Played this weekend at Pacificon in Santa Clara, CA:
Cuba Libre – There were enough interested COIN players to setup two games of this. One table of new players, and one table of COIN veterans. I’ve only played Cuba Libre once but have played the others all several times, so I joined the veterans table, all of whom all had more specific Cuba Libre experience than I did. I was assigned 26July(Castro’s movement). Things started out rough for me through the first campaign and a half, 26July was third or fourth priority on all the cards except one (which I was second). However, I started to be able to fight back later in the game and ended up losing a -2 tie to Directorio on the final propaganda. Only three cards were left in our deck, which was quite different from the newbie game in which apparently Government won on the fourth card or so.
Nations – Played a five player game of this, three of us were new to the game with two veterans. My friend who was teaching it described it as “Through the Ages without the bottle of aspirin included”. We only made it through the end of the renaissance and didn’t even bother to count up VP, but I very much liked the game. It was an unusual game from what I understand as there were very few military units in the card mix. Only two appeared on the board until the Renaissance, so three of us had to make due with the vanilla axeman units until then. I’m sorely tempted to buy this now.
Fading Glory / Waterloo 20 – Fading Glory is a low-complexity and low-counter-count wargame that can be completed in less than 30 minutes. I played two games of this against the same opponent. It was my copy but he was familiar with the system. I played the French both times, and lost the first game due to my over aggressive approach and poor die rolls. I won the second but only with some subtle coaching from my opponent and lucky die rolls. I also enjoyed this and am glad I bought it. I’ll be looking for opportunities to deploy this game as a gateway wargame with friends who I think might like the genre but are intimidated by their complexity.
Saturday I went by myself, and Sunday I took my seven-year-old son.
Sentinels of the Multiverse – This is my son’s go-to game right now. We setup in the Euro area and ended up playing a two player game. This was kind of disappointing as we’ve been able to find other people to play with at past cons, but the Pacificon young player room was anemic compared to DunDraCon’s and KublaCon’s, and in the standard Euro open gaming area there were just wandering groups who had already decided on a game. We’ve played all the difficulty 1 villains several times but for this game decided to take on a difficulty 2 villain – Akash’bhuta from Infernal Relics. He played his favorites (hard to get him to play anything else but that’s ok) Bunker and The Scholar. I played Legacy and The Argent Adept. It was an exciting game as we took a lot of damage very quickly, but started a comeback when The Scholar got out his +1 healing and converting-healing-to-additional-damage elemental forms, and started using Legacy and Argent Adept to generate small heals that would be boosted into significant hits. Unfortunately we ran out of time at about half villain health and “saved” the game, as it was time to run to:
Pathfinder – Played a Pathfinder society scenario together with my son, “We Be Goblins”. This was a game setup for young players, so we had two kids including my son about his age, the mother of the other boy, another boy who was about twelve, and the Gamemaster’s pre-teen daughter. In this particular scenario the players play goblins who go out on a raid. My son’s character (a Goblin barbarian known as Stumpbiter) won an elixir of fire breathing from the Goblin Tribe’s chief by successfully choking down five large, black slugs. That item allowed him to dispatch the final enemy of the scenario with a 4d6 fire attack. The look on his face was a priceless mixture of laughter and horror when his character’s reward for completing the adventure was to be married to the Goblin chief’s daughter “the fearsomely corpulent Gupy Wartbits”.
