Gaming Session: Dreams of Splat!

So this week my son Caleb came to me in a dream and said, "Dad, I have an award-winning design" and proceeded to explain a game concept to me. The game was about a board with paths, and some type of hunter moved along the paths eliminating subjects. When I awoke the concept quickly evolved to a person stomping around a room killing cockroaches, and Splat! was born. I made the game in about a day and actually playtested it tonight for game night. A variable tile set-up created pathways with nodes for the cockroaches to follow, and every player had a number of cockroaches. The hunter, or "big shoe" was played by each player on a rotating basis, and each player would play a card from 1-5 each turn representing the number of movement spaces they could move the shoe or their cockroaches. You got a point for each cockroach you smashed and collected, and you get points for how many of your cockroaches survive. I haven't got the end game completely figured out, but there is a ball that can be kicked by the shoe to also turn over some cockroaches to make them easy prey. It was kind of fun to play it, we'll see where it goes.

We also played Tobago tonight, that game is never a bad time. I finally played some of the reverse side boards which made for an even better experience. I would say that Tobago is easily in my top 25, it has strategy, replay value, is not long nor difficult to learn. And you make really cool grinding noises whenever you rotate the idols on the island.

Gaming Session: Leaders & Cities

Tonight in limited time we played 7 Wonders for the first time with both the Leaders and Cities expansion. It did make the game a bit longer, but not too much. I had played with Leaders before and liked the concept, but it at times was more of a distraction to fit the leaders into your strategy. This was the first time I played with Cities and I loved it. The new black cards added much more variety to the game, and the addition of debt and peace tokens added another layer of strategy that I consider very welcome. I felt more in control with the ability to do things that affected my opponents more. I had a decent score of 78, but we all got squashed by Josh who earned 85 points just by Science alone. It makes me more eager to play 7 Wonders again.

Family Games with Dolphins

My beautiful Sarah the gamer

Actually had some time at the end of Family night to play a game with Michelle and Sarah, and their game of choice was Aquaretto. We had always liked Zooloretto when it first came out, a great family game with a decent amount of strategy and a fun family theme of zoo animals. My daughters Brittany and Hannah always like it as they had played Zoo Tycoon for years on the computer. Aquaretto was a real step up as you had to create your own "pools" for aquatic animals instead of pre-defined exhibits. It made for more strategy, along with earning workers that could be used in a variety of ways for points. My favorite mechanic from these Michael Schacht games is the placement of tiles on different "trucks", then choosing the timing of when to take a truck. You can choose early and get a few of what you want but run low in animals, or wait and take a full truck but risk being forced to takes animals you don't want (and will score against you). In this game I went for trainers as my workers and was able to collect and place Orca, Dolphins & Seals that scored more off of trainers. My cute little Sarah (not so little at age 10) always seems up to playing a game and is pretty smart in figuring out strategy.

Gaming Session: Fruits & Aliens

For game night I introduced the game Finca to the group, the one I played at Strategicon about gathering fruits and delivering by cart to different towns to fill orders. Again the cool mechanism of placing workers on a windmill, and moving according to the number of players on your "blade" of the windmill, and collecting a number of fruit according to the blade you land on and the number of players there, is unique and strategic. It was a tight game, and I barely won in the end due to some luck in other players not ending the game earlier. Finca is a nice, compact and fluid game with no really glaring holes.

We then continued with another game of Level 7, this time with all the rules firmly understood. To make it even better I had made laminated summary cards of the most important rules which helped greatly. I am so into the game right now that I even took advantage of an offer for the company to make a personal player card for me with my image on it. I had Hannah take a picture of me with an expression I thought would be appropriate for the game. They sent the player card graphic to me, I printed it out and mounted it on chipboard, and boom! Now I am officially subject "45UNG0715" trying to escape from level 7 of the facility. Pretty cool.

We replayed the 2nd scenario and we all made it out alive, but there were some uneasy moments. I want to play again! I can't wait to go through all 7 levels in one sitting! We thought of some cool rules to include like no talking unless your character is next to you on the gameboard, using a timer to speed up turns and make quicker (and probably more fatal) decisions, etc.

Ronald LeRoy Holbrook - 20 years - 10-11-12

Twenty years ago today my father passed away. I put together some pictures in a slideshow (it is at the bottom, my daughter Hannah the tech wiz helped me to embed it) to commemorate his life, and to remember what I had forgotten. I have some great pics of him growing up from his parents, some neat ones when I was young, none of him from my teenage years, and scant few later. My last picture of him I have was from my wedding, he never did get to meet any of my kids. I remember playing some classical Rachmaninoff for him one time, and telling him how amazing the piano was. He told me, "you want to hear piano, listen to this!" and put on some of his favorite jazz, by Keith Jarrett. He would say, "you need three hands to play that!" I added some smooth KJ to this slideshow for him. As you watch and listen, you can imagine him, as I do, leaning back in his chair in his home office as the jazz piano fills the air. Listening to it reminds me of him. I do find myself trying to be like him at times, wanting to relive some of my experiences I had with him.

Seven years  to the day after his death, my boy Caleb was born. Today he turned 13, on official teenager. He is getting to be such a big young man. We caught the momentous occasion this morning officially at 7:08:09 on 10-11-12 as he turned 13. Pretty cool. You can see that he's got a bit of grandpa in him.

Can you see some of his inheritance? Its all in the dimples

Ron L. Holbrook from Brett Holbrook on Vimeo.

 

Go here to see the pictures:

 

Click here to view the pictures

Gaming Session - sharks and level 7

From the simple to complex, October games rock already. One of the most simplest games we played is Get Bit! an appropriately named game about avoiding a shark. You have a guy with removable limbs, and you place them on the table in a lione and play one of your cards numbered 1-7. If you play the same number as someone else, your position in the line remains the same, all other jump to the front in ascending order of card number. The one in the back of the line then loses a limb to the shark, but jumps to the front. Play another card, move players, someone loses a limb. As I am scared of sharks this simple game can be instense for me. Last survivor wins. It has some cool little strategy, but is easy to play. I dig it.

That doesn't compare to the fear involved in Level 7, a new cooperative game where 1-4 player try to escape a facility doing otherworldly experiments. Cooperative, until the place goes on lockdown and then it is every man to himself. In the meantime you are trying to control your adrenaline and fear level, as clone aliens in the facilty smell fear and are after you. Oh yeah, and then there are military guards intent on keeping you in there. The game involves 7 scenarios you can play as you try to escape, each with varying difficulty and the facility layout with tiles is different every time so there is great replayability. Challenges on every turn can be overcome with strength or intelligence, and every level has its own goal to meet before you can escape. You can also travel through the facility vents, but beware, so can the alien clones!

Our first game was rough as an introduction as we were just getting to know the rules, and went  really slow. We found out some rules we weren't playing right and decided to play the second scenario with three of us. It was pretty tense and we needed some fortunate rolls to escape a few times, but in the end we lost one player and only two escaped. Even then we weren't playing all the rules right and it was still cool. I can't wait to play it again, as I think we have it down now and there are more scenarios to go, but it can be intense.

My character card in Level 7, never got to use the scalpel

That's my guy on the right, need to get by two guards to escape.