Sunday, October 20, 2013

The horror of cooperative games

I've been lax in keeping the blog current so I'm making up for it today with a graphic recounting of the annual Border Board Games horror fest.  It's been our tradition to break out our monster themed games in October because, well, monster games are cool.  We were pleased to have some travelers from away as well as a few new faces at the Derby Line Village Hall this month.

Thanks to Evil Brad and Lia for coming along as well as a big thanks to Lee, Monique, Josh and Alton for coming by.  Alton has been a regular for the past few months but, due to my sloth, hadn't been mentioned yet.  The regular gang of Beth, Rob, Mike, Dennis, Homer, Neil and myself made for three tables of mayhem.

The longest game of the evening pitted Beth, Monique, Rob, Josh and Neil against The Dark Goat of the Wood itself - Shub-Nigurrath.  The gang battled bravely fending off repeated monster surges, travelling to the outer worlds and eventually sealing off the evil from Arkham.  having watched a few how-to videos on Arkham Horror prior to Saturday night enabled the gang to formulate a plan to help dig out the tools and knowledge the group needed to accomplish their task.

Lee, Lia and Alton tackled Betrayal at House on the Hill in the first installment of the game played.  Not sure how that went but it appeared that they enjoyed themselves thoroughly.

Meanwhile, Homer, Dennis , Mike and I tried to take on Evil Brad and his legions of undead in Last Night on Earth.  By some bizarre twist, this game turned out to be the worst Bible camp experience any of our characters had ever experienced.  With Father McFeely (or whatever his name was) leading the group of teens in Sally, Jenny and Billy, it was some old dude and a bunch of hormonal  kids against ravenous hordes.  The outcome was pretty much a foregone conclusion as Brad unleashed endless waves of zombies while the teens picked through the wreckage of the high school in an attempt to dig up anything useful.

What they managed to find was a chainsaw in the garage, a pair of flares guns and not much else.  father McFeely's flare gun lit up a zombie while Sally decided to use hers to send a signal for help.  Unfortunately, the only help that arrived smelled bad, looked worse and only wanted to eat us all.  No one is really sure what Billy did except to turn into a zombie and cost us the game.

In a strange twist, the transition from LNoE to Tammany Hall came as a great surprise to all of us.  But politics is a horror show of its own I suppose.  In the end, despite having trailed the pack for most of the game, Dennis pulled out the win based on the strength of his Irish votes.  Dennis winning control of New York is probably what triggered the zombie apocalypse that followed.

From Tammany Hall, Brad and I took the hearse of defeat over to join Lia and Lee for a game of Zombicide.  Our task was seemingly simple - gather some supplies, jack a car and get the heck out of Dodge.  Amy, Ned, Phil and Wanda had to break into the old store, gather up water, canned goods and rice, find a car and then drive off into the post-apocalyptic sunset.  easy-peasy you say.  Well, it kind of was thanks to a couple of sawed off shotguns, an early Molotov cocktail, my second chainsaw of the night and some timely sniping.  In the biggest surprise of the night, Evil Brad (or Brad the Beatific) declared that no one would get left behind.  Constable Phil was stuck on the other side of the building by the Pimp Mobile and wouldn't be able to make it to the squad car for the quick getaway.  Rather than abandon a fellow survivor, the gun toting maniacs decided to shoot Phil a path back across the Mega Mart.  In the end, hot-foot Wanda raced the car around the corner and to safety, all four survivors and the goods intact.

Meanwhile, round two of Betrayal was breaking out as Beth, Monique, Josh, Rob and Neil braved that creaking old mansion on top of the hill.  The haunt (Neil) turned out to be a pretty potent poltergeist.  As the heroes rushed around, somewhat ineffectually, trying to find and light candles to perform an exorcism, Neil floated around choking them out one by one.  In the end the poltergeist found the peace he sought, even if it was occasionally disturbed by the drip-drip-dripping of his victims' blood.

And that was how we spent our Almost-Halloween.  How about you?