What Mrs. G wants, Mrs. G gets, so they were displayed in all their glory, with about 5 minutes to spare.

SirKy arrived first at 5 o’clock sharp, which was good, because he found the football game. I had promised Timmah that the playoffs would be on, but what the hell do I know about pro football? I played two years in junior high, but that was enough for me.

Surprisingly, it filled up fast. Timmah appeared, and at some point Birry rolled in… which was a shocker. We are back to "Natting Out" because NatX Natted out. Suck that, NatX!

So now it was time for Tumblin’ Dice, which is hella fun. With the perfect mix of skill, luck, and smacktalk. Supposedly moneys changed hands, but I know nassink!

My fresh, and completely unplayed copy of Castle Panic made it to the table right away.

Luckily, I was not in charge of the rules, but we still made a game-losing mistake, by recycling the monsters back in to the monster bag. Unfortunately, killing all the monsters in the bag is the goal of the game, so we were quickly destroyed.

While this was going on, I convinced a newcomer, Belucci, and Bunker regular “Ex-Intern” to play Risk Express. (I’m being pretty liberal with the nerd handles here, but they should know who they are. If I could ever get back on the LAN again, I would probably remember what Ex-Intern’s tag is!)

Castle Panic morphed into a quick game of Tsuro, which was perfect to draw in Very Metal and his very hip girly, who I will name… George, because I am hilarious.

I have to mention that hosting a board game party requires a certain amount of bullying. I swear, the average human would rather take a spike to the eyeball than play a boardgame.

Once the ladies finished Risk Express, they moved on to Monopoly Deal, which is a very fun card game. Just like Monopoly, it has major screwage, but it only takes fifteen minutes to play, so you don’t end up wanting your 3 hours back (and there are fewer broken bones.) Somehow Pottse managed to schmooze his way in.

Then Ticket to Ride appeared, for the first time in a year. I stumbled through the rules explanation and let them go. By the time I returned, another newcomer, Erica, had torn everyone up.

This led to a game of Quicksand, which I won for the very first time. (Probably because Mrs. G, the Queen of Deception, was nowhere to be seen.) Smink had a winning hand directly after me, but that just made him first loser. Burn!

As all this was going on, Jeng arrived bearing pizzas, and Jolli in tow. Jolli is a major Chess goon, so my crappy board game out. I think he won a lot, but I never got a final tally. All I know is, he didn’t play SirKy, which I desperately wanted to see.

  Then… tragedy struck. Twice. First was my ridiculous attempt at starting a ginormous game of Battlestar Galactica… at 11pm, knowing that it is 3 hours long… after having only played it once… and completely forgetting the rules. Second… Jolli spilled an entire glass of wine on the board.

I have no pictures, but the board seems fine now. All hope of playing the game was lost.

I tried to regroup with a lumbering game of Chinatown.

Jolli bailed halfway through with a ridiculous building layout (note the black tokens below). I don’t think he got it.

I tried to warn Smink and Jasper that Mrs. G is evil and was not to be trusted, but they wouldn’t believe me. She ended up totally sneaking up from behind and stealing the win from the crestfallen Jasper, and drained Smink’s resources down to last loser. (Now he knows how I feel.) I finished third.

By now it was 2, and for some reason we were compelled to play another game of Castle Panic. We won! But it was 3am at closing time, and the rodents were set to awake at their usually 7:30am, so I kicked everyone out.

The kids woke up at 6:45 by the way. D’oh.

First to arrive was Timmah!, who came with a bag of grocery store cellophaned subs (my favorite kind!) He checked out Beatles Rock Band while I fretted over the loss of machine #7. D’OH!!

Believe it or not, I solved this by inserting my Windows CD, hitting ‘R’, attempting to log in, realizing that I do not know my administrator password for that machine (which is odd), then frantically rebooting. It woke right back up. Booyah!

Next in were Vitamin Z heavy laden with beer, and SirKy, returning like the prodigal son from a 1+ year hiatus in the desert.

Thus began the endless playing of the third version of DOTA to hit the Bunker: Heroes of Newerth. SirKy slipped comfortably in to smacktalk mode, Z took it like a man, and I knew all was right with the world.

Eventually Pottse appeared and started up version two of DOTA: Demigod. I love Stardock and all, but it was obvious that Demigod has performance issues. I had chalked it up to my 100Mb LAN before, but we were now on Gigabit, with only two clients, and it ran poorly. At the same time HoN smoked along at a decent clip.

JayJian arrived, and with two fixed games underway, he was forced to experience a little Pain, Andy Dick style. I’m a sucker for Pain DLC, even if I don’t actually play the game, and earlier in the day I had downloaded all the new content. This included a new Museum environment. (Imagine every Smithsonian building kind of mushed together with the Mall of America and you’ll get the idea.) New characters included George Takei (whom I haven’t played yet), and Andy. He was funny enough.

Soon HMAN, Stub, Markus, and Banana showed up, and the LAN activated fully with HoN. Since I would rather take a hot acid bath than actually play any DOTA variant, I resumed the Pain chillout.

Then NatX arrived, and wanted to play… Resistance (??!)

I decided to just drink it in, spectating while he went through the single-player campaign from the beginning. This was all good until he started making frequent 180 degree turns, at which point I got violently ill. I spent the next 10 on the crapper, desperately craving Dramamine.

I escaped to the analog room, and was eventually joined for the only analog of the night, a five-player game of Tsuro. It looked like Banana was going to win, but she had chosen her cards unwisely. Somehow Markus took it, and for some reason this depressed me.

Then came the great Beatles Rock Band experience. I had been looking forward to this. Unlike the other Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and SingStar games, I was finally going to be singing to songs that I sort of knew the words too, and had listened to long enough to actually know how the words were supposed to sound. I also had managed to amass three Lips wireless mics for the harmonizing features of the game.

But this proved to be my undoing.

Somehow, the confluence of two wireless guitars, a wireless drum set, three wireless mics, two wireless access points, about 300 miles of Cat5 cable, 15 computers, three console systems, and the collected cell phone signals of the Bunker faithful in attendance wigged out the mics, and culminated in the message “I can’t hear you!” Stopping each song from one to five times. It was a total drag, and really sucked the life out of the game. Pottse, who was in a DOTA-clone coma later said “I didn’t even want to try after seeing that.”

There better be a patch, or I am going to boycott.

Once that was over, some sort of miracle happened. I don’t know what, but it was as if a veil had been lifted from the nerd’s eyes, and they decided… that they didn’t want to play a DOTA clone any more! I was dumbstruck. Even more strange was that somehow, by the grace of the almighty gods of Steam, I had convinced these nitwits that we should play… Dystopia!

Unfortunately, the map cycle I had set up (probably for a sense of variety) included maps that most of us had never tried before. On top of that, there were only two or three of us who had played the game at all. It started off pretty rocky, and none of the teams managed to complete a full assault. Hopefully we will play again now that we have a good cross-section of BP players who have at least two game rounds under their belts.

Finally Scotty arrived, and with him a big Bass Guitar Amp in tow. By now I was pretty exhausted so I went to see what the deal was. He explained that the speaker was dead, so I chilled out in the analog room with that and my multimeter and benched it while the party wound down with more Beatles Rock Band (this time with wired mics… boo!)

All told, it was a decent day, and all the things I was worried about breaking worked fine. The new guts are ready for primetime, and hopefully I can get clearance from Mrs. G for a fully populated festival. I’ll let you know.

By now everything was working and more dorks were arriving. It was decided that it was time to fire up Left 4 Dead.

Left 4 Dead is a 4-player coop game, with an 8-player versus mode. In my infinite (and draconian) wisdom, I vetoed the versus mode and fell back to Pottse’s suggested L4D Race. The gist of this is, you start two coop games at the same time and see which team makes it through first.

While that was going on, Scene It was finally hitting the 360. I had bought it months on clearance at Target months ago (boo-yah!) but hadn’t found the right crowd to inflict it on.

In the Analog Room, I was trying to convince Red and Dirrty to play Yahtzee Free for All. Either it sucked, or it is impossible to enjoy playing anything other than Blokus with Dirrty. Thus… we played Blokus. I lost (for the very first time I think). Very Metal won. Innuendo permeated.

I have to mention that the Left 4 Dead screaming in the other room was hilarious, and gave us a new Bunker Party gem, spoken by the great Hman: “I need time to heal.”

(You had to be there.)

Next up was the long awaited first match of Star Wars Pocketmodels (pew pew). It was full of drama and suspense, and a massive amount of eye-rolling, bitching, and general sarcastic smuggery by Dirrty and BC (who could have just walked their asses home if they didn’t want to witness the event of the universe.) I lost. Barely (or maybe humiliatingly. Boo.)

By now, Rock Band 2 was back on the 360, Left 4 Dead was finishing, and Z was itching to be commander in Savage 2. This turned out to be quite fun. Game 1 was good (I was on the winning team.) Game 2 sucked (I was on the losing team.) Z and Seraphim played as the RTS mode commanders while the rest of us did their bidding.

Unbelievably, the DOTA plague appeared again, and I retreated to the Analog room for anything. I had hoped to start a game of BSG, but the fans in attendance were dropping like flies and… everybody had to go to work in the morning. Herein we find the real weakness of the Sunday BP.

Eventually, Mrs. G used her powers of telling me what to do and decided we would play Electronic Detective. (Acquired for her by me from eBay… awesomest husband evar.) This was her favorite game as a yute, and we were forced to enjoy it with her. It wasn’t bad, but very 70’s, and a little unintuitive. (It seems to have the processing power of a calculator, and definitely the display of one.) Mrs. G owned us all, and wore a gloaty face for the rest of the night. And week.

By now it was late (11pm… HA!) We decroded into a melange of Singstar Abba, Tsuro and a few lingering cursed games of DOTA. Guests were booted out the door at midnight. Unthinkable. 

I replaced it with an Arcade, to make sure I got a Jasper and HDMI. This meant using the old hard drive, and the transferring of content. If anyone is interested, or I am bored, I will post the details of 360 DRM management.

The Bunker was a disaster, mainly because I had vomited little styrene spaceships all over the place. Details on those later. You are on pins and needles, I can tell.

The Wii needed to be retrieved from the family room, since Mrs. G has decided to Karaoke on it with the rodents. Disappointing note: T-Bird has decided that she hates Wii Music. This was going to be my entrée into turning her into a gamer. Boo.

Steam started their gigantic sale, which meant I could finally buy the remaining copies of Counter-Strike Source that I needed. Luckily they unfroze my credit cards in their system. Unluckily no one cares about this game, including me.

Savage 2 was installed on all the machines, but needed to be patched. I did this while T-Bird played games at Sprout Online. Unfortunately, the intro screen scared the crap out of her, possibly scarring her (more) forever.

Finally, all the junk that had accumulated in the Analog room was shoved into the Storage room. That place is a deathtrap again. Anyone want some computer stuff?

I’ve been here before, we’ll see how it plays out. Yay 2009.

However, they haven’t put anything new out in a while, and that has really bummed me out. I don’t know if this is true, but I have been blaming BattleLore.

Sure, the game has lots of cool bits, and if it is anything like Memoir 44, (which I enjoyed my one brief play of) it should be fun.

However, I’m sick of going to the DOW website and being bombarded with news of up and coming Battlelore expansion packs, and no new games!

So… I was quite surprised, and endlessly pleased when I saw this bizarre press release on Fantasy Flight’s website titled: “FFG to Produce, Distribute BattleLore“.

Here’s hoping that DOW will get back to work making great themey games with great bits, and that FFG will use that Battlelore money to speed up the production of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: THE BOARD GAME!!!! OMGZ!!!111one)

First up was a lot of San Juan. I had tried this out for the first time earlier this week, so was glad to introduce it to a few new players.

Of course Pandemic was played all through the day, with even Mrs. G playing. There was at least one win, but I don’t know what the final tally was. (I am aware of some flagrant rules violations, but the offenders will receive their karmic punishment eventually.)

Even Risk Express made an appearance! NatX is still awaiting his copy.

Galaxy Trucker was played for the third time, and really appreciated for the first. I have no pics, but here is a weird Youtube video of it showing the first phase of the game.

In a nutshell, you build your ship, then fly it through a card driven adventure, and try to make money from your journey. Probably better with alcohol.

I finally opened Blokus Trigon, and lost to Reebs. If I remember correctly, this is my first loss at any flavor of Blokus, boo. Regardless of my lack of victory, I think the game is less fun, since it inspires far fewer jokes, or perhaps we just haven’t figured them out yet. 

Citadels made it to the table, but I was too much of a spaz to finish it, as I needed to get to the Quake Wars game inside. Sorry Red and Reebs. Expect a full pictorial on this game later.

The highlight of the night was the Colosseum game that went long after the party was scheduled to end. I had a great time, but I had to wake up at 6 in the morning for some work stuff. Painful.

Reebs won… all by herself, with no help from anyone. Here’s her production of “Isis’ Revealed Secrets”.

… and the scoring track. I lost, by a lot (blue). Jester (green) was second biggest loser, and Pottse (red) was third. Seraphim (orange) came second. Notice that purple one all the way around the board at 104.

By the time we wrapped up, it was 1am. So much for this being a Daywalker BP.

Prey - I started things out with Prey Multiplayer running on each machine. I don’t know if more than three people ever played simultaneously. If anyone knows, speak up on the comments!

Tron - Pottse was clever enough to dig this up while I tried to get Team Fortress 2 running. From what I could tell, the game was full with 4 teams of 2 players each. What sucked was, the game isn’t smart enough to point the player away from the wall when the game starts, so the few games I played, I was constantly spawning in an alcove facing the back wall!

Surprisingly, everyone seemed to like this game, even with this massive fault.

Team Fortress 2 - Gold Rush

I was really looking forward to playing this, but I was deeply involved in a game of Risk Express with Red5 and Reebs. From what I heard, it was awesome.

Enemy Territory - Quake Wars

This one I demanded we play, even going so far as to shut down the currently running TF2 game. I love objective-based/assault/team games like this, and until Novalogic makes a successor to Joint Ops, this just might do.

Luckily, no one knew what they were doing, so we all equally sucked, but it started to come together by the third and final round. All I know is that Red 5 constantly used me as his personal spank totem for the last 15 minutes, and it hurt.

Here’s a decent video showing the full range of hardware:

I think everyone went away satisfied with the game play, and by now it was 9:45pm, 15 minutes before close. Or was it?

As people trickled in around 3pm, the easiest thing to do was start with Boom Blox. For those that don’t know, this is Spielberg’s first real entry into the video game space. Whether or not Spielberg was intimately involved in the creation of the game, I can’t say. What I can say is, this game is awesome!

Here is the official trailer:

Basically, Boom Blox boils down to three types of game play: Throwing stuff, Pulling Stuff, and Shooting stuff.

In the basic throwing game, you have a tower of blocks, which you must knock down by throwing baseballs at it. You get points for each block you knock off.

In the Pulling type games, you have a tower, a la Jenga, which you dismantle piece by piece. You gain 5 points for removing a single piece, and lose a point for every other piece you knock out along the way.

A demo of pulling:

The shooting game amounts to target practice, and in my opinion should have been left out.

As I expected, Boom Blox was a hit, but I had no idea how popular it would be. Nothing else made it on the Wii that day (not even Mario Kart which Mrs. G lovingly donated to the cause, with a full set of four wheels!) Several people left saying that they had to buy it for their parents (the whole “adult” Wii thing is really cracking me up/freaking me out.)

For those looking for the game, both Circuit City and Target are giving away a $10 gift card with purchase this week. Buy it, you’ll love it!