Sunday, October 21, 2012

Extra-life AAR


Extra-Life after action report

Well, as promised I'm back to give a more detailed report on the events of the day. I started at exactly 8:00 a.m. playing Ocrs Must Die 2 and eating a doughnut from the dozen I had picked up from Stan the Donut Man. I had decided it would be nice to have breakfast for everyone who came.

At about 8:20 my first guest arrived, Allison Duke, and she brought a dozen doughnuts from Bill’s doughnuts. We started with Castle Panic, a game of tower defense where you are the defenders of a castle besieged by orcs, goblins, and troll. Since it’s an easy game to add people to and plays well with two players I had it set up the night before to make sure we could play right as soon as people arrived. We did this for about an hour before my third guest arrived mid-game. Joe Herbert, also entering with a dozen doughnuts from Krisp Kreme, preceded his brother Mark, who did not bring doughnuts, by about ten minutes.

After two successful games the four of us switched to Smash Up until Allison’s husband John showed bearing Wendy’s.  Smash up is a card game where you take two decks of cards representing different factions and shuffle them together and attempt to destroy bases better than the other players. The current games factions include; dinosaurs, Martians, ninjas, pirates, robots, tricksters, wizards, and zombies, so you can imagine how strange some of the combinations get. While finishing our game of Smash Up and discussing playing Risk: Legacy an old friend of mine I hadn’t seen in quite sometime, Scot Lane, arrived to great fan faire. Since there were six of us it was decided to put off playing Risk and instead play a game John had brought, Flash Point: Fire Rescue.

Flash Point is a co-operative game where you play firefighters attempting to save people from a burning building. It’s really hard, fire keeps popping up all over the board while your running in and out trying to save people. Everyone has a different roll on the squad that comes with it‘s own special rules, from the Fire Chief who can move other characters on his turn to the paramedic who can heal people in the building so they are easier to get in and out. It’s a tough, nearly impossible game where if anything goes wrong it does so in spades. Giant flaming spade that are twenty feet high. It’s a lot of fun, after we lost our first two games we still wanted to play again right away. We finally succeeded on our third game just after Joe left for work. To be fair, I’m not saying we won because Joe left, I’m just saying Joe left and we won. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

Dinner was finished, I had decided to make crock-pot chili and try something a little different. Have you ever made pulled pork in the crock-pot where you leave it in there with some liquid to cook for 8-10 hours and get all tender and fall apart? When you do that in chili it’s amazing. I hope to do it again someday but will need a bigger crock-pot.

Since there were once again five of us we played Risk: Legacy. Some people have commented on how they used to play Risk and thought it was interesting that we got to play that as well. This is not that Risk, the game comes with several packets that you don’t open until things happen during the game, some of which can’t happen until you’ve opened some of the packs. Certain events cause irreparable changes be made to the board. Cities are founded, countries are destroyed, and lands are irradiated. You literally rip cards in half because you will never use them again. It is one of the most amazing games I have ever played, makes you oddly giddy. Everyone who came yesterday played at least one game and has signed the board, I will be posting a picture later, not of the front of the board, the part we signed. No spoilers here.

As the games of Risk went on, a friend of mine names Keith Tyra showed up and sat in giving us the shortest ever game of Risk in History, 6 turns. My Niece, Molly and here father Mike Mayne showed up, I am going to have to get Molly to sign the board since she was nice enough to roll dice for me. They stayed long enough to drop some stuff off and then had to run.

A woman I used to work with, Amberly Hoffman showed up next and we discovered the small world principal still in action. It turns out that she and Mark knew each other from a job they both had but had no idea the three of us knew one another. After catching up we played a quick game of Dixit. Dixit is a game of deduction on empathy where you play cards with very beautiful art on them and try and guess whose is whose. It’s very fun, but as it was a bit past midnight we we’re getting confused and having a bit of trouble thinking.

We played another game of Risk so Amberly could sign the board.

Afterwards we tried a quick game of Descent which is a semi-cooperative dungeon delving adventure game. This was also one of John’s and sadly as he had been painting some of the figures and taken the monsters stat cards out of the box we had to cobble the figures stats together from memory, and the internet. We still had fun and the heroes managed to just beat the bad guys in the last turn of the game. And alas after a hard days work Amberly had to go.

Joe returned and we broke out a game called seven wonders and played a few games of this. Seven Wonders is a game where each player is a different ancient civilization attempting to build it’s own wonder of the world while also advancing it’s civilization. Everyone gets a hand of cards selects and plays one and then passes then rest to their neighbors. This continues for three rounds making the game not only, what you need to improve your nation but keeping your neighbor from getting what he needs. We finished three games and then sadly Scot had to go and bid us all a fond farewell.

We played a final game of Risk so Joe could sign the board. They’re becoming much more vicious and hard hitting.

We got out Smash up and played some more until Keith had to leave do to time and exhaustion. With just three of us left we decided to play Castle Panic and end the day the way we had started. In the last half hour I started to get a little fuzzy and fade in and out. In the end I made it the full 24 hours and we saved the castle. Most importantly we raised $270 for children’s miracle network.

I want to thank everyone who came and played; Allison Duke, Joe Herbert, Mark Herbert, John Duke, Keith Tyra, Scot Lane, Molly Mayne, and Amberly Hoffman. I’d also like to thank everyone who sponsored me; Alex Gifford, Scot Lane, Terri Furnas, Fred Mayne, Marianne Mayne, Adam Green, and Susan Thomas. Without you this wouldn’t have happened. I would also like to thank my Grandmother whose house we used for the event. Thanks again to everyone. It was a great day.

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