7/22/2013 Game Day Reflections

Yesterday was the inaugural weekly (hopefully!) game day. The idea behind it is to have a gathering day for gaming that can be worked into peoples' schedules so that they can come and play some games on a weekly basis. Roleplaying, card, board, even video games are all on the table. One shot RPG one week, a Halo tournament the next. All depends on who joins and what people are in the mood for.

On Monday, 7/22/2013, there were three attendees: Griff, Akulas, and Weird Dave. We played only a single game, though it was a fun one - AEG's Smash-Up. The tagline on the game is "The Shufflebuilding Game of Total Awesomeness!" and I must say it held up to its promise. Each player takes two faction decks, consisting of 20 cards each and representative of an "awesome geeky" faction. Pirates, aliens, ninjas, tricksters, wizards, robots, dinosaurs, and zombies are the options. You shuffle your two faction decks together and being playing, which consists of playing minions and action cards to control one or more bases out on the table. You earn points by having minions on any given base at the time that the base reaches its threshold.

The rules are simple, gameplay is fast, and the art is evocative. There were there of us so only two factions didn't get played (zombies and wizards). All of the factions seem to be balanced against each other, which was nice, but they did lend themselves towards certain strategies. Aliens tended to return cards to players' hands, pirates shuffled minions around, tricksters made it difficult to play other minions, dinosaurs are just rampaging beasts, and robots make other robots. It was very fun and had quite a few replayable options given its very nature. And oh yes, there's an expansion! Which I'll be picking up soon.

Definitely would play this again.

After Smash-Up we decided to partake in a little cinematic gem making the Twitter rounds called "Sharknado". It's a SyFy picture made by Asylum, a studio renown for its ridiculous premises ("Sharktopus", "Mega Python vs. Super Shark", etc.). "Sharknado" did not disappoint as a low-budget, poorly made movie about a tornado that sucked sharks into it and hurled said sharks at people. A fun time, though.