Not much gaming this week

It’s been a busy week of not much gaming among my core group of gaming friends. Sometimes life gets in the way! But I did see Social Distortion this week at a sold-out show so life isn’t all that bad. A friend of mine mentioned that it feels weird that an entire week goes by and not one single game of Battlestar Galactica has been played among us. The game has come up more frequently the last month now that I actually own the game, and we don’t have to rely on somebody else. We did get in a game of Nations earlier this week, and I unfortunately got crushed. Ugh.

I also played just one game this past weekend. My friends and I decided to try out Age of Conan, which is made my Fantasy Flight. I only point that out because the game has a bunch of different decks and plastic player pieces, a large rule book, and individual mini rule books for each of the players. Yes, there are that many rules. It took me a little bit to warm up to the game, mostly because I didn’t really comprehend what was going on in the first two rounds. I did read the rule book but it wasn’t written in a real streamlined way, and I couldn’t find any good video tutorials online on the game. But I did finally find my groove and slowly built up my empire and got lucky with being in charge of Conan over several adventures. Eventually I came in 2nd place, losing by 2 measly points!

There’s a map of Conan’s world, and at first glance it looks like an area-control game, but it’s really about building up armies and dice rolling. You take turns bidding on a player role, including the role that controls Conan. You gain treasures by completing adventures, and you win victory points by conquering provinces on this map. You can also start battles to gain control of cities and weaken your enemy. The game says it plays for 90 minutes, and that’s soooo not the case. Granted, our game took over 4 hours as we were learning to play for the first time, but we decided that even if we were experienced, it would definitely take about 2.5 hours.

In other gaming news, everybody is at Gen Con this weekend! My social-media feeds are blowing up with new games and excitement. I totally need to make it to this convention one year. Anyway, here’s a roundup of some links I’ve enjoyed this week. Happy Friday!

— Board Game Quest lists the top 10 games he’s looking forward to at Gen Con this year.

— Good advice from Daniel Solis on one thing to avoid in game design — Don’t stop players from playing the game!

— Dice Tower recaps Day 1 at Gen Con.

— Shut up & Sit Down does a review on Fief: France 1429. Oh Fief … the second to the last time we played this game, my friends got into a fight. The last time we played this game, we decided to call it after 6 hours since somebody had to leave. SMH.

— Opinionated Gamers writes about 5 games that have been impressive at Gen Con Day 1.

— The Drawdeck writes about The Duke. My friend got this game last year for Christmas, and it’s a pretty cool 2-player!

— Lastly, if you haven’t checked out App Store on iTunes recently, they’ve added lots of new board-game titles. Splendor is one of the more recent releases.