Wednesday Night NWN

The gang (Jeff, Harold, Nick, Rosie and myself) got together last night for some NWN action.  We are still trying to work our way through the quest system on Kharlindale Realms and move our current characters up to level 40 (max level).  After quite a few issues due to new laptops in the group we had a great session netting some nice items and I at least gained a level.

Wednesday Night Never Winter Nights

We had a full house for Never Winter Nights last night with myself, Jeff, Nick (and Rosie), and Harold all showing up.  We began the evening by my, in effect, costing Jeff $50 by showing him what the new Civilization V game looked like :-)

After this we went onto Kharlindale, the NWN server that we frequent and completed the Cleon Hipparcurus (sp) mission.  We had a great time and fought a bunch of creatures I had not seen before like Bulletts, Manticores, Sea Hags, and in the end Medusa herself.  Everyone leveled up during the evening and we seemed to be getting back into the flow after our recent break.  The party is now between levels 35 and 31 and we have went further along the story quest line than any of our other characters.

Wednesday Night Never Winter Nights

After a long hiatus due to the demise of Jeff's laptop we had another NWN session.  Harold, Jeff, Nick (and Rosie), and myself loaded up NWN and tried to remember how to play.  We went online to our favorite site, Kharlindale Realms.  We have been working through the story quests for the past year or so.  Harold needed to have his toon finish the Shadow Legion quest so we went there.  The Shadow Legion guys are very tough to hit and the boss guy is VERY hard to hit.  Given that Harold's toon had to be the person to hit the kill blow (not as big a problem as it would seem as his guy was the best attacker) we all dropped away when the boss fell to Near Death and simply healed Harold so he could keep swinging.  In the end we realized that there was no way for Harold to kill the guy along due to his high regeneration and we gave up on getting Harold the quest and Jeff killed the boss. 

Probably the funniest part of the session was when I killed my toon by taking off a necklace.  I had just been raised from the dead and was low on hit points.  We were changing regions and Harold mentioned that we needed to change out our amulets to maximize our armor value.  The amulet I was wearing gave me a constitution boost and when I took it off my hit points fell as I lost the constitution bonus points and crumpled to the ground!

Carcassonne - 7 July

Our normal Magic the Gathering/Never Winter Nights Wednesday gaming session played out a little differently this week.  Chief card flopper and Magic aficionado Harold was away on vacation so Jeff, Nick, Rosie and I instead tried out another new game from Origins, Carcassonne by Rio Grande Games.  Carcassonne is a tile laying game where you place tiles building roads, cities, cloisters, and fields.  You claim these features using one of your miniature people or Meeples as they are known.  More points are scored for longer roads and larger cities.  It is a very simple but elegant game that is always different due to the various ways that the tiles are placed.  It is also a beautiful game as the tiles and meeples are very nicely produced.

We played the first game without the included river expansion.  Nick won this game.  The second game we added the rivers expansion which adds further constraints to how the tiles are laid.  After a tight game where we experienced our first "Cloister F$@*" (nearly all of the cloisters clustered together) Nick and Jeff ended up tied at the end.  Everyone really enjoyed the game.  We all look forward to adding on the various expansions that are available.

On a related note, there is an iPhone app available for Carcassonne that is quite good.  I have been playing with it for a while and it does an excellent job of translating the game to a handheld device.