ALL of the games!

This weekend was the Extra Life gaming marathon where people play games for 25 straight hours to raise money for children's hospitals. Sara and Duncan converted their one bedroom apartment into a boardgaming haven by moving most of their furniture to other places in the building and bringing in extra tables and chairs. I believe there was something like 17 people there for the full 25 hours with a handful of other people popping in for brief periods of time to play games or make food. The group ended up raising more than $4300 for SickKids Foundation! That's currently 85th among all groups that took part. Woo!

Getting people to want to play games for a while is easy but actually getting people constantly playing games is not. They ended up running with a system where they'd pick people's names out of a hat and force them to pick a game to play. Then when enough games were picked the rest of the people would play those games. This solves a lot of problems that people like me create in that we don't like making decisions that other people might not like. I don't like picking games to play because I get worried that other people don't want to play that game and won't be happy. I'd rather play something I don't particularly want to play than risk making someone else do the same thing which doesn't make a whole ton of sense but there you are. Setting it up like this forces me to pick a game to play every now and then, which was good. Having 17 people meant no one was really forced to play a game they didn't want to play. Really don't want to play Thurn and Taxis? That's ok, you could instead play Kings of Air and Steam, or Battlestar Galactica, or the other copy of Battlestar Galactica. I think almost everyone got to pick twice so most people got to play the games they really wanted to play and tended to have a decent selection of games to play.

I ended up playing Battlestar Galactica, Through the Ages, Bruges, Power Grid, Battlestar Galactica, Battlestar Galactica, Galaxy Trucker, DC Deckbuilding Game, Bamboleo, Bamboleo, Battlestar Galactica, Dominion, and Jamaica. The astute among you may notice that's probably more than 25 hours worth of games. That's because some of us didn't see any point to stopping at 25 hours! MORE GAMES! Some of those are games I really, really like. A couple were new to me. One is a game I don't particularly like but other people wanted to play. A good mix, I think. My two game choices were both BSG because I just don't get to play it often enough and I figured other people would end up picking the other game I really want to play nowadays (Galaxy Trucker) and that risk paid off. The TTA game was a little silly. I got an early Napoleon, and I got the only classic army card, and a very early air forces card. The other two air forces were the bottom two cards of the deck. I resolved brutal wars against all three players. The first was a war over culture for 50 points that pretty much ended the game but then I threw holy wars at the other two players to be fair. Jack ended up getting back up to third despite the 50 point steal. I ended up with a score of 303!

I played BSG 4 times and I was a cylon in all 4 games. Maybe people should start throwing me out the airlock on principle? The games were a 2-2 split in terms of which side won. One of the human wins came when I got completely bamboozled by the other cylon. My reveal ability was to throw someone in the brig and I chose him because I was completely convinced he was a human president and I wanted to keep him out of the quorum chamber. I thought this because he was Baltar, had looked at Boomer's loyalty cards, and declared her human so people would try to break her out of the brig. I assumed this meant he was also human since claiming Boomer is a cylon seems like a straightforward thing to do. It turns out one of the other players was Cally and would have executed Baltar if he'd said that so I guess it was a good plan for him. Cally ended up executing the admiral instead because he didn't use a nuke. That made Cally the admiral and I assumed that meant Cally was the other cylon. If instead I'd thrown the newly respawned pilot in the brig things might have worked out better. Instead my cylon buddy used a quorum card to execute Boomer in the brig which let them start drawing crisis cards again. He never ended up taking an action as a revealed cylon. I think we could have won if we were both on the same wavelength but we weren't and lost as a result. The other loss had my cylon friend as the president and he also didn't reveal right away in order to play more quorum cards. Maybe we could have won if he was taking real actions, maybe not. We also could have used the cylon leader's help but he had to draw lots of different coloured cards and not play them which consumed too much time. Both of these games featured a below average number of jumps as the humans drew multiple 3s both times. One of my wins came about the turn before the humans were about to win. They lost on a 10+ skill check where they only managed to get a total of 9! Talk about close! This was in a game where both cylons revealed early and the humans threw 40+ value of cards away on a mistake. Playing the game with so many different people was definitely interesting to say the least!

I opted out of eating with other people to keep things simpler because of how picky I am. I ended up just bringing a bag of carrots and a 2-pack of steak so I could make the only meal I eat twice over the course of the day. It worked out quite well, I think. I drank lots of Coke which is something I haven't really had in a long time. Not caring about when I go to sleep and when I wake up has meant caffeine isn't needed. I was able to stay up for 36 hours with the Coke so that worked out pretty good too.