02BB3: End-to-End Gaming


Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 939

After last night's Night's Black Agents Dracula Dossier campaign finale, we continued making the most of our time by not just playing games but learning new games. We're always preparing for future game sessions with friends and a big part of that is making sure we know how to play the games we want to teach them. Sure, we've learned a few games on the fly during a game night itself, but we feel a lot more prepared once we've gone through trial sessions on our own. 

We first had to deal with the Ravensburger Escape Puzzle that we had started the night before (which was pretty fun in its own right), but that didn't take too long, admittedly. Then we went through our first playthrough of Consumption: Food and Choices, a game all about watching what you eat (and not necessarily tuberculosis). Its core mechanic feels a lot like, well, a "point salad" game as you try to balance the different types of food in your body while cooking great recipes (that give power-ups) and working out (to burn unwanted food in your body). It's not the most complicated game we've played but it's pretty satisfying without getting too heavy.

Today's RPG session was canceled due to internet issues for some of the players, so we used the extra time to learn Dice Theme Park, which had arrived together with the other Kickstarter stuff that arrived the other day. I figured the core gameplay loop would somehow feel like Dice Hospital, which we played the other day. But it was more than just a reimplementation even though it's a game by the same publisher. It has a whole other creative team that took some inspiration from the prior game but ran with it and make a completely different dice manipulation experience that was a lot of fun. These new Alley Cat Games dice board gamees are proving to be a lot of fun and I'm glad I took the gamble and went all-in for these games.

Again, I blame my love for Bullfrog-created simulation games from the nineties for why I got into this so eagerly. 

We still have to learn the other Alley Cat Games dice game I got as part of this particular Kickstarter effort - this being Eternal Palace. It's not directly part of the same sort of franchise as the others - I just got it at the same time. And given how the first two games have gone, I'm very excited to find time to dive into this last game sometime this week. 

And I'm even more excited to introduce some of these games to friends in the coming weeks and months as well. Good times. 

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