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The Gaming thread - anything but video games


Thunderplex

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This belongs here better than anywhere else: as part of a stag party over the weekend we went to HintHunt in London Euston. It's a physical locked room puzzle. Teams of 3-5 are shut in a room with 60 minutes get out. After a frenetic hour we escaped with 39 seconds to go. It's tremendous fun (as long as you like word games, secret codes, reading maps and the like otherwise it's horrendous). If you can find like-minded souls it's a great way to spend an hour.

 

... And the experience is not in anyway diminished because your team was the slowest.

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Dead of Winter is pretty awesome, from the one co-op game I played. It's like the BSG game but with added zombies.

 

 

 

Heard a few good things about this game. The coop with individual goals theme makes me want to give It a go.

 

 

This belongs here better than anywhere else: as part of a stag party over the weekend we went to HintHunt in London Euston. It's a physical locked room puzzle. Teams of 3-5 are shut in a room with 60 minutes get out. After a frenetic hour we escaped with 39 seconds to go. It's tremendous fun (as long as you like word games, secret codes, reading maps and the like otherwise it's horrendous). If you can find like-minded souls it's a great way to spend an hour.

... And the experience is not in anyway diminished because your team was the slowest.

Sounds excellent. Would love something like that oop North.

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  • 3 weeks later...
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Thunder, how'd you get on with your re-introduction to Magic?

 

I am loving the new Khans set. Really fun. I've got myself a proper Standard deck together for the first time (Temur Monsters, for anyone that means anything to), and actually took part in a Gameday at the weekend.

 

I did better than I thought I might, but not great overall. Didn't make Top 8. Learned a lot though, and have smoothed out some kinks in my deck and got some better answers in my sideboard. Looking forward to running the deck out again as soon as I can!

 

As I've mentioned elsewhere on the forum recently I'm travelling a whole bunch back and forth to Glasgow at the moment, but I have found a gaming shop there called Spellbound where they seem to draft a couple times a week and play Standard on a Thursday night so I will take my deck on the road am looking forward to checking the local Glasgow meta out!

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My reintroduction to magic died a death unfortunately due to real life shite that has just steamrollered over everything. Hoping to restart the fire soon though! Great news about the game day. Love that type of thing, always either meet new buddies or see someone I've not seen in years to reconnect. Good luck with the Glasgow club, shopmeets sometimes have access to exclusive cards which is nice! You always find a like minded soul at one which helps greatly.

 

The GOT board game is great from what I have heard. The original was stuck on many shop shelves for a couple of years until the showstarted , then it exploded. Used copies were going for about £170 on eBay.

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Anyone tried the Game of Thrones board game?

 

Yeah, and it's ace. Although it'll take a good few goes at it before you can even begin to figure out actual strategies. The first play-through is immensely confusing, and you'll take about an hour to set the board up. With each successive play, you'll think "Okay, I've got this," but realise you haven't at all when some unthought-of piece of strategy has a massive effect, adding to the things you have to keep in mind next time. Once you do get the hang of it, it's very much worth your time (about 3-4 hours a session), and there's so much going on, and so much to think about, every game is wildly different, and filled with those moments where everyone throws their hands up and does a big "Holy shit..."

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Oh, I've just remembered.

 

I played Race for the Galaxy for the first time this weekend. It sounded really fucking complicated when my friends tried to explain it to me, but by the second go around I felt I had a good grip on it.

 

It was good fun. I'm not sure if there are enough effective varying strategies for true longevity but I'll definitely play again so I'll find out soon enough, I'm sure..

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Was recently introduced to World of Darkness by a friend - I'd never played anything like D&D or any other pen-and-paper RPG in my life, as I never knew anyone else who was into it. Nearest I ever got was the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf books (of which I still have quite a few).

 

Anyway, this first time was creating characters - didn't realise just how much detail went into it, but it was a lot of fun.

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Ooh, I get a double response to this thread.

Did a room escape a couple of weeks back. Same idea as most of them: 60 minutes to escape a room following clues. We did http://www.puzzlair.co.uk/, which is a small franchise thing and was the low-tech, slightly shabby but fun affair you'd expect in Bristol. Three things that stood out compared to some other reports I've seen of similar games:

 

* The one we did had a lot of searching round the room for stuff rather than just solving clues and puzzles. Some of the stuff was brilliantly hidden in plain sight such as...

 

 

A key hidden inside a fake electrical socket. It was a fair hiding place as we'd been told we could touch anything that didn't have a specific 'don't touch' safety sticker on -- it's just that nobody spotted the absence of the sticker and unless you are being methodical, you don't even think of the possibility of looking inside a socket.

 

 

* It was very well designed in terms of having lots of different strands of clues open at a time rather than being linear, so you could take many different routes to solving it. It also meant that you're almost guaranteed to wind up with all sorts of stuff (keys, locks, codes) stacked up near the end so that you finally find/solve something and it brings up a chain reaction of opening stuff and finishing off.

 

* The host, who could send us clues via a TV screen and was watching/listening, did a really good job of giving us just enough help to steer us in the right direction when we got stuck without making it too easy. On reflection, it's very clear that unless you are spectacularly good at it or just plain useless, they'll adjust it so you finish with only a few moments to spare.

 

Moving on from that, yesterday afternoon we went to a local board games cafe, which is two families who own a fuck load of games hiring a church hall, bringing the games along and doing teas and coffees in return for voluntary donations towards the hall hire. Not really been into that type of game before (most of the ones we play are more quiz based) but had a lot of fun. We played:

 

* Ingenious: Basically a hexagonal version of dominos but with six different colours rather than numbers of spots. Suffice to say we were destroyed by a 12 year old boy.

 

* King of Tokyo: As described earlier on, it's pretty much a combination of dice rolling and choosing when to play cards, but definitely good for a quick play. This time we were beaten by the same 12 year old boy, then by his 9 year old sister. Obviously that's just because dice games are all luck.

 

* Ticket to Ride (Europe): Much longer game, all about piecing together connections to build railways on specific routes while trying not to tip off your opponents as to where you are targeting. This time three adults managed to beat a 9 year old girl (as it were). I'd like to play it again having got a better idea of how it works: I'm pretty sure I was the first to complete their long route, but it's clear that's not necessarily the best winning strategy.

 

Definitely thinking of going again (it's monthly) to try out some new games, particularly given they tend to be quite expensive and hard to find second-hand, so you'd want to play a few times before you buy. Any recommendations from this list, bearing in mind my missus has more limited patience/ability to remember new rules) and there's a strong possibility one or two (scarily intelligent) kids might want to play as well:

 

http://www.andrewschuman.macmate.me/BoardGameCafe/Menu_-_Games.html

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The Board Games Cafe is an excellent idea. Good to see there is a wide spread of ages there too. From the list provided, Forbidden island and Forbidden desert are perfect for clever kids and reluctant wives. Simple to play, but a lot of content and fun to be had. Pandemic is simple but fun as well. Good thing is that you can have a wander round between games to see what others are playing, so she may see other this she fancies too.

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