"Walkürenritt"

Nerdly part two.

Early on Saturday morning, Jeff's alarm went off. If was about 10 minutes before mine, so I wasn't upset or anything. Mark started hollering at me to shut it off. I told him it wasn't mine it was Jeff's. He crawled out of bed, turned it off and headed for the shower. A few minutes later, Jeff's alarm went off again, but he was already in the shower. While cursing his name, I got up, shur off the alarm for good and then got dressed and headed up for breakfast.

Again there was no skim milk. And again I began to question what kind of food planers we had. Then the rest of the food smells made me realise that cold cereal was not in the cards for me. We had oatmeal and omelets and bacon, and we had the greatest vegan muffins ever. The muffins were pineapple and blueberry, and they were so popular that Derek, our fearless chef, had to make an announcement to the vegans in the house that we were running low so get off your bony anemic asses and come get some. OK, I might have added the last part in my head.

Mark had cleanup duty Saturday morning and was the first of my little group to realise that the cleanup standards were being set very high. We had to wait around 20-30 minutes for him before we could start our next game:

Valkyrie was a play test of a game by Jason Morningstar. Clinton, Mark, Jeff, and I enjoyed a game of tense intrigue as we planned on assassinating Hitler. The game as written takes about two hours or so. It lacked a strong role playing element, and was in fact more of a strategy war board game without the board. I had fun, and Mark had fun. I don't really think it was Jeff's cup of tea, but he seemed to dig it well enough. The fact that it was only two hours really helped. Jason told us that his company was contacted by the marketing arm of the film and asked if they could do up a game. The film is in the can now, and they keep moving back the date, so who knows if the game will ever get to see the light of day. (Hours later at Nerdly, I was approached with the idea that Jason may have been pulling an elaborate prank on all of us, and that he was never contacted to work on a game for the film.)

Jason explained the rules clearly, and then stepped back and only facilitated as needed. The rule system seemed to be a little confusing, but they were in fact really simple, I just tend to need to read rules before completely understanding. Every round, each of the conspirators (us the players) could choose to 1.) erode the confidence of one of the groups of power (military, civilians, or elite) 2.) recruit a new conspirator 3.) get more resources or 4.) "pull the trigger" and kill Hitler. The game had a really interesting concept wherein whatever you decided to do, you could not help yourself with your hard fought resources. Your teammates had to help you. So we plotted and planned and then went into action. We lost at least 4 conspirators to the SS. And Frelling Eva Braun cost us a good man and a wealth of resources, plus she was still around to defend Hitler at the end. She was absolutely the nemeses of the crew. But in the end, we killed Hitler, and marshalled our forces to win the coup afterwords!

After we finished the game, I found Jeff and Clinton preparing to reenact the battle for the beaches at Normandy. I sided with Jeff, because he was zee Germans, and I was going to need practice playing the bad guy for my after lunch game.

A ridiculously well played match between an old hand and two noobs. The battle came down to the wire, with both sides needing just one more victory point. Clinton had a strategy, and we had nothing. The luck of the cards gave us air power enough to defeat one of his tank units, and victory was ours, by the skin of our teeth. Later upon closer reading of the rules we realised that we (Jeff and I) were playing at a disadvantage. So there was some snags in the rules that almost caused us to lose. Remember that would you, until my next Nerdly update!