Bunker Project Log

One word:

infuriating.

Oh crap…?

?I love Tanga. They have a great business model, cool content, and they are run by this guy?(how cool is that?). I have bought a godzillion things there.

And that’s the problem.

For an obsessive compulsive collector hobbyist weirdo like me, with a previously disposable income…?but now a father of two whose expenses are catching up with him, this is very bad.

So, when Ticket to Ride Marklin Edition (the “Real Gamer’s version”)?showed up at the appointed time of Tanga (1opm EST for the uninitiated) I did my usual bolt downstairs, halfway through a 5-player game?of Fluxx no less.

I suck at rules. I have spoiled many a game night gathering the dorks together to play some new game, only to find that, yes… there are some?important rules on the third through sixth pages… and… Yes! Players have a hard time playing when they don’t know how to win, and YES!! If you wreck the first play of a good game, it doesn’t matter how good it could have been, first impressions matter.

So, I decided to fix this. My first step? Read the rules… all the way through. A bunch of times!

OMG. There’s this game called Zombies!… and the box has, like, 5 million little zombie guys in it, and… like… the game is named ZOMBIES! But, we were like, at this party, where we played it, and there were like…?NO ZOMBIES! We played the whole friggin game, and there were like, 3 zombies all the way through it. WTH???

I have been reading posts on Boardgamegeek about Loopin’ Louie being?teh funnest game evar!!!!11one, and, it suddenly became available on Firebox.com, so I bit. Here’s the last game of the night, right before everyone shuffled off to Buffalo. Enjoy!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eySMQZuXzXY]

It’s late, I leave you with a slideshow…

So I mentioned actually winning a game (for once) against Mrs. G. She wasn’t happy. So not happy that she immediately suggested we play Rat Hot, a nice simple abstract that is sort of a reverse Mah-Jong. A stacking, pairing, tile-placing extravaganza, quick enough to finish in the last minutes before Tanga flips at 10PM EST. ?

Did she win? Check out the goods below. Major props to Pottse for taking our hella boring video and giving it?Michael Bay-esque intensity!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_TekFKtu-I]

I don’t know why I keep buying these things, other than the skull elf keeps telling me to.

I hate card games. I never played cards when I was a kid, and my dad was the kind of guy who would occasionally play 52-card pickup with me. (I got to play the pick-up phase of the game, just in case you are wondering.)

Every five years on Labor Day, my company hosts a secret weekend vacation. We have no idea where we are going until we are ready to arrive at the destination. We are given one piece of luggage, and a basic list to pack from. My first trip, which was ten years ago, started in Vegas, and ended in the Grand Canyon. The second started in DC and ended in New York. This year we arrived in San Francisco, a city I am semi-acclimated to having been there for GDC.

The Abstract Apocalypse game night started with Pottse and I playing “Ricochet Robots”. Mrs. G was putting Prince Thud to bed. The three-year old DemonPop was tearing ass all over the place, and father-in-law wasn’t yet back from his galavanting. It was a perfect time to learn rules whilst everything settled around us.

Ricochet Robots is a game that can be played by as many people as can see the board. There are no “turns”. There is only a problem that must be solved. This problem is to get a single robot from its current position, to a specified position on the playing surface.