Playin' Catch Up Part 1

Its been a little while sensed I blogged so I figured now (on a Saturday evening) would be a good time to play catch up. Last entry was on Wednesday so pretty much have to play catch up to some extent. Without any further a due.

Thursday:

Thursday was kind of more of the same at least for work. Not a whole lot happen at work pretty much the same routine as per usually. I did start nodding on and off again but I'm not sure if that was due to lack of sleep or trying to read material I had a reasonable good thumb on. Was reading up on how to use SQL command in PowerBuilder. PowerBuild is a tool I'm not 100% familiar with so the portions in which how you could use SQL in powerbuilder was neat however the command mentioned are quite similar to regular SQL. Thus its a little bit of hit and miss in terms of learning some new material. We don't directly change the code but it doesn't hurt to have the knowledge to look at PB code and understand the logic behind it. On the same note though it was cool cause one of my teammates stopped by and praised me for reviewing it in advance. Also discovered to other neat things about this co-worker.

For starters he complimented me on my...how to say 'Asian/Japanese mannerism. Mainly in the sense of over politeness and so forth. Also he knew the term "Gaijin" which I thought was fantastic. I didn't really go on about how I liked anime and such but let him know that I did have an interest in the japanese culture. The rest of the day consisted of some knowledge transfer about how to do particular types of CarMax orders (i.e: Someone goes to buy a car, they have a car which they wish to sell to CarMax however this car has a lease on it. That sort of thing). After work was done I stopped by home to pick up some mail then headed over to a friend's place to try out a game called "Fury of Dracula".

Before we even started the game I knew we probably weren't going to finish it within a reasonable time for me to play the entire time. Mainly because I'm finally back on my sleep schedule and don't want to mess it up again. With the group of friends I spend a good bit of my board game time with I use to accumulate about 5-7 hours of sleep each night and get back home around midnightish. I realized that with this new position I have, waking up at 6:30 each morning, that crashing at 11-midnightish would kill me. So I will go ahead and say I had to cut it short which kind of collapsed the already collapsed group. I'll give a brief overview of my thoughts though.

For starters this is definitely one of those games with a fairly large rule set and probably a bit of over the top in terms of rules. One issue from the bat to the end was the constant reference to the rules. Have to admit for some games a good rule of thumb is to have it so you can play the game without referencing the rules right off the bat. Think that's a bit overzealous as some simple games I've played still require some references to the rules. Its definitely one of those niche games though that once you find a particular crowd of people that enjoy playing it, it can get adapted fairly quickly. Simple example one group of friends I don't play Lunch Money with due to the fact of memorizing 15-16 cards while another group doesn't mind this fact. Same can be said with Race to the Galaxy, Munchkin, certain versions of Fluxx, the list goes on. Set-up does take some time though but once its all configured your good to go.

The basic premise of the game is to catch dracula and kill. There's only one way to kill Dracula and that's basically in combat. Dracula is a PC who runs about the country and you have to find him (Carmen Sandigo anyone?). Dracula basically wins by accumulate 6 points via hunters not finding where his been, a day passes and Dracula lives, or Dracula kills a hunter. Based on previous plays with each person the game can be absurdly boring or constantly interacting. The session which I attend was a mixture of both. Myself and another individual definitely had an ok time with the game while two other individuals weren't so keen on it (one basically started trolling) and then went off to play another game while this game was going. Disrespectful imo I mean if you don't want to play just don't play... don't ignore half the game rotation come back and go 'ok so what are we doing now?'.

Trolling in this game is not particularly difficult to do. You pretty much just have to take the train and skip pass any locations dracula may have passed or keep missing the train (about a 33% chance of that occurring). I guess the other gief I have is the overdone combat system. It really could have been broken down into 2 elements initiative and damage however there's micro elements in which depending on the weapon used against another weapon can vary the result. So at least for the first round one would have to constant reference the cards to get a feel for them, however I think after a few plays it becomes intuitive to have some idea what actions/weapons do against what (i.e: knife, punch, escape, dodge, rifle, etc). Those I'd say were the two issues we encountered that and I suppose the RNG card element but there's not much you can do their. Length of the game was an issue for some even though I provide ample warning.

After Dracula concluded I went home read some 1984 and headed off to bed.

Off to blog about Friday now :).