all for the event. In theory, this is a really good card for bruise/bleed decks, since it cuts down on the number of minions you need to chew through in order to get to your prey's pool. Since I'm the only player in my playgroup who plays weenie decks with anything like regularity, I'm not sure if this is borne out in actual play or not.

Reaction [13]
2x Eyes of the Night
1x Faerie Wards
3x On the Qui Vive
4x Redirection
3x Wake with Evening's Freshness

Faerie Wards is really excellent, especially when Omme plays it and it only costs one blood. The younger vampire clause on it really hurt my chances of playing it usefully, though, and I think this card might have to be filed next to Basilisk's Touch under "Mytherceria cards which are only useful if your name happens to be Marconius."

My theory here was to have enough intercept to block casually stealthy actions, between the permanent intercept, the Eyes of the Night, and Aura Absorption at basic, but it seemed like I never had enough intercept to block anything that I actually cared about. To improve the deck, the intercept can safely be ditched.

I think I may have drunk more Storm Kings than I realized while building this, as it's definitely short on wake tech, a weakness which I felt keenly during every game of the tournament. For a deck this size, I normally start at eight wakes and add more if necessary, and this deck definitely needs at least that many.

Reaction/Action Modifier [4]
4x Aura Absorption

As mentioned above, I'd ditch these entirely if I was going to focus on streamlining the deck.

Retainer [1]
1x Mr. Winthrop

Also to be cut, if the deck should eventually be turned into something good.

Not sure if I'm going to keep this deck or not. The combat package is wonderfully toothsome, but it's not trumpy enough to be used as the sharp end of a straight-up rush package, and bruise/bleed is an archetype that I really don't have much love for. I can see how I could make this deck good, but I strongly suspect that it would also make the deck less fun to play. If I do keep this, it will probably be relegated to casual play only. It has too much potential for bad matchups to possess much in the reliability department when facing sleeker, more honed decks.

Zombie Realpolitik In the Wild West

2010-05-21T08:58:00.000-07:00

Well, not all at once, unlike what the title suggests.

We had five people show up to our Monday night session, which is normally V:TES plus the occasional other game. Since we'd had our tournament the day before, it didn't seem like anybody really wanted to play more V:TES right then and there. Josh had suggested earlier that we try to scrape together a game of Bang!, which I was totally into, since I've got a copy of the game but hadn't yet ever played it. Everyone else seemed congenial, so we slapped cowboy hats on our heads, bellied up to the bar for a shot or six of rotgut, and prepared to squint at each other malevolently.

Game One - If I'm a Cylon, Does It Take An Action to Reveal?
At the beginning of a game of Bang!, every player is assigned a secret role, which defines his victory condition. The Sheriff, who reveals his role as soon as he gets it, is trying to kill everyone who isn't a Deputy. The Deputies win if the Sheriff does. The Outlaws want to kill the Sheriff. The Renegade wants to kill everyone except the Sheriff, and then kill the Sheriff. As you can see from that synopsis, only the Renegade's victory conditions are in any way complicated. This will become important later.

In theory, this game could involve a fair amount of bluffing and negotiation, given that nobody knows for sure what the other players are trying to accomplish. In practice, at least during this game, almost everyone opted for a "shoot first and interrogate the corpse" methodology instead. I suspect that this is usually the way the game plays, since the vast majority of the cards are either kill-you or save-me cards. Having little or no technology available to try to suss out other players' roles without violence means that about the only way to try to figure out who's who is to throw a couple of bullets at people and see how they react. That's good design, given that Bang! is meant to be a quick play. Forcing players to start shooting as a means of gathering information keeps play from stagnating into he-said/she-said politicking, which is definitely not how the West was won.

Ben was our Sheriff, and started out by building up his position with a long-barreled gun, an iron plate under his shirt, and a horse. Josh screwed up early on, telling Ben that he had no intention of stealing Ben's gun, a comment which arrived apropos of nothing and immediately aroused Ben's suspicions. I managed to make an even bigger mistake right after that. When I had gotten my role card, I'd glanced at it and immediately forgotten what it said - I was tired and Josh was going over the rules of the game at the time, so what I'd looked at fell right out of my head. I looked at my card again, to see what in tarnation I was supposed to be doing, making a joke about revealing myself as a cylon as I did so. Ben assumed that the only reason I'd have to look at my card a second time was because I was the Renegade and hadn't fully understood the victory conditions for that role, as all the others are so simple. Since I was actually an Outlaw, I didn't put up much of an argument against that logic.

Ben took potshots at Josh and Max to see what they'd do. Josh shot at Matt, and Max went after Josh with gusto. Max must be the Deputy, then, right? Ben threw Matt into jail, which was the one mechanic in the game that I found really annoying. (While in jail, you don't get to play at all, and there's nothing you or anyone else can do to get out of jail - whether or not you're released is purely random.) I played some cards to build up my position and didn't act aggressively toward anyone.

Max kept plugging away at Josh, who got gunned down in short order, revealing that he was the Renegade. That gave Ben pause, since he was now unsure of my role, but he quickly decided to throw me into jail just to be on the safe side. Several turns passed in which Ben and Max didn't do anything while Matt and I rotted in jail, which I knew meant that Max must be the other Outlaw. If he'd been the Deputy, he would've been shooting at Matt and I. Ben didn't twig to that, though, given the smart trust investment Max had made with Ben earlier, by following Ben's orders and blasting Josh when he was told to.

Matt and I freed ourselves from jail at about the same time, and Matt decided that the thing to do was to light a stick of dynamite, which passes around the table and randomly blows up one player. Unfortunately, he got tossed back into the clink right afterward, and sat there staring at the dynamite in his hand before it blew him to pieces. That revealed that he was the Deputy, so all pretenses were put aside and Max and I laid into Ben with everything we had. That turned out to be rather a lot of flying lead, and though Ben managed to dodge bullets like he'd taken the red pill for a couple of turns, we soon laid out the Sheriff before he managed to put either of us down. "Deserve's got nothing to do with it," indeed.

Game Two - Backdoored by Squidbillies
Max had just bought the Game of Thrones boardgame, so we set it up and prepared to battle it out for control of Westeros. I was the white guys in the north, Ben was the green guys in the south, Josh was the yellow guys in the mid-east, Matt was the red guys in the mid-west, and Max was the black squidbilly guys squished between my territory, Matt's and Josh's.

AGoT is an area-control game with a few mechanical hiccups meant to evoke the atmosphere of the books on which the game is based. Those design choices are quite effective at getting the feel of the novels across, but unfortunately what makes for compelling fiction doesn't necessarily correlate to what makes for compelling gaming.

The setting is faux-medieval England, but unlike most fantasy settings, it hews closer to alt-history than it does to Tolkienesque flights of fancy (at least in the first few books, which are what the game models). This means that there's no magic to speak of, no great heroes who can destroy entire armies, and no horses or boats that can travel with the speed of the wind. In short, this is the kind of setting where just getting to the battlefield is a logistical slog, and the battles themselves are rarely decisive, as armies tend to be routed and regroup rather than being utterly destroyed where they stand.

To reflect this, AGoT uses the strangest set of mans mechanics I've seen in an area-control game. Everyone starts with a very small number of mans, such that there are neutral territories between every players' individual starting territories. In and of itself, that's not so strange, but it's determined completely at random when players get new mans, meaning that there's no safe way to expand your holdings beyond a territory or two from where you start, and no way to safely defend the territories you're leaving behind. The game mitigates this a bit by making your mans quite a bit more doughty than the mans in most area control games; most battles result in retreats rather than a loss of mans, so as long as you've kept a clear path of retreat behind your advance, you're unlikely to have your overall force strength reduced.

I have no problem with games possessed of a high degree of randomness, as long as that randomness suits the theme of the game. I really like Yetisburg and Mall of Horror, and both of those are as dependent on luck as they are on strategy (or maybe even moreso). The AGoT setting is certainly one in which I can get behind the randomness of when your mans muster, but it baffles me as to why there isn't a Monies For Mans mechanic in the game. That would have perfect thematic resonance, as mercenaries play a hugely important role in the novels, and would also help to alleviate the turtling/iceberging tendency that we saw in our game, and which I imagine happens in most plays of this game. Such a mechanic would incentivize players to try to take Monies territories, and would force tough decisions between conquering Monies territories (which could be used to buy more mans, but which might also be needed for other uses) and Mans Factory territories (which give you more mans for free, but are unreliable).

Our game started slowly. We got a lot of cards that let us bid monies for big cardboard pieces: a sword, a bird and a chair. I managed to get myself fairly well-positioned along each of those power tracks, simply because I bid as much as everyone else and was the furthest distance from Josh, who had the chair (which let him break all the ties that came up) and knew that I was the least threatening to him, and so let me be the highest amongst the tied players. None of these things seemed to really have much effect on the game at that point, but there wasn't anything else going on, so everyone moved to occupy Make Monies territories and then spent those monies on these auctions, with the end result that no one really did much of anything and mostly maintained their starting positions on the power tracks.

Ben and I secured some uncontested territories in our respective ends of the island, and Josh overreached himself a bit and lost some mans in battles with both Ben and Matt. Max pushed south to mess with Ben on the high seas, leaving me alone to start greedily eyeing his Mans Factory territories which weren't too far from my southern border. I hadn't really been paying much attention to the way that the ocean spaces worked, since I only had one boat and couldn't see much use for it. The few times I tried to push my boat south, Josh stepped up and defended his sea lanes, but he didn't really seem to be able to leverage that ocean power to any useful end, so I kind of wrote off the oceans as anything worth worrying about.

There were a few more inconclusive skirmishes in the middle of the board, with the other four players pushing each other around a bit, but with nothing conclusive happening there. We finally got our first More Mans command from the game, and I prepared to head south to unseat Max from some of his lightly defended northern territories. My push was a success and he was forced to fall back. Since I didn't have enough mans to leave a reasonable defensive force behind me, though, he was able to use his command of the sea lanes to backdoor his way into my northern territories. Drunken squidbillies piled into my ancestral home and pushed my mans stationed there southward to join my other forces, which would have been a tragic tale of woe if not for the fact that I couldn't work up the will to care. Though I'd been ousted in the north, the new territories I'd conquered in the south compensated for the lost lands exactly, so it didn't make any difference.

Josh had been getting his face pounded in by Ben during all this, and Ben had managed to acquire five Mans Factory spaces. Due to geographical restrictions, none of the rest of us could stop him, even if we teamed up. The game was almost over anyway, and we had about an hour left before the store closed, so we decided to call the game with Ben the winner. It wasn't a particularly satisifying play experience for me. Ben won by turtling, Max and Matt and I iceberged around the board, and Josh got his teeth kicked in because he was the only one really trying to conquer more territory. An area control game which discourages you from trying to control more areas than you start with is a pretty flawed premise, and there's definitely a lesson to be learned here about trying to0 hard to capture flavor at the expense of dynamic gameplay.

Game Three - Zombies Want Sexy Clothes
Mall of Horror isn't like other zombie games. In other zombie games, you move your mans from space to space, look for weapons to kill zombies, and try to keep yourself alive long enough to complete some kind of objective. In Mall of Horror, you move from space to space and look for weapons to kill zombies with, and you definitely want to keep your characters alive, but the objective here is to make sure that other peoples' characters get eaten before yours do. The game doesn't end until almost all of the characters have been eaten, so your objective is to look as helpful as possible while being as spiteful as possible.

It's a French game, complete with hilariously mistranslated manual, whose central mechanic is hidden voting. That voting mechanic is location-based, meaning that only players who have their characters in an appropriate location get to cast votes to resolve what's happening in that location. So, players who have characters in the security office get to vote on who among them will be security chief for the round, characters in a location that's being attacked by zombies vote to see who gets pushed to the front of the crowd and eaten by the living dead, and characters who are in the parking lot vote to see who gets to search the supply truck for useful equipment. Players who have more than one character in a location get more votes there, but since you can only move one character per turn, it's also easy to lose one of those characters if that location gets overwhelmed with zombies, which creates a nice decision-making tension between spreading yourself too thin and putting all your eggs in one fragile basket.

By the time we got around to playing MoH, my brain was pretty fried, and I honestly don't have real firm grasp on the chronology of this particular zombie holocaust. Chalk it up to the overwhelming horror of this "uncomfortable situation" (a phrase straight from the rulebook). I'm quite sure that the following events occurred, in more or less this order: Max had two of his three guys eaten in one turn, throwing him into a highly defensive posture; the Cachou "Sexy Clothes" store was closed as a result of there being too many zombies waiting there for someone to buy lingerie; Matt very quietly managed to keep all three of his characters alive long after the rest of us were reduced to one or two guys.

The game ended with the kind of climactic lightning round that characterizes the best endgames of MoH, in which the security office was too overwhelmed with zombies for anyone to venture there to check the security monitors to see where the next incoming wave of zombies would be appearing, several of the locations were closed entirely and the rest all had zombies waiting outside for fresh meats, and everyone had run out of equipment cards and so had nothing to rely on except luck and persuasion. Additionally, everyone other than Matt was down to one character, which meant that the rest of us would need to team up in order to keep him from winning.

Matt was able to outfox us all, though, putting both of his remaining characters into the same location. Since the zombies in a given location only eat one character, even if he lost the vote and was chosen to be eaten, he would've been able to choose his higher-point character and thus win. It was a great, out-of-the-box play on Matt's part. In the end, though, it didn't matter, since Max got caught in the parking lot and ripped limb from limb, ending the game.

Afterwards, we discussed the highly random nature of the game, and a few of the people who've played it multiple times expressed some dissatisfaction with that. I've since come up with few houserules that I think will add some more strategery to the game (one of which is to make everyones' dead characters come back as zombies, which is so genre-appropriate that it seems like it should've been a bigger part of the game in the first place), so we'll give those a shot next time we play this one.

Battling For Lines In Boston

2010-05-19T18:22:00.001-07:00

I hadn't been planning to attend our V:TES storyline event, largely because I wasn't able to think up anything interesting to build for it. However, the week before the date of the event, I realized that I had already built two decks which sported storyline-compliant crypts, both of which I wanted to play more in order to tune them. So I headed south, to battle for lines. Battle with lines? Against lines? There were lines, and there was battling, so it all worked out in the end.

The decks in question are a Harbingers blood denial deck and a Kiasyd combat toolbox. I didn't make any changes to either one for the event, and I decided to choose the Loyalist faction, simply because that meant I'd be much less tempted to use the special card that choice granted me if I had a moment of weakness during play. Guide and Mentor has such a small effect on the game that I didn't think I'd ever feel the desire to tap it.

I'd played the Harbingers deck quite a bit more than the Kiasyd one, but I was worried that the elves would be a much more enticing prospect than the skulls for people who might really want to win. I really hate contesting, so I considered asking the other nine players who showed up for the tournament if either of those decks would cause issues with their own deck choices. In the end, I decided that everyone would probably be playing Baali and the scarce clans, and went with the Kiasyd. Mostly, that was a good guess, though my other metagame guesswork turned out to be totally wrong.

Round One - Suicide Prevention Hotline
Greg (Trujah vote) -> me -> Chris (Trujah vote) -> Prescott (Salubri) -> Matt (Baali stealth/bleed)

Greg brought out some titled Trujah, I brought out some elves, Chris brought out some titled Trujah, Prescott confused Matt by bringing out Matthew, and Matt brought out WhoEatsALottaBroccoli. Chris and Greg were both playing Lilith's Blessing, and each of them decided not to pay any pool for their vampires by abusing Villein and Blessing. As a result, it quickly became clear to me that I was never going to oust Chris, and Matt wasn't able to get much going against Greg. Matt bled with his three vampires each turn, but didn't really play any cards. I assumed that he was playing a bad deck, as Matt has a tendency to enjoy playing bad decks.

All this meant trouble for Prescott, who decided that his precarious position naturally meant that he should spend himself down to almost no pool. Chris obliged this suicidal urge by calling an unblocked oust-vote, but for some reason Greg decided that Chris shouldn't get the oust and voted it down. Maybe Greg thought he could sweep the table? By the time his next turn rolled around, Chris had apparently decided that Greg was right and that he shouldn't oust Prescott, so he played Golconda on Prescott's 10-cap. Meanwhile, Prescott had seemingly had a George Bailey revelation and decided that he wanted to live after all, so his vampire found religion and he found some pool. After that, nothing interesting happened. Everyone had bloat and lacked the muscle to move forward, so we hung our heads in shame and submitted to the dreaded zero-oust timeout.

My only real relevance in this game was to separate the two vote decks so that they would mostly agree to help each others' votes. This should have meant that Chris and Greg could run the table, but both of them made inexplicable choices, and the rest of us didn't seem to have much to do. I failed to get into any meaningful combats, which I began to realize was the point of my deck. I thought I'd built a deck geared toward an even mix of meaningful combat technology, ousting power and defense, but the latter two were definitely lacking, which was worrisome.

Round Two - Remember That Thing We Talked About?
Dave (Salubri wall) -> Greg -> Max (Gargoyle bruise/bleed) -> Jen (Kiasyd stealth/bleed) -> me

Jen was more committed than I was to this tournament, so she had actually put in the effort to build something new for the event. That was good, because it meant that she was able to use vampires from groups that I hadn't allowed myself access to, which meant that we were able to mostly avoid contestation issues in three consecutive games.

Dave brought out Solomon Batanea, who was the worst minion who could possibly show up in my prey's ready region. Intercept and combat defense? I didn't roll into town with a Plan C. Nonetheless, I resolved to try to give Dave as much free rein as I could, since I figured that Greg wasn't going to be interested in paying for his vampires, just like in round one. He wasn't, but he was quite keen on mangling Max's pool. Max lacked bloat or rush, so he decided to power forward. His bleeds all slid down the conduit of Jen's bleed bounce into my lap, but that worked out pretty well for me, since I wasn't going to be able to block Jen anyway and blocking Max allowed me to cycle combat cards which would have been utterly wasted against Dave.

As luck would have it, Dave was experiencing some critical issues with his hand at the same time that I drew into a big chunk of oust. Dave had gotten Matthias into play, but wasn't doing much to stop Greg, who had already ousted Max at this point, so I decided to see if I could punch through Dave's defenses and start working on Greg's pool. Amusingly, Dave and I had been talking about whether or not Pentex is problematic for the game before the tournament had begun, and now Dave found his untapped +1 intercept minon scared of a van outside his apartment. After that led to my victory point, I was forced to concede that while Pentex might be bad for the game, it was certainly good for my game. Jen and I struggled gamely on, but Greg didn't have much trouble blasting through us, walking away with four VPs.

Round Three - The Broccoli Gambit Unveiled
Max -> me -> Matt -> Jen -> Peter (Trujah vote)

Matt brought out WhoEatsALottaBroccoli again, but this time showed me that my initial assessment of his deck had been wrong. It wasn't that he'd built a bad deck, but that he hadn't drawn what seemed to be the key to his deck, Call the Great Beast. Amidst a lot of talk of Broccoli Lessons and Vegetable Hats, I managed to fend off Max's bleeds, using my supposed combat offense as bleed defense. As Jen hammered into Peter, Matt's CTGB got a Contagion, which I was totally cool with. Jen ousted Peter and everyone else continued to grind away at their respective preys, with both Matt and I having some success.

Omme got Condemned to sit in front of the computer and play Doom rather than take actions, which hampered my ability to go forward somewhat, but thankfully Max started turning his attention elsewhere. He used Lucinde to rush one of Jen's vampires, and shortly after that Matt ousted her. Lucinde then paid the CTGB a visit, sending the Beast to naptime after Matt realized that he hadn't given it Presence and so couldn't play the Majesty in his hand. I assured Max that if he diablerized the Beast I'd vote to keep him alive in the blood hunt, and he agreed that this was a good idea. For a change, I managed to keep my word during a tournament, and didn't vote to burn Max's diablerist.

Not too long after Matt lost his star vampire, I unleashed the oust that I'd been piling up in my hand for most of the game, including a Conditioning that had been sitting in the Storage Annex since turn three. He blocked one of my bleeds but ran out of wake after that, and I nabbed a VP. I dropped Pentex on Lucinde and torporized both of Max's other vampires with the first Arms/Swords combats that actually managed to have an effect on this tournament, at which point he conceded.

Final Table - Arms Can't Help You Now
Jen -> Dave -> Ben (Nagaraja intercept/combat) -> Greg -> me

I had third choice of seating, meaning first actual choice of seating, and decided to prey on Jen rather than Dave. I'd like to claim that this was a clever way to glean more play data for my deck, since preying on Dave would have put me into the same initial predator/prey relationships that I had in round two, but actually I was just tired and thought that I'd have an easier time ousting Jen than Dave. That turned out not to be the case, but not because of anything either of them did, so choosing the other available seat might not have made any difference.

Greg chose to prey on me, which I thought wouldn't be so bad. Trujah can't generate a whole lot of stealth, and I had a fair sprinkling of intercept in my deck, so I figured he'd have a really tough time getting through me. Before we started transferring, Jen and I talked about our crypt options, and I saw that I'd be forced to play with The Arcadian and Omme, as my other guys were about to appear in her ready region. I figured I could dig around for a third minion once I'd stabilized my postion and beaten Greg back a bit. File that under "best laid plans."

I brought out The Arcadian first, so that he could Govern down to Omme. Before either of us had a second minion in play, Greg attempted to initiate some hostility towards my pool. I had an Arms and a Swords in hand, which made me feel safe, so I blocked. Greg promptly played Domain of Evernight at basic and Outside the Hourglass at superior, dumping me into torpor before there was a window for me to play any combat cards. Annoying, but not a huge deal, as I had no problem self-rescuing on my next turn. I proceeded to get out Omme at the same time that Greg got out a second Trujah. With Omme's priscus title, we now each had an equal number of votes in play. I knew he had votepush in his deck, but figured that Omme's votes would at least slow Greg down a bit.

During all this, Jen was bleeding heavily into Dave. She got him down to three pool and then sputtered out. Dave launched headlong into activities such as drawing a line in the sand, digging his heels into the ground, scrabbling desperately for purchase, and so on and so forth. He managed to build back up a bit, eventually having one vampire with Sight Beyond Sight and the Bowl of Convergence and another with +1 intercept. He explained to Jen unequivocally, several times, that he was going to put her vampires into torpor every time he got the chance to do so. During all this, Ben bled steadily into Greg, without apparent effect on Greg's plans. (Remember, Greg chose not to pay any pool for his vampires during this tournament.)

Greg took another action to reduce my pool while The Arcadian was tapped, Omme was untapped, and I had no wakes in hand. I still had that same Arms and Swords in hand, so I figured I'd block, since the chances of Greg dropping the Domain/Hourglass combo again weren't very good. What could go wrong? Of course, Greg unstoppably torporized Omme, which very neatly left him with votelock. The next Trujah in line chowed down on delicious elfmeats, and I was down to one minion. I tried to explain to Greg that I was pretty sure his move had been a mistake, since I now couldn't do anything at all to Jen for the rest of the game, because all of the other guys in my uncontrolled region were already controlled by Jen.

V:TES isn't normally much of a spectator sport, but I did have a good time watching Jen and Dave interact, which was good since I didn't have much left to do in the game at that point. Jen attempted to take a Guide and Mentor action to get an archetype for Kassiym, and Dave blocked him and sent him to torpor with a string of four prevent/press cards. That made for some highly compelling comedy, as we got to watch this conversation iterate itself exactly, four times in a row, with increasing vehemence on both sides:

Dave: "Press to continue."
Jen: "But I'm not doing anything to you right now!"
Dave: "I already told you that I was going to do this."
Jen: "Fine."
[repeat]

I drew a Great Symposium shortly thereafter, and had enough pool to grab my second copy of Omme and get him into play. Greg was unimpressed and called votes to oust me, which Ben wasn't able to block. I retired from the table at this point, because some of the other people who hadn't made the finals were starting up a new game elsewhere, so I'm not sure exactly how the table shook out. I do know that Jen won in the end, adding a Kiasyd/Loyalist victory to the rolls.

Non-V:TES Bonus Round - Vikingmans
Prescott wanted to play more V:TES, for some bizarre reason. Thankfully, we were able to talk him down from that particular ledge, and Matt taught us how to play Eketorp.

Eketorp is a worker-placement game like a lot of others, except that in this game your mans are vikings, not farmers. So rather than getting to the area first and taking more stuff than other players' mans deployed to that area, the mans in Eketorp fight each other if there aren't enough resources to go around. Those resources are used to build your base, and your mans can also be sent out to smash other peoples' bases.

As with most games, the preliminary rules explanation made the game sound much more complicated than it actually was. Each turn, resources drop onto the board randomly, everyone secretly assigns destinations for their mans, the mans fight it out and carry home resources, and then mans who got beat up earlier in the game get better. Pretty simple stuff, but it's got a lot of interaction between the individual mechanics that add nice bits of tasty design.

For example, combat is conducted via War - each player has a hand of cards with numbers on them, both players play a hidden card, and the higher card wins. But there are two fun twists to that system. The first is that the card you play is given to your opponent, so winning with a high card guarantees a win for one of your opponents at some time in the future. The cards you get from other players in this manner don't go into your hand right away, though, which is the other clever mechanic. You don't get to pick up the cards you've received until your current hand is empty, which gives combat a more strategic feel than it first appeared to have. Rather than just using your highest card during your most important fight of the turn, you have to consider what the long-term consequences of giving away such a powerful card are, and try to mitigate those by giving that card to one of the players who's not doing well.

Everyone had a good time playing this, though there didn't seem to be any particular long-term strategies so much as reacting to a continually evolving situation and trying to outguess your opponents. I'm not sure if that's due to the nature of the game itself or just because most of us playing had never played it before. For a relatively light, fast-playing game, it was a lot of fun, and it's definitely a game I'm looking forward to playing again.