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.

Battling For Lines In Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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