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pedanther. The 7th Continent. After a few more sessions, we finished our adventure. Well, I say "finished" -- we all died of starvation and exposure on a snowy mountainside. But apparently that kind of end is fairly common for a game of The 7th Continent; it's definitely a game that's about the journey rather than the destination. (At one point we did think we had reached our destination, but it turned out getting there gave us one more fetch quest to do before we succeeded, and halfway through that was when our luck ran out.)
. 7 Wonders: Duel. I played two games against the same opponent, and I remember some interesting things happened that I wanted to blog about, but I don't remember details and my notes are insufficient because I wasn't expecting it to be this long before I blogged. All I wrote down were the two words "science" and "military", which I do remember were the approaches I took in each game. In the first one, I put most of my effort into accumulating scientific achievements; I don't recall for sure whether it led to victory, but I think it did. In the second game, card availability led me down a path of accumulating military might, and I was poised for my armies to sweep down and crush my opponent when he triggered an instant win condition (I don't remember what it was, and didn't write it down, but it might have been the scientific achievement victory) and won the game.
. Ingenious. I've been taking my copy along as a game to suggest if nobody else has anything they want to play, since I enjoy playing it and everyone I've introduced it to seems to like it too. A few weeks ago, I had the first game with four players, which is the game's maximum and requires significantly different strategies from the two-player games I'm most used to. It was a close-run thing, and in the end I tied for first place.
. Betrayal at Baldur's Gate is a new edition/spin-off of Betrayal at House on the Hill, but set in a city in the Forgotten Realms fantasy setting instead of in a haunted house. (I was amused to note that one of the terrain tiles features graffiti saying "Minsc was here".) The overall game format is the same: first you explore and collect useful artifacts, then at some point a plot event is triggered and something horrible happens (which is different every time you play, depending on when and where it is triggered), changing the objective of the game and turning player against player. In our game, we got plunged into a murder mystery, where one of the players was the murderer and the others have to identify him before they get murdered too. I drew the murderer card, and apparently I did a reasonable job of playing innocent, but I had bad luck in that two of the other players were able to prove to each other that they weren't the murderer and decided to team up and hunt all the other suspects down one by one.
. ShitennÅ is a game where the players are Japanese courtiers trying to gain land and influence. Play alternates between a round where players gain cards representing money and military, and a round where they can use their cards to buy or conquer spaces on the game board, which is divided into provinces. At the end of the game, the player with the most tokens in a given province gets a bonus; if it's a tie, the first person to place a token in the province gets the bonus. (But if it isn't a tie, there are reasons for not wanting to go first...) The card distribution round is so complicated that I'm not even going to attempt a brief description, except to say that each round there's one player who has to try and control the distribution and they have a very tough job. I did very badly at the game to begin with, and spent a while lagging way behind everyone else, but toward the end I started gaining ground in leaps and bounds, and came very close to winning. Partly it was that I was beginning to get the hang of the game, and I think partly it was that I had a better grip on it once the available options began narrowing and there were only a few things I could potentially do each turn. (It will be interesting to see, if I play the game again, whether I do better from the beginning or start badly again.) Also, there was the fact that after the first few rounds, I actively avoided being the person attempting to control card distribution; much easier to sit back and wait for the cards you need to come past...
. Attack on Titan is a co-operative game based on a TV series I'm vaguely aware of but have never watched. It's another one where the most likely end of the game is that everybody dies, which is certainly what happened when we played.
. The Others is another co-operative game with a survival horror theme and a tendency to end with everybody dying. If I'm being perfunctory about these it's less because of the "tendency to end with everybody dying", which can be a perfectly fine way to end a game if the game itself is enjoyable, but in the case of these two games I just didn't enjoy the journey all that much.
. Guardians' Chronicles is a co-operative game with gameplay that reminded me rather of The Others, though as far as I know that's just a coincidence. The theme of this one is superheroes. We didn't die, although I'm not sure how much that's due to gameplay design (TPK being less appropriate in a superhero game than in a survival horror game) and how much is us due to not setting up all the hazards properly: it's a crowdfunded game, and the manual is not clearly laid out nor well written, so we spent the entire game puzzling over parts of it and not gaining any greater understanding. (While I'm listing its shortcomings, I'll also mention that the available superheroes are a bunch of dudes and one young woman wearing the kind of top that must be held in place by magic or strategic use of double-sided tape.) I played the magician -- I always seem to play the magician in these type of games, because nobody else seems to want to, though I don't know why they don't because the magician is always a perfectly fine character to play -- which led to the pleasantly incongrous result that the action climax consisted of the magician (having one of the higher INT stats in the team) hacking the supervillain's computer system while the other two heroes fought off the mooks trying to stop him.
. Tiny Epic Kingdoms is part of a series of board games that fit rich gameplay into pocket-sized boxes. Kingdoms is the fantasy-themed one, with dwarves, elves, goblins, etc. exploring territories, collecting resources, building castles, and battling each other.
And one game I played not at the gaming group:
. Organ Attack! is a spin-off of a webcomic my sister likes where the title character interacts with anthropomorphic personifications of his own brain and other internal organs. In the game, a body's worth of cute cartoon organs is divvied out between the players, who then use action cards to protect their own organs and attack their opponent's, with the winner being the last person left with at least one working organ. Attack cards can have a general effect, like Poison, or affect specific organs, like Pancreatitis (or like Love, which wounds the Heart -- and kills the Brain stone dead).
. 7 Wonders: Duel. I played two games against the same opponent, and I remember some interesting things happened that I wanted to blog about, but I don't remember details and my notes are insufficient because I wasn't expecting it to be this long before I blogged. All I wrote down were the two words "science" and "military", which I do remember were the approaches I took in each game. In the first one, I put most of my effort into accumulating scientific achievements; I don't recall for sure whether it led to victory, but I think it did. In the second game, card availability led me down a path of accumulating military might, and I was poised for my armies to sweep down and crush my opponent when he triggered an instant win condition (I don't remember what it was, and didn't write it down, but it might have been the scientific achievement victory) and won the game.
. Ingenious. I've been taking my copy along as a game to suggest if nobody else has anything they want to play, since I enjoy playing it and everyone I've introduced it to seems to like it too. A few weeks ago, I had the first game with four players, which is the game's maximum and requires significantly different strategies from the two-player games I'm most used to. It was a close-run thing, and in the end I tied for first place.
. Betrayal at Baldur's Gate is a new edition/spin-off of Betrayal at House on the Hill, but set in a city in the Forgotten Realms fantasy setting instead of in a haunted house. (I was amused to note that one of the terrain tiles features graffiti saying "Minsc was here".) The overall game format is the same: first you explore and collect useful artifacts, then at some point a plot event is triggered and something horrible happens (which is different every time you play, depending on when and where it is triggered), changing the objective of the game and turning player against player. In our game, we got plunged into a murder mystery, where one of the players was the murderer and the others have to identify him before they get murdered too. I drew the murderer card, and apparently I did a reasonable job of playing innocent, but I had bad luck in that two of the other players were able to prove to each other that they weren't the murderer and decided to team up and hunt all the other suspects down one by one.
. ShitennÅ is a game where the players are Japanese courtiers trying to gain land and influence. Play alternates between a round where players gain cards representing money and military, and a round where they can use their cards to buy or conquer spaces on the game board, which is divided into provinces. At the end of the game, the player with the most tokens in a given province gets a bonus; if it's a tie, the first person to place a token in the province gets the bonus. (But if it isn't a tie, there are reasons for not wanting to go first...) The card distribution round is so complicated that I'm not even going to attempt a brief description, except to say that each round there's one player who has to try and control the distribution and they have a very tough job. I did very badly at the game to begin with, and spent a while lagging way behind everyone else, but toward the end I started gaining ground in leaps and bounds, and came very close to winning. Partly it was that I was beginning to get the hang of the game, and I think partly it was that I had a better grip on it once the available options began narrowing and there were only a few things I could potentially do each turn. (It will be interesting to see, if I play the game again, whether I do better from the beginning or start badly again.) Also, there was the fact that after the first few rounds, I actively avoided being the person attempting to control card distribution; much easier to sit back and wait for the cards you need to come past...
. Attack on Titan is a co-operative game based on a TV series I'm vaguely aware of but have never watched. It's another one where the most likely end of the game is that everybody dies, which is certainly what happened when we played.
. The Others is another co-operative game with a survival horror theme and a tendency to end with everybody dying. If I'm being perfunctory about these it's less because of the "tendency to end with everybody dying", which can be a perfectly fine way to end a game if the game itself is enjoyable, but in the case of these two games I just didn't enjoy the journey all that much.
. Guardians' Chronicles is a co-operative game with gameplay that reminded me rather of The Others, though as far as I know that's just a coincidence. The theme of this one is superheroes. We didn't die, although I'm not sure how much that's due to gameplay design (TPK being less appropriate in a superhero game than in a survival horror game) and how much is us due to not setting up all the hazards properly: it's a crowdfunded game, and the manual is not clearly laid out nor well written, so we spent the entire game puzzling over parts of it and not gaining any greater understanding. (While I'm listing its shortcomings, I'll also mention that the available superheroes are a bunch of dudes and one young woman wearing the kind of top that must be held in place by magic or strategic use of double-sided tape.) I played the magician -- I always seem to play the magician in these type of games, because nobody else seems to want to, though I don't know why they don't because the magician is always a perfectly fine character to play -- which led to the pleasantly incongrous result that the action climax consisted of the magician (having one of the higher INT stats in the team) hacking the supervillain's computer system while the other two heroes fought off the mooks trying to stop him.
. Tiny Epic Kingdoms is part of a series of board games that fit rich gameplay into pocket-sized boxes. Kingdoms is the fantasy-themed one, with dwarves, elves, goblins, etc. exploring territories, collecting resources, building castles, and battling each other.
And one game I played not at the gaming group:
. Organ Attack! is a spin-off of a webcomic my sister likes where the title character interacts with anthropomorphic personifications of his own brain and other internal organs. In the game, a body's worth of cute cartoon organs is divvied out between the players, who then use action cards to protect their own organs and attack their opponent's, with the winner being the last person left with at least one working organ. Attack cards can have a general effect, like Poison, or affect specific organs, like Pancreatitis (or like Love, which wounds the Heart -- and kills the Brain stone dead).
