Twilight Imperium, Or, How I Blew All Saturday

*EDIT*: I'm sorry about this. I fully intended to finish this last night, but I fell asleep in my chair before I had a chance to. (Of course, that means I also lost about a page and a half of what I had written, since I have my computer restart every morning.) All this morning and up until a few hours ago, the Internet was out in my room. So, slightly late, is the account of yesterday.

Twilight Imperium is a board game wherein multiple factions clash repeatedly in attempts to take over the galaxy and become Emperor of all inhabitants of the area. It is also, really, really, really long. A game between six of us:

Myself, playing a race that was basically the Borg
Victoria, playing a race that I don't quite recall the characteristics of
Mike, playing a race that similarly escapes me
Louis, playing a race that was a bunch of universities and politicians
Steven, playing a race that was big on ground combat and fighters
Matt, playing a race that was a bunch of religious terrorists

Took about seven hours. And it ended earlier than it usually does. This game is long, long, long. It's not as long as some games I've played - one glorious long weekend, I played a game of Homeworld II for 71 straight hours, I took half-hour catnaps while my teammates covered for me - but it's pretty darn long. It's a lot of fun, too. There are politics and intrigue and alliances and trade partnerships and all that sort of thing, and when that fails, there are destroyers and cruisers and carriers and even the mighty totally-not-ripping-off-the-Death-Star behemoths known as War Suns. They are extraordinarily powerful. So of course, Victoria's race started with one. This made the rest of us void ourselves in terror if she considered attacking us.

My race had bonuses to Dreadnoughts, the totally awesome Star Destroyer-style ships. So I built myself up a nice fleet of those. By the end of the game, we all had vast and imposing fleets, except for Matt, who never had anything bigger than a cruiser (one step below a Dreadnought). But he could send his cruisers and destroyers on suicide runs to ram opposing ships, so there was that. Alliances were set up quickly. Victoria and Mike joined together almost instantly. I don't know all of what motivated this, but perhaps the fact that Mike was next to her and that Victoria had the aforementioned horrifyingly powerful battle station caused him to wave the white flag. Steven and Louis had an on-again off-again alliance that persisted as long as either of them cared about it. I teamed up with Matt, eventually. Of course, the weakest and most suicidal player would be my natural choice for a teammate. I need to learn how to sit next to the right people.

My trading stunk, because I was the Borg and nobody liked me, but I managed to get enough money to start building a mighty fleet. Unfortunately, before Matt and I were allied, we were sort of sniping at each other. Each of our defenses was too tough for the other to penetrate, but he took from me two awesome planets that I really wanted to control. So I mostly seethed and boiled and sobbed quietly on the inside as Victoria started hinting about attacking me with her mighty battle station. It took me a good long while before I got a handle on the intricacies of the game, but get a handle on them I did. Of course, by that point, Louis had pulled ahead so far that there was no catching him up, and he ended up winning. Of course. (I can't remember the last time I actually won one of the game-night games. Go figure.)

Eventually, Mike wandered into my territory and attacked me while I wasn't fully prepared. I had only two Dreadnoughts to his four, but in this game, the attacker has to craft his offense carefully or suffer several disadvantages. The mines I had laid in space accounted for some of his craft, and my planetary defense cannons accounted for some others. My destroyers blew up his fighters (fighters in this game are little more than targets and cannon fodder. They exist to take hits so that the capital ships won't have to, and maybe at some point to successfully attack, but unmodified, they only have a 20% chance to hit. Which stinks.) in one volley. Then the battle began.

Most ships in the game die in one hit, which is odd, but Dreadnoughts can take two hits before exploding. When a successful attack is rolled by the attacker, the defender chooses which of his ships takes the hit. Slightly unrealistic, but otherwise the capital ships would always be the first to fall and every battle would degenerate into fighter skirmishes. Which gets boring, seeing as they nearly always miss. I took a hit on each of my Dreadnoughts, then played a special card to repair them to full. Then I took another hit on each of my Dreadnoughts. Then I played another special card to repair them to full. As I had pretty near erased four direct hits, Mike was at this point gnashing his teeth and seething. I managed to win the battle without losing any major ships, which was a feat in and of itself. Unfortunately, the whole thing was rendered moot by the fact that Louis had won while we were off giggling and rolling dice. So it goes, I suppose.

Friday night was Dungeons and Dragons. I made a new character, a psion. Never before had I realized just how broken psionics were in D&D. I wish I had known this years ago. Psions, instead of having spells per day like wizards or sorcerers, have "power points" that they can spend on "manifestations" which are basically spells. Sort of like the mana system in many video-game RPGs. I like things better this way, it allows for much more flexibility.

My character was also a "warforged," a living construct that exists only in the setting of Eberron, a D&D world, wherein we were playing. Since he was psionic, he was a "psiforged." Partly living, partly constructed, I decided he would speak like HK-47 from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and preface all of his sentences with the type of sentence it was:

"Query: Now what are we supposed to do?"
"Aside: These meatbags really piss me off."
"Statement: I'm pretty sure we're boned."
"Forceful Imperative: Get out or I'll throw you out."

That sort of thing. Well, you had to be there, I guess. Some quotable quotes from the game, Matt was DM:

Matt: Would you like to be the Chosen One?
Me: Sweet, how?
Matt: Take these feats.
Me: ...What? Are they "Chosen One," "Greater Chosen One," "Advanced Chosen One"?
Matt: Not exactly.

Matt: The halfling girl starts humping your leg.
Me: I cast Psionic Grease.
Matt: She falls off and slides away, and hits the wall. She says "Whee!"
Me: "Imperative: Cut that out."

(don't remember who exactly said what)
Player1: I say we throw her off the airship.
Player2: We can't!
Player1: She brought with her on board a number of suspicious looking crates. I had a look inside. We all did. They're full of skeletons with body armor on!
Player3: That's not good enough.
Player1: But...skeletons! They'll kill us all! Throw her and them off!
Player2: It's against the law to just go and do that.
Me: Statement: We should not act until a threat is proven.
Player1: This is a threat! They're ****ing skeletons!
Me: Snide Rhetorical Query: Ah, but have they done anything yet?
Player1: *brain hemorrhage*

Matt: The captain tells you "Messing with her stuff is punishable by being thrown off the airship. If you open any of the boxes, that's punishable by being tazered, and then thrown off the airship."
Me: Does the tazering really matter?
Matt: You'd be surprised.

I'll finish this tonight - I have to go to the band banquet. Heck, I'll write about that. But it's mostly done.

So, it's tonight. And the banquet was a blast. I got to see lots of people I've been missing...Stanley was taken aback by the fact that I came in a suit and tie. He took my arm and walked me to the table, saying "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Moreau." Apparently, I clean up good. Now if only I had remembered to shave. Bugger it, I'm shaving tonight. Maybe tomorrow morning. No, tonight, I have to get up relatively early in the morning to practice with my partner for the line memorizations for Artists in Several Media. (Tuesday, I have to go buy the remaining textbooks for that and my other classes. I can't find many of them.)

The actual meal was decent enough. It was a choice between chicken cordon bleu or seared sirloin, so you can imagine which one I took. (Hint: It wasn't the ham 'n' cheese chicken loaf. Though apparently that was pretty good.) We all shared a laugh over days gone by, and all sorts of humor went on that you really would have had to have been in band for a few years to get at all. For instance, Curtis started tapping on his water glass with his spoon. I noticed it had a rhythm to it, so I started a pattern of my own that complemented his. Pretty soon, we were all doing it. Oh, the reckless hedonism of band students.

Stanley announced his "Black People Movies Thursdays," as he calls them. Every Thursday night at his apartment, he's going to have public showings of movies starring black people. He'll serve us homemade fried chicken and sweet tea, and the rest is potluck depending on what people bring. This is seriously what he's going to do...I'm not exaggerating at all. Truth is stranger than fiction and all that sort of thing. I'm going to bring a box of Krispy Kreme. Everyone likes Krispy Kreme.

So that's pretty much it. The Luke-Approved YouTube Link of...er...Yesterday has got to be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZQQgvhn4jg It's the trailer to the upcoming Will Smith movie Hancock. Smith stars as a man with Superman-level powers, but he's a raging screw-up and does things like smash into freeway signs while chasing fleeing villains. The trailer is hilarious. The movie should prove to be the same.

REPLIES.

Mom: Thanks for the help with the Spanish practicing. I have a feeling I may need it.

Mike: Yes, it seems to be the most awesome class yet. Except maybe Artists in Several Media, I'm not sure which. Time will tell. All I know is that Wednesdays will be kickin'. And I always reread books, sometimes as many as twenty times over, until I feel that all the enjoyment that there is to be had in them has been had. So, no Wheel of Time...I'll head for Song of Ice and Fire, then.

Dad: Educational? Pfft, as if that's why I'm here. I know why news writers have to write the way they do - newspapers would be two hundred pages long if the writers got to go all out, and nobody would ever read them. But it's the prospect of actually writing in that style myself that gives me a horrible sinking feeling.

We were actually discussing fantasy vs. SF in the first meeting. The topic the professor brought up was dragons. Can you have dragons in SF, or are they automatically fantasy-related? Here's the transcript of the notes I took on that discussion:

Science fiction can be seen as kind of a rationalized fantasy. In fantasy, you don’t need to explain the presence of dragons, they just are. They’re a part of the world. But in sci fi, you need to have some kind of explanation for how you can have enormous flying fire-breathing lizards flitting about.

I read Dragonsbane years ago. Then I read the second one, and it was pretty bad. I didn't even try the third one. And hopefully the Dolphins will rise again.

Vic: Er, all right. I'll keep that in mind. And my father does generally have a good way of putting things. In his job, it's essential that he can explain things so that people can understand him.

Steve: Truth be told, I'm no great shakes at Spanish, but everyone says it's a must-have, so I guess I must have it. I don't know how the heck I'm going to fit it into my schedule in the next few years, though...it's going to be packed to the brim. The power creep has really become ridiculous in Magic, although that's okay, because Extended is still far more broken than Standard ever could be.

Bye.