Saturday Morning Gaming: Kobayashi Maru (as a board game)

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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7 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    First game with the group (five players): We lost and lost badly. Nobody really knew what they were doing.

    Second game with the group (five players): We won and won handily. We might have been able to beat the game even if we were playing at a higher difficulty. We had synergies with each other and I am confident that if we used these same characters again for the next 5 games, we’d win 4 of them. Whew!

    Now I never have to play the game again.Report

    • KenB in reply to Jaybird says:

      Our group has played the coop game Shadowrift a number of times. The first few times, I couldn’t join, and the other three in our group learned and played — they won about 25% of the games and the wins were by the skin of their teeth. Then I joined in, and we won about 50% of the few games we played. Not long after, we added a couple new people to our group and played several more games (it’s one of the few we have that support 6 players) and we’ve won all of those games without any sense we were ever in the slightest danger. No doubt some of this is increasing experience, but it also appears they didn’t get the difficulty balance quite right in the basic game when scaling up the number of players. We’ve discussed some options for handicapping ourselves more if/when we play again.

      This one sounds like a good one for our group, but maybe i should wait for a follow-up game report from you before I plunk down the money…Report

      • Jaybird in reply to KenB says:

        I’ve had two days to think about it and I’d say that this is a great game *IF* part of the joy of playing the game is figuring out the mechanics.

        But we’ve figured out the mechanics and I don’t know that we’re ever going to play it again.

        Now, *I* might play it again with new people (my boss and his wife are Trekkies to the core and they’ll *LOVE* the game) but there’s no reason for my regular gaming group to ever play it again.

        We figured it out.Report

        • KenB in reply to Jaybird says:

          Thanks, this is great information — probably a pass then, though maybe I’ll survey the group.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to KenB says:

            My public library has games that can be checked out.

            If your public library does this sort of hippie crap, see if they have The Captain Is Dead. It’s the *PERFECT* “check it out from the library” game.Report

            • KenB in reply to Jaybird says:

              Oh wow, I never even considered that might be a possibility — I’m pretty sure our local library doesn’t, but most or all of the libraries in the state share membership, so I’ll look around. We’ve played a few games that were loaners from family/friends — same principle, it’s the best way to play a game that doesn’t have much left to offer after a half-dozen playthroughs.Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    And I’ve now met Sigrun in God of War. I’m pleased to say that I can consistently knock off two of her sixteen squares before needing a resurrection stone.Report