Gaming in Oregon
I’m gaming with good friend, Chris Brooks, on the Oregon coast this week. During the first half of the week, we are playing epic and war games. Later in the week, a few more folks show up and we move into shorter, euro-style games. It is also great to have gaming friends, KC Humphrey (Havoc: The Hundred Years War) and Jeff DeBoer (Funagain Games), involved since I don’t see them more than once every year or so.
Sunday
Chris, Ken C and I played Supreme Commander. Supreme Commander is a European Theater strategic war game by GMT. Chris wrote about preparing for our play in the weeks leading up to this event. For a grand strategy game, the rules complexity is relatively low. Still, it is a BIG game! We played all day and didn’t progress beyond the end of 1940.
After a whiskey, bourbon, rye, scotch tasting, we pulled out a few decks of A Game of Thrones LCG and a multiplayer game ensued.
Monday
Chris and I started with Richard III: The War of the Roses. R3 is a block war game by Columbia Games in the same vein as Hammer of the Scots. The mechanics of R3 are very much like Hammer but Chris and I felt R3 is a more straightforward implementation of the system and like it better.
In the middle of the day, Doug C, Chris, KC, Jeff and I played Manifest Destiny. This is a card driven civ type game with a fair bit of player interaction. I enjoyed Manifest Destiny but, overall, like Clash of Cultures better and we played that later in the evening!
Tuesday
KC and I played Twilight Struggle in the morning. TS is a favorite of mine and covers the Cold War using the card driven mechanic that originated with We the People. In the afternoon, KC, Jeff, Alex C and I played Eclipse, a space themed 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) game that plays so well, I sold my copy of Twilight Imperium a few years ago.
Wednesday
Jeff and I played Legend of the 5 Rings in the morning. L5R is a oriental themed collectible card game. It’s one of the only CCGs continuously published since it first appeared about a year after Magic: The Gathering. The rest of the day was spent deck building with the A Game of Thrones boosters Chris distributed the evening before and playing against each other.
To Be Continued…
The week is half over and has been great fun to this point. Tomorrow, we’ll play a few more epic games before moving on to the euro-style portion of the week.