I'll get around to Pax Porfiriana...probably if I can make it over to The New Swamp Castle II some time. It looks good, and I like pretty much anything Eklund does.

Small World - Paired with some kind of birch syrup barleywine. Haven't played the game in a long time. I lost pretty badly due to having my initial human race sent into extinction before I could even decline them. Fucking Were-Gypsies! Never really got anything going after that.

King Of Tokyo - Paired with Dogfish Head's Raisin D'Etre. I released the Kraken on Tokyo for a good run putting me well in the lead for VP's but ended up dying later from lack of fast enough healing. Game was won by the King wiping out the other monsters.

An ~~~EPIC~~~ game of Babylon's Burning - some Raiders trying to steal the ammo stores from an Enclave. Unfortunately for the Raiders, there wasn't much wind so the batteries of mortars were laying down pre-aimed fire, blowing them to bird shit, while leaving huge swaths of smoke on the battlefield.

To make matters worse it allowed the Enclave guards to toss nerve gas grenades, which took forever the clouds to clear, and it caused a two-foot wide no-go zone. Suppressing fire kept the other areas closed off while the mortars pounded away.

The few raiders who did happen to get around the wall of gas/machinegun fire ended up realizing that there were guards in the small church to the north, who popped out with assault rifles and lit them the fuck up.

It was a glorious bloodbath. Took forever and a day to set up, took forever and a day to get the squads picked, but the game was two hours of orders, attacks, and awesome.

played City of Remnants. Game flopped a little, but more due to the people i was playing with than the game. This game can bring out the AP in people as theres lots of decisions to make. I got a couple of rules wrong, notably allowing people to reap the benefits of their higher rank developments every turn rather than round. So the development tile that allowed you to roll to see how much prestige you got really churned it and became the king of the hill objective. I did realise this fairly quickly but left it as i wanted the game to end quicker. It still took 3 hours, but as i say this is more due to the players than the game itself.

The rules themselves are fairly clear, but hard to reference and some of the cards seem to be open to interpretation.

Pretty impressed by Chris "Fallout" Taylor's Moonbase Alpha (published by Victory Games). It's a simple wargame with a smart setting and some clever ideas. Well worth a look if you like to play games that are a little off the beaten track. Avoids the usual VG pitfall of cheapo components too, which is a bonus.

Played a 2 player City of Remnants on Friday night. I think this game is awesome, I think it's going to be great with my group, I can't wait to play it again, I DON'T think it's a very good 2 player game. We had the red gang going against the blue gang, and with the races so far apart from each other blue was able to build up so much faster than red, and red wasn't able to use his superior strength to do much (especially with some YCUs dropping betwixt us.)

The whole no retreat combat mechanic makes combat so very, very, very costly. Losing a major battle basically knocks you out of the game, and red learned that the hard way.

That said, this game mixes disparate genres better than just about any other game I've ever seen. The deckbuilding combined with the area control combined with the action points combined with the DOAM... I'm so happy with it. You know games are awesome when you start thinking up expansion possibilities during your first play.

Saturday I played Dominant Species for the first time ever. That game is... heavy. Incredibly heavy. My head's still spinning heavy. I enjoyed it even though I only "got" it in the last third or so of the game. I got smoked. Looking forward to playing it again, but really glad I didn't buy it.

Played Kremlin with some entirely new players last weekend. They enjoyed it a lot. One of them went entirely power crazy and started purging people just because he could.

Played one game of City of Remnants 2-player, I was the green and my opponent was the blue. He basically charged up the middle right away, winning a few key battles (green's units are crap in comparison) and captured my starting location. I resigned. We felt it didn't make a very good 2-player game since whoever wins the first few battles and controls the center has a huge advantage. Since I can never get more than one other person to the table I'm trading it.

Played Tribunal with 5 players this time. I made a mistake early on when I took the Senators and took 2 cards (which I needed) instead of a scroll or I could have ended the game as tribune a round before it did. I'm still not sure about this one, as it just seems too easy to accomplish most of the goals unless someone is really going to run interference and take up two slots in a faction to prevent taking them, in addition to the chariot. That, of course, screws with their own game, so it can boil down to kingmaker.

When our 6th person arrived, we switched to Rex. I was the only one there with Dune experience and was playing Sol/Fremen. The Hacan/Navigators won the first game in turn 3 with a quick strike that took two of the other players by surprise. We decided to stick with the same races and I got wrecked by cards and had most of my forces in the tanks and, thus, could never muster the influence to get cards after that and became a combat non-entity. I did manage to ally with the Jol-Nar/Atreides and we came close to winning but the Lazax just had too many tanks... which we later discovered he had because he was taking his free one from the dead piles AND recruiting another with influence. He won a solo in turn 5.

Then we switched to CE and it was Magician vs Mite vs Cudgel vs Lightning vs Animal vs Fungus. I moved pretty quickly to 4 colonies but couldn't get past the hurdle and the Fungus was just wrecking everything before he lost one fight and Mite used the Reincarnator flare on him, forcing him to switch to Mirror. We had 2 players at 4 and 3 players at 3 before Mite finally won her 5th over Cudgel.

Got some gaming in this week:

Nexus Ops. Excellent as always. The guy who won launched two dragons off the tower and landed on a guy's home base hex that had only one human. But the human played a card that reversed the combat order and his lone human rolled a 6 stabbed the dragon in the eye with a pen knife. Awesome.

Cosmic Encounter. I fucked up and thought I could fend off alone (no allies) a guy who was one planet away from winning. He had already spent high cards just before my turn. I had vengeance or whatever and a good card, so my total reached 30 or so. But he played a 40 card and won. blech.

Zombies!!! It was my first time playing. Fun game!

Modern Art. Excellent as always. Damn this game is hard. But it always has some good laughs and interaction.