The gaming slowed down a little, obviously.

Sunday didn't amount to much. We didn't have enough interested players to run the AGOT tourney, so we played a couple group games instead. I played Stark Wo5K, won the first and came in 2nd in the 2nd. After that, Jerod and I played a couple games. His Baratheon Threat deck wasn't fully tweaked, though, and after a couple games he got called away to deal with customers, and I started to build decks. Steve decided to start priming some figs in the back, and the residual fumes that the figures brought in with them were really bothering me (I am, for some reason, really sensitive to this stuff), so I left. I had a dinner party to go to anyway, so no big deal.

I'll throw a little comment in here on some other gaming I've been doing. Based on a geeklist I found under the St. Pete entry on boardgamegeek, I've been playing a couple free downloadable games that you can play against bots, San Juan and a two player Tigris & Euphrates program. San Juan is an interesting play. The Tigris game is, I think, pretty useful just for practicing how to think about various situations in the game. There are still a couple bugs in the latter, though.

Speaking of online gaming, our weekly online boardgame group met on Tuesday, and it was Carcassonne again. Jef joined Sean and I, and we had a nice, competitive game. Jef was, at one point, very nice to Sean. As usual, we had a big farmer battle, but everyone had a really hard time tying in. I built up a big enough early lead, and it held out over Jef's slight farmer advantage.

Tonight was boardgame night at Critical Hit. The game of the night was Robo Rally. I got there early, so Shawn, Chris, and I played a quick 3-player game. This was good, as I had forgotten how some of the board options worked. I messed up a progam, and, bang, it was over. Chris won. The second game, we had seven players, and it was pretty chaotic. We were only playing one board and two flags, and this game went pretty quickly as well. Erin and Gary, who hadn't played before, had some trouble and didn't really get anywhere. I started well, but a timely bump from another player put me right out. In the end, Chad ripped from middle of the pack right into the victory.

After our second Robo Rally game, Chris offered up Tikal, which I've been wanting to play, so he, Erin, Gary, and I moved to another table to start excavating. Two more Robo Rally games got played tonight, and everyone seemed to be into it. Oddly, all three of the copies present were the old Wizards edition. We played a variant on the Tikal rules, in which you turn up a tile for each player at the beginning of the round, and then bid victory points for first pick/turn. I thought the game was pretty good, I enjoyed the choices available with tile-laying, choice of how to use action points, building, etc., however, I would really like to play it without the variant. I thought the tile auction made the game take a lot longer, and also brought with it a strange order to the turn-taking that seemed to be fairly regular, despite the bidding. I'm sure it's at least in part an artifact of differing play style/experience, but I ended up placing all of the volcanoes to trigger the scoring rounds. We were pretty tight in the first round. I scored really big in the second, and took the lead, but very quickly lost it due to a porr bidding decision against Erin. I did pretty well in the third and final round, and ended up tied for 2nd with Chris. I mainly enjoyed the midgame of Tikal. The endgame seemed a little bit of a letdown, as the far end of the board had some uninteresting/uncontestable zones in it. It seemed like one could get trapped, too, with a lot of workers in a place where they couldn't really do anything. People who had gotten more out of their workers early were able to coast on those advantages and watch other players chase them. I'd like to play this a couple more times though, next time for sure with the original rules.

Gamicon Omicron is this weekend at the IMU. Hopefully I'll get to attend for a little while and play some games. Nothing on the schedule I'm really looking forward to, but just playing will be great.