Attendees: Luke, Rhondda, Israel, Mark, Martyn, Nigel, Matthew, Camilla, Emma, Devon
Games night, on Saturday, started with a game of Mysterium which was new for most players. Mark sailed through the clues, while the rest of us got there by the skin of our teeth. Then disaster struck! The final three cards given by the ghost to determine their murderer were shuffled and came out in an unfortunate order. This pointed very clearly at the wrong set, and we unanimously voted for the wrong person. Noooo! At this point a small group broke off to play Suburbia (with Suburbia Inc and 5 Star expansions). Since we had a larger group the rest of us pulled out Codenames for a couple of games, including the last one with Dixit cards. According to the spymasters for those ones, the Dixit cards makes things a bit more difficult. I also learned that when I get too tired for my brain to work, I need to close my mouth. I think I rambled at poor Milly for a good half hour about nothing at the end of the night. Sorry Milly! x
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Yesterday morning we watched The Amazing Spiderman, which motivated Devon to ask for a game of Legendary - one of his favourites.
We successfully stopped Scythe with his plot to overrun the town with Goblin Demons (Devon with mostly Hawkeye and Deadpool, and myself with Iron Man and Cable) and saved the day I haven't gone to Mark's for games tonight as I'm exhausted from being up all night yesterday with Zac, who was unwell. I am finally done making my Merchant of Venus insert - it was a big job! I was honestly pretty over it near the end, but I'm really happy to have a functional insert for this very hard-to-organise game. There were several more challenges in this one. Because there are so many components to fit in the box, the precision on the plans were down to the mm, and as I mentioned I made the narrow trays about 2mm too thin. I had to unsleeve my cards as they just wouldn't fit with this design, even if I modified the design of the tray (which I had to do with a couple of them).
Still, this is a huge improvement over a messy box filled with baggies of tokens, and no easy way to separate the two versions of the game. I used the plans designed by Universal Head, found at The Esoteric Order of Gamers. The stuff this guy designs is generally pretty fantastic. I was pleased with the success of my Mysterium insert so I have started work on an insert for Merchant of Venus. If any game needs it, this one does.
I've really thrown myself in the deep end here. Following online plans, there is a base and about 6 different trays. MoV (Merchant of Venus) contains two versions of the game with different components, and has a massive amount of setup. With this insert, the components are separated logically and it provides special lift-out trays you can add next to the board already set up! This is a massive plus - the setup time is one of the reasons we hardly ever play this. The measurements are very fiddly. I was out by a couple of millimetres on the base so I have had to redesign two of the trays. The design is so tight that those 2 millimetres mean things no longer fit as planned. I also had to redesign the card tray to allow for sleeves. I've found solutions though and, while it doesn't look as flash, it's easier than starting all over again. I'll post photos when I'm done. It's a slow process so it will probably take a few days. At the top you can see the original insert, which is beautifully designed until you sleeve your cards. Then, as you can see on the right, the cards stack up too high and some don't quite fit, and then you have to dump the other stuff on the top. Result - the box doesn't even close properly.
Below is the insert I made. I copied the design of one you can buy online. You can fit the board and rulebook on top and the box shuts perfectly. As you can see there are two removeable trays which stack above components below, and there is a place for everything. As it was my first attempt, I did make a few mistakes. It took me a while to get the technique to cut foamboard without it ripping up. I also got the large tray (with the player pieces) flipped around after measuring it and so made the small compartments on the wrong side. That basically means they aren't quite evenly sized as planned, but oh well - better than the gluey mess I would've made if I'd tried to fix my mistake. All in all I'm very happy with it! Bonus: Devon found other uses for foamboard: I've been having pretty early nights at Wednesday games lately since I've been quite tired.
Last Wednesday I bought Mysterium, which 6 of us played. Israel was the ghost so it was cool to play the game on the other side of things. After that we played Cardline: Dinosaurs, which is a little game where you have to try and rank different dinosaurs by length or weight. It's similar to Timeline (which I don't like) but it was pretty cool seeing all the different dinosaurs. Making inserts: The problem with Mysterium is that the cards really need to be sleeved, but once I'd sleeved them I couldn't fit everything back into the fancy insert (A game insert is the piece of plastic or cardboard that is inside the game box. Sometimes it's specially shaped to hold the components.) So today I bought some foamboard to make a custom insert. A couple of people from Wednesday games have made some already, and I watched a YouTube tutorial which made it look easy. Yeah... it's actually pretty time consuming and mine looks a lot messier than the video! But it's coming along. I made the base today and tomorrow I will make a couple of trays to add in. Also, craft is fun. Here's what I've got so far, will update as I progress. I have finally got my hands on my copy of Mysterium. I feel a bit sorry for the the owner of Megazone. I ordered it in and then bugged them a bit with "is it here yet?" emails. The guy at the store ended up picking it up himself from Pixelpark and bringing it back in the wee hours of last night, and I come in a day earlier than I said I would to check if I can get it now (I was literally driving past...). The guy at the counter then rang the owner at home to check the price when he is probably catching up on sleep after a busy weekend. Oops.
As you can tell, I'm unusually excited for this game. I think it's a mix of the cool components, the interesting-sounding game play (I mean.. a ghost giving "visions" to players just sounds like an awesome theme) and the fact that I've been reading hype about this game for ages and it's only recently become available in New Zealand. Now to bug somebody to play it with me... I got Brad and Devon to play Mysterium with me tonight, although Brad wouldn't let me put on the ambient soundtrack provided so that was a downer. He said something about not wanting to fall asleep?
It took a while as I'd never played it before, so had to check the bits and pieces in the rulebook. I played the ghost, Brad and Devon played 2 psychics each. It's a co-operative game, so we all win or lose together. It was pretty difficult to find "visions" that matched what I was trying to point out, and when I found the perfect card they would fixate on the wrong thing!. I gave Devon a picture of a large saw and knife but he couldn't figure out I was trying to say the murder weapon was a razor! In some ways it reminded me of Codenames, in that you were trying to get them to think about one part of the picture, but they would notice a different part that you hadn't seen and it would send them in the wrong direction. We figured it all out in the end, and the ghost got his (her?) closure. Did I like it? Yes Why? Awesome components. Exercised my lateral thinking skills. I enjoyed the weird art. Lovely collaborative feel. It felt really cool saying "I have a vision..." at random times. Did Devon like it? Yes Why? I forgot to ask him why, but he didn't want the game to end. Did Brad like it? No Why? He doesn't think it's very interesting. He says he's not a fan of Dixit either so it wasn't surprising. In other news, Mysterium finally arrives next week and I'm excited to try it.
Tabletop Day this year is on April 30th so watch this space. Did you know that there is a board game store at Megazone? I have started going there first for my games as it's great to have an actual store in town, their prices are competitive, and their staff are fantastic. (No, I wasn't paid to say that ;)) Attendees: Lisa, John, Gareth, Nigel, Luke, Emma, Brad
We had the first games night in a while last night, and I'm keen to have another soon. We started with Codenames. Luke and I were the spymasters. Due to my overly obscure clues (trying to desperately to link my particularly eclectic set of words) it looked like Luke's team had it in the bag. His team had one word remaining, and ours a stack of four. I threw out an "unlimited-guess" clue and hoped that there were few enough words on the board at this point that they could figure out my earlier clues. Somehow, the gamble paid off and my team (me, Lisa & John) won. I suspect that I may have been accidentally giving away a bit much during the game though, so I'll keep my mouth shut next time. We followed up with 7 Wonders which is a popular choice for many people in the group. Poor Gareth was the only person new to it so he was thrown in the deep end. In the end I took it out by a single point (Lisa and Nigel tied for second), due to the massive pile of cash I had managed to accumulate - thanks neighbours! ;) Following this, a couple of people cheekily suggested Rock Band, so we diverted from board gaming to play a few sets. I enjoy Rock Band and was happy to play, but still feel the need for some more board gaming (as the games we played were pretty light) so I'll probably hold another games night soon. Thanks for a great night everyone. |
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