So the Olympics happened. That was a thing, right?

Since neither myself or my friends qualified for any of the events this time, we decided to have our own alternate Olympic Games involving less… athletic games. One might call it the OR-lympics. One might also be pretty lame. One (Edwin) might also mistake it as something related to Original Recipe chicken. In any case, on the 28th day of the month of July in the year of our Lord 2012, the 2012 OR-lympic Games were held at Wells Street.

Obviously for an event like this, appropriate prizes are needed. Medals were prepared for the eventual winners of the gaming events. A non-medal was also created to honour the greatest non-achiever.

If you’re having an Olympics event, you should also have a torch.

The torch still takes pride of place on top of the games shelf, but it is now protected by a group of plastic cup ninjas who also serve as Nerfr gun practice targets (not pictured).

We started off watching the replay of the opening ceremony, which was pretty enjoyable, although we missed Rowan Atkinson’s bit and had to catch it later online. Jon, Daniel, Heng Lin and I selected some random countries to represent at the games, and set up the Xbox 360 for the Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 and SSX events. Taboo was a good after dinner warm-up game, after which we split into two groups to play Ra and 7 Wonders.

I managed to not suck terribly at Ra this time, and it looked like the 7 Wonders group had a pretty good time too. Jeff certainly had a huge pile of resources. I’m not sure who won, but I bet it was Heng Lin being all sneaky again. I can see his big pile of Science cards and his smile in this picture.

We kept score for a while, but after a few games everyone was having fun and we just didn’t keep up the Olympics theme.

The medals were awarded though.

The Xbox was fired up again after the board games were done, and the second round was all Kinect titles, with Kinect Adventures, Dance Central and Fruit Ninja hitting the Xbox. I didn’t manage to get any photos of the games since we were too busy laughing at each other’s antics. While the Kinect was in use, a few of us also managed to sneak in a side game of Quarriors.

We played with a couple of variant rules, which were that you could capture 2 dice a turn and you have to cull a monster die when you score it. The 2 buy rule is a preference thing and I could take it or leave it. I always like having more options though, so I think I will continue using it. The culling rule looks like it would prevent runaway leaders since they couldn’t re-use high scoring monsters. However, playing with 4-players, the win condition was low enough that it didn’t really seem to matter too much. This game just seems to belong to Jin Wei. I believe he’s won every game of it he has played so far. What a master.

We also finally managed to play some more Magic with the Cube after a long hiatus. I’ll have to do a post about my Cube some time. I think we all had a great night at the Or-lympics, even though the Olympic theme fell off the radar after a few games. It probably would have benefitted from a bit more planning but as long as everyone is enjoying themselves, it’s a win for all. We’ll  see how the next OR-lympics fares in 2016. Until next time, happy gaming!