Category Archives: Geekery

Pandemic Legacy April Review

We lost our first game! We each played the same characters as the March campaign: the quarantine specialist, operations expert, dispatcher, and scientist. Starting out the game the objectives were the same as the last one, accomplish two out of the three objectives. The objectives were cure the three diseases, make military bases in every region, or eradicate one disease. This game was especially harder than the previous ones though for us.

When we got to the second epidemic the city that Don’s character was in,  I believe it was Johannesburg, outbroke so he had to take a scar. The operations specialist has the first scar since we started playing legacy. He chose the scar that would make him discard a card whenever an epidemic card is pulled.

During the second epidemic card we were instructed to pull the next legacy card. This one told us that the yellow disease which is c0da has mutated even more.  Basically from the description it sounds like this disease creates zombies. The cities that are infected with the yellow disease are called faded cities now. They get a faded sticker and instead of yellow cubes they get faded markers, which look like little zombie figures. Faded cities are bad because if they outbreak they spread to the surrounding cities even if the surrounding cities are of other colors. They work just like the regular cubes in that if you run out of them and can’t put anymore on the board you lose the game. Also if you are in a city that becomes faded your character takes a scar. Basically the only way to control the faded cities are to keep quarantines on the yellow cities.

We were going through the cards and we were realizing we were not close to any of the objectives. We made a plan of how to get the cures but the blue cure was complicated. This game as well as the last game I found myself struggling as the scientist to get enough cards to create cures. It should be easy for me to cure because I need one less card than everyone else, but instead I am struggling to get cities of the same color. I am wondering if this is because we are not using the researcher. Maybe we should switch it up next time by taking out the scientist and putting in the researcher.

We were no where near getting military bases up so we opted to try to eradicate the black disease because it had already been cured. Things seemed to be going on track and I would be able to cure blue on my turn. We failed to realize though that the red disease was getting out of control and on Ian’s turn, right before mine, red exploded twice and we ran out of red cubes, meaning we lost the game. It was very disappointing. I think even if we found the cure for blue in the next turn we still would have struggled to eradicate black. Eradication of diseases is one of the hardest things to do in pandemic so next time I think we are focusing on military bases. Even though we lost we will be able to replay April’s campaign one more time before we have to move on.

Since we lost we got to add 2 to our funding, meaning we will get event cards in the next game. This will be nice. And even in losing, you are able to pick 2 upgrades. I believe for our upgrades we chose to keep 2 military bases to be in every game. This will help us accomplish our goal in the next game.

Pandemic Legacy March Review

The March game was a little scary at first because we learned we would have to complete two objectives. In addition to the mandatory objective of curing the three diseases we would also have to either eradicate one disease or build military bases in each of the six major regions of the world. We got a new character in this game, the operations expert. We also got a new set of available scars for players, which fortunately we haven’t had to use yet.

We didn’t think the instructions really explained military bases much. Only players with dog tags on their character card were allowed to jump from military base to military base. It also never told us how to make a military base, but the new character was able to make them so it only made sense to play the operations expert.  Don was excited to have the operations expert because he likes to play him. He can also make research stations easier. We opened a box that gave us little green houses to symbolize the military bases.

Don played the operations expert, Ian was the quarantine specialist, Cassie was the dispatcher, and I was the scientist again. This was probably the hardest game so far; cities were out breaking like crazy and the outbreak marker got down pretty far.  We won though and at the end we got to choose upgrades. Since we eradicated one disease we upgraded that one. While we were choosing the upgrades we noticed we did the upgrade on the disease wrong during the first game. In the instructions it says to make sure to upgrade the diseases in the correct order, but on the sticker sheet it just tells you that these are the upgrades for the eradicated diseases.  The first time we upgraded an eradicated disease we only read from the sticker sheet. So like anyone, we questioned that the upgrades were numbered level 1-4, but we still decided to choose a level 3 or 4 upgrade. We should have chose a level 1. So this time we went by the rules in the book and chose a level 1 upgrade. We keep misreading things! Can’t wait for April.

Zombie Apocalypse Live

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By far the best haunted house / zombie experience I have ever had. Each person gets a realistic M16A4 Rifle (infrared) that has safety, single round and 3 round burst settings. Air-soft recoil action. All the zombie actors have electronic sensors. Gotta make the head-shot. Soooooo good. Zombies come charging at you and you let them have it. Three Reloading/Safe House locations throughout. Two Buildings/play areas.http://zombieapocalypselive.com/ This group is doing a small tour, if its coming by you I highly recommend.

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Tabletop Starcraft Cameo – Felicia Day – Geek and Sundry

So I follow Felicia Day’s updates. What can I say, I’m a fan. And I was watching some of her “commercial trailers” for her up and coming Geek and Sundry channel on Youtube. I’ll probably keep up with it. It looks good.

Anyways… One of the shows on Geek & Sundry, that will appear every other Friday, is TableTop with Wil Wheaton. Basically a show in which celebrity geeks play table top games. Sounds like fun to me.

So I’m watching this Wil Wheaton commercial trailer for Tabletop and that’s when I see a cameo! At first I was like, I guess I’ll watch this show, but after seeing the cameo, I am TOTALLY going to watch this show. Hopefully this person will be in the first few episodes!

If you like Starcraft, you’ll spot him right away!

Massive Fail

So Valmonuni and I recorded 100 minutes of footage last night. This was done in ten 10-minute segments. Was really excited to encode them this morning and start editing them. However when I went to encode them I found out that none of Val’s audio was recorded. So really, all I have is about 30 minutes of me talking and 70 minutes of me listening.

UGH

So sad. So sad to lose so much footage to such a stupid thing. I guess from now on there has to be a mic check and footage check throughout the recording.

MAN sucks sooo much. I mean yeah it was a 100 minutes of footage that may or may not have been good. And who knows if any of it would have been entertaining enough to put online, but still…. ugh 100 minutes. dammit!

Oh well. … It’s a learning experience. I guess.