Heng’s Gaming Blog

Date: 7-1-06 Saturday Hari Raya Haji eve’s eve’s eve’s gaming session:-

Session length: 9.30pm - 7.30am (10 hours)

Gamerz: Heng, Ivan, Alvin, Jun Hao, Edward

Games: Kill Dr. Lucky, Carcassonne, Twilight Imperium 3, Ticket to Ride: Europe

Sometime ago, we have this crazy idea - let’s do 12 hour gaming marathons! We some planning, we finally get to do it on the Hari Raya Haji holidays.

9.30pm - Ivan and I started by setting up the main course, Twilight Imperium 3, our intergalactic space mega battle game. Neither of us has played it before and we took the opportunity to setup as much as possible and to familiarize ourselves with the game components. Not long after, Alvin arrived with his Kill Dr. Lucky (KDL) game and we set it up just in time for Jun Hao and Edward to reach and start playing. The gameplay of KDL is simple, Dr. Lucky moves through the mansion room by room every turn and the players must try to catch him alone and kill him. It’s a humourous game despite its gruesome objective, as you play various funny murder weapon cards like chainsaw and civil war cannon to try and do the good doctor in. Other players try to stop you by playing failure cards. The flavor text on the failure cards itself are pretty funny as well: some simply mentions that your aim is bad while others explains that a mystical kung-fu man had appeared out of nowhere to protect Dr. Lucky. We went through the failure cards pretty quickly, forcing it out of other player’s hand, until the deck ran out. Each player now has limited supply of failure cards. Until now, the murder weapons were pretty tame, requiring some 3 or 4 point failure cards to cancel. Seeing opportunity, I took a gamble, lured the poor doctor to the gallery and when everybody’s back was turned, attempted to hang Dr. Lucky using an 8-point rope (gallery bonus). This drew out everyone’s failure cards and Dr. Lucky walked free!… But not for long, as the next player, Jun Hao, got to kill him easy due to my exhaustion of everyone’s failure cards. Doh!

The next game, Carcassonne, was a game that most of us were familiar with. A quick explanation was needed for Edward, who has not played the game, and then off we go tile-laying. Alliances were the order of the day as the ‘you scratch my back and I scratch yours’ syndrome overtook us. Plenty of road and castle sharing happening, in particular the longest stretch of road ever being built and shared out by Edward and Alvin, taking their points total high to surpass everyone else. Castles were kept to reasonable sizes and a major solo effort by Jun Hao put him back into contention. Sabotages of tile spaces were few and infrequent and yours truly who practices it got snubbed out of the more valuable alliances. In the end, Alvin won with a good number of alliances (sharing) with various players while I went in last place by managing to rub the wrong way with almost everyone on board and find myself with short roads and small castles. If anything I learned from this session is that: make friends with everyone!!! (and share in the spoils…)

Just a little past midnight, we brought out the biggie… (drum roll) … Twilight Imperium 3! There were lots of oohs and aahs around, admiring of gaming bits and miniatures. As this was the first time we were playing, Ivan and I, being the only people who read the rules, frantically tried to finish setting up the board and to explain the one thousand and one number of rules to all at the same time. It would have been a simple procedure, except that both of us did not always remember the rules correctly, we contradicted each other often and still needed to refer back to the rulebook. The end result was that the setup and rules explanation took two hours. It was long and we only got to the point where the board was laid out and everyone started reading and picking strategy cards before we declared the intergalactic space mega battle to officially begin! Five players equaled five races and the following was randomly dealt out:- Heng (Lixiz Mindnet), Ivan (Federation of Sol), Alvin (Yssaril Tribes), Edward (xXxcha Kingdom) and Jun Hao (Universities of Jol-Nar).

Using the Lixiz, I went straight for the Warfare Strategy with my superior starting setup. By the end of the first round, I had more planets than any others in my grasp. Jun Hao, using the Universities, went for the War Sun technology as he tries to offset his race’s combat deficiencies with his technology superiority. Edward of the xXxcha Kingdom went the diplomatic route with massive building and turtle-ling tactics and dared anyone to challenge him with his race’s combat bonuses. Alvin of the devious Yssaril Tribes sat back and watched everyone make their moves while collecting devastating action cards one by one to wait for the moment to unleash it upon his unsuspecting enemy. Ivan of the Federation of Sol made his slow snaking trail across the galaxy, using his race’s special ability to populate his planets with vast amounts of ground troops.

I went expanding too near Ivan and feeling threatened, he unleashed the full force of his Sol forces at me. It doesn’t help that he’s got the God of luck on his side as he basically got the better of me in the war of numbers. It doesn’t help also that in the course of the game, a law was passed that dreadnaughts suffers penalties for being such a weapon of mass destruction, rendering my vast fleet of Lizix dreadnaughts, useless! Edward and Alvin had a minor excursion at a peripheral system before settling down to a stalemate of built-up forces, fortifying rich worlds bordering each other. Jun Hao and his warsuns went for the Imperial world of Metacol Rex uncontested, as everyone else was busy… which wasn’t much of a big deal other than it was the centre of the galaxy. Until he started revealing that it was his secret objective all along, leapfrogging all of us in victory points all of a sudden. Okay, so we spent one turn decimating the university boy off Mecatol Rex and call it a day for Twilight Imperium 3 as we’ve already spent six hours playing it. Winner was still Jun Hao at 8 VPs.

6.00am - we got out TTR:E and played. Everyone had fun and agreed it’s a good game to wind down as everyone can go on autopilot mode while playing (strategy & brains not required), just draw and play cards, simple. Edward went for the ‘one long ticket and one short ticket’ strategy and came up tops. Ivan with his ‘two extremely short tickets & two long tracks’ strategy paid off as he end up second. Me and my ‘lotsa lotsa short tickets’ strategy confirmed that it was a lousy strategy as I came up last. Good game, more sessions to come.

7.30am - home and ZzZzZzZz….