June 2017 Boardgame Round-Up

3 June 2017 – Arkham Horror

The first weekend of June was the first weekend we had free of dance classes for The Girl. Amanda had to attend a conference over the weekend, however… 

My Friend Jasper joined the kids and I for a game of Arkham Horror. I have not played Arkham Horror since last year sometime, and I have not seen Japer since… maybe when we played  A Game of Thrones back in February…?

For this game Jasper chose Yig to battle. Yig has a shorter doom track – which means less time before the end game – but Yig also doesn’t have magical or physical resistance or immunity and only 10 doom tokens – so it almost seems like it could potentially be defeated in a climactic end-game-battle. We totally DIDN’T, but, y’know, compared to some of the others it seems like it COULD be possible.

The Girl played Caroline Fern – the Psychologist, Finnegan played Vincent Lee – The Doctor, Jasper played Kate Winthrop – the Scientist, and I played Dexter Drake – the magician. We had each sealed one gate – for a total of four – Caroline Fern may have been able to seal a fifth, had we not killed two cultists (which added tokens to the doom track), because she still had a pile of clue tokens… but it would have been difficult for us to seal a sixth one as we would have all been fresh out of clue tokens…

Fighting Yig we did managed to remove SIX of the ten doom tokens before we were all utterly devoured.

I wish I could get this one on the table a bit more often. I don’t think we’ve even faced all the Elder Gods in the base set – let along cracked any of the expansions I’ve picked up for this. I had been thinking I might make October “Arkham Horror” month – we could play it each weekend in October, each with a different expansion… of course we’d probably have to play the base set in September at least once to remember how to play before adding in expansions… and then there’s Eldritch Horror and Elder Sign (and  A Study in Emerald (Second Edition) and countless other Cthulhu Mytohos/Horror games that I don’t get to play often enough…)

10 June 2017 – Pax Renaissance/7Wonders

I didn’t plan any more games until the following Saturday when Brent and Bruce stopped by to play Pax Renaissance. We played twice. That’s pretty much all I remember.

Oh, and I won a game… maybe…? And I think I actually won with something OTHER THAN an Imperial Victory – which is what EVERY OTHER GAME has been won with.

Yeah. I think I took this picture to remind me what the heck I won with… Maybe it was a Globilization Victory – I have a lot of Discovery Prestige there…? I did have the Law Prestige to try and set myself up for a Renaissance Victory (with Republics) but that didn’t’ happen. I can’t remember if it was this game or the earlier one that almost ended with a Holy Victory…?

I really enjoy this game. Wish I could have gotten it on the table another time in June. I’ll have to brow beat some players into playing it a few times in July (and August… and September… as I’ll be running it at ToonCon!)

Later that evening I played a game of 7 Wonders with the family. This was yet another game where Amanda complained throughout the game that she just wasn’t getting the cards she needed and wasn’t going to do very well and then crushed us all by a landslide.

The next week was pretty busy with rehearsals for the Queen Maeve School of Irish Dance final recital (both me and the kids take dance classes with the school – in separate groups, though) and other stuff. On Tuesday I started having weird dizzy spells – which have been coming and going for the last two and a half weeks!! (partly why I haven’t been doing much gaming or painting of miniatures).

16 June 2017 - Retro Loonacy

Finnegan and I played about ten games of Retro Loonacy while waiting in the dressing room backstage the night of our performance. 

No games on Saturday that week – we did get over the Dragon’s Den Games for Free RPG Day. The kids picked up some stuff (Pelegrane Press adventure and Runequest Quickstart) and I picked up a miniature they were giving away. A couple days later I got an emails saying I’d won one of the draws – a free copy of the Timewatch RPG Core Rules. The kids were pretty excited about that! Me, I’ve got all the role-Playing Games I want – and I’m looking to play simpler, homebrew rules anyway.

The following week we had our meeting with the Home Education Coordinator – after which we have a tradition of stopping by the Dragon’s Den to pick out a new game. Finnegan got The Guardians of the Galaxy Expansion for Legendary. The Girl got a game called Bear Valley.

21 June 2017 – Legendary/Guardians of the Galaxy

We did get to play Legendary with the Guardians of the Galaxy expansion that week… but that was about it.

27 June 2017 – Flash Point: Fire Rescue

The final week of June, my folks came over for supper one night and brought with them a new game my mom had picked up – Flash Point: Fire Rescue. It is a co-op game where all the players are Fire Rescue Peoples running about a burning building trying to put out fires, find people in the building and get them out before it’s completely engulfed in flames and collapses (or too many people burn up in the flames).

I got home late from an appointment with a physiotherapist and Finnegan had already read the rules and the game was well underway.

I joined in at the very end and we managed to get all the people (and a cat and a dog!) out safely. Whew! We just played the basic game. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to try it out again and try out some of the advanced rules.

And that’s it… Hopefully July will be a little less busy and we’ll get some more games in! (as of today we’ve already gotten in games of Kingdomino. We're planning to play Dominion tomorrow and Brent, Kurtis and John are coming over on Monday to play Angola. I'd really like to get in a game of The Pikeman’s Lament this week or next week as well as some more Pax Renaissance! Not sure what else we'll get up to in July.

With June done we're halfway through the year and if things were progressing as they should I would have played 25 of the games on my 2017 List of Games to Play... but so far I've only managed to play slightly less than a quarter of them... 

Coming soon on Tim’s Miniature Wargaming Blog:

JET BIKES!!! Having finally finished up Rick’s Robot (which I swore to myself I would finally FINISH before I allowed myself to build any more Jet Bikes) I’ve started working on more Jet Bikes!!! I assembled two for my friend John and have a third underway – so stay tuned for those!

I also have a unit of Shot that I’ve been working on from time to time over the last week or so for The Pikeman’s Lament, as well as some Highland dwarves for Dragon Rampant, and some miniatures from Mike Bravo Miniatures that I helped crowdfund a year ago finally arrived… so there are a lot of thing clogging up the workbench at the moment and any of those could end up being posted in the weeks to come.