Friday Night Shots – Game Moments That Make You Go “Wow”

I know you keep walking by this bar every Friday night and are constantly amazed when you see the big neon “Open” sign.

Especially given my history the last few months.

But this is now the fifth weekend in a row where you get to join me at the bar to talk about boardgames.

How’s that for consistency?

So sit your butt down at the bar and let me get you a drink!

Or, you know, coffee.

I don’t judge…much.

But geez, it’s Friday night!

Let me unplug the jukebox, just because I don’t think we want to hear from the Royal Bagpipe Brigade of 4-Year-Olds anymore.

I just had that on to reset my brain since we didn’t have any customers.

Strange, that.

Anyway, let’s talk about boardgames!

Mainly, moments in boardgames that just made you go “wow,” both in a positive and negative way.

Not negative in a “I hate that” sense, but more in a “this lost me the game” sense.

What inspired this post is something that happened in one of my plays of Final Girl from Van Ryder Games.

This is a solo game where you play as the “final girl” in a typical horror movie, basically the woman who survives and ends up having to eliminate the killer after everybody else in the movie dies stupidly.

You’ll be hearing more from me about this game later, either in a review or in my “New to Me Games – June” post.

Suffice to say, though, that you are the hero of the game, running around the location, trying to rescue victims who can’t rescue themselves and doing so before the killer can do their thing.

When you are done with your actions each turn, it’s the Killer’s turn and you draw a Terror card to see what he does (it’s typically a “he”, or at least an “it”).

In this particular film (you can mix and match Final Girls, Killers, and Locations, so I was playing as Reiko against Hans the Butcher at Camp Happy Trails), Reiko ran to the Cabin to get some stuff and she dragged two victims with her (you can only bring two with you no matter how many are in your space) into the Cabin.

There was some cool stuff at the Cabin!

And Hans was all the way across the camp, nowhere near being able to move to bother her.

Nothing to worry about.

Until the Terror card I drew had Hans appear in the farthest space from where he was.

Yep, that was the Cabin.

And then draw another Terror card!

What the hell?

Yep, somehow some idiot was sleeping on a hidden bed during all of this and was finally awoken by the sudden appearance of this mass murderer right beside his bed.

This is what I mean by “negative” yet “amazing.”

In Final Girl, anything weird and wacky can happen!

Not pictured, but I picked up the Fireworks in the Cabin. You can throw Fireworks into an adjacent space and whenever the Killer is supposed to move towards a target, it moves toward the Fireworks instead.

I got out of the Cabin on my next turn, bringing two victims with me, tossing the Fireworks into an adjacent space as I got away.

Hans killed one other victim in his space, making the other two panic.

When they panic, you roll a die for each of them and they automatically move to an adjacent space following the route number on the die (you can see the numbers on each path in the pics above).

Yep, sure enough, both of them panicked into the space with the Fireworks.

They didn’t last long after that.

A second wow moment for me was partially because it was my first play of the game and partially due to who I was playing.

A 2-player game of Res Arcana, my first against Cal.

Cal is good at games. He’s not a Heavy Cardboard teacher, in that he will teach you the game well, and then lose.

Instead, he won’t really take any mercy on you.

He may try a strategy he doesn’t normally do, so maybe it will be more difficult for him, but he’ll still destroy you with no regrets if he carries out his new strategy well.

He usually wins most games, or at least he beats me even if somebody else ends up winning.

We don’t usually play 2-player games at our meetup, but we only had 3 people and one person cancelled at the last minute, so we played this after brunch.

Things were going pretty well. I was getting some immediate points but he was racking up the resources to make one massive push in the last turn.

In this game, you check at the end of each round and if somebody’s at 10 VP or above, the game ends and the highest score wins.

I did something (I forget what) to put myself at 11 points, but he had the stuff to get a huge number of points, bumping up from his current 5 to get at least 13.

But then I used the Sorcerer’s Bestiary ability to “Check Victory Now” and ended up winning 11 to 5!

I could see the grin building up on his face as he anticipated the actions he was going to take in the next turn or two in order to power his inevitable victory, and then the look of consternation when I did that and said “I’m reading this correctly, right?”

He literally said (and I remember this quote vividly) “I did not see that coming.”

There can be these moments in lots of games, and some more general than others.

The White Castle is a dice drafting game where you are taking a die from one of the bridges to then place and do the actions on that space associated with the colour.

This is a game where you only get nine dice drafts, or nine actions.

The trick to doing well is that many actions triggered by the dice can also trigger further actions.

If you’re only doing nine actions in the game, you’re not going to score very highly.

I remember when this game first “clicked” with me. My first couple of plays, I think I ended up in the 20s for points.

Then it happened, and I believe it was on BGA where I was playing a 2-player game with Robin.

Don’t get me wrong. Robin destroyed me, but I managed to score in the 40s!

That moment just moved this game from a love relationship to a “maybe I would marry this game, if I wasn’t already married” status.

It’s a tight game, and that doesn’t appeal to everyone.

But now I consistently score in the 40s, sometimes higher, and actually win some games.

However, the “wow” moment for me in this game is the first time I took that die, placed it on Samurai action, spending the steel to go into a Samurai space that let me do a Garden action.

Then did the Garden action because I happened to have the right amount of food available to go to a space where it let me pay some money to take a Castle action.

I still had some pearl and some money so I was able to put out a Courtier and then advance him up into the Castle, getting me a new card and a free white action from that card!

(That isn’t actually shown in the picture above, but you get the idea)

One final one I’d like to mention, I sadly don’t have any pictures of because it was on Boardgame Arena and I didn’t take a screenshot.

However, it’s a moment (maybe it’s happened a few times, as I’ve played a lot of it asynchronously lately) that I love when it happens.

It’s a game of Memoir ’44, the World War II game using a similar system to Commands & Colors.

So I’m going to illustrate using a picture of Commands & Colors.

In the system, you move and attack with your troops by using Command Cards, maybe activating a certain number of Infantry units, or Armor, or maybe even Artillery.

Sometimes you can activate a certain number of units in one sector of the board.

So I’m attacking a full-strength, 4-figure infantry unit with some armor (or some other method of rolling at least 4 dice).

(picture the horses as actual tanks and…well, picture them next to an enemy group of four blocks…and picture the board to be a lot greener…and…ok, just do your best)

I hit the “Attack” button and…four infantry figures!

That means the unit takes 4 hits, killing it.

Simply amazing.

And one day, I will experience that on the table when I actually get more plays of Commands & Colors in.

Anyway, those are some of my gaming “Wow” moments, at least that I can remember.

Have you had any of those?

Either when a game just clicks and you finally figure it out, or some event happens that just makes you burst out laughing or cheering?

Let me know in the comments.