prog | Entries tagged with citadels

Creative batteries recharged today from watching a bunch of Strong Bads (I'm still like a year behind) and then playing a game of Citadels where

classicaljunkie played a basic-deck purple card I can't remember ever seeing in play before, if you can believe it. ("School of Magic", which acts as any color for purposes of bonus income.)

Doing well at work, and I wanna get done with my current thing before I send out an invoice, but I think I'll give today over to Project X anyway coz it's been a while. Playing the Lost Cities demo on XBox puts ants in my pants.

Doug had another game party at his house on Sunday. It was good.

I played Knizia's abstract and very elegant Ingenious! twice, and though I lost pretty hard both times I decided I really like the game and must obtain a copy. Unlike my Wii/BattleLore/Fool needs, this is actually an attainable goal, so: cool. (

karlvonl taught the game to me earlier this year but for some reason it didn't really catch me at the time...)

When teaching the game, I recommend skipping the part about having to say "ingenious" before claiming an extra turn. That's just corny and doesn't add anything. Some people insisted that something ought to be said, so I suggested "cheeseburger" as an if-you-must alternative. People seemed to take to that pretty well, at least.

Then

dougo taught some of us Knizia's non-abstract and not-very-elegant-at-all Dragonland. It is still a fun game, mind you, and I'd like to play it again sometime. And I'd like to try playing it without the score-hiding screens, which, like all game mechanics that rely on forgetfulness to work, annoy me. (So why don't I insist on playing Settlers with face-up resource cards? I don't know... maybe I should...)

classicaljunkie and I both love Citadels and had earlier agreed to start experimenting with the alternate roles that come with the American edition of the game, but which nobody seems to have ever tried ever. We finally enacted this plan at Doug's, playing a four-handed game and swapping in two of the alts:

* The Tax Collector - replaces Thief; take 1 gold from every player who builds, at the end of their turn. Sounds like easy money, a low-risk, low-return version of the Thief. But he more often than not got nothing, or maybe just one gold, as players who built were careful to spend all their gold, leaving nothing for him. With the thief out of the game, nobody was able to pull off a nice combo of stealing someone's pile in one turn and then building something lavish in the next.

* The Alchemist - replaces Merchant; after building, take back the gold you just spent. Sounds quite potent, doesn't he? The problem is, unlike the Merchant, he doesn't do much to help you build up your wealth so that you can build those nice expensive districts. I never found him to be a tempting choice, and later in the game when I had three green districts and no money, I was really missing the Merchant!

Removing both the Thief and the Merchant from the deck led to a dramatically gold-poor game. I ended up winning the game by building (if memory serves) six 3-point districts, one 5-pointer and one 1-pointer. That's one impovershed principality! The other players tended towards strategies of saving up and building more expensive districts, but nobody else managed to complete eight after I went out - which is a fairly rare occurrence - and only one other player got the five-color bonus.

cthulhia came in second, just three points behind me, even though she had only five or six districts built.

Speaking of Ms. Cthules, there was some Baking Madness afoot, and photographic evidence shall be forthcoming.

Friday worked on ITA stuff from home via finally-working VPN, and received a long-sought written spec on this project I am tackling alone. First I need to machine me up some Perl tools, and spent the day sketching out some modules I can design to help me start hacking this company. I shall enjoy this, at least at first. I hope I can keep it up.

Friday evening was a lot of fun. My clothes are ratty, so I went clothes shopping with

dictator555. I hate making clothes decisions by myself so this was excellent. She helped me pick out some nice shirts at the Eddie Bauer outlet, and on her advice I got mediums instead of larges. Yes, they fit nicer off the rack, but will they survive their first washing? We shall see.

I did have to put the kibosh on a pair of strange gray jeans she suggested. They actually fit perfectly, and I this I mean they were snug from the waist to the knees. In the mirror, they looked much tighter than they felt, and as a lifelong rumply-pants-wearer I was sufficiently tweaked by the effect to veto them.

No, for the pants purchase I reverted to my old ways, diving into Filene's Basement, locating some trou of my numbers that seemed inoffensive, and getting the hell out. Even with the dictator's company my clothes-shopping tolerance is only so long. Alas I am wearing the gray chinos I got now, and they manage to be slightly too short, revealing a scandalous amount of ankle while I sit. Grr. (At least I wear tall socks.) I need to find who online sells "OTB" pants and get some more of those. I liked those a lot.

Bakc to Friday: dinner at Pho Pasteur. It was good. I had not had pho since I worked in Hermon, under a boss whose Vietnamese parents-in-law ran a restaurant in Bangor. (The Oriental Dang, which I think is sadly no longer with us.) And then Battlestar watching with a big and noisy crowd. It was very good.

Saturday and Sunday worked on Volity RSS and the newsletter, both long-delayed projects, and both all done now. I mean, we will make more RSS feeds and more newsletters, but our little publishing systems for both are complete and it'll be a lot easier now.

We ended up mailing out over 400 newsletters to people who either (1) explicitly asked for mail via the website's prefs page, or (2) haven't set their prefs at all. In the latter case, we set their mail prefs to "no" as soon as the letter went out, so they won't get any more mass-mailing from us unless they visit the website and then check the "mail me stuff" checkbox. A postscript in the newsletter says as much. This is

daerr's idea, and like all his ideas of treating your customers well I tend to put my full weight behind it. He is a customer-happiness geek, and to be listened to in this regard!

At any rate I'm pretty psyched that we managed to collect 400 emails without trying particularly hard. We only started to do so after chatting with Kristin Looney's (

looneykristin's) about it after Origins, when she chided us for not doing enough to establish connections with our customers. And even then we were pretty passive about it, making it easy for people to register their email addresses, and giving them good reasons to do it (like password recovery), but not throwing a fit or barring them from gameplay if they chose not to.

Monday was almost entirely sunk into Jmac's Arcade. I produced the Nibbler ep, and then went ahead and did the other stuff I had been threatening, including mixing a better version of the Scramble one and then putting them all on YouTube as well as Google Video. (Will link to them later.) I hadn't uploaded anything to YouTube before and it's interesting to compare the features they offer to uploaders, versus Google. And, as I had hoped, Missile Command got a decent thumbnail, so yay.

Then games at

dougos, where I played "Courtyards", a game produced by some guy who (I am told) owned a $10,000 wood-printer and wanted to make a game out of it so zappity-zap. It's an all-right tile-laying game, but I think it's more about "hey look what I did with my wood printer" than anything. Even the box is made from interlocking slats of printer-output. Unfortunately the rules are on a plain old sheet of paper; he should have tried burning them into the box!

And then I krushed everyone at Citadels. Ma ha ha ha. I love that game so much. I still really want to play the two/three-player variant again sometime, though. (Spoiler for the next Gameshelf: I do not win the game we played. I don't think I even came close!)

Games run amok this weekend. Hadn't played any tabletops in a while so it was all good.

On Saturday

classicaljunkie had a birthday party and lo the games were busted out. I brought along my copies of Citadels and Shadows over Camelot and actually got to play both.

Played Citadels first, and I won... again. Maybe my fifth win in a row. I am chronic at winning this game. I do not have a clear recollection of the last time I lost at it... maybe at J&C's foo two Decembers ago? Please play it with me some more so that I will lose. I am inviting you to BRING IT.

Oddly I have never played this game with five people and so never encountered the rule that each round starts with some number of role cards tossed out face-up as well as face-down. I have only played the game with three or seven people, I think! So that was a new, and I liked this version of the game as much as I like the others (that is, quite a bit). I'm glad that another experienced player was at the table to note the rule difference.

Shadows over Camelot - I have been lugging this around to different game events for months without playing it, so was very happy to finally get a chance Saturday, and it ended up being the craziest game of it I've ever had. I had a Loyal role, and while I was gearing up the courage to accuse one player or another of being a traitor (one kept promising to help me with the Grail quest and then going somewhere else, while the other consciously chose to play an Evil card that caused a quest to fail) I found myself at the end of an accusation!

My jaw literally dropped at this, not just because I don't think I was acting particularly traitorous but because a lot of the table thought I was it, and I wasn't even aware of it. Apparently treachery was seen not in how I was playing the game but in my lack of interest in the other players' discussion of who the traitor might be. Interesting! Of course the traitor turned out to be

classicaljunkie herself, who spent the whole game playing as quietly and passively as possible, and she ended up winning by lasting the whole game undetected for a final sword tally of 7 dark to 5 light. Very nice!

Having played Shadows a few times now, I think I understand how to play within the spirit of the can't-reveal-your-cards rule, as well as the letter of it. A couple of first-time players were sticking only to the latter so that the whole rule became meaningless, but everyone was clearly having a lot of fun so I didn't press the issue. (

doctor_atomic, you would have been proud.) Still, it would have been nice if the printed rules showed how this was done, maybe with a sample player dialogue.

Finally, there was semi-spontaneous Settlers on Sunday, at a visiting

meerkitty suggestion. The Andys were over, and trolling for anyone else interested hooked

pheromone. Who, after mumbling about unfamiliarity with the vanilla rules (being one of those C&K people) and having made her apologies ahead of time for not playing well, proceeded to leisurely stomp the four of us into the ~~dirt~~ sheep pastures.

Beware the Settlers sharks! But really any sting from the loss was soothed by some fun followup conversation about my business because boy do I love to talk about that because you know it's all I do ha ha HA ha HA ha though I am blessed that I can occasionally take breaks to engage in sinful acts of random number generation with friends. Coz that's what it's all about ultimatley.

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A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

Entries tagged with citadels

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