Boardgamecafe 100115

After two years being absent from regular boardgaming, we'd finally found ourself back at Old Town Kopitiam Cheras to meet up with the Boardgamecafe regulars for a night of boardgaming! This group, as coined by Datuk Long, is quite hardcore when it comes to boardgaming. Not just in terms of the kind of games they play, which range from the simple to the intricate, but also because a meetup for games can go from 9pm Friday night till 6am Saturday morning.

Goodness it's been some time since we've done that. And to think that we were going to stay just for Round 1 (simpler games till before midnight).

The evening started with us making our way from work to Cheras, and us deciding to use the Federal, take the exit after MidValley where others will also exit to Old Klang Road, taking the toll that'll lead us to Cheras somewhere before finding our way to OTK.

Ugh. We should have just remembered how we used to go there and stick to the tried-and-true formula.

First, there was the traffic snarl from Amcorp all the way to MidValley. An hour of senseless crawling. We took the opportunity to snack of crisps and a Christmas candy cane to while the time away and keep from starving. Once heading towards Cheras, the road miraculously cleared up and we rushed towards Cheras.

Once we reached Cheras, the fight began anew: this time with aggressive drivers. Imaginelah, a driver who sped down the emergency lane, tried to left-overtake us (and failed), and wanted to head straight on while we needed to take the left exit with him trying to block us in his attempt to overtake us. Oh oh oh and another, who sped all the way until near the divider where the left lane goes under a roundabout while the right lane goes up a flyover, and this sakai driver ignores the long queue of cars and tries to cut in just before the divider.

Thank goodness our own driving skills never really lost that edge when it comes to beating aggressive drivers at their own game. Of course, we wouldn't put Aidan in terrible risk, but that doesn't mean we let these bastards just walk all over us.

Stress levels? High by the time we arrived at OTK near 8pm and discovered that the rest have yet to arrived at 8pm. Soon, though, everyone started trickling in and we'd all did dinner first before delving into our first game.

With the food court nearby closing down and OTK expanding their menu, the Root Beer Float is very popular.

We'd all started off with blownfreak's Long Shot, a horse racing game! With jack208 explaining the rules, it dawned onto us rather quickly that we were essentially gambling (with fake money! With fake money!). Horses move based on the roll of the dice, money would be bet on potential horses in the lead or cards would be played to meddle with the movements of the horses, and the player with the most money in the end will win.

A good game with an easy theme. Plus it can take up to 8 players! Here's one interesting thing that took place in the game, tho'.

Now for Long Shot, you most likely will own a racing horse, and, if your horse was in the lead with other players placing bets on him (not to mention that you've place a considerable amount of money on him too), we're sure you would do whatever you can to make sure that horse won first place and snagged the prize money making you richer too, right? Not with Havoc Hewey, who instead of getting his horse past the finish line, instead got another horse that no one (save ayheng) had bets on into the lead. Havoc Hewey's horse saw a lot of money lost that night...

From there we moved on to Bang! Another game that could take 8 players. Unfortunately jack208 couldn't find his expansion set to allow a 8-player game so he sat out and allowed the other 7-players duke it out. We were sitting to the right of the Sheriff, making us the last player to move, and Sheriff Blownfreaks rather mercilessly peppered us with bullets using a Volcanic gun that allowed him to fired nonstop. We barely lasted two rounds, as everyone else avoided the trigger-happy Sheriff and targetted everyone else instead.

Some players soon left, and rhyen brought out Power Grid: Spain & Portugal. It was at this point that we lost track of time and thought it was only 10pm-something when in actuality it was past 11pm. We thought we could play a game, then leave the gang to spend the rest of the night having a game of whatever 18XX train game they brought to play. We got a shock when near halfway through the game, we looked at the time and saw it was past 1am.

A game where players build cities and then use their power plants to power said cities, Power Grid: Spain & Portugal turned out to be a punishing map where uranium was rare and expensive if you were running a nuclear power plant. Thankfully we snagged two hybrid power plants (which could use either coal or oil) to help keep our expenditure flexible, but we haven't played in ages and was thinking of expanding fast early in the game. A poor strategy for this map with resources refilling slowly and city expansion expensive.

Thankfully for us halfway through the game the power plants that came up in the market for auction were obsolete and that caused a gap between players, with us and jack208 owning newer power plants that could power 5-7 cities at least while the other players could only power 5 at most. Dodya's strategy of holding back to gain initiative in buying resources and building cities backfired at this point as there wasn't any suitable power plants for him to help earn enough cash to keep up.

Was the night over when Power Grid finished at 3-ish? Nooooo...we moved downstairs and started two games of Puerto Rico. Two more players left, leaving jack208, ayheng, ryhen and us, so before calling it a night we decided to do a game that everybody knew and was quick to set up. Puerto Rico it was.

So, yeah. Whether we can think of doing this regularly every fortnight or so? Hahaha not quite likely.