Zombies, zombies and pirates.

I've mentioned before about our year long game of Pandemic: Legacy. We started in April and finally finished it in mid December.

This is us before our first game.

And this is our board.

It didn't take me long to make us our own meeple.

And here they are in action. Good old Fimo! 

But we didn't win all our games.

However we DID win enough to have an overall success. 

Here's our finishing board. We actually scored pretty highly in the end game round up. About three quarters of the way up the score board. 

Now Pandemic season two isn't out yet so we needed something to fill the gap. We've had a few months of Dead of Winter (fighting Zombies!)  but recently started Seafall which is exploring and pirating!

 Of course, the wee plastic ships needed a coat of paint. *g*

There's only 8 of them, it still took 8 hours though!

Here's how I did it. Lots of fun!

So we'll see how it goes. It's not a co-operative game like Pandemic is - every Captain for herself!

Pandemic Legacy - February

I'm a bit behind with the blogging so this is a wee recap (really for me and my buds) of last Sunday's game of Pandemic:Legacy. I do have socks and sewing queued up for another day - feel fee to skip!

Here's our set up before hand. We're slowly sussing what works best for us so Biff is in charge of the rules book (with additional rules this month - woop!), Sue does the outbreaks (I've started calling her Typhoid Tallulah - long story. *g*) so is in charge of moving markers and sticking stickers on panicking cities and Moira is our card shuffler. I even bought her her very own automatic card shuffler so there's no excuses for badly mixed cards. Well, so you'd think - more on that later. Me? I'm doing the legacy deck which is really just reading cards at the beginning and end. Easy peasy. We also got to open our first box which was most exciting - there's 8 of them to be opened at certain points. This one had new tokens in it. 

Now we've had trouble the last few games (well, to be honest, I have had trouble) remembering whose meeple belongs to whom (feel free to correct my grammar here - I'm fed up changing it!) and so I thought I'd make us personalised ones. Here's the game ones on top and mine underneath. They're only about an inch tall so were a pig to make (also my white Fimo is very old and not very malleable!) but were worth it for the giggles they induced and the added bonus of no mistaken moving of pieces on the board!

See? Here's Biff's Cliff the Dispatcher (you can name your character - that's a Postman Pat reference!) quarantining Santiago to stop the spread of our untreatable mutated CodA disease. Heh heh.

And here's where we finished. We won!! Woop! You get 2 goes at each month and haven't needed either late game to proceed. Of course, our funding is now at zero - you know how it is, the government going "you're doing fine, you're getting no cash" so we get no extra goodies going into March. Rats. Moira's Bryony the scientist has a scar (affecting her movement in Asia) but also a nice extra skill and we eradicated the Black Zombie virus (which we get to officially name) so got to add a positive mutation for next time. Great stuff.

And the card shuffling? Well due to some fluke, Moira (who we affectionately call Brian after the unfortunate guy in the rulebook example who unleashes an epidemic on the world) pulled 4 of the 5 epidemic cards from the deck one after the other. Which was bad for her but funny for us. And almost all the red Asia player cards were in the bottom half of the deck. Which was bad. But yellow South America came out the infection deck loads and we quarantined like mofos down there so the cards were cruel but also kind. But I think we might get gubbed when we play March. Fun!

Don't panic!

This is my gaming group. 

These girls are my school friends, were drinking buddies in my youth and we all still live in the same town with our significant others and children. You know how it goes when you get older, though; getting together gets harder and harder and before you know it 6 months has gone past and you haven't seen each other. When Chook was 6 months old I instigated the "first Wednesday dinner club" and on the first Wednesday of every month we'd go out and eat together. But some of us have eating issues and it gets surprisingly boring to always be going out for dinner. The last few years we have done "Ice cream Sundays" where we literally go out and eat sundaes. On Sunday. Which was awesome but a little erratic. So. At the start of the year I was determined to rectify our sporadic socialising. I played, amongst other things, Hero Quest with certain parties when I was 15, Magic: the Gathering with others when I was in my late teens and Dungeons and Dragons with them all in our early twenties. But nothing in almost 20 years.

Enter Pandemic:Legacy.

Pandemic is a co-operative boardgame where you all work together to save the world from diseases playing against the board and the card decks. We've been playing the vanilla version for a few months getting a feel for it and trying to figure out the rules. The Legacy version? Well. It's the original game on steroids.

It is played over 12 months in game time with only 2 tries to win a month before you move on to the next one. So your maximum number of games in a campaign is 24 (you obviously don't have to play one game per calendar month! We are on a fortnightly schedule.) But where it gets interesting is these chaps

The Legacy deck is read at certain times in a certain order and irrevocably alters the game. Little doors on the advent calendar style files are opened to reveal more stickers and cards. We haven't a clue what is in those black boxes but they rattle.  Stickers are placed on cards and the board, cards are torn up, the board is written on. Cities are destroyed, diseases mutate, characters suffer PTSD and generally it is a massively stressful ball of hilarity and fun. No, really! And what happens in one game directly affects what happens in subsequent games. Well we opened our Legacy game last night. Here we are at set up. 

 I'm going to take a starting photo at the beginning of every game to see how we progress. There's already half a dozen new stickers on the board - and one torn up card. I, of course, gave the honour to our player with the greatest OCD tendencies just to laugh at her and take a photo. #sorry #notsorry

And we only went and won! We did miss one (well, two really) wee detail(s) but those stickers will be stuck on before the start of the next game (new rules to remember!) I can promise you, you'll never have so much fun losing a game...

the time suck

There's been a distinct lack of time to make anything round these parts the last few weeks. Mostly because we have all 3 disappeared down the particular rabbit hole that is Diablo 3.

When Spouse and I first lived together (17 years ago!) we lost weeks and months of evenings to the original Diablo on the PlayStation. He was thrilled to have a gaming girlfriend - I was thrilled he had a PlayStation. *g* When Diablo 2 came out before we were parents I played it myself - we were gutted when it wasn't a multiplayer game. Now, Chook loves a game called Star Stable. You own, compete with and complete tasks with various horses you buy (with game or real money) but can customise them and improve their stats with rider items and equine tack. So she's used to the questing and goodie aquisition format. The question was could she get behind the swords and sorcery theme. Her not being a sci-fi fan meant I didn't really have a handle on her fantasy leanings.

(this is my wizard - I was thrilled to finally find green dye for my armour!)

I can happily report that she absolutely loves it! That's her badass monk there in the middle. And Spouse's barbarian, Farticus. *rollseyes* 

So family gaming nights have become popular here. We're even playing once a week online with my boss, heh heh. But it has greatly reduced my sewing time! I'll get back to it eventually, I'm enjoying crusading far too much currently to care! There is a reason I have never bought a World of Warcraft membership.

Amiright?!