Heads of State and The Accountant 2

A pair of action flicks!

Heads of State

When arms dealing bad guys try to attack a NATO summit its up to the new(ish) POTUS (played by John Cena) and a grizzled UK PM (played by Idris Elba) to save the day. Luckily they are also both fit dudes because this show is definitely an action comedy one with some good hits of laughs as the two leaders don't really like each other. Big props to the very succinct flash back sequences used and to Priyanka Chopra who actually carries the harder action segments in this film wonderfully. Definitely a silly movie and one you don't want to turn your brain on for. If that sounds like your cup of tea then you will certainly enjoy this!  

The Accountant 2

The autistic accountant/hitman (again played by Ben Affleck) is back and roped into a tricky missings persons case which warrants the involvement of his also hitman/but not accountant brother (played by Jon Bernthal) in a pretty humorous and violent outing with decent action scenes and character growth. While there are still some plot holes I actually prefer this one to the first as the blend between nerdity and violence is much better from the get go. Thumbs up!

Guest Board Game Ranking

I had five extra people in my house for just around three weeks and we played games on every night except four. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to list how I feel they ranked the games they played (they didn't get through my whole collection) just based on engagement and enjoyment (I didn't ask them to fill out a survey) as to compare with how I've ranked things previously. 

From worst to best:

Pandemic - too slow at 7 players and virus cube thing not just cutting it. Loss.

Kiri-ai: The Duel - seats only 2. too obtuse and hard to compete with other games that seat more.

Police Precinct - slow at 6 player and too easy. Win.

Operation Flash Point - 3 player. Was OK but too simple. Win.

Squid Game - 3 player. Better recieved than I thought, but too luck based.

Forbidden Desert - 4 player. Another mostly luck based game. Loss. My components here are getting frayed from years of play. :P

Ra - 5 player. Just "ok". Hasn't been rating high for any of my groups compared to the online accolades.

Horrified - 5 player. Fun and funny but still too slow for some.

Atlantis Rising - 8 player. Seats many is a plus but goes a bit long. 

Magic Maze - 8 player giggle fest, but got old after 2 games.

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea - 4 player mind wreck. Good but headaches occur over time.

Jaws - 4 player might have rated higher if the shark didn't win, but I'm a pretty good shark. :P

The Grizzled - 4 player multi victory. It was easy mode though as I forgot that multi supports cancel out

Lord of the Rings Duel - rated high with the visiting chess player even though he lost to his mom

Mikado "Pickup Sticks" / Jack stone / Tortoise Tumble - physical games enjoyed by many

Mancala - since its much like Sungka it was enjoyed by the visiting Sungka champ who won a lot

El Grande - 4 players. By the time they were working out the strategy it was too late to catch the run away victor (me) 

Black Orchestra - 4 players. Chess player killed Hitler hitting 4 out of 4 dice. OMG.

Risk: Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim - 4 player. Wifey won on victory points followed by chess man. My heroes were super short lived. :P

Darts - 3 players, round the world. My wife is too good at this. :P

The Mind - 8 players. Hilarious and always a good party game.

Klask - fast paced "air hockey" with magnets is always a winner. Seating only 2 is its downside.

Chess - well. When there's a chess player in the house, of course this ranks high. Been awhile since the board got this much use. I lost one blitz as white and won one long game as black using the Caro-Kann.

Escape from Colditz - 6 players. POWs escaped the German guards (played by me) and good fun was had by all. Being too long is its down side.

Lords of Waterdeep - 4 player. Awesome, and my wife still rules this game. 

Crokinole - Fun, fast and seats four. There's a reason its my most played game. 

Sequence - 6 players. The game they liked the best is something I didn't really rate as being that great.

Just goes to show that different games appeal to different people!

Echoes of Exile: The Prince's Pursuit

It's spruiking time as guildie Malkhia has released his fantasy novel Echoes of Exile: The Prince's Pursuit! If you're an avid reader please give it a try. Maybe you'll also enjoy Juris' The Golem City while you're at it. 

While we're doing all things guildie, I may as well up the link to Lyv's music youtube channel and the Dragonarm website where DL does monthly gaming posts or videos.

Sully, A Working Man

Two movies I watched with my guests!

Sully

After performing an emergency water landing of a passenger plane in the Hudson River, Captain Sully (played by Tom Hanks) faces the aviation review board who question if that was the correct course of action after simulations project his damaged flight being able to make it to two airports all while most of the public treats him as a hero. This "based on true events" film is a mostly talking one with heavy use of flash backs, but it is still pretty cool all up.

A Working Man

A retired soldier who now works in construction (played by Jason Statham) tries his best [not very hard at all] to leave his life of killing behind but when ridiculously over the top bad guys show up to mess with his place of business, what else can a guy do but blow them all away with high powered weaponry? Yep, this flick is one of pure "Statham taking out the bad guys" action with very little plot and set dressing to go with it. An easy one to turn off your brain and enjoy. :P

Risk: Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim

Here's a cut throat competitive game for 2-5 players that I originally just got awhile ago because I like all things "Skyrim" but haven't had a group to play it with until now. So, first of all it is RISK. A game of putting little figures on a map and then moving said little figures into territories of your frenemies to do some dice battle in a bid for map-wide domination.

Dice determines a lot of things here like who goes first and who survives combat. After "spawning" the map with your little dudes each player can then invade sending up to three of them into neighboring hostile territory (and some neighbors are connected by daedric portals). Attackers roll a dice per dude they sent while the defenders can defend with up to two. Compare the highest die pairs with defenders winning ties and remove the losing pieces. Then if there are still defenders, continue the dice rolling fest!

So far that's just regular Risk on a Skyrim map. What makes it more Skyrim though is that each faction has a hero and each turn other than gaining reinforcements you gain magicka which lets you buy and cast spells (all one shot) or buy important objective cards. You start with two of these and at the end of your turn if you've completed one you announce it and gain the indicated victory points. First to 10 wins, which is a lot faster than map-wide domination. For ridiculous hi jinks you can also shuffle in the "End of Game" card in the reward pile that people draw from if they won any territory on their turn.

Heroes are pretty tough with 10 HP each but they can only move where you have a little dude, and while enemy little dudes can attack them they can only defend against the little dudes (even if they were invading). Attack or defend, heroes always use max dice. Wait, if heroes can only defend against little dudes what do they attack? Other heroes (and heroes slain by other heroes get all their gear [you can buy armor and weapons too] taken by the victor).

Heroes can also fight dragons. There are four that randomly spawn at the start of the game and no little dudes can enter their territory without a hero to try slay the dragon. Dragons also have 10 HP and will only ever defend. Killing one grants the victorious hero a powerful dragon shout that they can use once per turn like, convince enemy little guy to become your little guy or Fus Ro Dah all enemy little guys out of a territory! 

Alas the rules need some interpretation and I house ruled only three invasions per turn to keep turns shorter and have each player engaged (which also invalidated at least two objective cards as they needed 4 and 6 successful invasions respectively). The VP win condition thankfully makes the game more manageable but it still took 4 of us maybe three and a half hours to finish. 

Better than I thought it would be, but it still doesn't beat El Grande or the always excellent and fast paced Lords of Waterdeep. 

Bracket City

Sorry I've been quiet for awhile. I've had some guests over for a number of weeks which has kept us quite entertained and busy! Here's some entertainment for you while I write up future posts... Bracket City!

(GR) Wildlands: Pardon

[Part of the Wasted Land story] 

Despite the recent set backs with my squad the cartel must really be hurting on other fronts with full on aerial assaults happening on their production lines as the cartel leader calls in to meet. After killing who knows how many people he has managed to negotiate his way to a Presidential Pardon and extraction to turn in other nearby cartels, but this doesn't sit well with the CIA handler assigned to this task force and she shoots him dead before fleeing the scene. Maybe there's some truth to Walker's intuition?

Nevertheless, we're sent to support an elite Splinter Cell operative Sam Fisher in catching her - at a Unidad base no less, where she's selling secrets to try make a deal to escape. She's already KIA by Fisher when we arrive, but he has to hack the database to purge the Unidad server of its intel (in the center of the base we just stealthed through, with a strict "drop no bodies" requirement) while we mount a defense at all costs (and kill everyone anyway - wtf) as the entire army is alerted and tries to get to us. 

Under barrel grenade launchers are great for helicopters and many Unidad soldiers go down for each Ghost Recon soldier that does the same. Eventually its just Sam and myself left as the wipe completes. We jump out a back window and run for the nearest car when an explosion erupts behind me, throwing me forward and into a wall. Everything goes black. [Seriously, I can't win this mission...]