The Failure of Strength In Arms

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

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.

Friday Night Gaming Pre-Season

(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

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 #4: I Hear Dominate Is Good

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
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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]
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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.

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

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.