tacos, hammerwatch, and thordan's triumph

Last month, numbers, Dante, HGR, and I played Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos (the tacos game). It was originally numbers' idea. "This might be cool as a new Hammerwatch-ish kinda thing to play?" he said. It turned out not to be particularly good, but we still had fun with it. HGR played ranger, but he didn't have a bow, so he was basically just a gimp melee. Then he switched to reaper, with the special ability to turn into a skull and roll around the screen. This did literally nothing, but hey, nice skull. numbers was our TANK and got solely TANK upgrades and was therefore comically useless in combat, but also unkillable.

It turns out that Hammerwatch has a sequel. So now we're playing Heroes of Hammerwatch, an actual good game. newbie found a way to mod the game to add a fifth player, so he's joined the squad. It's kinda amazing how much better this game is: combat is great, classes are very distinct and have useful abilities (no skull-rolling here), and the in-run character progression is very satisfying (there's an actual loot system and the mods are more interesting than just "higher damage numbers" or "higher HP").

===

In raid news, Silver ("Master's degree soon") was unavailable on Sunday due to finals, so Tiro took his spot. We were hyped to defeat Thordan. Dante was still going on about how he was the best paladin in the world and Thordan was no match for him.

numbers did a ready check and we all checked in: 8/8 ready to go. Then all of us except Kan simultaneously got disconnected from the game.

HGR suggested, "Maybe it only kicked really good players, like the best paladin in the world."

"That's right," said Dante.

Apparently, the Lamia server died. (Right at our scheduled raid time. Very rude. Kan's on Excalibur, so he was unaffected.) RIP. You win this time, Thordan. Instead, we played Gartic Phone, a telephone pictionary game. This was amazing—basically the pinnacle of party games. There's a "knockoff" mode where everyone makes a drawing, and then it passes to a random other person who has half the time to try and memorize/replicate the drawing, and so on for the whole group. It was amazing to watch the pictures degrading over time (and also sometimes being augmented. Luis randomly put a tree that didn't exist in HGR's drawing—he remembered "something green" but not what it was—and every other drawing faithfully replicated the tree. Nothing else was recognizable, but there's that tree).