Impromptu Game Night 2!!

So last night turned into a great big ol' Game Night at my place again. I've dubbed it "Impromptu Game Night 2". All the stars were there: Tony, Loban, Angela, Broban, Paula, Molyneaux, Big Cal, Autumn, and Joe. This turned out to be a good night for The Tauz, gamewise. I ended up with victories on many fronts this evening.

We started out with some Guitar Hero 3. Molyneaux was kind enough to bring his Xbox 360 over, so we hooked that up to PeeWee (Loban's gigantic HDtv) and let the rock flow. Mega-fun.

At the first Impromptu Game Night at my place (two weeks ago), Loban beheld the wonder of Guitar Hero, but didn't give it a try. He regretted it for the next two weeks. He redeemed himself, though by jumping at the chance to play tonight, going even so far as to request that GH be present tonight so he could play. Both Tony and Molyneaux brought their copies of the GH games.

This is what happened:



Then the Rock Wig appeared...



And then it traveled...



Here's some footage of the premiere of the soon-to-be legendary brotherly rock duo, The Brothers Loban, kickin' out some Guitar Hero jams... Beware the RAWK!!!



A bit later, as a finale (at least it was the last GH tune for Molyneaux and I) we took on the DragonForce song. Twice. I played on Easy and Molyneaux played on Medium for the first try. It was a fun challenge.

Then we both played on Expert. Ridiculous. And still fun. BUT...I had help: Broban was on the bottom two fret buttons while I strummed and took the red, yellow and green frets. It was pretty funny because about halfway through, Molyneaux looked over at me and was like..."OH! That's how you're doing so well..." He had no idea that Broban was on the guitar, too, and he was right to be confused at my current rate of surprising success. Here's a few seconds of very dark video of some of our excursion into the higher levels of GH3 in vs. mode:




(While I was composing this Blaug Entry, Joe Fourhman wrote the following statement from his computer while screen-sharing with me, which is possible because we both have iMacs with Leopard running on them! Word.)

MY WEBSITE IS THE BEST DURRRRR (www.fourhman.com) DAMN STRAIGHT

And now, back to teh Blaug...

After that, Molyneaux, Paula and I left the Lobans in the safe and searingly rockworthy hands of Tony. They continued to play, eventually switching over to GH2 for some variety. We, however set off into the realm of card games; namely Zombie Fluxx.



It was during this game that Tony took off to spend time with Melissa (a.k.a. "Johnson", his pregnant wife who was arriving home from work at that point) and Caleb and Autumn arrived to jump in on the GH action... and Joe arrived to jump in on the Zombie Fluxx game. Here's an in-game table shot:



We all found the addition of the zombies to the already fun game of Fluxx to be easy to adapt to. Paula, who'd never played normal Fluxx, had a good time with it despite the fact that the game kept her at Game Night well past her intended time constraints. The game lasted well over an hour, but was definitely good times. Here's another in-game shot, this time, of Paula's large amount of zombies. At the time of the picture, it was the largest gathering of zombies...however, I think we topped that pretty handily later in the game. Joe helps out by indicating where the zombies are with his index finger.



But in the end, I won. After a mixing-up of Keepers, I ended up with both the car and the gas can. Soon after that, someone (I believe it was Joe) was forced (by the "Play All" rule) to play the "Hit the Gas" Goal, which made me the winner. Here's my uber-hobo face of excitement-fear-happiness-confusion that set in during my moment of victory. I'm sorry.



After seeing that face, Paula felt the need to bail for some reason...
So we stuck in the "Xbox-exclusive" Beautiful Katamari to roll for a bit. This is the newest version of the oddball yet wickedly fun Katamari Damacy series, which Joe introduced some of us to years ago. And since Joe dislikes/doesn't respect any Microsoft product, he does not own an Xbox, which therefore means that he'd never played BK. But I guess his love of all things Katamari proved to be stronger than his aversion to Microsoft's console, because this happened:



If this were part of the Joe Fourhman Collectable Card Game, this would be an Ultra-Rare, or maybe even a Promo Card, available only at "Four-Con".

Anyways...Molyneaux, Joe, Caleb and I all took turns rolling while a tired (and tipsy) and somewhat confused Broban loudly mocked us. It was really quite funny and fun. Of the four of us, Mr. Fourhman was the only one to roll up a Katamari that met the size goal for The King of All Cosmos. So amazed were we, that I took another shot of Joe playing an Xbox:



While we were rolling, Molyneaux, Loban and Broban all started to fade. Loban headed up to bed. Broban set himself up on the floor with a pillow and crashed out. And Molyneaux gathered up his Xbox and Zombie Fluxx, and headed for home. He did, however leave his brand new Killer Bunnies set for us to play.



So it was down to Joe, Caleb, Autumn and me for a game of Killer Bunnies. Despite owning this game and remembering that it was "not that good", Joe wanted to give it another go. None of the rest of us had ever played it and were intrigued. We all laughed heartily when Joe was reading the directions and came across the section titled "If someone in the game suddenly has to leave..."

That did not bode well for the game's ability to keep its players interested, nor for its length of play time... And then we started to realize why this game was remembered as "not that good". When we saw the line "Am I missing something?" we started in with the comments of "Yeah...like the fun, maybe?"



Then we reached Instruction Book #2...



Note the "Read me second" star in the bottom left. We made up addendums to this such as "If you're still interested in playing this crap-ass game at all..." That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the game: playing and laughing AT the various facets of the game. I won't go into them for you, but we realized that we had much more fun commenting on the flaws than we did actually playing it...

Here's a great in-game shot. I love the following picture for three distinct reasons. They are: 1) You can see the mockery and disgust for this game on Joe's and Caleb's hilarious facial (and manual) expressions. 2) You can see the card (the orange one) that (SPOILER) wins me the game on the far side of the table at my empty seat. 3) You can see Broban sleeping on the floor behind my chair, mere inches from our loudness and derision. That is where he spent the rest of the night, folks.



So, basically what it boils down to is that you go through the motions of playing this minorly intricate game full of in-jokes (that you're not in on) made up by the guys who crapped this game out (who are douches) and it all comes down to pure chance as to who wins. Here's the endgame shot:



I won, simply because the only Carrot Card I held at the end of gameplay matched the last card in the pile of Carrot Cards. So, even though everyone else played the game well enough to have more Carrot Cards than I did by the end of the game, none of that mattered in actually winning the game. Turns out, having more Carrot Cards just increases your odds of matching THE Carrot Card that wins you the game, which is determined randomly. So the solo Carrot Card in my possession just happened to match THE Carrot Card that mattered. Point is: I won the stupid game. Local reaction:



But the one who ended up having the most fun while we played Killer Bunnies:



After that debacle, Joe went home and Autumn, Caleb and I played modified-rules Catchphrase for half an hour.

------ ***Addition!!***
While we the three of us were playing, Broban was still passed out on the floor nearby. We were between rounds and we hear him talking out of nowhere. He said "Once, obviously. Once. Obviously." This sent the three of us who were awake into a laughing fit, especially Caleb. The irony of him saying "once" more than once cleary struck Caleb as particularly funny. I had to agree, as I was laughing just as hard. Hilarious, and I'm sorry I forgot to include it in the original post. So, thanks, Caleb for the reminder in comments.
------

Then we realized that we were keeping Loban and Angela awake because we were being loud. The marrieds left for home and I finally hit the hay, too.

All in all, it was a good night. The Tauz cleaned up, victory-wise and had a lot of fun, as usual.