Session - Alien Frontiers & Shadow Hunters

20th of May 2012 (Sunday)

Game(s) Played:
Alien Frontiers


Shadow Hunters



Session – Alien Frontiers

Player(s):
Bro D
Hayen
Milo
Mo

Our little gaming group has grown with the addition of Divad (henceforth dubbed Bro D after the Shadow Hunters session today) which is great for two reasons:
1) When one of the siblings typically forgets and then claims "but nobody told me" with indignation plastered all over their faces, we still get to play really great 4 Player games, of which I have plenty
2) It also means that I get to go shopping, to expand my library to include more 5 Player games, of which I only have… … okay, scratch that, I already have 11 games that can be reasonably completed in under 2 hours

One of those games is Alien Frontiers which we played today. This will probably be the third time we’ve played Alien Frontiers although the previous two sessions remain unrecorded, mostly because I’m a sore loser and I came away from those games feeling that Alien Frontiers was broken with Da Panda thoroughly abusing the Raider’s Outpost and Terraforming Station to handily beat Mo & I at both sessions.

That’s our family tag line these days

Well, Da Panda was late today so it was a good opportunity to give Alien Frontiers another go and see if I was right about the game or Da Panda is the one that breaks it. It was also a good opportunity for me to test out the "Single Page Dice Tower v. 1.1" that I constructed a month or so back. You can see it in this pic here.

Oh and this is a pic of Milo laughing whilst Bro D ignores her pleas for mercy as he is about to take over the Raider’s Outpost

If you would like to try your hand at it, go on over to badgeguy’s uploaded pdf and be sure to give him some thumbs for this extraordinary piece of art. There are some print settings he recommends but I just made sure I printed mine as large as I could make it and on paper as thick as I could buy them (250gms I think?) and only required a ruler, cutter and 20 minutes of work.

Okay back to the game. After the first round of play, the question came up on whether the Starting Player rotates to the next person and I decided to give it a shot and house-ruled it into play. My rationale behind it was to apportion the value of the Raider’s Outpost across all Players, as it is usually most valuable to the Starting Player and ends up being a bullying mechanism with the Starting Player stealing all the resources and the remaining Players having to re-do their resource gathering actions again and again.

This rule change actually worked out quite well against Milo "High Roller". Although Mo was first on the planet, one big step for Mo and all that, Milo’s uncanny rolling caused her to surge ahead and would have remained unchecked I believe, if not for this rule change. Everyone’s strategies were quite different this time round. You could tell that Milo wanted to take advantage of her rolls as much as possible because she never used the Terraforming Station whilst Mo was happy to self-destruct his ships because he had the advantage of the Alien Ship and lowered ship building costs from Herbert Valley. Bro D did very well for his first time out and was always either number 2 or number 3 and was a big user of the Colonist Hub (coupled with his extra advance advantage from Asimov Crater). It was a simple strategy but it worked for him although I think staking 3 colonies on Asimov Crater to protect his advantage might have been overkill. I went into dice manipulation in a big way, using Tech Cards like Mind Control Helmet and Orbital Teleporter with wild abandon and taking full advantage of my 1 to 1 exchange rate from Heinlein Plains and reduced costs from Bradbury Plateau, it felt amazing to chain my dice and actions together like that.

The cool thing about Alien Frontiers is that your strategy is usually apparent from the board

Milo constantly fought Mo for control of provinces on the alien planet, cheesing Mo off no end and eventually pulled out a win largely due to a rules correction in Colony Constructor I discovered right at the end of the game. You see, this is what Milo did when she didn’t have anything to do in an earlier turn:

She started two rows on the Colonist Hub which equates to Error #1 as the rulebook states that each Player can only utilize one track

She completed one track and was left with her last colony on the Colonist Hub track for a really long time. Heaven knows why she never bothered to finish it but for some odd reason or another, I decided to look up the rulebook when she rolled a triple, just to see if she could take out the colony from the track and use it with the Colony Constructor and now we have Error #2 where she COULD use the colony stuck on that track when I had earlier ruled that she could not. And so, despite our best efforts, it appears that people who seem to have lady luck on their shoulder when rolling dice do end up winning games like Alien Frontiers.

Time Taken: 75 minutes

Results Of Game
Winna – Milo (9 Points)
2nd – Bro D (6 Points)
3rd – Hayen (5 Points)
Dead Last – Mo (4 Points)

This was surprisingly satisfying despite the imbalance towards high rollers

Memorable In-Game Comments:
Mo & Hayen to Bro D: "Use the Raider’s Outpost! Use it! Use it! Use it!"
Milo: "Nooo!!! Hahaha! Nooo!!!"
Bro D: Evil laughter

Rating: 7/10

I’m going to bump Alien Frontiers up to a rating of 7. I believe the rotating Start Player is crucial particularly against Players who can get their dice to do somersaults for them. Many people might comment that the Tech Cards are the key to the secrets of beating the probability odds of dice and whilst that is true, they probably have not played against Da Panda who not only steals your resources, but then steals your Tech Cards, after you have run out of resources and we had one session where Da Panda used the Raider’s Outpost three consecutive turns in a row because with more dice, she can make them do more tricks. Nevertheless, being given the opportunity to at least use the Tech Cards was immensely rewarding and most importantly, fun which is all I ask for in a game, even if I can be a sore loser.

Session #26 – Shadow Hunters

Player(s):
Bro D (Black)
Da Panda (Orange)
Hayen (Green)
Milo (Pink)
Mo (White)

By this time, Da Panda had arrived and started heckling everybody about her awesomeness at Alien Frontiers, which is why we won’t play it with her anymore, hoho. Shadow Hunters doesn’t see much play at my game sessions, mostly because I thought it was one of those games that really shines when played with the full ensemble of 8 Players but I was wrong, a good time can certainly be had by less Players and what the game really suffers from is lack of variety in Character Cards. This is easily remedied by the Expansion Kit which is now officially on my wishlist.

The funny thing about human nature (and what makes Bang so playable) is the fact that sometimes you just want to hit somebody and the fact that you don’t know whether the person is an ally, enemy or just an innocent bystander is actually further encouragement to just poke somebody in the eye. These sorts of games tend to reveal your true nature and Bro D seems to be the exception to randomly attacking others and is actually what gave him his new call sign. He started to call people around the table "Bro", either to dissuade his would be attacker or just trying to judge a response to an attack. He was probably the only person at the table actually playing the game, methodically trying to find out everyone else’s real identity, whilst the others were pummelling each other into the ground. Mo started to call him "Bro D" and it looks like its’ stuck.

We played two rounds of Shadow Hunters and I got stuck being the Werewolf. There was just excitement all around the table particularly when someone accidentally revealed their faction and then everyone discovered it was all a ruse and the "accident" was actually staged. This is a liars’ game and when played by champions it really does shine.

Now Bro D and I aren’t very good at telling falsehoods and in the second round, I didn’t attack Mo even when I had the opportunity (totally uncharacteristic with the going-ons at the table) in order to "befriend" him, and it worked for a few turns then I got brutally messed up by him. In the meantime, I also "befriended" Bro D, for real this time because I knew he was my ally, who took it the wrong way and killed me. Turns out, he thought Mo was his ally through the Hermit Card but Mo was actually the Shadow (whose ability was to outright lie) which left Bro D really distraught especially since he had killed me.

Time Taken: 60 minutes

Results Of Game
Shadows 0 – Hunters 2 – Neutrals 0

I wonder if the Expansion Kit comes with a new board?

Memorable In-Game Comments:
After realizing the Shadow has the power to lie:
Bro D
"That’s just not right man. That’s just wrong."

Rating: 8/10