• Location: Horsham

Hampasta night!

Today's Monday, which means hampasta night! This time it was at Paddy's house, and we ended up playing Concept. It's a board game twist on charades - instead of acting out words, there's a board full of various symbols and pictures that you place markers next to. Everyone then tries to guess what your chosen ones represent, which could be a thing, a name, a concept, or a phrase (the latter tend to be very hard to guess and result in much fail).

elemnar joined us today and proved to be scarily good at Concept. In one case she guessed the answer almost immediately - I played as the main concept "fictional character" with the added attributes "small" and "green", then played an additional thought of "film". Two guesses later elemnar had Yoda as the answer.

Speaking of board games, on Saturday I was round at Jonners' and we played Eclipse with Matt and Paddy. My empire didn't do particularly well for victory points - exploration only netted me low-value hexes - but the imperial fleet on the other hand was surprisingly effective. A squadron of three interceptors blatted aliens left and right without taking any damage, and in the final round Paddy went for broke and launched an invasion fleet consisting of two cruisers and two dreadnoughts (all upgraded with plenty of shielding and targeting computers - meaning he only had to roll 3 or higher to hit). Unfortunately for him, I'd been sneakily upgrading my vessels with improved firepower, improved drives (giving me initiative), and more armour (having abandoned targeting computers as being pointless against his -3 to hit shields). That combined with some last-minute shipbuilding resulted in a defending force of four surprisingly tough interceptors (I think 3 hit points each), and four very heavily armoured cruisers (6 hit points!).

The opening salvo from my interceptors blew away both his cruisers before they could act (I managed four 6's on eight dice, dealing two damage per hit). It then turned into a war of attrition, with his dreadnoughts slowly chewing through the interceptors and then nibbling away at the cruisers. Eventually it came down to one dreadnought and one cruiser, both badly damaged with the next hit deciding the battle... which went to Paddy, as he only needed a 3 while I needed a 6. Still, 'twas an epic battle and if it hadn't been the last turn I may have been able to chase him out of the system with freshly-built ships - while I was struggling for victory points, my economy on the other hand was doing great.