Wednesday 29 January 2014

Ruining Games with Maths since 1978

Evening people,

Bit of a tongue in cheek one tonight, which probably isn't too much of a shock. Last night at Enfield Gamers Rich C, aka Shado, kicked off his idea for a rolling  Zombiecide campaign. Basically there's 30 scenarios and 25 survivors, can we make it through?

As it had been a while we had to knock off a bit of rust and we got a few bits wrong but nothing major as we successfully shuffled through the first two scenarios. Main issue was forgetting to to take all of the restricted weapons from the items deck (combined from all three box sets) allowing us to blow away two Abominations far too easily. We spawned the first one almost immediately and that initial panic attack was all too easily dispelled.
As a co-operative game it's important to co-ordinate the group's actions but it did end up running to an extreme with Mr C and Shado forming an impromptu statistical analysis committee to the eventual barracking of the rest of us, "play the GAME!!" and "you're ruining the GAME with maths".

Rather amusingly Scenario 2 quite literally bit back at Mr C. Having carefully calculated a safe point for himself a flurry of zombie bonus action cards saw him in deep trouble. Rob jumped in to the rescue but luck just wasn't with them and another set of bonus action cards saw them chewed up and spit out!
28 missions remaining, 23 survivors!
For further context and hilarity the evening's entertainment came on the back of myself and Mr C having a number of nerdy STAW conversations about fleet lists. The first was how to defeat the Fed Anti-Proton Mine list, it was sort of impressive to see how "focused" he became.

The second was use of the Flagship card, which I have to admit was down to me. To get the best use you might want to put them on a small, cheap ship with high agility, the RIS Vo for example (8 defence dice when cloaked). Hmm that's impressive so what could you have it deliver offensively? Nuclear Warheads or Additional Weapons Array. Not bad, especially with points left over for two Valdores with Counter-Attack.

See! It's a slippery slope and all too easily done. That's where it got left it for me, don't do maths-hammer, but Mr C became "focused" on whether he would be better off with the Romulan Flagship for re-roll on attacks or the Independent Flaghip for +1 attack. To work it out he put together a scarily impressive EXCEL spreadsheet to work it our and mailed it round to a few of us.

All this after admitting the on the Facebook Big Bang Theory character test he came up as Wolawitz as the first thing he'd do with a new game is flick to the "how to win" section!

His signature,....Ruining games with maths since 1978! Had to chuckle :)

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