Viscount Eric's Day of Gaming 2 AAR

Sunday was the second annual Viscount Eric's Day of Gaming.  I didn't want the same mass of humanity this year, so no firehall, no birthday cake, so major social media announcements.  I figured that if there were five or six of us total, we wouldn't run out of snacks and beer.

I ended up with 3 1/2 of us, and you know what, it was perfect.

After dragging the kids out of bed early on a Sunday morning and running to the store for the gaming vittles, we got home before the 10am start so I could put on a pot of coffee, munch on a donut, and read the paper while the kids were exiled to the playroom to watch "live" TV (I was not going to be interrupted by DVR or Netflix snafus today, nosiree.)

Brian wandered in about 10:30 with a truck packed for a far bigger spectacle than I was planning, with extra chairs and tables, and three or four additional board games on top of his already packed briefcase o' gaming. 

We moved immediately onto Battletech.  We grabbed twelve mechs at 50 tons or less (the ones I managed to photocopy the sheets at work) and we randomly drafted our six. 

Since we hadn't played B'Tech since my last birthday soiree and the previous time to that was more than a decade ago, we creept along slower than usual (note to self, next time time we have d6s not only to denote hex movement, but different colors to differentiate walking/running). 

With the radom draft, it looked like I got all the fast mechs.  I survived my mad dash behind enemy lines, which turned around to follow and allowed me to peg them in the back with other mechs with long-range weaponry. 

Then Brian's freakin' Panther tried to pop my head off with a PPC.  My pilot scampered over a hill and out of sight, but then the Panther turned his attention on stationary Assassin, pulled two criticals, and hit 23 racks of LRM 15 ammo.  *BOOOM!*

Although the outcome was still open to anything, with my fast mechs drawing his heavy firepower and my Trebuchet on a level 3 hill raining LRMs on anything with range, Steve showed up, so we cracked up the grill (with a quick tank change three minutes in) and had some lunch with the girls. 

The round right before my Assassin (L) went ka-blewey!

Despite Millie's pleas to play campfire outside, we moved back inside for a quick session of CoC.   Two quick facts (1) the group is now in Cairo and (2) I'm waaaay behind on the campaign log.

Steve (and Nate, and Josh) missed the last session, so we took less than an hour to fill in some holes from the previous sessions investigation.  I'll titling this vignette "Why Bob Shouldn't Have Slugged Francois."  We also determined that Brian's new character (again) would be Francois and he could build the ex-French Foreign Legion however he wished.

The girls had come inside from their camping/bike riding adventure, and Maja wanted to play Dungeon Roll "The Dice in the Chest."    Despite Steve racking up a sizable lead, I managed to go 8 levels into the dungeon on the very last turn of the game to win

Millie ran off to watch Ninja Turtles, but Maja stayed, so we now had four players for the rest of the night!

Steve then broke out Tiny Epic Defenders.  I'm usually not giant fans of the cooperative game (I'm not a super-competitive guy either, but the set-up and build-up for the last 15 minutes of panic that most games provide isn't worth it.

Tiny Epic Defenders is quick and simple enough that by the end of turn 2, most players can see the oncoming storm threatening the capital city. 

Our four player group wasn't a well-oiled machine, but we kept everything at bay. When the big bad, The Kraken, showed up, we didn't panic. In fact, at the end of the turn we were halfway to killing it.

Then every bad card for the outlying regions were pulled, destroying three of the regions, and laying waste to the capital, before we even had a chance to respond.

Still, we all had fun.

Next Steve pulled out Harbour, a resource trading game.  While Steve explained the rules to Brian and Maja, I dealt with a Mrs Viscount bringing home groceries.   While the resource acquisition seemed a bit confusing to somehow missing the first ten minutes, we had some fun accumulating resources.  Maja enjoyed going to the Inn for "milkshakes," and that's the story we're sticking to.

Maja took over and broke out Zombie Dice.  We attempted a record for futility going through three rounds without rolling a brain.  After everyone carefully harvesting two or three brains every round like a baby climbing stairs for the first time (and me rolling seven shotgun blasts in one round.  Four on an obvious misroll, and three more on the reroll), Steve came out on top.

Finally, with things getting dark, Maja whipped out the most cutthroat game of all for us to play:  Connect 4!

Connect 4

As to be expected, a team of two grown men defeated the father-five year old daughter duo, but not without some tight moments.

For a gaming throwdown, I think we did enough gaming of all sorts.   Sure, we didn't get Car Wars in (One game of Car Wars would take the place of all those games, and no Maja to help/play), but the map was used to play everything upon after Battletech.  We need to invade Steve's place after a long absence, and Car Wars might be the game of choice.

Of course, the whole game day was to be a belated celebration of my birthday, so Brian was nice enough to add an item to my expanding gnome collection.

The variety of the "My Little Gnomies" collection is enough to make me venture into a Five Below to see if they have any others in stock. 

 The only casualty of the day was after the fellas left.  We cooked up hamburgers on the grill for the family (and enough for the week's lunches) and as I walked the ever annoying Pokey, Pippen our canine poop machine, pulled herself up to the back of the counter to enjoy the cooling burgers.

Anyone want a free dog?