Last night I decided to check out the New York City Boardgames & Cardgames Group from meetup.com. I even paid almost $30 just to get there and back from Grand Central since I was on crutches and needed to take a taxi. But I don’t regret spending the money.
The meetup is held at Lucky Jack’s down on the lower east side. It’s a bar that has a comfy little downstairs area. The hardest part of the evening was getting down the 15 or so steps on crutches. Actually, getting back up them was the scarier bit…
I got there a little late (maybe 6:30) and people were already gaming. Everybody seemed pretty engaged, so I just went over to an empty table and figured I might as well put out my copy of Drakon as bait and see what happens.
Well it worked and within 5 minutes I had 3 other people who wanted to play. I went over the basics and we played one game. Since it was everybody else’s first time playing I took it easy and tried to explain different strategies and good and bad reasons for doing certain things, even letting players take back decisions if they wanted to.
After that one of the players was nice enough to go get me a drink from upstairs, then showed us a game called Set.
I don’t normally enjoy “abstract” games, but this one was pretty neat. The gist is that you have a bunch of cards with different symbols, colors, shadings and numbers on them. A set is any combination where each of those attributes are all the same or all completely different. So if the symbol, shading and color are all the same, but they each have a different number of symbols… you have a set. It took a little while to grasp it but we eventually got it. Then some seasoned players came along and just schooled us at the game. Then it wasn’t quite as fun…
After that a guy came over and asked if we wanted to play a game called Hybrid Dungeon. That sounded cool to me, so I was up for it. We ended up playing with 4 people. The premise of this game is that each player has a character made of 3 creature parts: upper, middle and lower. So you might have the head of an elephant, the body of a shark and the legs of a centaur – which is what I have. Each part has different attributes like weight, height, attack, carry, etc. Some let you fly, swim, jump and even carry other characters. You travel through a dungeon, opening doors and fighting the guardians of those doors. The players work together to fight the creatures with the end goal of retrieving 3 gems located throughout the dungeon. I got into this game because we could joke about our characters and the situations we were getting into, like how I was really strong and defeated a lot of monsters but somehow never got to keep any treature… it was all in good fun though.
Somebody was passing around a Vegetarian Indian menu by then and I decided to get something since I hadn’t had any dinner and it was already 9pm.
After that we played another game by the same guy called Assorti. This was a card game using only the numbers and aces (as ones). The idea was to try to get cards in your hand that matched as many cards as people put down in front of them (3 total each), but those cards keep changing. It was certainly interesting but not my kind of game.
Dinner arrived and I spent some time talking to the couple I had played Hybrid Dungeon and Assorti with. The woman told me she’s being playing Magic The Gathering with her daughter for the past 11 years. I told her that’s the last thing I was expecting her to tell me!
Once I was done eating it was around 10:30 and I was getting pretty tired and had a long trek home. I peeked at some of the games people were playing and then headed up the stairs. Overall it was a very fun evening and I’m very glad I went. I’ve already RSVP’d for the next one on April 1st. I wish they had them more often!
