Marathon Weekend

Just getting back to normal today (Monday). Have a LONG-ass weekend. A real good one, but long... why is that you ask? We'll I have a bunch of the fellas over on Saturday night...food, beer, and Twilight Imperium, with a few movies thrown in.

Well anyway, Game 1 of what turned out to be a double-header went pretty well. 7 players on a huge split-galaxy board. Interesting dynamic splitting it up like that. Well anyway, the game progressed fairly quickly, one player got knocked down and out pretty early, setting up 3 civs on each side of the board. Its was getting onto about 1030-1100 pm and two players, myself and this other AF guy, James, had the most points, with Kirk (a retiring Navy grognard) close behind (but with the biggest fleet, biggest threat to score a lot - quickly). And out comes a weird political card, effectively granting two victory points to every player. What are victory points you ask? Nevermind, its too much to go into. Suffice it to say: you win with them, and that at the time Those two VPs would effectively GIVE the game to James. Now, you'd THINK, that that would be no-brainer....James would vote YES, and every other player would vote no and shoot down the proposed law....uh...guess not....It seems another player, who did in fact have the votes to swing it in James favor felt like ending the game....and blammo, there is was....the vote pass 21-19 and the game was over.....

but the night wasn't! After a few folks left to go home, a few hearty souls and I figured on making the most of the night (since the wife was working mids). So we continued the Star Wars marathon and decided to kick off a smaller game.

4 players, 1 galaxy (James, Alley, Whalen and myself). The double-header was definitely a closer contest. We had a incredible trade dynamic, with two players (Alley's geeky tech race and James' Lion-esque Hacan traders) scooping up mad dollars every turn via trade. My humans were not nearly so lucky, but as the clear-cut expansionists, I made up for the last of trade by conquering planets much faster than anyone else and getting my resources the old-fashioned way. The key to the game turned out to be another one-off law. Trade swap....basically it allowed Whalen and I to swipe the War Sun (think Death Star) technology from a trading partner (we both had trade agreements with the techies) and it radically altered the balance of power in the galaxy (away from the techie Jol-Nar and money-grubbing Hacan and towards, well, me)....well anyway, the human race eventually won out, and I scored a end-game victory, punching out the Jol-Nar on the last turn and having everyone concede that nothing could be done to avoid a Sol victory....good thing too, we wrapped up the game about 0600 and my wife came home about 20 minutes after everyone went home.

The funny part? The marathon part of the day had just begun....the wifey then informed me that we were going to the farewell brunch for some of the folks about to deploy. The time 1000...We got back about 1130, but I'd caught my second wind....Christina passed out by noon, but I stayed up...for whatever reason...I cannot say...all I know is that I stayed up, playing around on the computer most of the day. I got her up about 5 pm just because I didn't want to let her sleep all night (had stuff to do on Monday ya know). We had dinner, and shortly afterwards (sometime between 7-8pm) I finally succumb....35 hours or so of consciousness was enough for me...

Its thrown off my entire week....like taking so long to post this blog....