8/13 Las Vegas Game Day

Hello again my friends,

Today was an unusual Game Day for me, I did not play Pathfinder Society, instead I dipped a bit in the board games that are prevalent each and every game day.  Recently I had purchased Star Trek Expeditions, since I am an acknowledged Trekkie and this was the weekend of the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas.  It caught my interest by having the same look as the recent reboot of the series.

The look of the box is sweet, I've also played and enjoyed Heroclix, who's parent company WizKids is a solid game company. The creator Reiner Knizia is as a friend of mine calls "Rockstar of Board Game Creation". Opening the box everything was sorted and packaged well. The miniatures we nicely painted except the eyes on Kirk kept reminding of the hamster in the Adam Sandler movie Bedtime Stories. The character cards and mission cards were of high quality unfortunately the bulk of the playing cards were kind of on the flimsy side, it was agreed at the table we would've paid a few extra dollars for higher quality.

The rules and the first group took a failed start as we realized we were playing half the game wrong so we did a reset and tried again. The rules took about half an hour 45 minutes to go through and we had to visit them a couple of time during the first game. On a side note shooting Klingons with the band 3d6 was a blast! We played it on Cadet (easy) to get a feel for it and it was fun I thought it was a little to easy, but the second I thought that we had a close call losing the Enterprise! A few quick repairs and awesome rolls later we accomplished the 3 missions in the required time and had a good time doing so.

Unfortunately half the table had to leave so we were taking a break when Steve came by and asked if we could play again. So I busted it out again, Ed D. and Bill T. joined in for the game and we attempted it on medium difficulty. This time seemed to be much more brutal and difficult even though the "medium" part really did not have much of an effect, just the klingons rolled very very well and nearly destroyed the Enterprise (common theme?) again after scrambling to get repairs and fend off our foes, we noticed that the timer was getting close to the end. With 4 stardates(days/turns) left we destroyed the klingons and with only one turn left finished the final mission with almost a Max score!

It was a solid offering by WizKids and one I will surely be playing again in the future. Overall I give a 7 out of 10.

Our VC Issak before his killing spree

In other news the table next to ours was playing Pathfinder Society and suffered a TPK at the hands of our local Venture Captain, they were fortunately Resurrected and still among the living.  The only reason i bring this is up, is that that table was the oldest(highest level) characters in the Las Vegas Lodge.



VGD (Vegas Game Day) looked to be another success today, a nice attendance with at least 6 full tables of games and people mingling and chatting about the games. One of the biggest subject's I over heard was the recent GenCon (sniff sniff I didn't get to go) and the upcoming NeonCon (ftw!) so buzz has started for the Con.

As one last note I recently received an email from Margaret Weis (http://www.margaretweis.com/) author of my Favorite trilogy DragonLance Chronicles, has given my permission to use the title Fewmaster for my blog here and twitter! Now I know a lot of people would not have bothered asking Ms Weis or Mr. Hickman, but I felt a little guilty for using their IP without permission.


But its time to watch my DVR'd Torchwood Miracle Day

Yours in Gaming

Fewmaster Jay