My apologies for lack of real posts in a while but I am headed on my annual pilgrimage to Vegas this week for the Ice Hockey Tourney we play in every year. So I have had to work a bunch extra to get these extra days off. So after tonight I am likely unable to post much for about a week and a half but I will try and get back on the horse ASAP when I get back in town and off from work.

BUT… Until then I wanted to talk quickly about a few games I got last week. I went to a different FLGS (Sci-Fi Genre) then I normally go to, mainly b/c I needed to grab some comic book boxes to re-box my collection. It’s not a huge collection but it’s about 3 boxes of all comics being 20+ years old. They have been in my garage for a bit so I now want to get them in new boxes and see if I can inventory them a bit and even estimate what it might actually be worth. I am under no delusions of grandeur, but I am hoping holding on to them so long is going to one day pay off. But back on point, the good thing about this game store is it has a different sort of selection of board games then The Gamers Armory. The Armory has a great selection, but of what it has I generally have everything I want that isn’t brand new, so sometimes it’s good to see some of the out of the ordinary things other stores have. The other good thing about Sci Fi Genre is that it has a little different rewards program then the GA. The Armory has a program that for every $100 you spend you get $10 store credit towards a future purchase (which is great). The alternate program that Sci-Fi has, is a pay a price per year (I think it’s at or just under $20) and then you get special on line only pricing on purchases. This generally evens out after 1-2 trips at absolute most.

While there I was wanting to pick up Egizia, which is a great next step in worker placement since my group, and wife all love Stone Age. It’s easy to learn, deep to master and a ton of fun. I also had wanted to try and grab the 1st expansion of Fresco which has expansion modules 4,5,6 (yeah I know it’s weird-they package “expansions” 1,2,3 with the game itself), and Alan Moons amazing followup to Ticket To Ride—> Airlines Europe. Well I was 1 for 3 as they at least had Airlines Europe in stock. I also saw Dungeon Run (Plaid Hat Games), which I had wanted for a while  and Donal X Vaccarino’s Kingdom Builder which I had played before a few times and have fallen in love with. Since I couldn’t make up my mind which 2 to get I ended up with ALL 3!!! The Mrs would have been upset but b/c of the online pricing I basically got 1 of the games for free which worked out well enough for me!

Here is my quick impressions of each of these:

Airlines Europe: I start with this one b/c it’s the only one of these 3 that I didn’t have the opportunity to get to the table yet. However, that’s not to say I haven’t played it. I have previously played this game twice, and I loved it both times I played it. Think Ticket To Ride with a sort of bluffing, Stock component to it. Instead of collecting tickets to lay down routes, you are paying money to purchase routes for certain colors. You also can buy stock in certain colors, and lay down stock/share cards in each color which determines how many points you get when it’s a scoring round. Each time you play a color plane to get a route the stock of the plane goes up as well. So what you basically have is a give and take to decide between, do I buy routes, do I pick up share cards, do I lay down share cards? Buy too many and other people won’t touch that color and you are increasing it by yourself, or someone will use their turn to steal all the shares. So it’s got a great element just like TTR to bide your time and try and not give away your real intentions too soon.

As I already said I love this game and I think not only will my group love it, but Mrs. GeekJock and my parents should get into it as well. The only down point being this isn’t going to be a good 2-player game.

Dungeon Run: I wanted to get this one, b/c it’s a light dungeon crawler with simple mechanics, so it’s a good introductory dung. crawl for both the group and for my 8 year old daughter. She just loves playing games with me and I know this is one we can house rule a bit and play completely co-op and have a great bonding game session. In a nutshell you each have a character, with unique powers/stats/abilities, and are going into a dungeon trying to fight monsters, level up and ultimately defeat the dungeon boss and get the summoning stone. Normally once you get the stone you become the new boss with your own big time special power and then it’s even man for himself as you try and get out with the stone alive. But again, with my daughter I figure we will both just try and level up and try and defeat the boss together.

Fighting is simple as every monster has a number(s) of dice to roll, numbers which they hit you and a defense #, that you have to roll higher then to hit them. You can equal their to hit number of yours when you roll to block, And/or you can just roll higher then their defense to hit them. This is all done with six-sided dice. Now, it might sound a bit confusing, but do it once and you will know exactly how it goes. The beauty in the game is the varied monsters, the simplicity in it all and the ease of set up/strip down. Our one play had a few problems to it unfortunately. When we shuffled up all the monster/encounter cards we ended up with what seemed to be an endless run of trap cards. So not only did we have problems with these, but we also didn’t get enough EXP from them, so it felt like we were running in place. So when the boss was finally revealed (upon turning over the last dungeon tile in the stack, the boss tile is placed the furthest tile away from the entrance) none of us felt like we had a chance to beat the boss. I went on a nice roll as I was trying to get TO the boss so I was able to kill him and then each of my opponents and escape with the win.

I don’t think either of them particularly liked it, but I think they also both recognized that it was more our bad luck in the draws then the game itself. Hopefully, this has made them enjoy it enough so that I might be able to sometime soon play it again, and then borrow one of the D&D board games (Castle Ravenloft or the Dizz’t game) and have them like it.

So all in all I like the game but the jury is out I think from the rest of the group, and I hope to get my daughter to play it soon enough.

Kingdom Builder: A lot has been debated both online and in person by many people about this game from Dominion’s creator Donald X Vaccarino. I got into a couple of spirited debates on Twitter, but only one did I think was totally off his rocker (no not you Gamer Chris— I definitely agree that a first turn 2 card draw can be a beneficial variant– but 1st turn only like you say as well–Click his name to check out his very good, very through review). The reason I get annoyed at people who dislike games like KB are the same reasons I get annoyed with people who don’t like Ascension. They all say the same thing. There is no real choices, b/c all of my choices are pre-made by what is drawn or on the board. My response to this is, once you TRULY know how to play the game you will notice this is not the case. B/c once you learn the strategies and how to really plan ahead you will see the tons of options available to you. I will admit 100% that both of these games have that slight possibility that every 10th or more games you play that you will just get screwed by the luck, and well both those games (especially KB) are so short that the next game is never more then 30 mins away. Of course any real reviewer who has played the game more then a couple of times would be able to see this themselves. I suspect some of the real haters out there just have not played it enough.

So after my derailment how the hell do you play this game. The game comes with double sided boards which can all be used as a game side with varying hexes as terrain, and a scoring side with a scoring track. You shuffle each of the boards up and place four of them together to create the game board. You also take the final scoring cards (I believe there are 12 in all int he base game) and you shuffle them up and only use 3 each game. So right there you have 2 great aspects of random set up and game variability/re-playability. Each player in turn takes one of the terrain cards from the stack and then places 3 of his houses on the board on the terrain type of that card. The biggest rule is that if you can you MUST play adjacent to an existing house of yours on the board. There are also special power pieces that you can acquire to use which allow you to cheat a little but I am not going to go into all the rules here. So you basically go around the table placing your houses on the board until one person is out then play out the round. The whole time you are just trying to put yourself in to position to score points at the end game based on the 3 end game scoring cards which are out. Again it’s not a secret that I LOVE this game. The subtle complexity, and deep strategy are what I like, but the EASY as all hell to learn and harder to master is what I LOVE. My group has played this a ton b/c when you all know how to play it can be played in 30 mins or less (and max of 40-60mins even with teaching) and they all loved it as well. I haven’t shown the wife or fam yet but that’s soon to come, as I know Mrs GeekJock will love it, and who knows maybe even my 8 year old will be good at it too!

Well as always I started off thinking this would be a quick blurb but I can never manage to shut up. There has been no “real”buyers remorse from my 3 purchases from the store, the slight BR from Dungeon Run will go away once I get it to the table again.

I hope you pick up one of these great games and better still let me know what you think of these three games as well! Drop me a line by clicking the contact me up top, or just comment here, I will get back to you after VEGAS BABY VEGAS!

–GeekJock

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