FC and Friday gaming update

[quarrel]

I did a small amount of gaming at FC, though not with anyone new. There was a round of Quiddler with Shaterri, which I won by a large margin almost entirely due to luck. We both agreed there was very little he could have done in any round to achieve more points. Then I taught him Roll Through the Ages, which I ended up losing despite being slightly ahead most of the game. I let too many bad skull rolls slide and accumulated negative points for them, and my plan to build lots of monuments and get the advancement that gives bonus points for them fell through when I only managed to build one before the game ended.

Last night was the resumption of a friend’s regular biweekly gaming night. First up was a four-player game of Pandemic to playtest a house rule that added anti-vaccination propaganda to the game. Pandemic is a cooperative game: either everyone wins or everyone loses. It’s a hard game to begin with and this add-on makes it harder. The idea is that healthy cities can accumulate anti-vaccination activism tokens, and if the city ever gets infected, those tokens make it worse. The game was hard-fought from beginning to end and came down to a coin flip even with good play. On the turn before we could make the winning move, we were one outbreak from losing and had two cities that might suffer one at the end of the turn. The next-to-last player could treat one of them but not both. With no way of knowing which (if either) was about to break out, he treated one arbitrarily, and it turned out he guessed right. Afterward we discussed the new rule. Most of us thought it added a novel and fair amount of additional difficulty. One player disliked how the rules for propaganda spreading encouraged players to leave cities partially infected, which is not something actual disease control specialists would do when fighting a worldwide epidemic, so we brainstormed alternatives a bit.

After such a tense game, we unwound with a round the 2012 re-issue of the non-serious, beer-and-pretzels Dungeon!, which goes back to 1975 originally. And it shows. The rules are lightweight with lots of randomness. Orbus ended up winning. I was on my way back with enough treasure, but I had at least three turns and a tough fight between me and victory. The third player may or may have not been right behind Orbus, and the fourth had virtually nothing, having lost it all getting beat up by monsters (which I subsequently killed and took).