So this intro is a late addition to
this particular article as it's become one of those posts you keep
trying to finish but for whatever reason (usually sleep) ya can't
quite wrap up. By this point it's not unlike a frosty marriage. All
passion for the subject has been lost, only to be replaced by the
ever growing need to get it over with. Of course it also makes for a
fine bit of stalling while I work up some potential book and movie
reviews, and prep for the new sentai series that I plan on actually
keeping up with this year.
Oh, and if you find it out of touch to
be writing about something Christmas related this far into the new
year, just remember that package was just received a week ago. Santa
must be getting slow in his old age.
Frequent visitors may know of my
fondness for boardgames even though I rarely cover them. My regular
place of study and convo for them is over on boardgamegeek.com. If
you've never been, it's a damn fine place to throw away an
afternoon.... or ten. Every year there are multiple holiday exchanges
ranging from regular Secret Santa, Xmas cards, Wargamer Santa, and
thrifty Santa. There may be more than that but you get the idea.
Being a man with a very light bank-account I only participated in the
cards (covered in an earlier post) and thrifty Santa.
There are two key differences between
regular and thrifty Santa. Naturally the one is that regular peeps
get brand new stuff while thrifters stick to smelly used things. The
other difference is much bigger. Due to the lower cost of our games
there's a distinct possibility of receiving a gaming mountain from
your own personal Santa. True there are some folks who only get one
or two nice things but overall it's a very generous group. Even
someone with fairly limited cash flow like myself can pull of some
pretty impressive work in this regard.
The tricky part was waiting on my own
Santa who didn't contact me until two weeks before Christmas. To put
that in perspective, my target opened his gifts the following day.
Santa's message to me was that he couldn't find anything I wanted so
he just bought me something new. In my rash judgment I assumed
they'd simply gotten one of the cheaper items off of my list and
called it a day. As time would later reveal, they bought me a copy of
Black Fleet which is a beautiful and awesome game all around, which
made me choke down that seething jealousy at other people's hauls.
Upon arrival I wrote a lengthy and
detailed report of my experiences and thanked Santa profusely for
their game picking skills, but this triggered something. My Santa
seemed to take to my complaints about what a horrid year 2014 had
been (thank god it's over) and decided to one up himself. Last
Saturday I got a second box that was meant to give me the full
thrifty Santa experience so let's look through it shall we?
First thing to note is that Santa had
an aim to follow up on his original theme, so there was a plethora of
Pirate titles to choose from, starting with three card games.
First up is Pirate Fluxx. In case
you've never encountered it, Fluxx is essentially the card based
equivalent of Calvinball and if you'd don't know what Calvenball is
then what the hell are you doing here? Go catch up on some pop
culture. Anywho, the trick to Fluxx is that you start with simple
play one/draw one rules and no goal. Then you play cards that create
endgame scenarios, or change them, possibly even steeling them. Then
you add it keeper items and some versions even have sorts of attack
cards. I say versions because not unlike Monopoly, there's a Fluxx
for nearly any taste.
Next up is Loot, which I've generally
heard good things about. It's sort of a bidding game disguised as
pirate ships attacking other vessels. Possibly the most unique
feature of the game are the cards that resemble those boardwalk
caricature paintings. You know, the kind were someone draws you as a
pirate, only now you're head is twice the size of your body and
you've developed a rapid onset case of rabies.
Lastly on the card game line up is
Splice. Never heard of it before getting this box. It's got a pretty
lousy reputation though the rules don't sound all too bad. Plus the
cards are really thick & smooth which are just nice to hold. Like
the previous two, this one would fair best at a fuller player count
which makes for the difficult task of convincing enough people to
join in. Think I might have my chance this weekend.
Pirateer is an older title that could
be considered as pirate checkers crossed with capture the flag.
You've got some very abstract looking game play that's about steeling
a treasure off of the main island only to return it to your home
port. Messed up part is how bad the rules are. This has one of the
worst manuals I've ever encountered. I actually learned more about
playing them game from some micro review than the actual
instructions. Very interested to see how fun it is as t has a mensa
award and lots of people hate it. Which are two things that rarely go
together.
Aargh! Is a very simple children’s
memory game with some fairly decent components. Nothing much to say
there. For an adult, the trick with memory games is to get nice &
tipsy first, kinda ups the challenge.
The game of Life Pirates of the
Carribean is fairly self-explanatory. Like most kids we had a copy of
the regular game of Life. Me and my sister used to play against each
other all the time, tough I'm not sure way other than it was so much
shorter than Monopoly. So this is one of those items that will get
pulled out specifically for a nostalgia night with the added flair of
us now being able to do some piraty actions instead of just laughing
at the poor bastard who got stuck living in the trailer park.
Eventually ol' Saint Nick ran out of
high seas adventures and gave me some pure Milton Bradley goodness.
Scotland Yard may have been in some of
your childhood collections as it's a fairly popular game. I never
knew of until getting into the hobby. Think of it as boardgame hide &
seek with more mobility. One player is a master criminal trying to
bust outta town while the others try to catch him. Supposedly newer
versions and even other games have improved on this style
dramatically but this is the classic game of the year version which
is nice as I'm aiming for a complete collection of those. Want to
note that this is where one of those sleep interruptions happened
while writing the post. When I woke up there was some gibberish about
adding mushrooms to the game. Can only assume I was hungry.
Screaming Eagles is the game any Top
Gun maniac would love. Best as either one on one or teams of two, you
use cards to pick movement direction and the number of dice to roll,
then you select which type of ammo to fire (from a limited supply)
and roll the appropriate number of dice. There's tons of neat little
touches to this one which made me want it for a while. Santa really
made me happy with this one.
On the surprise front was Battleball.
This was from a time when Milton Bradley had been bought by Hasbro
but was still producing really excessive games under their proper
name before it was totally removed from the gaming scene. Most of my
fellow thrifters consider this one a rite of passage but it looks
like it deserves more than that reputation. The components are
outstanding and the rules are pretty quick & simple. Much as I
hate football itself, ya give me some lil robot players and tons of
dice & suddenly I'm talking like Madden, boom!
So that was my introduction to the
world of Secret Santa. Honestly; I'm looking forward to the next
exchange and maybe joining one of the others for fun......employment
pending of course. For now I'll be working on some different posts
for you folks. Went through another stash of new foods, also reading
about slutty German girls and space gladiators. Surely there must be
something good to report on there.
