Games Day Review

As I mentioned in the previous post, Sunday was Games Day at my place.  Playing was Tommy “ozjesting” Dean, Richard “Virral” Andrew, Fernando “FLo” Lopez and Stuart “Smegish” Lynton and yours truly.

Formula De
Had a go at this and have been keen to play it.  Basically it’s a car racing game around a track and each player needs to select gears and go around corners in a manner that forces you to down shift gears.  The higher the gear, the greater the number of squares you move, but if you take a corner too fast you need to use a limited supply of brakes and fuel and when you run out of those items, your car can konk out or spin.  In addition, overtaking opposing cars means you can collide and take body damage and too much body damage equals failure to finish.  The very simple game system though means the game was easy to pick up and we played a two lap game around the Monaco circuit.  FLo had poll and basically led from start to finish despite a late push by Smegish (who span on the last corner) and yours truly came well and truly last when I ran out of brakes and tyres so I had to nurse the car in the last corners.  Great fun.

Fury of Dracula
A good game that was hindered by the fact that we Vampire Hunters got off to a great start.  Tommy was playing Dracula and the board was a map of Europe with a lot cities joined by roads and railway lines.  Essentially Dracula was hidden from view from us and we Hunters had to travel around Europe searching fro Dracula who left encounters for us to deal with as he passed through cities.  However straight from the get go, we worked out by luck that Dracula was in Prague and we descended upon him.  A merry chase across Eastern Europe forced Dracula to set sail across the Mediterranean and Smegish was lucky (downright arsey) to simultaneously land in Genoa when Dracula did.  Dracula met his match and given Smegish also had the good fortune to meet up with Dracula in the daytime where his powers were weak and he was slain.  Good game, I liked the dynamic and the game play (card based system for Dracula’s movement and combat) but the game was stymied by great luck for the goodies.

Betrayal on the House on the Hill
A game we have played before and was made even weirder because at this stage the house had lost power, but we had two very quick games of this as both hauntings were fairly easy to defeat.  In haunt one, Tommy’s character (Professor Longfellow) went insane and sacrificed himself to allow vampire bats into the haunted house who then were seeking the rest of us.  To defeat them, we had to find the organ in the organ room, fire it up, play the right chords which would cause all flapping bats to flee and then slay any vampires that remained attached to any of the remaining heroes.  Unfortunately for the game, FLo’s character was in the Organ room and quickly started her up and all the bats which were still flapping flew away.  Only one had started feeding on Smegish and it was quickly dispatched.

Given the very quick finish, we went again and this time it was Virral’s character who was the traitor and had evil house servants in his employ and we had to survive till dawn (10 turns) whilst we ran around the house trying to hide from Virral and his servants.  Virral quickly killed Tommy’s character and then Smegish’s character was slain soon after whilst FLo and I hid upstairs.  I had a spear and decided to defend myself whilst FLo ran away to avoid the servants and I held them at bay for the last 2 – 3 turns.  A win for the goodies!

All up, a great day thanks for the guys who came up and thanks for Niki who fed us and looked after the kids.  The next Games Day is on 2 October, details in the Forum.