Five Games I Played Last Month Make a Post
Aug. 6th, 2017 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther1. The Witcher Adventure Game is a board game based on, I gather, a video game I'm vaguely aware of but have never played. Each player gets a character with a different set of strengths and weaknesses, and there is a deck of cards which assign Quests.
There's something very heroic-fantasy-ish about the quests, in that each quest card has some text on it telling a story about what the quest achieves, but in the end it comes down to mechanically going to specified places on the board and collecting literal plot tokens. I also feel it might have been a mistake, though I understand why it would have seemed a good idea logistically, to have the outcome of each quest printed on the same card as the instructions; knowing the outcome in advance affects both the story experience ("Now I have enough plot tokens to end this quest. Oh, it's a twist ending that would have been a surprise if I hadn't first read it half an hour ago. Yay.") and the gameplay experience (more than once I looked at the outcome of a quest with a promising-seeming beginning and decided to do something else instead).
To be fair to the game, we didn't get quite the proper experience because, as we realised about halfway through, we hadn't shuffled all the cards before we started (and it was a new copy of the game, so that left them in their original unshuffled order). This had the most effect with the Investigation cards, which are supposed to liven the game with a mixture of lucky and unlucky events; because they were unshuffled, all the unlucky events were at the top of the deck, so after a few attempts we all just avoided them entirely and that entire aspect of the game pretty much fell by the wayside.
Achieving quest goals scores points, and the person with the most points at the end is the winner, if that's what you care about in a game. I played the sorceress, since nobody else seemed to want to, and found her to have interesting and valuable in-game abilities. Also I scored a lot of points, and if the player on my left hadn't completed a quest on his final turn and leapfrogged me, I'd have won.
2. Planechase is an expansion of Magic: The Gathering intended for multiple-opponent battles. The idea is that instead of happening in a single place, the battle is from time to time randomly shifted to a new location, as represented by a card drawn from a special deck. Each location comes with its own slight variation of the game rules. (For example, in one location it might be less expensive to place creatures on the battlefield, while in another players might gain extra health for each round they stay there. There are also locations with disadvantageous rule changes, or changes that help some players and hinder others depending on what kind of deck they're using.) Players have some ability to affect when the next location card is drawn, and can try to make it happen sooner if they feel the current rule disadvantages them or later if they like it where they are.
We had four players and played two games of it. In the first one, I came very close to winning, largely because I was by some distance the least experienced player at the table and the others concentrated on knocking each other out first. In the second game, I had a better grip on what I was doing but also the other players didn't go so easy on me, so I got squished sooner. But I enjoyed both games, and might try not to leave it so long until I play MtG again. (If I do, I need to adjust the balance of my deck; I kept drawing interesting and powerful red spells and creatures that I couldn't use because I wasn't drawing any red mana to spend on them.)
3. I have played X-Wing again, this time in a three-player match, and was reminded of the truth that many games become significantly less straightforward when you add a third player. Especially if a miscalculation early in the match turns you into the player everybody else wants to get out of the way first.
4. I have not actually played "Game: Most Popular Game in All Mother Russia (Not Really)". I won it, if that's the word, in the gaming group's fundraising raffle, which had several copies as consolation prizes. (I suspect somebody had old stock they wanted to get rid of, and am reminded of another raffle where I won an entire box of Towers in Time, a CCG that wanted to be the next Magic and failed in just about every way possible.) The impression I get from the rulebook is that it's a game that only works with several players who approach it in the right spirit, and none of the other people who ended up with copies seemed inclined to approach it at all, so it may end up gathering dust next to the box of Towers in Time.
5. This is the first time I've played Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. Last time I played D&D, there wasn't a fifth edition. Or a fourth edition. Possibly not even a third, although I couldn't say that for sure without looking it up. I moved away from where my old game was, and didn't know how to find players in the place where I live now. I've been vaguely aware that playing over the internet is a thing now, but I didn't know how to get into that either. And then justice_turtle mentioned that they wanted to try running a session over the internet, so I thought I'd join in.
I'd forgotten how many numbers there are in D&D.
I enjoyed it, though. It was the kind of game where... well, put it this way: the players were spread around the globe in such a way that no matter when we scheduled it, half the players would be mildly-to-severely sleep deprived. It wasn't very serious, is what I'm saying. It was a lot of fun. I hope we do another one some time.
There's something very heroic-fantasy-ish about the quests, in that each quest card has some text on it telling a story about what the quest achieves, but in the end it comes down to mechanically going to specified places on the board and collecting literal plot tokens. I also feel it might have been a mistake, though I understand why it would have seemed a good idea logistically, to have the outcome of each quest printed on the same card as the instructions; knowing the outcome in advance affects both the story experience ("Now I have enough plot tokens to end this quest. Oh, it's a twist ending that would have been a surprise if I hadn't first read it half an hour ago. Yay.") and the gameplay experience (more than once I looked at the outcome of a quest with a promising-seeming beginning and decided to do something else instead).
To be fair to the game, we didn't get quite the proper experience because, as we realised about halfway through, we hadn't shuffled all the cards before we started (and it was a new copy of the game, so that left them in their original unshuffled order). This had the most effect with the Investigation cards, which are supposed to liven the game with a mixture of lucky and unlucky events; because they were unshuffled, all the unlucky events were at the top of the deck, so after a few attempts we all just avoided them entirely and that entire aspect of the game pretty much fell by the wayside.
Achieving quest goals scores points, and the person with the most points at the end is the winner, if that's what you care about in a game. I played the sorceress, since nobody else seemed to want to, and found her to have interesting and valuable in-game abilities. Also I scored a lot of points, and if the player on my left hadn't completed a quest on his final turn and leapfrogged me, I'd have won.
2. Planechase is an expansion of Magic: The Gathering intended for multiple-opponent battles. The idea is that instead of happening in a single place, the battle is from time to time randomly shifted to a new location, as represented by a card drawn from a special deck. Each location comes with its own slight variation of the game rules. (For example, in one location it might be less expensive to place creatures on the battlefield, while in another players might gain extra health for each round they stay there. There are also locations with disadvantageous rule changes, or changes that help some players and hinder others depending on what kind of deck they're using.) Players have some ability to affect when the next location card is drawn, and can try to make it happen sooner if they feel the current rule disadvantages them or later if they like it where they are.
We had four players and played two games of it. In the first one, I came very close to winning, largely because I was by some distance the least experienced player at the table and the others concentrated on knocking each other out first. In the second game, I had a better grip on what I was doing but also the other players didn't go so easy on me, so I got squished sooner. But I enjoyed both games, and might try not to leave it so long until I play MtG again. (If I do, I need to adjust the balance of my deck; I kept drawing interesting and powerful red spells and creatures that I couldn't use because I wasn't drawing any red mana to spend on them.)
3. I have played X-Wing again, this time in a three-player match, and was reminded of the truth that many games become significantly less straightforward when you add a third player. Especially if a miscalculation early in the match turns you into the player everybody else wants to get out of the way first.
4. I have not actually played "Game: Most Popular Game in All Mother Russia (Not Really)". I won it, if that's the word, in the gaming group's fundraising raffle, which had several copies as consolation prizes. (I suspect somebody had old stock they wanted to get rid of, and am reminded of another raffle where I won an entire box of Towers in Time, a CCG that wanted to be the next Magic and failed in just about every way possible.) The impression I get from the rulebook is that it's a game that only works with several players who approach it in the right spirit, and none of the other people who ended up with copies seemed inclined to approach it at all, so it may end up gathering dust next to the box of Towers in Time.
5. This is the first time I've played Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. Last time I played D&D, there wasn't a fifth edition. Or a fourth edition. Possibly not even a third, although I couldn't say that for sure without looking it up. I moved away from where my old game was, and didn't know how to find players in the place where I live now. I've been vaguely aware that playing over the internet is a thing now, but I didn't know how to get into that either. And then justice_turtle mentioned that they wanted to try running a session over the internet, so I thought I'd join in.
I'd forgotten how many numbers there are in D&D.
I enjoyed it, though. It was the kind of game where... well, put it this way: the players were spread around the globe in such a way that no matter when we scheduled it, half the players would be mildly-to-severely sleep deprived. It wasn't very serious, is what I'm saying. It was a lot of fun. I hope we do another one some time.
