Archive for the ‘board games’ Category
- In: board games | conventions | fun stuff | gaming
- 6 Comments
We have returned, victorious from GrandCon! A new gaming convention in Grand Rapids, MI, GrandCon featured pre-scheduled gaming events, a ginormous gaming library you could sign games out from, a Pathfinder competition, table top roleplaying, game demos, a really nice dealer room, seminars, and more. I’m happy we got there early in the morning on Saturday, as the registration lines only grew and grew into the afternoon. I heard at one point that over 1200 badges were printed and that they ran out of programs. I think they’re gonna need a bigger hotel/convention location next year!
There was also an adventure to a brand new comic/gaming shop in the city, and an unintentionally SFnal dinner involving LED lights in a sushi presentation.
While I write up a longer post about the super cool World building panel that was presented by Tracy Hickman, Ed Greenwood, Steven Schend and Jeff Grubb, you should enjoy these photos.
photodump commencing in three. . . . two. . . . and we have lift-off/photo dump!
These huge cardboard monsters were set up in the lobby, they were part of an oversized gaming demo for King of Tokyo
The game comes with regular sized dice, and regular sized cardboard characters that go on a regular sized board, but throwing big plushy dice is so much more fun!
what a board game map usually looks like:
- it has places on it.
- sometimes a road, or a line, between those places showing paths you can take
- it has barriers or hazards you have to go around
Except if you are Phil Eklund, a boardgame map looks like this:
my photo doesn’t do it justice. This is seriously the most beautiful game board map I’ve ever seen.
it still has all the things a game board map should have – places, lines between the places, barriers and hazards. High Frontier is a game about developing technologies to travel to the solar system. Figure out which thrusters or engines and robonaut your ship should have. Take a crew if you want. Water is the only currency. If you take enough resources you can build a factory wherever you end up, maybe a colony. But don’t make your ship too heavy, this game uses real physics and the heavier your ship is, the more fuel it needs to escape Earth’s gravity. And yes, there is a solar sail. All the techs in the game are real. Makes you wonder why we’re not already using them.
Some more close up photos:
We used the sun’s radiation area to store our extra water tokens
I really don’t want to go to Mercury.
Everyone starts on Earth
Everyone starts on Earth. Once your mission is ready to go, you can boost your components in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and then High Eccentric Orbit (HEO), and the Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO). Each of these movements costs you burns of fuel, cuz we’re using real physics. those “L” spots are Lagrange points, where it doesn’t cost you any fuel to change direction. you can just fly right through them and be on your way!
A great way to learn how the game works is getting a crew to the moon, and then getting your crew home alive. You’ll learn how your different ship components work, and how much fuel it costs you to move around.
Alien frontiers!
Posted on: May 22, 2011
Last night was an evening of the most wonderful trifecta currently known to mankind: dinner with friends, booze, and gaming.
we played a newish game called Alien frontiers. The game was easy enough to learn, and in my case, easy enough to win. It didn’t require insane amounts of strategy or card playing, it was mostly a dice rolling, steal from your neighbor, resource spending kind of thing. Actually, a really good gateway game for non-gamers.
don’t let the complicated looking board fool you, it’s a very simple game:
You gain points by landing colonies on the planet in the center of the board. Whoever controls the colony gets the bonus, and the card for the colony. Now, take a close look at the names of these colonies:
the Little Red Reviewer 
Recent Comments