Friday, November 28, 2008

Boardgamegeek Con 2008

Nov 20-23rd was the 4th year of Boardgamegeek Con. I've attended, since it is here in the DFW area, for all 4yrs and it keeps getting bigger and better every year. This year it seemed that the number of wargames played took a large leap from the previous years past, which is a good thing in my opinion.

I like to play the longer games at the con and try to make a geeklist after the con every year. Here is this years BGG Con 2008 geeklist and links to the past 3 years geeklists too, 2007 (Kuhrusty took up the mantle that year),2006, and 2005.

Mark Woodson, a local in our game group, created a geeklist this year too, BGG.CON@WAR geeklist.

The other two non-wargames I played at the con were Ghost Stories and Dominion. Both seemed to be popular games at the con. I liked Dominion but did not like Ghost Stories; it seemed boring to me.

I was so busy playing games that I didn't browse the vendor boths until Saturday afternoon. I bought, Senji, Formula D, Caledea, and a used copy of Mustangs in the Saturday morning flea market.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Galactic Emperor - Saturday 11/15/08

Played Galactic Emperor (GE) at Mark Bausman's house today with Mark Bausman, Mark Simonitch, Mark Woodson, and Robert(Bob) Woodson. Mark had hosted GE before but this was the first time I was able to make it to his house.

Galactic Emperor is a space exploration and conquest game from CrossCut Games and their first foray into boardgames. I give their first attempt two thumbs up.

On first playing, it reminds me of Twilight Imperium III (TI3) "light". This isn't a bad thing in my opinion as is seemed to play faster and I don't think the turtling that seemed to be more apt in TI3 is present. I have not played TI3 with the Shattered Empire expansion, but I heard it fixes some of the problems with turtling in TI3.

Being the newbie to the game I consistently came in last in the scoring rounds through most of the middle game so lucked out by not being a threat. In the turn before last I was able to score 3 points for destroying 3 Empire tokens and then scored 9 more VPs in the final turn scoring round to come in second, 1 point behind Bob's 39VPs.

Half way through the game, it appeared to me that having a good supply of Food producing planets is a good idea as Bob was never strapped for money. In the end this was the margin of victory as the player with the most money at the end of the game is awarded 2VPs.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

RISK again on Saturday - with Cody, Claire, and Catherine

The kids wanted to play Risk again today. Dad was almost knocked out early after my victory Friday but managed to stay in the game. We called it after Catherine knocked off Claire in her last redoubt in Australia. After taking Claire's cards Catherine was entitled to place 95 armies!

Early on in the game, Claire managed to take Australia, while Cody grabbed South America. Catherine was Queen of Asia for a turn and I took North America for a couple of turns. North and South America changed hands quite a few times before Catherine finally took control of Africa and South America at the end before knocking off Claire.

Friday, November 7, 2008

RISK - With Cody and Claire

Claire wanted to play Risk last night so we pulled out Cody's copy and had a 3-player slugfest. My Red Army came out victorious launching their attacks from South America and Australia.
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