torkell | Entries tagged with swarm

For several years now I've tended to head to Brighton for my Christmas shopping - the Lanes and North Laines are full of so many quirky shops that are excellent for silly presents - and this year was no exception. For a change I drove down (to avoid having to rely on Southern Rail, or Southern Fail as they are known as these days), and it was actually a fairly straightforward drive. I even managed to park in Churchill Square with no problems.

I ended up meeting

talismancer in town for lunch, followed by investigating various random shops in search of presents before he had to head off elsewhere. It's interesting to see all the changes in the shops - some old favourites are still there and have even expanded (Daydream Nation has moved from being well-hidden at the top of a clothing store to less well-hidden and taking over half the shop), some have evaporated (there used to be a good model shop near Churchill Square), and others are ticking over quite nicely (Dave's Comics and Dave's Books are exactly where they were in my university days). Anyway, I found a few presents for different people, and even one for myself - a small painting/print of West Pier caught my eye in a art shop that I've walked past several times, so I entered to discover a veritable Aladdin's Cave of random artwork. I swear extradimensional space is involved.

After shopping I trundled across to Sussex Uni for my traditional annual SWARM visit, where I hardly recognised anyone. It does look like less and less of the old SWARMites are turning up, though there's a few people I did remember from other visits and I ended up playing a couple of games (though not Magic, oddly enough). First up was Race for the Galaxy which I was managing a reasonable showing at until Kat stormed ahead to victory, followed by a new one for me: Machi Koro. This is an interesting construction game where actions can happen on anyone's turn - each player takes it in turn to be the active player and roll some dice, but depending on the resulting number and what other players have built it could be their opponents that benefit. Kat after a slow build once again stormed to victory (I'm beginning to spot a theme here...), but I'm happy as at least one long-shot strategy of mine paid off (a Tech Center with a ludicrous amount of tokens stashed on it, which I activated once and got nearly 30 coins out of).

So yesterday I dropped in on SWARM on the way back from Newick, and ended up staying for several hours and several games (none of which were MtG!). Unfortunately

talismancer couldn't make it, but I did recognise some other faces from my university days including Aaron (a name which confused me no end as he pronounced it "Erin") and Cogs (who's real name might be Ben? I'm not actually sure).

Let's see... what did I end up playing? First Aaron and I did a round of Hero Realms - it's a deck-building game a little like Dominion, except instead of amassing victory points you're trying to splat your opponents. Aaron managed to quickly put together a stupid amount of lifegain with me slowly chipping away here and there. I was managing to weather this attacks reasonably well until he used his special ability to swipe a useful defender from me and it all went downhill very quickly. It's an interesting game and one I wouldn't mind playing again with a bit more knowledge of the cards available.

Next up was Boss Monster. This also went badly for me - I made a terrible decision early on as to which cards to discard and ended up with a dungeon that never really went anywhere, while Aaron managed to put together a nice combo at the end of his dungeon that reliably splatted heroes and gave him extra room cards. Still, a few bits of my dungeon worked well - a boulder ramp at the end is always useful for taking out overconfident heroes.

Kat (or is it Cat? I'm terrible with names) turned up and we gave Discworld a go with the three of us. I've always done this 4-player before, but it seemed to work equally well with three (although the win conditions are slightly harder to achieve). Once we all got our heads round the rules it ran along nicely with chaos left right and centre scrambling several carefully-laid plans. The game ended with no clear winner due to running out of cards, though hilariously if I hadn't ended the game on my turn (I played a random event, got Fog which discarded the remaining cards in the draw deck) Aaron would have won as Vetinari he'd finally managed to get enough minions. He still won on points though, which is rather fitting of Vetinari.

Finally Cogs joined us for Room 25, an escape game a bit like Forbidden Desert but with attitude. The layout is a 5-by-5 grid of hidden rooms which may be green (generally helpful), yellow (generally annoying), or red (avoid the red murder-rooms). This was a hilarious fail from start to finish - our starting square was surrounded with red rooms in three directions, one of which being the Paranoia Room which makes the player randomise their actions, with the only non-red direction having a yellow room which turned out to be a dungeon randomiser (like Forbidden Desert, the layout can be shifted). Things didn't improve when Kat found a Jamming Room (while someone's in there, we're not supposed to give each other any information) and I couldn't tell anyone I'd found the Exit, (or get to it, as my character was in the Prison Room). I rearranged the dungeon to try and break out from the Prison Room at which point Kat made a bid for freedom... into what was no longer a safe room, but now one of the two instant-death rooms. With her out of the game and us still having to find the Key room we were doomed. As it happens we did find the key room in time... but were left with one turn in which to get everyone to the exit which was impossible. All in all, 'twas good fun and another one to play again though maybe without the expansion (which added the Key room).

Current Location: Sussex University

I keep forgetting that now I have a car I can actually go places. Like, for example, SWARM - it's actually practical to head over after work (I've previously considered trains but the timings just don't work out). I'm unlikely to do so every week as driving to Brighton does involve going past Chichester (which surprisingly flows very well at around 5:30pm), Arundel ('at capacity' is probably the best way to describe it, with traffic doing 20mph-30mph between the dual carriageways)... and Worthing (which is terribly slow). Then again I was originally only thinking of heading to pasta night every few weeks and that's turned into a regular weekly event, so who knows?

Anyway, SWARM. A couple of weeks ago (I also keep forgetting to make LJ posts in a timely fashion) I drove over to catch up with friends old and new, and to have a go at the Dominion tournament they were running. In the end I only managed one game of that due to being delayed for a whole collection of reasons (not least in Worthing when the driver of a massive crane decided to stop, get out, and yell at a driver that turned across him). No prizes for me - they were for single highest and lowest scores, and mine was an average score. Perhaps another time.

As is traditional at SWARM there was also MtG, and I played a few rounds. The Orzhov deck (not yet posted) put up a valiant effort against a "destroy the world" style deck but couldn't rebuild fast enough once the world was destroyed, while the Mephitic Ooze deck made the mistake of playing against opponents with black decks (at which point the Dross Golems cease to be effective). On the other hand I lent the Spikeshot Goblin deck out and that spent many turns slowly nibbling people to death with 1/1 goblins - it's not supposed to do that, but it worked well enough. Especially when a 1/1 Goblin Sky Raider suddenly becomes 5/1 thanks to Fists of the Anvil. I think if the person playing it had concentrated the damage on one opponent it would have chewed through their health very quickly.

One friend's reaction (Cogs - he acquired that nickname due to playing crazily complicated combo decks) to that deck appearing was hilarious - he recognised it from when I was an undergrad all those years ago. A few moments later he blurted out "oh god it's got Warhammers" as he remembered exactly what was in it - specifically, the troll-worthy Loxodon Warhammers.

It's been a long time since I last played badminton - today Nick, Dan,

the_ladylark and myself played a few games at the uni sports centre. I was glad to discover that I'm not as badly out of practice as I thought I was, and managed to make Nick work at trying to beat me. Playing Dan was amusing, as we managed to consistently make the same mistakes as each other, as well as score a couple of hits directly on each other. Plus one that flew straight over my head, close enough to brush my hair on the way past.

Unfortuantly the sports hall is lacking air conditioning, or indeed any decent form of cooling (two large fans right up by the ceiling on opposite sides don't really cut it, as that just results in a current of air by the ceiling and no air movement at the floor). Next time I shall be smart and bring both a towel, and a cold bottle of water (as opposed to one at ~30°C).

Later on Nick and I trundled over to East Slope, where the rest of Swarm had gathered to play a mixture of Bang! and Werewolf (a card game which involves a werewolf trying to eat everyone, a seer trying to find the werewolf, and an angry mod in the form of a bunch of villagers ready to lynch anyone who they think is the werewolf). Both games are suprisingly complicated - in Bang you have to try to work out who's on whos side, while in Werewolf the trick is to lynch the werewolf and not the seer (as we managed a few times).

We also played a game of Magic earlier, which turned into a stalemate once Ian managed to gain over 100 life. I think we brought it to an honourable draw with Ian on a near-unkillable life total, Rick with a bunch of Myr and Pincher tokens generally looking intimidating, Joe with a small collection of creatures (Rule 1 having been ignored somewhat after Ian pulled off his insane lifegain), Conrad with some enchantment trickery, Nick with a handful of creatures and small-scale targeted destruction, myself running my Peer Pressure deck (and about to nad most of Conrad's enchantment tricks) and Will with a Soldier deck that never really got going. Ian's lifegain deck is rude in a large multiplayer game, when it runs Stormherd, Soul Warden and a couple other tricks to gain 30-odd life, put 50 or so 1/1 flyers into play and in the process gain another 100 life. Fortuantly Rick and Nick between them had enough wide-spread destruction to take out the horde before it destroyed them.

In other news, been tinkering with my website some more. Comment management now works in my gallery (though banning isn't quite there yet), and I've begun to flesh it out a bit. Any and all comments regarding the design and layout welcome.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Jackrabbit Transformer ~ Mazedude and AlexanderBrandon/The American Album