Weekend Gaming Session Report

Our regular gaming friends came over today for a weekend gaming session. We played one game of Hellapagos, a game of Azul, five rounds of Codenames with the kids, and we ended the evening with a couple of fast games of Skulls. Our longer afternoon game was Shadows Over Camelot and our evening game was Dead of Winter. For DoW we attempted “Home Sweet Home” on easy mode.

Spoiler alert: We did not make it.

Hellapagos is one of our recent discoveries, and we have thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a fairly light game, with an occasional disturbing card or two. (Yes, we had a cannibal barbecue. No, I’m not proud of it.) I’ll write more about this game soon. Next the kids dispersed to their computers for Fortnite (don’t get me started) while the adults set up Azul. I try to teach our group a new game each time we get together, and this was the second new game (after Hellapagos) for the weekend.

Once we finished that, we broke out Shadows Over Camelot. I had never won this game. It didn’t matter how many players we had, or whether we had a traitor or not, I had never played this game to the end and won. Over our various attempts we have slowly started to build up a strategy. Tonight we won! It was actually a weird feeling as we won by losing a quest, but we had to fill up the table to trigger the end-game. We had enough white swords for the win.

Next, dinner break (Taco Night!). As dinner was cleaned up we kept the kids in the room and played Adults versus Kids in Codenames. The adults took the first two rounds, but the kiddos came back to win the next three rounds to win the evening.

Finally, our last game for the evening: Dead Of Winter.

Dead of Winter is a fantastic game; it’s one of my favorites that we play. We don’t always play with the traitor option because we enjoy the puzzle aspects of the game just as much without the heavy psycho-drama that comes along with trying to figure out who is working for / against the colony. Don’t get me wrong. I like playing with the traitor too. For us the game works fine without it.

We were playing “Home Sweet Home” which meant that we needed a bunch of barricades at the colony along with at least one barricade at each outside location. We started off with our first player losing one of their characters to a zombie bite on her very first turn! The bite spread, and next thing we knew we were down two characters, and we hadn’t even left the colony yet. Morale was plummeting (goes down one for each death) and things were getting ugly.

We did eventually manage to disperse to various locations (the teacher went to the school, the doctor went to the hospital, Sparky went to the grocery store). We had plenty of food, we were able to selectively complete or ignore various crisis cards, and the game felt like it was in a manageable situation.

Until it wasn’t.

Two more characters died, morale is at 2 (despite it recovering due to our aggressive contributions of crisis in earlier rounds), our trash heap is overflowing, and we realize we are in the last round and need to build 12 barricades and we only have ten action dice among the entire group.

We gave up and ran away. 🙂

This game is one of my favorites because it really captures the feeling of an inexorable horde of zombies at the door. There are so many moving parts…so many agenda items that you simply have to make hard choices as to what is important and what needs to be ignored. And just when you think you have it under control…wham, you swing a baseball bat at a couple of zombies and end up getting bitten for your trouble.

Fun times. 😎