Since face-to-face boardgaming meetings aren't happening at the
moment, I've been playing more solo and on-line games.
Two plays of the rather obscure (at least in the UK) Go 500
Racing Dice
Game.
As it stands this is a sort of super-Yahtzee push-your-luck game,
where you're rolling a bunch of (custom) dice to get as high a score
as possible without getting any of the trap faces. But there are
people on BoardGameGeek who've significantly improved it, by having
sections with a maximum score and a penalty if you exceed it; and I
accidentally ended up running a championship by dint of being readily
able to keep track of scores. ("Hey, I know Perl.")
As far as I can tell this game has never been commercially imported to
this country; I've seen it for sale on eBay in the US, but the postage
would be twice the price of the game. Fortunately I was able to find
out what the custom die faces are, and there's a Tabletop Simulator
version.
Things that it's pleasing to have happen: a player asks "hmm, what
happens if there's a tie?" And I can respond "my code spots it, and
shares out the points for the tied places evenly, dropping any
remainder".
One play of
Augustus.
This is one of my standard games for introducing people to TTS: it
doesn't need much fine manipulation, but you have the mechanics of
drawing a tile off a stack or a token out of a bag, and putting things
moderatelyx precisely on other things.
One play of the space-combat game
Talon, the basic
scenario of two heavy cruisers on each side. I like the record-keeping
system: rather than having a ship diagram like SFB or Full Thrust,
you simply write things onto the counter with a dry-erase marker. It
also works remarkably well on this Tabletop Simulator mod (blessed by
the publisher).
The last game for March was
Quantum, one
that I used to own but sold because I didn't play it often enough. I
had a decent setup, but my opponent took the initiative and
effectively kept it. (Complicated for both of us by some odd scripting
on this mod; it's clearly meant to do something terribly clever about
combat, but it didn't seem to work, or we were using it wrongly. Most
games I play on TTS don't really need scripting anyway; it shifts the
experience away from boardgame to computer game, but I'll grant it has
some virtue for setting up a complex game.)
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