A Lesbian Session Report!: Ghost Stories - Players vs Rulebook

G'day folks, we're a couple of gay gamers from the land down under, and today we have for you a speedy session report of that game of otherworldly difficulty, Ghost Stories.

A game of Ghost Stories is never the same twice. Or, if played between the Girlfriend and I, a game of Ghost Stories never has the same rules twice. Yes, believe it or not, Wu Feng's ugly incarnations are nothing compared to the utter terror contained with the German/French/English rule book. Let's recap (somewhat embarrassingly) what happened when the GF and I tried to play Ghost Stories as a "brief" evening game.

9:00 pm - Play Starts.
Mood: Happy. The night is young, and the ghosts are few. Even if we did turn over the defective side of the green Taoist board. 

THIS SIDE. Wish I could re-roll this board

9:20pm - Rule Violation: A Taoist must end their turn on the central square in order to retrieve the neutral tokens.
Mood: Self-irritation at our newbie level oversight, but pride at our honorable, chivalrous, and ok, maybe downright pedantic commitment to playing the game properly.
START GAME OVER

9:55pm - Rule Violation: When a player's board is overrun, players do not draw a new ghost. Yah...crucial point.....
Mood: Relieved at being saved from the fiery fiery pits of pseudo-Chinese hell.
START GAME OVER.

10:35pm - Two turns from kicking some serious ancient ghost arse... (metaphorically....because of course you can't actually kick ghosts.....)  
Rule Violation: No reward is gained for killing ghosts in the Sorcerers' Hut.
Mood: Kind of like when you see a bear in the forest, and then you run away from the bear, into a bear cave.... Oh sacred laws of board game rule-fidelity, WHY DO YOU TAUNT US?

11:05pm - The snacks have run out. The snacks we bought to replace the snacks have run out.  The determination and shear grim willpower we bought to replace the snacks to replace the snacks is dwindling. But so is the number of ghosts. UNTIL
Rule Violation: Black Ghosts must, if possible, be placed in front of the active player.
Mood: What? You mean you can't place them anywhere?

Hiatus End: Resuming Normal Operations!

Dearest friends,

This is the GF speaking.

You may have noticed an ominous silence in these parts as of late. Yes, we have been missing-in-action since July. But, good news, the lesbigamerz are back! And more furiously game-playing than ever before.

As a short explanation for our Ramona Flowers-esque flaky and sudden disappearance, I am happy to announce that Lesbigamer and I have moved in together ...  

We are living there with another friend who went to high school with us.This is Ren.

She occasionally gets dragged into our game-playing, fortunately not kicking or screaming.

It's a happy little terrace house (emphasis on little). But we've been so busy trying to find a place to live, getting rental applications approved and actually moving in, the last two months have flown us by without a blog post.  We hope to continue our regular posting now that things have settled down somewhat.

So really, the point of this boils down to, we've missed you all sorely, we've missed board game posts and WE'LL SEE YOU BACK HERE! (Very soon, Lesbigamer is next to me writing up a session report on Ghost Stories!)

A warm thank you also to the kind people who have left us encouraging messages to continue. We really appreciate your support. ❤

Cheers, 
The GF.

Lesbians On: A Few Hiccups in My Relationship with Board Games

Hey there, we’re two gay board gaming girls from the land of Vegemite. Now I like to think that I’m a bit of a board game Casanova – wooing the best units with my skillz and dashing good looks, playing my cards right to charm those victory points to my side of the board. I mean, I do literally keep all my games inside my (not usually steamy) boudoir. Sadly however, there are times when there are little hiccups in our otherwise beautiful relationship. Ok, it is a shameful admission, but there are a few parts of gaming I fail at harder than a five estate hand in Dominion. Try as I might, there are some things at which I will never improve, even with my very own training montage. Today, I’m writing about those curs’ed things.

1. Hoarding Cards to Make Apocalyptic Hands

There is a wise old saying, urging speedy and decisive action, which goes like this: “Strike while the iron is hot.” Sadly, I seem to have developed my own personal version of this phrase which goes something like “strike while the iron is still tepid.” Draw a killer card first round? I’m not waiting for that so called “optimal strategic moment” to play it as part of a “killer combo.” If I’m holding TNT in my hand I want to scorch my opponent now dammit, not wait to fuse it into an atomic bomb. Apparently, this is not what hard core awesome gamers do. I BRING SHAME ON MY FAMILY. An example. I mentioned on our Twitter (https://twitter.com/lesbigamerz) that my gorgeous gorgeous girlfriend had given me the best surprise an obsessed gamer can get, and planted a brand new copy of RFTG: The Gathering Storm in the middle of my games collection. She also slipped in another game – a cute and quirky card-based quick play called Gloom.

Featuring wonderful art by Keith Baker!

The object of Gloom is to subject the family you play to the most extreme misery possible, and then kill them off for points. Because, you know, board game players are such nice people. For a game of family fun, Gloom can get hilariously vicious, especially when I play with the GF when, as I mentioned before, a friendly match becomes an attempt to crush each other TO THE FIERY DEPTHS OF HELL.

Most of the cards in Gloom are averagely useful, but now and then in a 2 player game you draw a card SO AWESOME that it’s almost embarrassing. These cards have such power that when played it feels like your opponent has picked up your entire game so far and put it through a blender. Thus, when three or four of these cards come out in a row, it’s like a blender, followed by a meat mincer, then an industrial mixer, then back through the meat mincer once again. Which is pretty much what I felt had happened to me after I lost to the GF four games in a row (out of four). The first two games my ego let me chalk it down to luck. After the second two, I could deny it no longer. The GF had a skill I didn’t. The problem was, that while I played a series of unfortunate events, she played the game like a Shakespearian tragedy – everything goes along swimmingly until suddenly everyone ends up dead. No matter how determined I was, I could not hold those great cards until the end. My apocalyptic nuke’em hand of ultimate doom and destruction is never to be…

History of the Bored: Being Board Back in B.C.

Hey there, we’re a pair of gay gamers from the land of Kangaroos, and today we’ve got the first of our posts on ye board games of olde.

Long ago, when Gods were believed to roam the earth, when philosophy and mathematics were in their first golden age, when statues of inconceivable grandeur were built, and when men pulled each other’s brains out through their noses after death….people were bored. Very bored. Building pyramids and harvesting crops gets old after a while, and sometimes there isn’t even a civil war to keep you entertained. So, the bored Egyptians invented the first board games. Back then, sadly, this was not a pun, until the Proto-Germans in their great wisdom chose to make the two words somewhat similar (buron and burdam), a great linguistic development which I like to believe was not a coincidence but in fact a product of proto-germanic enlightenment about the relationship between the two concepts.

There is much debate as to exactly what is the oldest board game of all time.  The two contenders for the prize are the game Senet, from Egypt and the Royal Game of Ur from…well, from Ur actually, which is located in modern day Iraq.

Senet

An Original Senet Set. Photo not From Egyptian Timez

Senet is a seriously ancient board game. Archaeologists found it in tombs from the First Egyptian Dynasty – dating 3500B.C - 1500 years before anyone tasted a peach and a whopping 5200 years before mankind was gifted the grapefruit.  Since then, it’s popped up in tombs all over the place, and apparently was a great hit in Egypt, particularly among the dead.  The rules of Senet are not known, but what we do know is Senet is a race game, where players roll….roll…something….to get their five pawns to jump like lemmings off the edge of the board before their opponent. Senet was essentially a game of luck, but the Egyptians didn’t believe in luck, they believed ALL FATE was written by the mighty gods. Therefore, the winner of a game of Senet was not just a champion of chance, but CHOSEN by the power of THOTH, RA, and OSIRIS to TRIUMPH. The victor was considered to be under their patronage. Which is a good thing, because you wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of three guys who cut things to tiny pieces, doll out eternal punishments, and generally hold all the secrets of the universe. The game apparently made it as far as Crete and Cyprus, but since no one there really went for the whole Gods-with-animal-heads thing, they played it just for the kicks.

The Royal Game of Ur

The Royal Game of Ur lookin' pretty royal

The Royal Game of Ur is was around from at least 2500 B.C, but it may be as old as 5500 B.C, if it were named and claimed by Ur not long after the city itself was established. In a naming conundrum almost as bad as “Die Fugger” (quite a decent game from Adlung-Spiele), it seems that the Royal Game of Ur was indeed not a royal game but was in fact more widely played by commoners who, often too poor to afford a set, scratched boards out on bits of stone (reminds me of the Chinese chess set I made out of paper in English class.) The rules of the RGoU are handily transcribed on a 175 B.C. stone tablet from Babylon (when the literacy rate had probably increased from 0.00000001% to 0.0000001%).

Rules in Easy To Read Format

It is a race game, much like Senet, or how we think Senet was played. But wait, there’s an added demonic twist. A player can take his opponents pieces and remove them from the board, unless they have landed on a safe space. With seven pieces, it’s possible for one lucky player to occupy all the safe spaces and screw over his opponent utterly. Tactical play in 2500 B.C? Awesome.

Who Wins?

Like so many things in history, we don’t actually know for sure which game is the oldest. But the true winner in modern eyes is Senet, which has a BBG rating of 5.86, beating the Royal Game of Ur which scored only 5.47. It’s nice to know that even though these games were invented thousands of years ago we can still evaluate them online next to Puerto Rico and Memoir 44. The internet, they say, cares not for carbon dating.

What in the Weird?

Another very ancient Egyptian game was Mehen, which dates back to 3000 B.C. Mehen was played on a board depicting a coiled snake which is cut into segments – but not every board is divided into the same number. It is also played with 3 lion or lioness tokens per player, and 6 round marbley things. None of the components actually fit neatly within the segments of the snake. 

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what on earth the rules were?

Because all I can imagine is a group of Egyptians burying the thing especially for archaeologists to find and sniggering smugly to themselves.

Lesbians Review: Race For The Galaxy

Why hello there, we’re two game lovin’ and girl lovin’ chicks from down under, and today we are reviewing a staple of so many game cupboards, Race for The Galaxy.

The GF! In Space.

Race for the Galaxy Fact File
Players: 2-4
Playtime: 30 - 60
Genre: Card Driven / Civilisation 

Race for the Galaxy entered my apartment not so long ago in an exciting package inside another exciting package we received in the mail. The girlfriend and I had played it before, and we had also played it before we’d played it before, and before that, we had also played it, but had got most of the rules wrong. I’m reviewing it partly because it tops the “recently played” list, and partly because I have been challenged to slip ALL the phase names into my review. And I always accept a challenge. Unless it involves Vector 3 (shudder). 

Before I slide into the review proper, I wanted to announce that we now have a twitter – for all the stupid (I mean um…clever and droll…) board gaming jokes I think of throughout the day. Check it out here: https://twitter.com/#!/lesbigamerz

APPEARANCE

See the resemblance?

Race for the Galaxy, not surprisingly, is set in “space,” and that is “space” as it appeared on the front of 1980s hack sci-fi novels. The cards feature painted intergalactic landscapes, bad CG, and variety of tropes to let us know it is set a dark, stark, violent, but really really shiny future. Lazerz, alienz, and spaceshipz are trotted out on almost every card letting the player build themselves a glorious twelve card empire of stereotype.

But rare indeed is it for the player of RFTG to be looking at the background art, instead they are much more likely to use their eye power to explore the tiny tiny symbols on their cards – and be warned, these are a weirder alien language then any sci-fi flick I’ve ever seen. 

GAMEPLAY

(The GF is writing the gameplay section again because she is able to explain things in a calm sophisticated manner without using !!, sarcasm, or CAPSLOCK)

Each player is dealt a starting world, with it’s own special powers – some military focused, some trade focused and so on – and six cards. Two are immediately discarded, giving each player a starting hand of four. This is a nice touch, giving you at least a bit of choice in how you’ll be going about taking the galaxy for your own (i.e. earning VPs).

A Lesbian Session Report!: Mage Knight, The Reconnaissance

Hi everybody, we are a pair of geeky gay gamers from Aussieland, and today we have for you the first of our Speedy Session Reports for your general viewing.

It all started one quiet morning when the girlfriend and I received a mysterious package.

Me:  That’s odd. We didn’t order any mysterious packages. They must have delivered this mysterious package to the wrong place.
GF: SUPER WIDE GRIN
Me: … You know what’s in this package don’t you?
GF: SUPER WIDE GRIN
Me: It’s a Board Game, isn’t it?
But my girlfriend was no longer in the room, and echoing down the corridor were the suspicious sounds of bubble wrap being chewed, crushed and ripped into a million pieces.
And so it happened that the girlfriend and I played Mage Knight.

Nothing like a brand spanking new MK game, with no missing bits!

Why is it that battling the shrink wrapped card
and tokens in MK makes you feel like you're
doing your best chipmunk impersonation?

1. Setting Up
   
   GF:  Don’t use the scissors on that! You’ll damage the cards!
   (30 minutes of battling shrink wrap later)
   Me: Can you get me something from the kitchen?
   GF: Sure
   (CUTTING SOUNDS)
   GF: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
   ME: Can we play now?
   
   
2. Why You Don’t Skim the Rule Book
   
   Me: What does this funny roman-statue-like thing on this enemy token mean?
   GF: Maybe it’s a super-good looking enemy.
   Me: Well, we are in a strange fantasy world. Snakes-for-hair could be the rockin’ look. Oh well, I guess I’ll attack.
   (10 minutes of battle later)
   GF:  PARALYSIS.
   Me: What?
   RIP PEASANTS
   Oh well, if it wasn’t the medusa it would have been malnutrition.  

3. The Girlfriend Is Infinitely Moar Awesome than Me
   
   GF: And then I use the green mana from mana gain to activate Concentration which I use on Improvisation for 7 attack, killing the second creature in the spawning ground, and gaining my reward! I also level up.
   (I think for ten minutes)
   Me: I MOVE ONE SPACE! 
   GF: You move one space?
   Me: That’s all I can move.
   GF: That’s it? That’s your turn?
   Me: I’m in a desert.
   GF:  WHYAREYOUINTHEDESERTINTHEDAYTIME?
   Me: I just explored and I got here.
   GF: SIGH…never playing co-op with you….(solo-play, my one true love)

4. The Game Gets Really Big
   
   GF: Can we move your bed?
   Me: No, we’re not moving the bed. Just imagine these two tiles are connected.
   GF: Aw….
   …..
   …..Can we move your desk? (Or to a bigger place?)

5. The Final Exciting Moments!
   
   GF: I explore!
   Oh look, a city.
   Well… I guess we won then….
   Me: Yep, I guess we did.
   (A moment to embrace our sensational heroic breathtaking victory.)
   GF: We should play a scenario with a better win condition next time…
   Me: YES WE SHOULD.(Still, it was an excellent beginner scenario, especially since in the beginning we could not even work out how to move!)

6. Packing up
   
   GF: WAAAAAAAIT DON’T PUT THOSE IN THAT BAG
   ME: Why not?
   GF: WHY NOT?!?!?
   ME: Why not?
   GF: DID YOU COUNT THEM TO MAKE SURE THERE WAS 16?
   Me:….. No.
   GF: THEN HOW DO YOU KNOW THEY ARE ALL THERE?
   Me: Uh….where else would they go?
   GF: DO YOU NOT SEE THE SIZE OF THIS GAME. I demand a full  inventory count.
   (And it was true, the entire room was covered in cards, and the spell offer was lined up along the windowsill.
   
   All in all, I reckon it was one awesome first time play of Mage Knight!
   Look out for a review coming soon (after five billion more plays) 

Our Heroic Triumph - Finding the City