| Apr. 27th, 2012 @ 01:57 pm Weekly gaming update |
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Last night, I joined Chien and his GF R at our usual hangout. R, unfortunately, had homework to do and was a little uneasy at the sizeable crowd, so she left after dinner.
We started with a game of To Court The King. I had never played it before, though I had heard people playing it in the background on other occasions. For those who don't know the game, it is played with a bunch of six-sided dice. You start with three on your first turn. Your turn consists of rolling your dice, then setting at least one aside, and re-rolling all of the ones that are left, until you have no more dice you can roll. At the end of your turn, you tally up your set-aside dice and try to make a "hand" which is then used to purchase one card from the deck. Purchase costs are things like a single pair, two pair, three pair, three-of-a-kind, a straight, all evens, all odds, and so forth. There are also cards that cost a specific total or higher (e.g., 20+ total pips on your dice).
Each card you buy gives you some special power. Often, it is another die of a specific value which can be used as that value, or picked up and rolled with any regular roll of your turn. Sometimes it lets you add pips to dice, move pips around between dice, re-roll one or more dice, or change the value of a die or dice.
The goal is to get the "king", who requires seven of a kind to buy. At that point, each player gets one more turn and they try to beat the roll that gave the one player the king. If one player beats that roll, they get the king, but the turn only goes until the last player has had a try. The player with the best "hand" in that final set of rolls wins.
I had no real idea what I was doing, but that didn't seem to hurt much. Some hints from Chien early on helped me out, and other specific plays become obvious after a little thought. Much of my play was simply trying to adapt to the rolls I got, and then make the best of what I wound up with. I think Chien may have tried a little too hard for some specific cards, which cost him.
The game pretty quickly wound down once I bought the General, which gives you two extra dice to roll. At that point, I was rolling six dice (three initial, one from the Farmer, two from the General), and had three extra dice with specific numbers on them. With those, plus the ability to re-roll my whole hand of dice once per turn, plus the ability to change one die into another, I was able to put together seven threes and get the King. Chien rallied to come up with eight fours (I think?), but then I rolled well and managed ten sixes! So victory in my first game.
That went quickly, so we tried a two-player game of Smallworld Underground, which I described a couple of weeks ago. I started out with the Gnomes, who are immune to all special powers! They found a Place that was outright two extra VPs per turn, which wound up being battled for on almost every turn thereafter. Chien declined first, coming back onto the board overrunning my Gnomes with the Flames--who conquer territories that are next to them or their special space (the Volcano) as if there were no opponents there! He had a lot of declined pieces on the other side of the board (across the river), so I then declined my Gnomes and showed up as the Mummies. They attacked the Flames and did OK, but Chien still got lots of points from his declined race.
He only held onto them another couple of turns, while I continued to reduce the numbers of his active race (the Flames). He then gave up on them and declined them--which took all of his old race off the board! That turn was worth all of two points to him. He came back as Ogres, which get a +1 bonus to conquer any space, but don't start with huge numbers. They quickly took 8 spaces, while I finished off the Flames. He declined the Ogres after only one turn, at which point I also declined my Mummies. His last race (Will O Wisps, which get a bonus of from 0 to 3 when trying to conquer any space) got one turn, while my last (Shadow Mimes!!??!!) got two turns.
The end score was Chien 94 points, me 96.
I won both games, against someone I consider a very good player of just about anything! |
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