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.

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.