boardgaming in photos

6 Jan 2013. Allen, Han and I played Innovation at innovation.isotropic.org. The user interface is good. Not pretty, but practical. On the right you can see the number of icons of each player, which is very handy.

This was still under beta testing when we played. I'm not sure about now. One of our games crashed, unfortunately, and we couldn't finish the game. But I guess that means we contributed in finding a bug for the developer to investigate.

11 Jan 2013. A game of Ascension against Han on the iPhone. This Samael the Fallen monster is the most powerful monster (this is in one of the expansions, not the base game). If you defeat him, you keep him in front of you instead of permanently removing him from the game. From that point onwards, other monsters you defeat can be put into your personal discard deck to be used as strength cards later. Too bad by the time I managed to defeat him it was quite late in the game and I didn't manage to make much use of him.

In the same game, Han managed to get himself 9 constructs! Constructs are cards that you place face-up in front of you and use every round, as opposed to being used only once and then getting discarded into your personal discard pile to wait for the next reshuffle before they can be drawn again.

Game end score: Han 108, me 65. Samael is no fight against 9 constructs.

24 Jan 2013. I witnessed the opening ceremony of Jeff's War of the Ring collector's edition. The wooden box is huge! All miniatures are pre-painted.

1 Feb 2013. Yspahan is a slightly old game, well-known for its interesting use of dice. It's a mid-weight Eurogame. It has been quite a while since I last played. I still find it quite good.

At the start of every round, the start player of the round rolls 9 dice, and then sorts them on this dice board by numbers. The coin space (leftmost) always gets the dice with the highest number. The camel space (rightmost) always gets the dice with the lower number. The rest are placed in the other spaces in between, starting with the sack space (next to the camel space). The only way that every space will have one or more dice is if all six numbers show up. During the round, a player removes a group of dice to take the corresponding action, like collecting money, collecting camels, and placing cubes in specific regions on the board.

I like this game board very much. This photo is courtesy of Boardgamecafe.net.

3 Feb 2013. I played Blokus 3D with Shee Yun (7). She wanted to play the pyramid board. In two player games, only half the pyramid is to be built. She wanted to build the full pyramid. So we decided to each play two colours.

I played blue. I was careless and blue was blocked out from the remaining available space at the centre.

The pyramid was almost completed.

During scoring, Shee Yun suggested that we took a photo from above. Every cube visible from above is 1pt. Each block that remains in hand is -1pt.

12 Feb 2013. I was back in KK (Kota Kinabalu) for Chinese New Year. It has been a long time since I last visited Chong Sean at Carcasean, City Mall. On my past few trips back to KK, my hometown, I have been busy with one thing or another, and didn't manage to set aside time to pay a visit. While waiting for other players to turn up, I played Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation with Chong Sean. I've always liked this game, and it was good to play it again. I was reminded again of how fine a design this is. I own both the first smaller edition and this bigger deluxe edition in this photo. However I prefer the older one which I find more portable, and the pieces are not cumbersome. I am not particularly impressed by the additional characters in the deluxe edition (not designed by Reiner Knizia), so I am willing to get rid of the deluxe edition and just keep the original edition. But then I'm too lazy to actually do it.

16 Feb 2013. Another visit to Carcasean. I watched others play BattleTech for a short while. This is a tactical wargame about giant robots fighting. It looks quite interesting.

Each model of robot has a sheet like this, to show its abilities and characteristics, like speed, armour, weapons, heat dissipation, and how damage spreads. The robot diagram is used for marking damage. There is a track for recording heat level, i.e. whether you are overheating your systems and your weapons.

22 Feb 2013. My long-time kaki (fellow gamer) Han is back in Malaysia after a one-year overseas assignment. While waiting for Allen to arrive, we continued our long-running Blue Moon tournament. We want to play every combination of the eight races against one another. I think this tournament has been running for more than three years, and we're only about halfway through playing the various combinations. This time I played the Terrah (strong in Earth), and he played the Khind (child-like race which can fight in gangs).

These are simple cards. Just strength, no special text.

Han, Allen and I played The Great Zimbabwe. Han was new to the game. This was the first time Allen and I played a three-player game. The game board is like a stealth bomber. I came in last again! But I think I learned something from this game. I find that I tend to underestimate how quickly the game ends. I'm totally off in grasping the pace of the game. In contrast, in this game Allen had been carefully planning which monuments to upgrade to reach the required VP's. At the time I was still thinking along the lines of a rough plan of making some money first, and then later upgrade monuments by utilising the God I worshipped which let me reuse exhausted resources. I am still keen to play this game again.

Game end. Allen was red and had achieved his victory requirement. Han was yellow and was just 3VP short. I was green and was still 7VP away.