Reworking in Progress

Two years ago, I took a class at Texas State University that required me to create a blog and write an article every week. The blog could be about anything I possibly wanted to write about. Fitness, movies, music, travel, etc. I chose something that I loved to do, and that I knew I would keep track of pretty easily. Table Top Board Games.

My friends and I always played new games from week to week, and I knew that blogging about it would be pretty easy. So that’s exactly what I did. For the most part, I did enjoy it. After all, I got to write about my own experiences with different games. However, I could never truly get over the feeling of it being a school project. So of course, once the class ended, this blog that I named Table Games sort of, well, died.

Now, two years later, I think it’s time for a reboot.

Over the next several weeks I’m going to be experimenting with new content for this blog, as well as revamping the look of it. I’m also going to expand on the topics, covering more than just table top games, and include other nerdy things that are oh so close to my heart.

But, I also want this to become more than just a blog that some bored nerd decided to write. I want to include who ever is reading this thing as well. So it would be great to hear from any readers from time to time. Comment on what you like, what topics you would want to read about or see, and help me make this the coolest nerd community out there!

So I’m gonna roll a D20 to see how this will turn out, and hope that I don’t roll a natural 1!

 

Blog Retrospective

Well this is it. The end of the semester and perhaps the final post of this blog. It has certainly been an interesting semester with some fun new games. The whole purpose of this blog was to learn how to present myself through both a blog and social media, and I have to say it was a great way to utilize the concept.

My twitter has seen an increase of followers due to this hear blog, and I’m sure the widget feature down at the bottom helped out a bit. The Media feature on WordPress is another particular favorite of mine. Made it very easy to include photos and video on here.

However, I do wish the dashboard was a little easier to access. My first few posts took me a while just because I couldn’t find the darn thing. Forgetting that I needed to access the Admin button.

I also think that this blog may have benefitted from more videos. The topic of this blog being board games probably should have had more visual representation than I gave it.

As for the data of this blog, looks like March 21st was the day I got my most views. 12 people checked out my post about Seasons. I am curious about the one person from the United Kingdom who viewed that particular post. I guess you can say that this blog has officially gone global!

Ultimately, I can see the benefit of blogging in the professional world. This digital era is requiring people to know the ins and outs of social media and the blog-o-sphere. I may not continue this blog, but I am considering checking out different topics that may benefit me in a professional environment.

 

 

 

Kingdom Death pt.2

In my last post, I sat down with my friend Andrew to talk a little bit about Kingdom Death. But I didn’t really say anything about our own experiences playing it.

This has got to be one of the hardest games we have ever played as a group. Andrew, our friend Scott and I sat down to play a new game the other day and it was a very bitter sweet game. We had all created our new characters and were ready to go out for the first hunt. Everything is determined by rolling a 10 sided dice, and my rolls were on fire! Making critical hit after critical hit on our enemies. But Kingdom Death is a very fickle game. You can be rolling like crazy and the game will find a way to get back at you. My first character took a bad hit and I had to roll to see if he’d live. Unfortunately, i couldn’t roll well enough to save him.

This happened to me two more times that night. As good as my rolls were, I just couldn’t keep anyone alive. We ended our game after the first nemesis fight against the monstrous Butcher.

The Butcher

We barely made it out. Battered and not in good shape, our characters immediately encountered the Kingsman. A knight who took one look at our civilization, and decided to kill half of our people. We had two choices, sit back and take it, or fight back. We ended it there that night. Still debating over the two choices. Or, to just start over.

Check out Kingdom Death for yourself at their website.

Or what others are saying at the Kingdom Death reddit!

Kingdom Death with Andrew

Kingdom Death is currently the big obsession of my friends and I. It’s a product of a very successful Kickstarter campaign that my buddy Andrew decided to participate in. It’s a terrific table top RPG. I sat down with Andrew and a couple of other buddies to play. Andrew was even willing to explain the game a bit down in the video below.

My Top 5 Board Games

These are the games that I absolutely love breaking out to play with my friends. The games that we just have to play, as long as we don’t have any new ones to play.

5. Forbidden Desert: A Co-Op game where you and your friends are stuck in a dessert, and have to find the missing pieces to a machine that will fly you home to safety. The big problem? The dessert is constantly changing the board, and your water is constantly getting lower. There is a water carrier class, but if the person who gets randomly assigned this class is a butt, then don’t expect to win this game.

4. The Resistance: A game for 5 or more players. You are a member of the resistance against an oppressive corporate government. Although a few of your members are spies for said government trying to screw up all of your plans. It’s a game full of lies and deceit. A great party game!

3. Ticket To Ride: As I stated in my last post, I LOVE this game. It’s just a great game to pick up and play.

2. Pandemic: A world were diseases threaten to extinguish all life, you and your friends rush to find a cure. Pandemic is a great game to break out to stop, well…a break out.

1.Now, this is a board game version of probably the most nerdy table top program out there. Dungeons and Dragons. I absolutely love D&D, and since this is a blog about tabletop games, it really shouldn’t be surprising that D&D would show up eventually. What’s nice about this game is that you don’t have to worry about creating a character or about who is going to be the GM (Game Master.) The game takes care of all of that for you, and walks you through a very player friendly gauntlet of enemies. If you have ever been curious about D&D, I totally recommend checking out one of the many board games they’ve released.

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Ticket To Ride

In the last post I talked about Mage Knight. A game so complicated and hardcore that I just couldn’t get. But today, I’m talking about a game so easy to pick up and play, but is all the more fun because of it. Ticket To Ride.

Ticket To Ride is simple. You take the role of a railroad tycoon, and try to finish different train routes to accumulate more points. The player with the longest route from one point to the other gets bonus points.

The first time I had ever heard of this classic game was from Wil Wheaton’s TableTop. I watched this episode and fell in love with this game. I found an app for the game on my iPad, and immediately downloaded it. I showed it to my younger brother, and we started playing online against one another. Trying to build the longest train we could to beat the other. While Christmas shopping in 2014 I saw the game in Target, and bought it for my brother. We got our parents involved, and they too fell in love with this game. A few months later I found Ticket To Ride Europe in the same Target, and had to buy it for myself.

Ticket To Ride Europe brought a slightly different spin to things. Introducing the tunnels and bridges that the original lacked. I can’t think of another game that I would recommend getting on Amazon.

Mage Knight, The Game I Just Can’t Understand.

Some games are relatively easy to pick up and play. Some examples would be Coup, or The Game from past posts. Then there are those games that take a little more time to figure out. One of our favorite games to play is Eclipse. It’s a bit more complicated of a game, having to do with war and economics in the setting of deep space. But then, there’s Mage Knight.

Mage Knight is part RPG, part deck building, and part traditional board game. You have to keep up with the army and spells you build up throughout the game. The shape of the map constantly changes. Each time the map changes you have to figure out what resources are now available to you, and how to correctly interact with the villages you run into. With so much going on, it’s a little daunting to pick up and attempt. The rule book is even split into two different parts. Each one is twenty pages long! Not the kind of game you just dive into.

Mage Knight is one of those rare board games that allows you to shun friends and play by yourself. Although thats no fun. My friends and I have tried playing this game on three different occasions. Each time we set it up, open the rule books, spend the next thirty minutes figuring it out, then we put it away.

Today I decided to give it another shot, and play the solo run through. Even looking up a few youtube videos to walkthrough it for me. However, even with the help of youtube, I just couldn’t get it.

Hopefully, one of these days we will figure things out.

Checking out The Opinionated Gamers

It can be hard to talk about board games through a blog. It can be hard to convey what exactly a game is like through written word, and there are very few board game blogs out there that reach the caliber of The Opinionated Gamers.

OpinionatedGamers.com is a review blog that looks at new board games, and gives us their unbiased opinions on them. All of their reviews are extremely detailed, and very informative. It’s also pretty interesting that this blog is a collaborative effort between fifteen different gamers! This brings a bunch of different perspectives to each game being reviewed.

I totally suggest checking The Opinionated Gamers out. I have already found a bunch of games to try out from their reviews. As a beginner on blogs, theirs is definitely a great inspiration for the direction I want this blog to get to eventually.

Matt and Friends play Seasons

This time, my friends Austin, Andrew, Scott, and I enter a world of wizards in the game Seasons, created by Regis Bonnessee-Naide.

Seasons is one of those games that has a kind of beauty to it. With a mix of strategy and luck of rolling some dice each round, 2-4 players take turns throwing down spell cards to collect crystals, victory points and outwit their opponents. At the end of a “Three Year,” tournament, the wizard with the most crystals and victory points at the end of the third year wins.

So, obviously the game doesn’t actually take three years to play, (really it takes about an hour to play.) Seasons is separated into three rounds, and each round is separated into four seasons. Each season comes with a set of dice that give you a few different actions to choose from. These actions help you strategize against your opponents. These coincide with the nine cards you all draw at the beginning of the game.

I have to say, as fun as this game is, I am not that great at it. I do have to commend my friend Austin though.He definitely had the long game planned out well, and completely annihilated us in the first game that we played. The second game came down to a complete luck of the draw, and Andrew had us beat with a few lucky draws. It was actually pretty amazing to total up the points of the third game and see that Andrew had only beaten Austin by one point.

Seasons is an excellent mix of a card, dice, strategy game hybrid. It has gotten a ton of great reviews from all sorts of board game critics, including Libellud Asmodee from Boardgaming.com. So if you ever feel like taking a step to the fantasy side of gaming, I totally suggest checking seasons out.

Matt and Friends play The Game

Want a game that you can play with a bunch of friends and is quick and easy to learn? Then you need to play The Game.Yup, that’s the name of this IDW Games very challenging cooperative card game. Let me just say, this is a game that my friends and I just could not win.

The purpose of The Game is to separate a deck of 98 cards in to four smaller decks. Two of the decks can only be put in ascending order from 1-100. The other two decks are descending from 100-1. This sounds pretty easy, but the trick is, you can’t show off what cards you have in your hand with your friends. This element brings about an edge of your seats experience, not knowing what card is going to get placed down next.

My friends and I had a blast playing this game, but the frustration with losing is very real. One minute, we’d be going pretty smoothly. Laying down a few cards with no big upheaval. But then, one of us would be forced to take one of the descending decks down from 50 to 23. These sorts of moves were fairly constant. We were only able to get the deck of 98 cards down to around 10 cards, which is actually pretty impressive.

My buddy Andrew playing down a bad move.

So, if you are planning on having a few friends over, and just want to quickly learn a new game, I highly recommend The Game. Hopefully, you and your friends can fare better at it than mine!

 

You can pick up The Game at any Target or game store. Amazon is also a pretty decent place to pick it up for pretty cheap as well!