The Gaming Den

The challenges are a bit different depending on the number of players. The hand size limit is going to be much more of a hurdle with two players than with four, but you'll have fewer problems assembling cures. Your options for character upgrades and relationships will also be more limited, but you'll get to use what you pick more often so eh. Some objectives will be easier or harder. It's hard to go too much into details without giving spoilers. If you're that concerned, Blicero's suggestion of having each player control two characters will work fine.

If you're going to have two players, I strongly second having each player play two characters, for a few (completely non-spoiler-y) reasons:

1) You unlock new upgrades, new characters, etc. as the campaign goes on, and you have limited slots for character upgrades, so only having two characters means running out of slots sooner and not being able to add that cool new character upgrade late in the game without swapping a character out.

2) As already mentioned, some characters you unlock are really really good, and there's a lot of potential for three- and four-character synergy you miss out on with only two; it's both more effective and more fun, I found, if you can specialize your characters to be "the Treat Disease guy" or "the movement gal" or whatever and play to their strengths than to have two jacks of all trades that need to cover everything.

2) It's possible for characters to die during the campaign, sometimes even going from not being in danger at all to being dead in a single turn if you run into a particularly bad board state or a particularly unlucky series of infections and Epidemics. In such a scenario, losing one of your only two highly-upgraded characters hurts much more than losing one of four moderately-upgrade characters, and having to play as a power- and upgrade-less Civilian isn't fun for the person whose character died.

I've also heard that the difficulty ends up being higher toward the end with only two characters, as the increased difficulty from added mechanics and the need to be in more than two places at once starts to outweigh the easier card collection and fewer infections, but I've only played with either four players or three players with one playing two characters so I couldn't say for sure.

I saw the movie “Along with the gods: The two worlds” in theaters for one of my wife’s classes.

Loved it, and just found it on amazon. I do recommend, great flick.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Along_w ... Two_Worlds

So the crew of next year's CBS midseason replacement "One Dollar" did a big favor for me yesterday. Can't vouch for the quality of the still-being-filmed project, but on kindness alone it's worth checking out the premier whenever it airs.

I'm seriously loving BBC America's new series Killing Eve. The suspense is amazing, the characters are fleshed out, and it's a cool take on spy vs spy.

Today is the date that in May 8th, 1984, Marvel's Transformers #1 comic hit shelves (with a cover date of September). This was the very first piece of Transformers product, making today the 34th anniversary of the Transformers brand...so HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Not bad for a four-issue mini-series.

Just binge watched Black Lightning on Netflix. It's probably the best CW DC show.

I feel like a lot of CW shows (with exceptions obviously) start out fairly strong, or at least passable, but devolve into chaos somewhere in the third or fourth season.

They're all structured like soap operas and soap operas have never been known for their narrative stability.

Maj wrote:I'm seriously loving BBC America's new series Killing Eve. The suspense is amazing, the characters are fleshed out, and it's a cool take on spy vs spy.

I'll be pleasantly surprised if there's a better new show than Killing Eve or Barry this year.

PBS has a webshow called The Art Assignment you can watch on YouTube. So good.

Each episode runs around 10 minutes and gives you a short run through about an artist, movement, or medium. Every one of them I've seen has been fascinating.

-Username17

Deadpool 2.

The first mission of X-Force made me totally lose it. Best deconstruction of comic book tropes ever.

I loved Deadpool 2 even more than the first Deadpool. There’s probably something I didn’t like about the movie, but for the life of me I don’t know what that could be.

erik wrote:I loved Deadpool 2 even more than the first Deadpool. There’s probably something I didn’t like about the movie, but for the life of me I don’t know what that could be.

The Deadpool casting was spot on. "Who can play an insufferable smug bastard that the audience will want to watch being shot/stabbed/beat up repeatedly, but also for some reason can cheer for?" Probably not the highest compliment an actor can receive, but good on the casting director.

The movie is puerile, but movies in general seem like a good time to turn off the brain and just watch something instead of needing to interact in any way. So, in this case, puerile isn't entirely a negative.

I enjoyed the first movie, and should probably watch the newest one, is what I'm saying.

Deadpool staying faithful to the comics is the most important thing about this.
If they had gone away from him being puerile, the movie would have tanked.
Hard. Harder than colossus trying to swim.

And somehow, Ryan Reynolds does the smug idiot bastard better than the star lord guy as well . . him i wanted blown out of an airlock after the first 10 minutes of guardians of the galaxy and it only got worse with part 2 and Infinity War . . . Why was deadpool not in infinity war?
Deadpool/Starlord/Stark/Strange snark off is a go!

Slight spoiler regarding the ongoing observation from Deadpool 1 about cheap studios and not including any of the A-lister X-men at Xavier's School for the Gifted...

The brief moment where the audience saw the rest of the school and Deadpool didn't made me laugh out loud. The fact that it was so brief really sold it

I mean, it's just licensing bullshit.

I would have loved to see Deadpool in IW just so they can have him ....

be affected by Thanos' snap, and start disintegrating, and start, well, the big scene stealing death scene he did in Dp2.

And then, like, five minutes later he's still disintegrating because his healing factor is keeping up. Cue looking at watch, sighing, etc. Then a post-credits scene of him making breakfast still disintegrating

On the other Hand, Thanos would have felt even more justified if he had met deadpool <.<

erik wrote:I loved Deadpool 2 even more than the first Deadpool. There’s probably something I didn’t like about the movie, but for the life of me I don’t know what that could be.

Generally agree.

Two quibbles

1. "the millennials are the hardest generation to reach" quip was in relation to a character who is a post-millennial / generation z character.

2. The climax could have been resolved in a less "typical heroic sacrifice" and more Deadpool-nihilistic fashion if

Instead of Deadpool sacrificing himself to make Russel realize that he doesn't have to be a killer, Deadpool could have grabbed the gun and used the last bullet to kill the abusive headmaster himself. It's well established that Deadpool is willing to kill baddies, and this would make it so Russel now can't kill the headmaster and doesn't acquire the taste for killing. This would also subvert the trope of noble heroism as role modeling -- since Russel kinda hates Deadpool pre-sacrifice and wouldn't want to follow in his footsteps.

Iduno wrote:The Deadpool casting was spot on. "Who can play an insufferable smug bastard that the audience will want to watch being shot/stabbed/beat up repeatedly, but also for some reason can cheer for?" Probably not the highest compliment an actor can receive, but good on the casting director.

No one cast Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. He's spent half his movie career begging people to let him do a Deadpool movie, and for 99% of it, no one would let him, they even put him in as A deadpool that was nothing like this one and terrible in a the Wolverine prequel movie.

But Deadpool as a movie exists 100% because Reynolds spend more than a decade and considerable social and financial capital wheedling it into existence.

Prak wrote:I mean, it's just licensing bullshit.

I would have loved to see Deadpool in IW just so they can have him ....

be affected by Thanos' snap, and start disintegrating, and start, well, the big scene stealing death scene he did in Dp2.

And then, like, five minutes later he's still disintegrating because his healing factor is keeping up. Cue looking at watch, sighing, etc. Then a post-credits scene of him making breakfast still disintegrating

And since he we have wierdo Balance Thanos instead of "I love Death" Thanos we can't see them doing a crossover where he finds out Death also loves Deadpool even though (or because) they can never be together, and flies into a rage and tries (unsuccessfully) to murder Deadpool.

Edit: Went and saw Deadpool 2 today as well. About what I expected so I enjoyed it quite much.

Y'know, it struck me...

Bedlam would've been really effective against Cable. Too bad he made like a bug on that bus...

So, just got back from concert.

The band Aboleth puts on a great high-energy performance - if you are at all into metal/blues fusion sound, check them out. The truly rocking part is that their use of a D&D monster name is intentional, and they will happily sign anything.

So I'm now regretting that I didn't tote a Monster Manual or a couple minis to the show.

Shrapnel wrote:Y'know, it struck me...

Bedlam would've been really effective against Cable. Too bad he made like a bug on that bus...

Bedlam could probably have screwed with cable's arm ad gun, but he's still a telepath and telekinetic. Though I suppose it's unclear whether he retains said powers in DP2. They aren't explicitly shown, but apparently in the comics he primarily has to use them to keep some techno organic virus at bay, and the writers of DP are interested in exploring that? so iunno.

He does pull the gun to him telekinetically at one point and pretty sure he was using TK to rebuild it in the hotel room.

Y'know, I completely forgot Cable had TK powers. Probably 'cos the film doesn't bring a lot of attention to it.