Bunker Project Log

Well, I finally got my ten… plus two extras. My first two worked fine. Then my CC was refused by Steam. I eventually got smart and set up a new Steam account, but used PayPal as my payment method. This allowed me to get five more before Steam wised up and killed that.

So, I started getting antsy, and emailed friends at work. Being that it was Sunday, I didn’t get a response. Then, I got really desperate, and asked DangerKitty to help out. He hasn’t PC gamed in years, and doesn’t have a Steam account, so chances were slim.

After not hearing from him, I finally decided to go to the wife. This means I have to explain that I’m buying a bunch of software for the LAN, which doesn’t really make her happy. She makes me do some chores, but agrees. I sign her up, put in her CC, and it lets me buy the final three.

So, as I’m doing this, my phone is buzzing with received emails. I finish up all the redemptions, then finally look at the Phone. Two emails which say “You have received a gift from Dangerkitty.”

Crap.

Anyway, the LAN is equipped. hopefully it will be a good multiplayer game, and even better, it might get a few guys woozy and urpy (just as long as they don’t puke on my monitors!) I’m sure there will be some sort of post about it at the next Bunker Party.

Steam is running a great special on Prey right now, at $4.95 a pop. This is perfect for me, as I can get a groovy game on the entire LAN for just shy of $50.

So, I bought the first one to try out the multiplayer and it worked lickity split. I had the dedicated server set up in about three minutes, which is a record for me. I was sure that the gravity and Portal effects would be perfect for a drunken Bunker Party LAN game.

However, once I actually tried to buy the third copy of the game, Steam denied all attempts. Telling me that my CC co is denying the transaction. I called them up and they say that they haven’t even gotten a new attempt.

This particularly sucks, because having only two on the LAN is possibly worse than having zero. No one is going to play a two-player Prey deathmatch.

For now, I wait for Steam support to get back to me, and hope this gets sorted before the promotion is over.

Whatever the outcome is, I still recommend that you PC gamers pick this up. $5 is a steal for the single-player alone.

Friday night, I went through a “medium” (five Epidemic card) game of Pandemic with Mrs. G and The Wall. Throughout the course of the game, we discovered that the St. Petersburg card popped up twice, which, if you know how the game works, is impossible.

I had heard at Boardgamegeek that there were possibilities of missing cards, but I figured it couldn’t happen to me. Upon further inspection, here’s what I found:

(And yes, my pictures are getting horribler. I blame the camera.)

As you can see, I have two St. Petersburgs, and no San Francisco. With the addition of some very stylish markerwork, order is restored.

This is not so easy with the completely missing player cards for Baghdad and Algiers! I can’t remember how many times I prognosticated that “we haven’t seen very many black cards yet, so we should be getting a bunch soon!” I can however, remember losing several times as the black disease rampaged all over the place.

So there you have it. We are not morons, we probably would have won every Pandemic game ever, had it not been for the lack of these cards.

(Except this brilliant masterpiece from Wednesday… which we lost to the red bug, even after eradicating yellow and black. D’oh! Look how close we were!)?

(Oh yeah… I blame VitaminZ, aka “Don’t Cure Manilla” for that one.)

Thanks to Scott Burkett at Pothole on the Infobahn, I’ve finally solved my theme changing issue. Hopefully my two loyal readers will never again be shellshocked by the constant theme switching.

Also, for my one mobile reader (possibly Dangerkitty), the site now actually shows up and works well in a mobile browser. Thanks to Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition for that one. (Of course, I’ve had this thing installed since about day one, but I was too stupid to install it correctly.)

One more thing off the list. Now to review the 10 or 20 games that have been waiting!

So last week or so, Toys’r’us has this 50% off blowout on games, and for whatever reason they usually throw some non licensed-Monopoly type game in the mix. Last time I scored the Seafarers of Catan 5-6 player expansion, which really wasn’t a victory at all. This time they had Starship Catan (which I already own, love, and have been too lazy to review) and Settlers of the Stone Age, which I did not own, and desperately needed to get closer to closing the loop on the whole Catan series. So I ordered it for the a-mazing price of $15, and had it two days later.

Luckily, Junior and Smink made themselves available, and Mrs. G was brainwashed into playing. Nicely.

Everyone should be familiar with the standard Catan production, trading, and building phases, so I won’t go into that here. What I will mention is the addition of the four upgrade tracks around the board.

Below is the food upgrade track, culminating in a victory point card.

The Food track increases the number of steps your explorers can move for each “Meat” resource spent.

The Clothing and Shelter tracks allow certain areas of the map to become accessible. For example, to explore the colder northern climes, the Clothing track must be at one or higher.

In the picture below, the top left-most segment requires a Clothing level of four, and a Shelter level of two. In the top right-most, a Clothing level of four and a Shelter level of four is needed.

Finally, the Hunting track allows the player to move the Neanderthal and the Sabre-Tooth Tiger around the map. These two characters are similar to the robber in the original Settlers.

When the first player has upgraded one of the tracks to it’s maximum level of five, s/he is awarded a victory point for the track.

Essentially, the game becomes a race around the map, each player trying to capture the best territory on the map and gain tribal victory points. The first person to ten wins.

In our game, Mrs. G immediately decided she was bored, but luckily my brainwashing kept her at bay. Junior managed to screw himself at every turn. Smink was very earnest and quietly intense, often loading up giant hands of cards, that only occasionally got halved by the deadly roll of seven.

Amazingly, even though I constantly made dumb decisions, I was only in second (after Mrs. G, who malevolently kicked ass even while utterly bored.)

Ultimately, I lucked into an easy exploration VP, and narrowly won the race against Junior for the two victory points awarded to the first person to conquer one of each of the four tribes. Then Mrs. G intentionally traded the two resources I needed to make the tenth VP. (Which semi-pissed Smink off, but I was glad to win for once, so tough.)

Luckily, the Meat, Skin, and Bone resources generated enough innuendo to keep us stupidly punch-drunk all the way through. I would love to play this with the usual Blokus crew. Hi-larious.

Did I like the game? Yes. Did anyone else? Still up in the air. Mrs. G didn’t, but what does she like besides being devious and scheming?

I spent so much time playing board games that I never got any pictures. Thus, I was only able to capture the aftermath.

Beer:

The third game of Pandemic in a row (in which we got our asses kicked):

Besides the fact that there were a few people from BP’s of yore, there was the usual. Plenty of Blokus, but totally innuendo free (not enough drunk girls playing… just mature manly men.) There was some Singstar, but? I missed it. Lots of Rock Band. A screwed up game of Shadows Over Camelot (I lost 2 of the loyalty cards, which messed things up, and there was NO TRAITOR!)

So… yeah… that’s it. Another party that I missed. I’ve got to charge this deally up somehow. Look for excitement in 3-4 weeks.

For whatever reason, the four of us (excluding Princess NotCool, AKA, Mrs. G) who played TI last time, all had this romantic notion that we would have a great time playing it again.

For me it was the white whale. I was bound and determined to make it through this damned game, whether we enjoyed it or not.

So, did we enjoy it? I’m not sure. Did we finish it? Almost. Z thinks Red5 was headed for a win, but I had managed to Diplomacy Markus into the boredom zone, and he was breaking off… which could have led me to Mecatol Rex, which my Secret Objective was all about.

Here’s the little cold war going on with my forced Diplomatic buddy Markus:

He had skeezed his way into a pair of planets due to my really dumb reading of the Diplomacy card. My masterstroke… smashed! I was such a gleeful bastard about it too.

Here’s all we had to show for our troubles.

Z was the Nerds at 3, Markus the tuwtles at 4, I was the cyborg bastards at 5, and Red5 the… umm… I can’t even remember what those are. We’ll call the the cheeyits at seeyix.

Anyway, I’m waiting another 5 months for the trois de gras.

In a typical fit of diva-esque luxurizing, Mrs. G refused to play anything unless I made it possible for her to do so without getting her ass off the couch.

I don’t know if it is slavish devotion, or just pure will to play, but I managed a solution which involved moving my matching couch (don’t ask… these couches were her idea) opposite hers, and then clever placement of a card table. In the end, it worked just fine. (Except for the stresses of playing a board game from a supine position, since I am 6ft+. She, being about three apples high, had nary a problemo.)

We started with Pandemic, and cured three diseases before being munched alive by the black cubes of Karachi. I was ready for another go. She was stressed out, so I went to the couples stash, and found Carcassonne: The Castle.

This is one of the more highly regarded couples games on the geek, and in my never-ending quest to consume the universe, I bought.

First off, I love Carcassonne. It was the first board game I bought for my collection, and started the whole obsession rolling. (In actuality, it was a present for Mrs. G, and I keep the receipt around to remind myself of how simple purchases can really enhance screw up ruin affect your life.)

This game, however, is not Carcassone. Or at least, you better not play it like Carcassone, or you will be boned, as I was.

I’ll start with the scoring track. Unlike Carcassonne, this is actually the boundary of the play area. No more wandering around willy nilly.

(That’s cardboard shavings, not a dandruff explosion, for those of you wondering.)

Another interesting feature are the special tiles placed face down around the scoring track. If you happen to land on one of these spaces, you are awarded the tile. There are several different varieties, granting special scoring options. Some of these are used during the game, but most used at the ending scoring session.

Placing tiles is also a little weird. You are given a lot of latitude, and the only real rules are that:

1) you must place a tile next to an existing tile, or project from a wall start area, like you can see at spaces 74 and 75 in the picture above.

2) roads must connect to other roads, or may be terminated into castle walls.

Placing meeples is similar to the original, except, there is a new kind of structure, the house (shown with the red roofs) and the farmers have become merchants.

The biggest difference is… there is no scoring for incomplete stuff!

I always thought it was a little weird in Carc, that there is almost no penalty for incomplete structures, other than your follower is locked up until the end of game. Not so with Castle. Here you are double-boned. No returned meeple, and you get jack at the end.

In the pic below, I have a massive kickass castle that would have netted me at least 30 points, but I could never get that final piece in. Same goes for my wicked road with lots of point-enhancing wells.?

In the end, Mrs’ G’s cheap four point moves (like the one-point castles in the original) ended up winning the game for her. She scored a massive 116 points! (That’s a complete go around the track.)

My serpentine ginormous half-ass castles, houses, and roads got me a whopping 35 points. I was pwn3d.

Of course, Carcassonne: The Castle has rocketed up to the top of Mrs. G’s favorites list.

There is a LAN for old men. Or, at least there is when the game is XMP, and the old men are myself, DangerKitty and Junior.

As I’ve mentioned before, I love XMP. The more I think about it, the more I realize that it is the most perfectly balanced multi-player game ever made.

The only problem with it is, it takes a lot to learn, and it is even harder to get anyone to play it.

Unless of course you challenge a whole LAN worth of young bucks to a three on seven game. (They took the bait.)

I’ll spare you the gory details, because you don’t really care anyway, but the fogies won three of the four games.

I think DangerKitty got two or three of his lives back too. That game means that much to him.

Anyway, to the younguns: thanks for playing, it meant a lot. Special thanks to whomever it was who always found a way to be right in front of my raptor when I desperately needed a gutblow.

This one was big, and I was all over the place, so I really don’t know what happened. Here are a few things I do know:

Rock Band was constant, although somehow the PS2 version got booted from the DDR room. I don’t know if it even got played past some n00b training.

Pandemic claimed another victim with the Blue disease outbreaking all over the place. I didn’t get the feeling the game was as well received by this group.

Shadows Over Camelot made it to the table, and Stub was the Traitor. He also won over a team of five, all n00bs to the game save Mrs. G. I question the focus on the Grail quest, but who knows. I’ve lost every SOC game I’ve played.

Junior flubbed his chance to win the late night Ticket to Ride game, especially after all the smack talk. Luckily his buddy T took victory, and not Seraphim, who would have never let him live it down.

Blokus had a lot of play… but… there’s not much to say about it other than its amazing ability to engender sexual innuendo. (Particularly amongst the drunk.)

The night ended as all good BPs do, with Singstar. By then I was completely burnt, and probably sick, but Survivor with Reebs is always magic.