Racing for Second & Playing Tricks - Monday Gaming Recap

I got to the Atomic Empire earlier than usual as traffic decided to be nice for once, leaving me with time to kill. I hit a nearby drive-thru & grabbed some dinner before heading into the store to eat & pick up my comics. I grabbed a beer (Fullsteam's Summer Basil - so freaking good!) & waited to see who all was going to make it. While waited, I resisted heading to the front of the store where they had a copy of La Granja just sitting there taunting me - I'm trying to save money at the moment, but man was it tempting given that my FLGS sells it for just $6 more than CoolStuff & I could have it right now!

I wants it, the precious...

I had brought many of my new games with me, so we started off with a six-player game of Why First? I get really anxious teaching games, but since nobody else had played the game, I had no choice. Luckily it went well enough, though I did get confused at one point - luckily we got the scoring sorted out before it was able to negatively affect the game. Unsurprisingly, Terry pulled out the win - no matter the game, he's a silent threat; that guy who sits quietly & just destroys you at the end.

We then moved onto Wurfel Bohnanza, a favourite of ours. Only one of the five players was new to the game so I was able to focus on him while giving my rules explanation which made things a lot easier. Again Terry beat us, but it was a close game and I seriously had thought Jeremy was going to take it.

The Symbiosis deck

Finally, we finished up with four 4-player games of Daniel's Trickster decks. We started with Trickster: Fantasy since we had a new player which I won. We then pulled out some of the new decks still in dveelopment; first up was Trickster: Spaceship which we played twice, and then we played a game of Trickster: Symbiosis which remains my favourite Trickster of all. Despite the early hour, multiple players were yawning away so we called it a night, settled our tabs & headed home.

When I got home, I discovered my copy of Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn was waiting on the porch. If only I'd had it a few hours earlier, I could have unboxed it & read the rules while I was waiting for people to show up. I sat down on the couch to open it up & organized the cards into the 6 pre-built decks for now. The art is as beautiful as the previews showed, and I loved the totally different feel of each phoenixborn's set. It doesn't hurt that the majority of characters are women either which is nice to see in a combat-themed game.

Oddly enough, when sorted the cards, I realized that I had 3 extra copies of one card but that's hardly a big deal as nothing else was missing. The only issue I had was that a few cards were stuck together, and while most separated easily, one pair ended up marking each other when peeled apart - it's not too obvious but if you catch one of them in the right light, you can tell the back is now marked & therefore could potentially ID that card in an opponents hand/draw-pile. I can't wait to get the game to the table, and I think it'll scratch the MTG itch that SpellSlingers has been causing me.

So pretty

All sorted and ready to go