Playing – Board Games

It’s been a busy couple of weeks but I managed to get a variety to the table.

Board Games

Horrified – Dungeons & Dragons

A friend brought Horrified – Dungeons & Dragons to the Saturday night table and we played it twice. It has much of the original Horrified mechanics with the mini games to defeat monsters and escorting villagers / NPCs across the board, but added a d20 action for each character class – cuz’ D&D, right? Like other Horrified after the original, instead of the random encounter deck being keyed to a specific monster, it uses icons that may match one or more monsters, creating an unexpected surge of activity.

The monsters are pretty iconic – beholder, displacer beast, mimic, and red dragon. The mimic isn’t hard to defeat if you work together to have the right items, but while active it can be quite destructive. The beholder and displacer beast have a similar ‘discard items to damage’ mini game but each with it’s own twist. The dragon in our opinion ought to be done as a solo monster as it involves solving multiple mini games. It ought to lend itself to expansions, either in extra monsters or even alternative boards (another adventure set in Waterdeep *sigh*) but that hasn’t been the trend with the franchise yet.

Overall, fun, easy to teach, and relatively a quick 1 – 2 hour play. I expect to play again.

Cthulhu Death May Die Season 2 Expansion

I remain a devoted fan of the Mythos, so when I found on 50% sale what I thought was an expansion to the box season I had, I jumped at it! In the end, turned out I was mistaken but we were undaunted and improvised a solution. Turns out that Season 2 required parts from Season 1, but I only had Season 3. What we were missing was tiles, so we used our trusty wet erase gaming mat and drew in the missing rooms from what we could discern from the scenario card. In some ways, it made it easier for us to see fine details like exits and if a tile was two rooms. Fun was still had though we were narrowly defeated by probably a single turn when the Great Old One slid onto the final spot.

There are some pretty nifty characters to choose from and it was nice to have some more scenarios to choose from, though scenario 2.1 chewed through us pretty quickly as it inflicted damage early on if we did not have companions and to get the companions required us to have had picked up items from the board before encountering them. The lesson learned for that one – gather before exploring if possible!

3 Dragon Ante

In one of the groups I game with, we have a running gag – “Hey, we have some time to burn, how about a quick game of Axis & Allies?”, in memory of a long weekend that we are never going to get back. Rarely a short game to begin with, one player managed by sheer luck to remain undefeated though driven back as far as they could without being eliminated ala Australia in Risk. When we told him he might as well concede so we could move on to another game, he replied that he gladly accepted our surrender if we didn’t want to play anymore. Young and brash were we, for we wanted him to eat those words, but his dice were hot and ours were not and it became the game that would never end …

Truly I have come to appreciate games with a definite end point.

3 Dragon Ante is not that game.

Sure, a run of exceptional luck can drive one player out quickly, but on average we could never quite get anyone knocked out. Like poker, there is an ante in and an attempt to build the best hand of cards, three in this case (hence the name), with special bonuses if you get 3 of the same value or three of the same dragon colour. Individual cards have special powers when you play them, but only if they are of a value equal to or less than the card played by the preceding player. Most of the special abilities are about taking coin from the pot or other players, some are very chaotic like changing the winner to the player with the lowest card values. In the end, as this “kill half an hour while we wait for the last player to arrive” went on for at least 2 hours.

Sure, I had fun at times but I also really wanted to play something else. I’ll play again but only if there is an alternate end condition added on like time or number of turns.

Clone Wars (Pandemic Engine)

I really like the Pandemic series of games. The core mechanics have been adapted into multiple set ups, including barbarians attempting to invade Rome, preventing Holland from flooding, stopping the Lich King, and of course the obligatory Cthulhu adaptation. Clone Wars also uses that core mechanic of hot spots continuing to produce trouble repeatedly. It adds in a boss that has their own mini deck of bad things that happen and a unique way that each boss has of being defeated. Similar to the World of Warcraft – Wrath of the Lich King, you can use cards in your hand to complete a mission without discarding them. However there are dice involved and those might cause damage, as measured by you losing cards in your hand.

It has a handful of Jedi for players to play as and droid soldiers to fight across the galaxy. Before you can face off against the boss, you must complete a number of missions based on your preferred difficulty. If you have to place a 4th droid on a planet, it gets a blockade added instead. Until that blockade is defeated, you can’t affect the planet. Things you don’t defeat deal you damage, plus whatever is randomly rolled on the die.

If you’ve watched the animated series, you are bound to recognize many of the missions and several of the cards that fall into assault, armor, flight, stealth, plus some familiar characters that have a one time special use.

It might not be in my top three Pandemic family of games, it certainly is one that I enjoy playing.

Mysterium

It’s been some time since I last player Mysterium and honestly, I preferred Mysterium Park as a streamlined version of the same game, but the original is still good.

One player is the ghost, giving out clues ala Dixit like cards to help the other players, acting as psychics attempting to pierce the veil and determine who the shocking murderer is, what room it occurred in, and with what implement. As a mini game, players can make a limited number of bets on other players being correct or incorrect in their guesses to match clues to the suspects / rooms / items. The goal is for everyone to succeed in as few guesses as possible in their own set of evidence and to then identify the one true mystery as decided by the Ghost. We sometimes call this game “Worst Ghost Ever” and accept that like Cards Against Humanity you will always draw the cards you needed after you already played the cards that you had.

It’s a solid game in the social “how well do I know what you will guess with this image of a penny farthing driving down a rain swept alley of rats will make you guess the Race Car Driver as the suspect”. I hadn’t played it for some time as it really is one of those games where playing with the right group of friends makes all the difference.

Starship Captains

I wrote about it before and managed to get in two more plays of it, including introducing it to new folks (who as long time Star Trek fans had an extra layer of amusement at the missions and a number of jokes at the expense of poor Ensign Kim 😦 )

It lasts for four turns, most turns move fast as long as analysis paralysis doesn’t strike, and playing it is far easier than listening to all the rules. A solid endorsement of I will play again!