As you can note from the time stamps – this has been pretty delayed. Anyway, I’ll probably get a hang of it as time passes. I was hoping to start off with a review of some games and other stuff, but obviously I’ll have to settle for Friday Gaming Night @ Hobbymania.
Hobbymania is a cozy little gaming shop located near La Salle Taft – close enough that we can steal some WiFi – hehehe – and if you skip over the PCs downstairs, which is the shop’s bread-and-butter, you can clim up to the second floor for some board game action – especially on Friday nights. We’ve been doing this since mid-2009 and we won’t be stopping anytime soon. Jay, my friend and proprietor, has two shelves full of games which he owns, though me and the other guys bring in other games if we’re in the mood for some difference.
Four of us where playing tonight: Jay, Mark, Nico, and me – we usually have five to six players but work sometimes gets in the way of gaming. ^_^
First of all, we started the night off with “Bushido – Way of the Warrior“, a German Samurai game of honor and backstabbing. I actually forgot to take pictures of that; the game was pretty smooth – a lot smoother than the first time we played it. The second play through definitely got the kinks out of the game. Four of us battled it out for a race to 50 honor on a hexagonal constructed board.
The great thing about Bushido is that every turn you aren’t the one making the moves – you’ll be delegating your responsibilities to other players. One gets to be your Sensei, your political adviser. Another gets to be your Samurai, which is your general. Finally, one gets to be your whipping boy, the Bushi. You’ll have to trust the other players to help you win – but then they’ll be trying to win, too. It’s a great game and has got the Japanese theme I like.
Anyway, it was a pretty fast game – we ended on turn 5 of a 12 turn game. Nico won by outsmarting us all and inviting Marc to a tea party he couldn’t refuse.
Next, I finally remembered my camera and started a game of Khronos. Khronos is a funky time-travel game – you’re a bunch of time travelers who plan to make a whole lot of profit from it. You do this by building structures across three different time periods.
Here’s a view of the board:
The Age of Might, the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason are the three battlegrounds. The great thing about it is that structure ripple through time. If you build something significant in the past – it carries over to the other ages – with corresponding results. You might suddenly see that cathedral you build in the Age of Faith disappear to be replaced by a fortress because of a time paradox.
Building structures requires cards – as you can see from my four-card hand. Scoring is done in boards where you have a time traveler present – and you only have two time traveler for three boards.
Anyway, Jay managed to win this time by totally dominating the Age of Faith with a little help from the Age of Might. Would have won if I time-rippled my fortress from the past into the future, meh. Win some, you lose some.
Finally to round out the day, we played several rounds of Guillotine! A classic from Wizards of the Coast.
You play as revolutionaries collecting noble heads – a simple game with a lot of screw-you mechanics.
Here’s the line of nobles as they march to be beheaded. Everyone got the chance to win. ^_^
Anyway – game night ended around 12 and we all went home until the next game night.
Nerd Samurai 
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