Time T+4, serious internal threat. Repeat, time T+4, serious internal threat.

[sniffnoy]

So we've been turning up the difficulty in Space Alert lately.

I should probably clarify who "we" is -- me, Noelle, Andy, Nick, and Seth. That's basically our usual Truth House crew now; roles vary. Josh and Eric (first-year Eric, not Gamble or DeVries, who haven't lived here for a while) have played before, as has Sam, but these days it's usually the same five of us. On the one hand, it seems kind of disappointing that we're not getting more people involved, like we used to; on the other hand, hey, a consistent crew. (Although Seth stayed out for the first two out of the four games tonight.)

And we definitely seem to be getting better! For quite a while here "standard difficulty" was all decks mixed, except serious internal, which would be white. But not too long ago we started mixing in the yellow serious internals; then removing the white ordinary threats; until today the final game we played was all decks yellow, except for serious internal, which was mixed.

Two of the games we played had all-yellow threats! We survived! In our final game the Seeker -- the dreaded Seeker, which I consider the scariest threat in the base set -- showed up! We survived! (Yeah, I realize other people consdier the Executioner or the Nuclear Device scarier. To be fair, I've still never faced the Nuclear Device; it might be harder than I'm giving it credit for.)

Actually, on that topic -- I realized today, one thing that makes the Seeker easier is that it doesn't move on ties, and ties are probably more likely than non-ties, and not moving is easier to handle than moving.

...we forgot to account for the Seeker knocking out the person who kills it though, which was Seth. Oops. Seth actually got knocked out in both games he was in tonight. In the earlier one, he was knocked out by the Executioner; we knew he would get knocked out, since his move to the bridge, where the Executioner was headed, was locked in by then; but I (the captain) got mixed up and thought he'd be knocked out at the end of the turn rather than the beginning. Which meant he was knocked out before hitting the mouse rather than after. But we survived!

Maybe soon we'll turn it up to all yellow -- I mean, guaranteed all yellow, not just possibly all yellow. And maybe soon I should look into getting the expansion, for the few more months we're all here...

-Harry

Comments

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Didn't we play all-yellow at Oren's once, and win? I don't remember quite what our performance was that game.

Also, did you coordinate to predict where the Seeker would move?

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah! Beyond all-yellow, even; we went nearly all-red and survived. I wrote that up here. :) I remember also surviving an all-yellow game with some math friends of mine, after surprisingly few games. Seems the Truth House crew is not quite as skilled. But we're getting there, evidently!

The Seeker fortunately only moved once. Or rather, didn't move at all; I (the captain) made a big call of "OK, everyone, I need to know where you're going to be at the end of turn 6!" And then it turned out the Seeker wasn't moving, allowing Seth to take it out pretty quickly. Actually doing this is what led to the realization above -- yes, you need to coordinate to predict where it's moving; but the die is loaded towards the easiest possibility.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Also, another funny story from this session: Second game, I think it was, I started out (turns 1 and 2) by going downstairs and cracking a canister (shield trick). Then second phase it turned out nobody else could get the mouse, so I had to go back upstairs and get it (turns 4 and 5); then on turn 6 I used my heroic to rush to lower blue, I think to start launching rockets. (Yes, it must have been the second game. That was the one with the crazy plan where I told Andy to instead of staying in lower blue and launching rockets, he should move over to lower red to get some energy there while I heroically rushed to lower blue and took over the rockets.)

Anyway, when time came to execute, it turned out that oops, I had left a "move blue" on turn 3. Was this a trip? On the other side as an A, i.e., firing the pulse cannon. I don't think it was supposed to be an A, though; I think it was just a remnant of an older plan I forgot to remove. I was going to count it as a trip anyway, until it was pointed out that would be disastrous -- I'd get delayed, and then we'd miss the mouse. Now, normally, that would still be better than an extraneous movement, which can throw off everything you do; but in this case, since I had a heroic movement coming up, the only effect would be that instead of getting the mouse, I'd uselessly pick up the battlebots instead. (Fortunately, nobody else needed them later!) So we went with that, and just all took the mouse delay, instead of me taking an additional delay. And we survived!

We also had a game where we did the shield trick but then got Crossed Wires! Fortunately, we managed to get someone to pull the energy to the blue reactor, so we only took 2 damage rather than 5...