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KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM & BOARDGAMECAFE.NET CHERAS 21/9/07
by jack208

Another week another meetup. This week we've shrapnel to thank for bringing his nephew Donovan's Zombies game (from Twilight Creations). I'd wanted to testdrive the game to see if it's suitable for us to play during the upcoming Halloween Party at Outpost Cafe.

Alan Tan, shrapnel, Don and rhyen starting the Zombies game

In Zombies, you play one of five people stuck in a town full of zombies. You start in the town square and your objective is to get to the helipad. To make things interesting for you, the helipad has zombies packed like sardines!

Your objective: Get here and fly away! But you may have to ask those zombies nicely....

Along the way, you can pick up weapons (skateboard, shotgun and chainsaw!) that allows you to hack them zombies more and faster! You can also pick up more bullet and life-point token. These are useful if you wanna survive longer than your comrades.

The Zombies are moved by the active player at the end of his turn.. obviously he's going to move some zombies your way! There's one variant where if a zombie has line of sight to any human, it runs towards that person (ie twice its movement point). Now this will induce more stress... hehehe

Players starting in the middle of the board ie town square.

Commentary from rhyen
Zombies (Jeff, Alan Tan, Sharpel and newphew, and me) - sharpel won after we cleared all the zombies and he was first to run to the helipad.

Verdict? Yup.. certainly a good game to bring to the Halloween table this Oct27! Oh Don's copy is the 1st Edition and thus does not include the female zombies.

Heng arrived while we've started the Zombies game, and were joined later by Jorge and Steven. Since the five of us were busy hacking the limbs of zombies..... he decided to do (wat else?) teach Steven and Jorge the joy of discoveries in Age of Empires III.

 
ayheng (back to camera) teaching Steven and Jorge AOEIII

There is some interesting chatter going on in the Boardgamecafe forum about AOE3. Some seems to hate the game, some indifferent and a few gave their thumbs-up. My take is that this is a good game (7/10) but a game which you need to play a few things in order to learn its nuances (especially its capital buildings) before you can play better.

You don't believe me? In the game above, ayheng stockpiled thousands of spanish coins to thrashed his newbie opponents!  

Look at the amount of coins ayheng has stockpiled! Big bully!!!

Commentary from rhyen
Age of Empires III - Heng introed Steven and Jorge to AOE3 (that becursed games :P), I presume that by now, Jeff Au has uploaded Hengy's demolition of the field and his stacks of gold doubloons.

Finally, a game that we've enjoyed in the past but strangely has not been hitting the gaming table recently... Age of Steam. Since this was our first game of Age of Steam in many many months and there were also some gamers here who were learning this game for the 1st time, we decided to start with the basic map.

6-player Age of Steam on the standard Rust Belt map

shrapnel, don, jorge and steven were learning this game for the 1st time.. and I think they enjoyed it! Look at their Happy Faces!! Now to take out the North Carolina map for them, hehe

The four AOS newbies - shrapnel/don, jorge and steven enjoying the Rust Belt map

Commentary from rhyen
We then did 6 player AOS where Jorge went out and got back into the game (by taking over from team sharpel/nephew, both of whom had to leave early). Hengy pipped Steven into second after Steven got distracted by Jeff Au trying to interrupt my hint to him to urbanized one of their town into a city. I tied with Jeff Au for 3rd, no idea about the tiebreaker, after some help from Jorge that padded my score with runs along my track. 

While shrapnel and don have to leave, we still have 5 players for R2. Since everyone's still high on train and steam engines, we decided to do 1856 - another old fave that has been missing from our table for a while... another 2 more gamers graduating from the BGC 18xx academy.

Here's rhyen's report on the session
We retired to RD2 in BGC where 1856 returned to the table. Quick instructions and hints to Jorge and Steven and we were off. Seating arrangement was Hengy, Steven, Jeff, Jorge and finally me.

Many gamers were trying to ride on the coattails of Jedi Council Member Jeff Au early on, capitalizing his LPS early on. but investor Hengy wised up to the potential of my CPR and duly invested as much money as possible thus allowing me to reward him with the first $22 EPS per share in the early part of the 3rd phase while everyone else was stuggling in the low teens. We both sapu-ed all 10 shares of CPR and my $20+ EPS kept him happy all the while.

Later on, I helped Steven defend his GW from being taken over by Hengy by buying the last share splitting it in a 3-way tie between me, Hengy and Steven (Jorge held the last share, perhaps Hengy could persuade him to sell since either me or hengy would be the first one to snap it up and take over Steven's lonely company). The favor was repaid by Hengy dumping all of his GW shares onto the market (to jumpstart CV) while Steven had to struggle to capitalized his new company WGB after setting a par value too low (perhaps being fooled by Jeff Au's opening par value of $70 for GT, a company that Jeff Au intended to merged into the CGR by taking on govt loans after govt loan). Immediately sizing up the prospect, Jeff Au started egging on Steven to Hot Sun me but Steven repaid my favour by heroically salvaging both companies from the throes of tight cashflows (and managed to buy the last 2 '5' trains).

Thus setting the grand finale for Jeff Au to buy the first 6 with GT (which fell into CGR), and then proceeding to upgrade his LPS '4' into a diesel rusting everyone else's train except for both of Steven's '5's. But dawn was breaking and Jorge's ride was waiting and Steven needed to crash so Jeff Au wins by consensus (Let's face it, how do you beat a LPS that has a 'D' and '5' and a CGR with '6'; guess we will never know unless Hengy and I managed to dabble in our stockmarket manipulation).

PS: Also noted, many of us misplayed a few rules, with Jeff Au actually overcapitalizing his GT with funds from investors that were supposed to be held in escrow until he actually destinated but sadly he forgot all about that until someone pointed it out.

Jeff Au and I then proceed to delay Hengy's return to Klang by talking about the caylus PLE competition and Hengy got so hungry that he joined us for dimsum breakfast. YAY! we finally managed to get Hengy to experience the real 8 AM syndrome. We talked on and on and on about possible moves, computer simulation programs, game annotations; we even found out that only I like chicken feet and jeff doesn't like prawns. Managed to sample the original gyoza, aka wo teap aka, fried leftover sui jiao.

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21-09-2007