Fearsome Foursome Festivus - Third Annual

When I was in college, I had a group of friends with whom I would game extensively.  We’ve kept in touch after graduation remaining very close.  Unfortunately, life and distance keep us from being able to see each other very often.

In no particular order, we have Adam, Josh and Serious Mike (he had to be differentiated from me somehow, and Adam enjoys assigning nicknames to people).

Josh speaks quietly and is a great sport for ribbing and teasing.  Which works well, because Adam and I certainly enjoy picking on everyone.  Josh always comes with great game ideas, but sometimes (and mostly accidentally) says and does some of the funniest things in games.

Adam likes to joke and hates when people try to tell him what he should be doing.  To the point where if someone suggests that he should do something, often he’ll do the opposite just to show them that in fact, he would do something different.  His usual stance is to avoid being serious in games, though he can come into streaks or games where he takes them quite seriously.  Just got to make sure he’s prepped for it ahead of time.

Serious Mike understands rules, numbers, and efficiency.  Very early on in our friendship, it was fun to see him come up with the most efficient method to achieve a result and explain it to the group, and then watch Adam do whatever he could to not do what Serious Mike suggested.  He has a dry and sarcastic sense of humor.

I don’t remember which of us it was that first suggested it, but three years ago we decided to pick a weekend in the Spring and head to a hotel somewhere centralized (in New Jersey, as the case turned out), bring a bunch of games, and just pretend we were back in college again playing games all weekend.  We’ve managed to do so every year now for three years.  This past weekend was the most recent one – the Fearsome Foursome Festivus, or the Fearsome Foursome Reunion Tour.

So what did we end up playing?

Zombicide

This is one I am quite familiar with.  By the time I arrived on Friday night, Josh and Adam had already played this one a few times.  We went for dinner and then got a few more games in.

At one point, Adam was trying to put together the board (which, for those who have tried, know it involves a healthy amount of cardboard).  One of the pieces on he put down made no sense where it was.  Josh deduced that Adam must be reading the instructions wrong so he took it from them, but after reading, he made no changes.  Knowing that both Josh and Adam must be wrong, I took the instructions and found that indeed, they were incorrect.  Adam laughed at how little either Josh or I trusted him.

But an example of our lack of trust for him followed later that same game!  Adam has no idea how to play games (at least that’s the opinion I have in my head despite all evidence to the contrary) so at one point Josh and I were getting excited about how close we were to winning and told Adam what he needed to do in order to get us to a full victory.

Now it’s worth saying that Adam does actually know how to play games just fine.  Unfortunately for Josh and me, he also hates people telling him what to do.  So instead of following our instructions, he took the car his character was in, drove over one of my characters, killing him, and then hopped out of the car and shot another of my characters.  I proceeded to drive over both of his characters.  While we were engaging in a battle in the streets, Josh’s two characters up and fled the scene, escaping and winning while my last character was pulled down by zombies.

Good times.

Gauntlet of Fools

Serious Mike joined us for the next game, Gauntlet of Fools.  This was the only new game for me this weekend.  At the beginning of the game, four characters were selected and each was given a random weapon.  We went around bidding on characters.  You could steal characters from other players, but to do so you had to add a boast to them (“I’ll play the Monk with the Throwing Stars, but I’ll do it while juggling!”)  Each boast provided a different mechanical disadvantage to the character.  Once all players had characters, you head into the dungeon to defeat monsters and collect gold until the monsters kill the last player.  Then whoever has the most gold wins.

Overall it was a decent game.  We were getting tired by the end of it, and most of us were not really paying much attention.  At one point I had a hungover, juggling, one-hand-tied-behind-my-back, hopping-on-one-foot barbarian head into the dungeon.  He got killed pretty quick.

Level 7

The guys wanted to try out Level 7.  We went through the first two adventures, the first time with Adam and I escaping through the elevator while Josh and Serious Mike were captured in the medical room as the Lockdown began.  The second game we all escaped as we got the aliens and guards to start fighting in the first few minutes of the game.  That gave us the breathing room to get everyone out by the end.  Wasn’t easy, but it was a lot of fun.

Flashpoint

This game has become a staple of our Reunion Tours.  Josh is the one who introduced it to me back at the first outing.  He had one expansion that I do not currently have (though I will be getting it soon).  It brings you into a two-story house.  We played two games, the first we managed to win but barely, and the second we rescued everyone we could.  Then, for absolutely no reason, we decided to try to get Josh into the house on the second story and cut the house down around him so it collapsed.  Adam took over the Captain to force Josh to move while Serious Mike and I ran around the outside of the house with chainsaws cutting down the supports.  We managed to get him killed – it was fun.

Iron Kingdoms

Serious Mike ran us through the introduction session of Iron Kingdoms.  It was pretty good – I had already played through it once before at GenCon, so I generally let the other guys make the decisions about the game while I moved around and helped out.  I picked the magic character – the first time I tried using one – and he was quite good.  Blasting out spells and being able to boost hit and damage was fun.

The session itself was pretty linear (as expected for an intro).  With the exception of the fact that this time we essentially opted not to open a biscuit business like we had the first time I ran through this campaign, we did everything almost exactly the same.  The boss fight felt a little tougher, but Serious Mike was playing the villain a bit smarter and healing him for 6 or so wounds every turn.  With an armor of 19, it was tough to take him down.  We ended up doing so by surrounding him and removing his shield from the equation.

Later, I ran the group through a second Iron Kingdoms session – one I had written a while ago and just left the notes in my book.  It involved a lot of negotiating, some history, and then a small fight.  We ended up passing out at 2:30 in the morning and leaving the session unfinished (which cut out two more fights).

Quarriors

Finally, we played Quarriors.  Since last year, I had picked up two new expansions – one that introduced Locked Dice and one that introduced Quests.  Overall, neither of those expansions really added much to the game.  They brought in some needless complexity while not really adding anything of value.  The best way to play Quarriors, I think, is to use the base game and first two expansions.  They don’t really add too much more in the way of rules, and don’t muck things up too much.

Overall, due to external circumstances, the weekend did not go as long as normal and I felt we got fewer games in than usual.  Hopefully next year I’ll have a little more freedom to get some time off from work and get out there early on Friday rather than losing about a half a day there.