CabinCon 2022 - Part IV

 CabinCon 2022 - Part IV

OUTER SPACE!

I promised you outer space, so now I'll deliver! Next up, we played Planet Unknown. I've raved about this game before and am always excited for any opportunity to introduce new folks to it! We had five people sit at the table for this one: Drew, Josh, Johnny, Ryan, and myself. In Planet Unknown, each player has a corporation board and their own planet they need to explore in order to determine if it's suitable for human life. There are symmetrical and asymmetrical sides to both the corporation and planet boards, but each time I've introduced folks to the game, they've been gamers, so I've felt comfortable starting on the asymmetrical sides of both. For anyone familiar with the game and keeping score at home, we each played the following:

• Me
• Corporation - Oasis Unlimited
• Planet - Persephone
• Johnny
• Corporation - Wormhole Corp.
• Planet - K-273
• Drew
• Corporation - Cosmos Inc.
• Planet - Gaia
• Josh
• Corporation - Republic
• Planet - Tartarus
• Ryan
• Corporation - Horizon Group
• Planet - Petra

The coolest part of this game, by far, is the lazy susan apparatus that sits in the middle of the table and dispenses polyomino pieces. It's just so unique and fun and I love it. Polyomino games rarely draw my attention and this one would've been no different had I not played it at Geekway to the West last year. Just loved it and then was lucky enough to win my own copy of it. Anyway, as much as I like the game, I sometimes forget my priorities. That totally happened in this game. I absolutely screwed the pooch in terms of completing rows and columns. I can't say if I just thought I had more time or what, but I do know this: I was so fixated on optimizing the placement of my water tiles on planetary ice spaces that I left myself with gaps that could've been filled if I'd spent a little more time on my biomass track so I could acquire and place biomass patches.

I scored an atrocious nine points for rows on my planet. Contrast that with the next highest planet scores - Johnny with 18 and Ryan with 19. Ten points was not the difference between my winning and losing (as you can see from the picture of our final score sheet below), but it was still really ugly. I needed to take a more balanced approach in general. I scored zero civ cards because by the time I was sort of thinking about them, everyone had gotten there before me and because my planet was divided up into quadrants in which I could only place certain types of terrain, which meant that I was backed into a corner as to where I could place my civ tiles. There wasn't a ton more I could really do about my objectives, honestly. As it turned out, Ryan and I were absolutely maxxing out our collected meteorites, so just keeping up with him enough to score a tie was difficult. I can't remember my other objective specifically, but I know it was between Johnny and me as to who had less of a particular type of terrain and it wasn't even close. Still: as always, a really damn fun game and I'm so glad I got to share it with most of the group!

After that, we decided to lighten things up with a game of CuBirds! Ryan introduced us to this cute set collection game. It's just another reminder that not every game needs to have a rulebook long enough to rival an encyclopedia and so many minis that one needs an extra car just to transport the game from place to place.

Look at those cute little cubes pretending to be birds!

Basically, each player is trying to collect 6 or 7 flocks (sets) of the same types of birds to win. Players do this by placing a bird on the end of a row of cards and either taking everything between that bird and its match in the row, or top-decking a new bird. I started slow, but then managed to take a couple of flocks in a row and got up to 6. But because I dumped so much of my hand to get those flocks one after another, I was stuck with a small hand with no versatility. So I couldn't put together one of the bigger flocks of birds and I never drew into a flamingo to finish that small flock I hadn't yet collected. Drew ended up top-decking a toucan card, finishing his flock and winning the game. It took me a minute to cotton on to what we were doing, but it was fun and I'm glad we got to it! We'd started to set it up the previous day, but then I can't remember why we moved on without playing it. Something came up, but I don't remember what.

Next up was one of the games on my "Never Again" list. That particular list is extremely short, but Cosmic Encounter was absolutely on it after my first and last time playing it. My friend Ted really enjoys the hell out of this game and asked Roger and I to play it quite some time ago. I remember really disliking it, but a year or two after the fact, I kind of couldn't remember why. Roger regularly makes jokes about how much I hate it, but after awhile, I couldn't remember absolutely loathing it. He reminded me that I hated the lack of agency owing to the random battle assignments. I didn't really remember, but I was willing to take his word for it. A week or two before CabinCon this year, we were all sharing some pics of new games we'd purchased for the retreat in the group chat, and Josh shared a picture of Cosmic Encounter and some of the expansions that would allow us to play with 7. Since I couldn't personally remember why I so disliked the game and didn't want to play it again, and because it was purchased specifically for CabinCon and would be a game we could all play, I decided to give it another shot. I played as the Extortionist and made the decision early to basically join an alliance whenever someone offered. I stuck to that plan, but was something like the sixth or seventh player. So by the time the game rolled around to my turn, my forces were pretty depleted. I guess I just kept backing the wrong horse. On my turn, I was forced to attack Johnny, who could use his Warpish ability to fight me using the multitude of ships that were sitting in the Void. I didn't stand a chance and it wasn't close. But it wasn't just losing to him that truly put me out of the game.

Prior to my attacking Johnny, I had used a card against him that allowed me to snag a random card from his hand. I managed to get the one that would allow me to free all ships from the Void and send them back to their owners. Johnny had been sitting on the card for awhile because as long as our ships were trapped there, he was that much more powerful. I got the card, but couldn't play it until a certain timing window for which I needed to wait. Except then I was forced to attack him. I didn't have any cards in my hand of 6 or 7 that could help me beat him. So after he beat me, he was able to go through my facedown hand, one card at a time, until he found one he wanted. Well, he knew exactly which card he wanted, so he could keep digging through my hand until he found it. And wouldn't you know it? It was the absolute last card in my hand. While searching for that one card, he got to discard the entirety of the rest of my hand. So now my turn is over, I have a total of 3 ships on two planets, no cards in my hand, no alien extortion ability to pull cards from other players, and so no influence in or over the game unless I'm attacked. I remembered exactly how much I hated this kind of loss of agency. To be fair, the game is not designed to be balanced or anything like that. But I just felt like I had basically no control other than when to play cards and joining other people in battle. But even that latter part was limited because I needed to be invited to join. If I wasn't, then all I could do was sit there and do nothing. For anyone who likes the game, I'm sure it sounds to you as though I'm whining. Fair enough! But man, I just hate it. We realized that I couldn't technically be in the game with fewer ships than it would take to win, so I had just enough ships that I could colonize enough planets to win. But ultimately, I was out of the game while still needing to sit and nominally participate just in case someone attacked me or asked for me to ally with them while attacking or defending.

I try very hard to avoid hating things. I dislike Settlers of Catan because of how luck-based it is. You can settle on spaces that feature more common rolls, but they're still not guaranteed to come up. And if they don't, the phrase "You can always trade" doesn't hold a lot of water, since you still need some resources in order to trade in the first place. To be clear, Catan is one of the games that got me gaming in the first place! And plenty of people still really enjoy it! I'm saying that despite the fact that I'd rather not play it again and the more games I play, the less I like the design space. But I wouldn't say I hate it; I say I dislike it. But I just hate the space in which Cosmic Encounter exists. I just don't enjoy it and won't be going back to it. It just drives me nuts.

We followed this up with Liar's Dice, during which we had great fun! But the best part of Liar's Dice was easily using the beautiful custom wooden dice cups that Ryan crafted himself! 

I'm not crafty at all. Honestly, the primary obstacle to a decent iteration cycle for my board game designs is the way I drag my feet when it comes to building a prototype. Even the simplest parts just put me off. So the notion of spending as much time as Ryan did on these cups is anathema to me! But it was so cool to play with a custom set that was crafted specifically for CabinCon. I mentioned in the first part that one of my ways of expressing affection for others is to go through the effort of cooking good food for them. I don't always want to spend a lot of time on prep, but sometimes, folks are worth marinating food for two days before finally cooking it. Anyway, I felt similarly to what Ryan had prepared for us here. Super cool. I managed to make it to the final 3 after I had a streak of losing a couple of dice. (Don't call it a comeback! Because it wasn't.) Drew ended up winning at the end (pictured above, thinking through how best to screw over the competition!) and it was a lot of fun seeing how wild the bids could be, especially at the beginning. Basically, one person would start by guessing how many of a particular die facing there would be after everyone rolled their dice in secret. It was good to know that, for a couple of rounds, I could reliably bid "ten 4s" just to have Suf immediately follow up with "Good buddy!"

After Liar's Dice, we got into some Cash n Guns. I enjoy this game and, for me, it's a staple of CabinCon. It gets us away from a table for a bit and is just goofy fun. I think it's made that much better by Johnny's attachment to the Godfather Desk. The man will literally give up better loot on a regular basis just so he can get that desk and tell other people to point their guns elsewhere. I ended up not using my player ability at all during the game because it involved swapping loot and I was always pretty happy with the loot I got. I decided to play this game at random, so I never knew if I had a bullet in the gun when I pointed it at people or not. It's not always the way I want to play, but it was a lot of fun for this year's game!

Photo credit to Mike; thanks, Mike!!

I got lucky in this one and really flew under the radar. I only had guns pointed at me throughout the round twice, and both times, they were blanks and I got to collect loot. I think I only backed out of one round when I had two guns pointed at me at once. By game's end, it was clear that I would snag the big diamond, so collecting those and straight cash had paid off. I ended with $205,000, which was enough to win the game. The diamonds were everything for me. Usually, they're a little more hotly contested, but for some reason, in this game, they came out fairly evenly (so there were at least a couple available every round) and nobody but me seemed particularly interested in them.

This is the part of the evening wherein we split up for whatever came next. I can't remember what was proposed, but I do know it was at this point that Josh and I started getting into our minis games. We decided to start with Josh teaching me how to play Marvel Crisis Protocol, which smoothly segued into us playing our first game of X-Wing against one another in far too long!