Guy's Forks Day

Date: 16th November 2013
Venue: The Monkeyhouse
Participants:
- Goggsy
- The Kevinator
- Lorenziboom
- Monkey
Itinerary:
- mostly boardgames, with an unintended co-op emphasis

Hardened Beardgamers travelled from far and wide (much like they had in Tales of Arabian Nights in Oktoberfest - but less psychedelic) and descended upon the den on all things Monkey. Sadly, due to various forgotten social arrangements and solitary felines, there were fewer games squeezed in. Still plenty of quality in there though.

Game 1 - Castle Panic (including The Wizard's Tower expansion)
Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!

We had all played this before in vanilla mode and it has, on occasion, been a little on the easy side. That said, I have lost before and most games have been a close run thing. This previous experience had not prepared us for the tide of cardboard that was going to surge towards our lovely walls for the next two hours.

The expansion brings a little more complexity to the game, as there are now flying and burning critters charging out of the forest intent on pulling down all stone structures they can lay their hands on. These are mostly a bit more powerful and seem to come faster and harder than in the original game. Thankfully there is now a nice big ivory (cardboard ivory that is) tower full of scrolls, grimoire and other wizardy clobber that we can use to fend off the jazzed up horde.

We were doing quite well, the initial surge had abated a little bit and then a uberboss popped out of the magic bag of doom. I can't quite remember if it was a Chimera or a Hydra, but whichever it was it cut off our access to all the big juju on the wizard's tower... not good.

Walls fell. Then towers fell. We fought on, darting between the rubble to pass each other cards, dodging the bits of burning troll that were falling out of the sky and managed to see off the uber boss and get our grubby mitts on the spells again. Sadly, just as we caught our breath, we saw the tower with all the goodies.. yes, the wizardy ivory one... collapse and with it our morale. We fought on, but the cardboard beasties had got the better of us.

Thankfully, I was rendered dead by a piece of flying masonry as the last tower collapsed. So I missed all the limb rending and burny chomping that the trolls etc subjected the others to.

Cardboard 1 - 0 Beardgamers

Game 2 - Race for the Galaxy
This went on too long. Whilst it is a good game, it does not lend itself to pick up, yes, I know what I am doing now after 2 turns type play. Especially when two of us had never played before and the other two had only played twice, a long... time.. before.

About 3/4 of the way through we....

Interlude - break for nice porky stew with a kick and some apple soup. V tasty (but still not as good as that black bean soup - I MUST HAVE that recipe... gimme gimme gimme)

... then we finished the last 1/4.

It was, in the end, a comfortable win for Goggsy (as he was not hosting this time it was allowed) - but as the first half of the game was largely four of us staggering around in the dark banging the batteries in the rules torch, it probably doesn't count as a full on victoire!

Rules 1 - 0 Beardgamers

Game 3 - Pathfinder Adventure Cardgame
I am not going to try and claim this is the GMless RPG you have always wanted. It isn't.

It is a co-op card game with LOTS of cards, lots of luck/randomness, levelling up a' la' RPG (more Torchlight/Diablo than PnP RPG). Persistence between adventures, l337 loot to get.

On its own terms I think it works and is enjoyable enough. As a PnP RPG it is useless.

Anyway. I'm thinking I might give our adventures in Pathfinder dedicated posts, so for now just let it be said that we did, eventually, succeed. So...

Cardboard 1 - 1 Beardgamers

So a draw in the end. If only we had brought our papier mache making forks we could have triumphed... next time, Carboard, next time you'll pay.