A brief gaming report on the parts I was at. Ended up playing a bunch with Andrew & Ashley, it seemed.
Friday - Chatting + Dixit. Ecuadorians were Enraged by Tigers, or something, and memes proved useful message-passing code.
Saturday - Walking around San Francisco a fair deal. Gawked at the Occupy SF tents + preached the strange virtues of Lovecraft at a geeky bookstore + ate ice cream, which qualifies as a fine day by my standards. Back at Gate's, there were two rounds of The Resistance into Shadows Over Camelot. For those that don't know, The Resistance is basically a simplified Mafia variant. In the first game, the dire Matriarchy infiltrated the freedom-loving Bros, and it looked rough... except.. the girls did enough strange things + guys redeeming themselves in the final voting round for us to feel good about a final team of all 4 guys, excluding the 3 spy girls. Which proved to be correct, as Great Mother HQ then exploded after the succesful mission or something. In the sequel game (which added Kiernan for 5 guys / 3 girls), the women, jealous over their loss of dominion, banded together to overthrow the Patriarchy, recruiting a few saps to help them do so (uh, including me, actually), but the guv's were too strong. Our teams ended up pretty much perfect null reads, and we weren't getting any useful ability cards, so it was kind of a slaughter in favor of the manly government spies (all 3 men, against the 3 woman / 2 man rebels). For Shadows, all I have to say is that King ArthurFire runs a tight ship. He's a good judge of character and thus can totally take credit for the fact that no Traitor was dealt out. ....that said the game was extremely chancy for awhile, and probably would have ended in failure had we had an actual traitor, since there was a genuine town screw-up. Sir Galahad (?) unwisely suggested the Black Knight was a wimp to Sir Laggiato, causing them to confidently eat a health damage before fighting the joust, sure of their victory + free healing... until the Black Knight's lance entered their skull. Oops. We remember their brave sacrifice, though.
Sunday - Played Ascension against Andrew / Ashley / Monkey, a Dominion-variant I brought. Ended up being a slightly freaky match due to the monsters being extremely clumpy, possibly due to insufficient shuffling + the previous people playing the set having sorted their banish piles by type for some reason. (Or just weird luck.) My Lifebound free-veep harvesters ended up taking the day, though Andy made it very close with his psychotic 5-combat-power-a-round Mechana artifact repertoire. Meanwhile DarkHolyElf + Laggy were playing some other game in back. Forget the name, something like Slalom Frontier. They weren't very good, it seemed, as they kept dying despite consulting a FAQ. Tsk. I showed off a bit of Cthulhu Saves The World while this was going on, and we also took a few walks. I got to the top of a nearby hill for some sweet views of the Pacific, and a bunch of us all went down to near the cliffs to see the ocean up close as well. There was a brief bit of button-mashing fighting games towards the end, as well - SSF4 and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, but I had to leave for the airport, so I have no idea how long that continued. Smash would have been fun but we should have brought more GameCube controllers; not having them, we didn't even try.
Thanks again to Gatewalker for the place + food, and hope the house gets fixed soon. Pretty fun.
