Andy Wood

Since I played risk for the very first time, I am always enjoyed a good game of risk. (dang dice are always against me)  At the shop yesterday, Dan, Rob, Rich and I sat down and played the latest version of risk.

This reinvention of Risk adds in Objectives.

Instead of conquering the world you can play optionally to capture 3 objectives, of which there are a total of eight possible,  4 major (hard), 4 minor (easier).  In addition to the objectives, there are also rewards that go along with them.

Rewards range from bonus attack or defense die to extra troops per turn, to additional maneuvers.  Each of the rewards are extremely useful, some are like the hand of god.

Also in this version are 15 cities. Each game you shuffle out 15 cards and place the cities on the countries of the cards. This also adds a uniqueness to every game. Cities make a country worth more as much when counting up territories to determine the number of troops you get on your turn.

We played two games, one with the basic rules where the board was pre-set for use and the 2nd was in common room mode.  Each of which it is basically the same game of risk that I remember, but the first player to get 3 objectives wins.

I will be 99 yrs old when first contact happens… Great!

Oh good god!

Don’t get me wrong, loved the movies, thought that the KOTR on the Xbox was fun, but I am a bigger fan of Trek than Wars, but this just looks AWESOME!

Now – many people got this day off and I for one was one of them.  I pretty much work 7 days a week.  Some may say, “Working at a Comic Book store, isn’t really work".  However; there are those days , but yes I have much less stress from my former occupation.

What does one do for their day off when they work 7 days a week?

Slept in, started on my liquid breakfast (Snapple and diet Mt. Dew) and started to play City of Villains’.

I had made arrangements with my normal COH/COV group to start new toons where we all would create Master Minds and play for like 4-5 hours.  Starting around 8.30a, they all slowly started to show up and soon we have about 7 people with all little minions to boss around.  (it was so awesome!)

After playing a little of City of Villains, it was time to watch some Tivo that was saved up and get in a couple more SG-1 Episodes. (currently on Season 6)

Had an awesome lunch, watched more Tivo and SG-1 and then around 6pm, it was back to COV for a Strike Force.

I have a very relaxing day off eating, playing games and watching great stuff on TV.

Here is the gang that showed up for the pre-release.

We filled up about 10 mins before game time, compared to our conflux prerelease.

Thank you all for making this a huge success.

This was something that I had the cards for and borrowed some other ideas.

I got a new gaming setup and I decided to go with the SteelSeries 5H v2 USB Headset. 

 

It fits nicely to my head and had a cool feature too, a retractable microphone!  I ran into some problems, even asked Amazon to send me a replacement.  Only to have the same problem with the replacement.  This sent me down the ‘google’ path to see solutions.

It turns out that by default the mic is set to 48 KHz vs 44.1 KHz, so by changing that setting.  Problem is now gone.

Myself and a couple of friends sat down with this game today and played, in fact we were able to play 2 games in the allotted time.

The rules take perhaps 15-20 mins to learn, pretty simple (the simplicity was along the same lines as Ticket to Ride), but not to simple, as there is still plenty of room for strategy.

The are basically two phases to the game:

Pre-bomb phase & Post-bomb phase, the game token/pogs are color coded on the back for each phase.  At the beginning of each phase, the tokens are placed randomly on the board. (we found it best to flip the tokens/pogs over with the color side up to help with random placing)  Each turn, a player is allowed to move their piece two spaces.  When you leave a space, you take the token/pog from that hex.

Eventually the available places to move becomes harder and hard to navigate as there are some ‘random’ obstables that prevent movement.  The goal is to move around and collect different items for points.  There is food, enemies (mutants/zombies & humans), or provisions.  There are also weapons that you can collect and use to enter a hex with a bad guy.

During the pre-bomb phase, you are basically delivering the tokens/pogs and making way for post-bomb phase and hopefully your survival.

The game was a blast!  Fast paced and with 3 people were were able to get 2 games in under 90mins.  If you like post-apocalyptic themed games, but you will love the simply and easy to learn game play.

Battle.net has relaunched with a new look and feel, and StarcraftWire.net reports that not only does registering automatically opt you into applying to beta testing Blizzard’s sci-fi RTS sequel, but that the first invites are already going out (though only to randomly selected members, not everyone gets invited). In other StarCraft II news, some new screenshots are online showing off the new replay functionality, and the StarCraft II Q&A Batch #50 is now online

Makes me wonder if there are support groups for folks like this:

Don’t get me wrong, I can be competitive, but even when I worked for fortune 500 companies, using the computer wasn’t that important.

Boss, “Why is your report wet?!!!”

Me, “Ummmm”