Hello Joe (and those of you not named Joe)! Welcome back! Let’s get to some bloggy goodness.
I’m on the last day of my first four day weekend of the summer. It’s been really nice. I almost forgot to write a blog today, that’s how relaxed I am. I think I’m ready for a three-day work week. I’d better be since that starts tomorrow, right? Anyhoo!
I got some gaming in this weekend. On Thursday, my mom, my niece, a 12 year old girl my mom was babysitting and I sat around the table for a game night. We played Ticket to Ride: The Card Game, Wazabi, Bugs & Co., King of Tokyo and Takenoko. Quite the docket isn’t it? These are all short games so we managed to play them all in about three and a half hours.
Bugs & Co. is a memory game where everybody is quickly flipping over tiles to try to find as many threes of a kind as possible. Once a player thinks they’ve done as best they can, they grab a trophy and stop. When all trophies are grabbed, the game continues for ten more seconds, allowing the last player to try to complete their hand. Each three of a kind is worth 3 points, each tile which was not part of a three of a kind is worth -1 point and the trophy is worth the points printed on it. It’s a cute game aimed at younger folk. For folk like me with terrible short term memory, it’s what it is. I did manage to win the first game of it (it plays in roughly five minutes) and lost the next three.
Takenoko is a great game where players lay tiles and move a farmer around to grow bamboo and a panda around to eat bamboo. There are objectives, worth varying amounts of points, to complete based on these three principles. Once one player has completed the allotted number of objectives (determined by the number of players) that player gets the Emperor bonus card worth two points and everybody gets one final turn. The player with the most points wins. It looks great and is great for families.
The other three games are games my mom and I played before. I got to try them with more players and I will say that King of Tokyo is WAY better with four players than it was with two. Ticket to Ride is more challenging as well. Wazabi plays about the same though there are more options when you play with more than two players.
On Saturday, I tried playing the computer version of Ticket to Ride (the original board game) and I was pleased that it was light enough that my computer didn’t overheat and I was able to play with no problems. (I need to get a new computer one of these days).
On Sunday, I tried playing the solo-variant of Marvel Legendary. It plays pretty smoothly. I used a randomizer app to pick the scenario, mastermind, villains and heroes. I ended up playing a bystander rescue mission with Magneto as the Mastermind leading the Spider-Foes and some Maggia goons against Rogue, Nightcrawler and Jean Gray. This was a great combo. The mission was such that we couldn’t attack Magneto unless we had rescued a number of bystanders equal to or greater than the number of scheme twists. Jean Grey is great with bystanders and on turns where I couldn’t recruit the card I wanted or attack a villain, I could use Nightcrawler’s teleport ability to save his cards until the next round. I breezed through the mission several times and never got over halfway through the scheme twists. I’ll have to try a few more games with different scenarios and heroes to see if solo play is worth it.
On Sunday night I went to see Dragao, which is a play based on the second installment of the Amos Daragon series (which was written by a Shawinigan author). I have two friends who are extras in the play so I got free tickets to the dress rehearsal. The play was okay. Amos Daragon is a very derivative story aimed at a younger audience. I feel the acrobatic sequences incorporated into the play were inferior to the ones from the first play. The production quality was very good. They were able to reuse a number of set pieces from the first play which therefore allowed them to really go all out for the new stuff. If I could walk through the sets and just look at everything up close, I think I’d get about as much enjoyment as I did from the actual play. It’s ninety minutes long and there were some sequences that really needed to be trimmed down. By the time we reached the final sequence, I was more than ready for it to be over. The tickets are really pricy and there’s no way I would have paid money out of my own pocket to see it (I knew that from the first play though).
Today I played Disney Infinity 2.0 since I found it at 50% off the original price at Best Buy and finally picked it up. The Marvel scenario included in the base set was fun but short (I already completed it). I’m not into the Toybox feature of Infinity so that means to be able to play anything else, I need to invest in the other adventure packs. That’s still where I have my greatest disconnect with Infinity compared to Skylanders. In Skylanders, while there is definitely an advantage to buying more figures, I don’t feel like I’m getting gypped out of the game play if I don’t buy more. There are just certain areas I can’t access. In Infinity, if you don’t buy those adventure sets, you’re really limited in your play options if the Toybox doesn’t appeal to you. Also, if I spend money to buy figures, it’d be nice to be able to play with them everywhere in the game. My interest is in the gameplay in the adventure sets and each set is limited to about a quarter of the figures available. The other figures are locked out. Not the best investment let me tell you.
Okay, so that’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.