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Post by wiltchamberlain on Mar 31, 2010 23:26:17 GMT -5
INTRO
So I've decided to write some session reports about my weekly game nights. I'll discuss the game we played, my thoughts on said games and various other musings.
Feel free to ask questions and or leave comments if you'd like me to expand upon anything.
This will be updated every week so check back often. And please COMMENT!
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Post by wiltchamberlain on Apr 1, 2010 0:23:24 GMT -5
Wednesday Mar 31st, 2010
Attendance: 4 Jamie Cris Heffe Clayton
The night started off with a game of Reef Encounter (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12962/reef-encounter) by Richard Breese. This was the first time any of us had played this game as I picked it up a couple months ago and just haven't gotten it to the table yet. To prepare I read the rules several times and listened to the "How to Play Podcast" episode that discusses the rules.
The game went somewhat smoothly but took a long time 2.5 hours-ish (with time off for pizza). All of us seemed to have a hard time recognizing a good strategy until it was too late. This is a total gamers game and with therefore only appeal to certain people. I do want to play this game again, since now I see what I might do differently unfortunately nobody was up for a second game tonight.
FINAL SCORE Cris - 5 Heffe - 5 Jamie - 6 Clayton - 6 (winner on 3rd tie breaker)
We decided to dumb it down a bit and pulled out Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game (a staple the last few game nights). After we played this game last week I went to BGG to look up a ruling on a particular card only to find we'd been doing the fight rolls all wrong. As stated in the rule book the humans get 2D6 and the zombies get 1D6... higher wins the fight, zombies win ties, but only die if doubles are rolled, otherwise they are just fought off. We had been summing the humans dice and comparing the total to the zombie roll where you are actually supposed to take the higher of the two dice the human rolled. The rule book is REALLY poorly written as it talks about comparing the humans DICE (not die) to the zombies DICE (not die). So the mix up was due to poor use of singular vs plural word choice.
We chose the Defend the Manor House scenario with myself and Cris as zombies and Clayton and Jeff as heroes. We had never played this scenario before and again the humans didn't pick up the best strategy to keep the zombies out of the manor. They also couldn't find any weapons to save their lives (literally). Zombies ended up winning by getting 9 zombies into the house before morning (17 turns). I didn't find the rules change that big of a change but the human players complained non-stop about how screwed they were and how they didn't have a chance. I offered to switch sides and do the same one again but it was too late to start another game.
We did institute a house rule that lets 2 women be affected by the "The could be our last night on Earth" zombie card... hehe.
FINAL SCORE Jamie (Zombie) - Win Cris (Zombie) - Win Heffe (Becky )- Lose (Jonny) - Dead Clayton (Jenny) - Dead (Sally) - Lose
A good session all in all. I was glad we got 4 players again since that opens up a few more options for games that play well. I was also happy to get Reef Encounter on the table since my cost per play was infinite until tonight.
Has anyone else played any of these games? Comments? Questions? Insults?
-Jamie
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Post by Gilvan Blight on Apr 1, 2010 8:53:06 GMT -5
Thanks for posting these.
Haven't played either so can't really comment on the games.
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Post by isaac on Apr 2, 2010 16:36:57 GMT -5
Last Night On Earth is a great zombie game; it really captures the feel of some of the best zombie movies. I've been tempted to buy the supernatural version of the game, "A Touch of Evil," but I'll probably spend my game dollars on expansions of LNOE instead. There's extra scenarios and cards available on Flying Frog's website, but I haven't tried any of them yet.
Making the "This could be our last night on Earth" card work on two women is intriguing, but by extension you should make it work on any combination and number of players, except the priest. I'd give the affected players one bonus card each for every round they don't move, and aren't interrupted by zombies or other players coming in.
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Post by wiltchamberlain on Apr 8, 2010 1:37:09 GMT -5
Wednesday April, 7th.
Attendance: 4 Jamie Cris Clayton Heffe
I decided to dig out Descent again tonight. Having only ever played it once before I took some time to go over the rules again. The basic game play is fairly simple to understand and it was easily picked up. I talked Clayton into playing the Overlord (as I am usually the DM, Overlord, Zargon, for whatever game we play), so it took him a bit longer to read through the cards to figure out what he can do.
Since the last time we'd played I'd picked up the Well of Darkness expansion which added in more of the goodness without really adding much more complexity. I added in the extra cards before everyone arrived. I also sorted out the map pieces and arranged the monsters so they would be easy to find for the Overlord.
I began with Trenloe the Strong, and did most of the tanking for the group. I had the TAUNT skill which meant I could make most the enemies focus their attacks on me. Cris was Runemaster Thorn and with his PRODIGY skill and a rune that let him spend 3 surges to add Blast 1 took care of any crowds of minions. Heffe was Red Scorpion who seemed to suck except for the fact that he had LEADERSHIP skill that let myself or Cris do our thing more often.
This game took a LONG time. Somewhere between 4-5 hours. Now part of this was because Clayton was the Overlord as he can be prone to analysis paralysis (so much so that any timer in any game is dubed the anti-clayton device). I'm hoping that as the cards/monster abilities become better known the game time will decrease.
I've also noticed that in the first couple of games the heroes have seemed to romp their way through the dungeon without much trouble. We ended with 10 conquest tokens and actually bypassed 2 of the glyphs so we could finish sooner. At no point did I feel like we were going to lose. I'm hoping the later adventures get a little more balanced. I'm also wondering how much this depends on your character creation random draws. Tonight we got characters and skills that REALLY complimented each other well, and I haven't played enough to know what the odds of that could be.
Verdict - I really love this game, it has great dungeon crawling atmosphere. I fear I will have a hard time talking the group into tabling this one again soon since it took until nearly 2AM to finish.
Perhaps an event at Hugin and Munin on a Saturday should happen soon.
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Post by Gilvan Blight on Apr 8, 2010 10:08:05 GMT -5
I'd be willing to do Descent some day at H&M. I've barely touched my copy. I also have Well of Darkness but never tried adding anything from it yet. In the games we played we found that the game was rather hard and that there were multiple deaths on the player side. I think the biggest thing is number of players.
We've found that if you play with a full group it's actually harder then when you play with just 1-3 heroes. This is due to how the monsters scaled. We actually found when playing two player with 1 DM that it was more fun to have each player take on two characters.
This weekend is RPGA at the store. Perhaps we can set something up for the Saturday after. April 17th. I'm thinking a Games and Grub on May 1st is a possibility as well. Work will determine if either will work. I go back to work Monday and will need to find out what my weekend schedule looks like before making any official plans.
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Post by ashaman771 on Apr 10, 2010 0:57:14 GMT -5
I love Descent and would for sure play at a Sat HnM 'impromptu' event.
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Post by wiltchamberlain on Apr 14, 2010 1:51:49 GMT -5
Tonight on a very special Wednesday Game Night: Tuesday!
Tuesday April 13th
Attendance 4 Jamie Clayton Heffe Danielle
So I talked everyone into playing Descent again. Well not so much talked them into it as had it already set up when they showed up- into it. I figured that tonight I would be the Overlord since that would obviously make the game shorter. That didn't happen. The game still lasted to almost 2AM (started around 8).
We played the 3rd adventure from the regular book and again the heroes came out on top, although I had them on the ropes several times. This made them overly cautious and I think may have been the reason for the length of the game. I found I had a lot of down time (as the Overlord) as I would have several turns where they were screwing around in empty rooms healing and running back and forth to town while all I could do was draw cards and maybe spawn some ineffectual low level monsters.
The group drew a fairly balanced bunch of heroes again. Danielle was the main melee fighter (Varikas the Dead), with the KNIGHT talent that let her attack 3 times, at the cost of 2 fatigue, when she used the Battle Action. This paired well with her characters "get a fatigue at the beginning of your turn" ability. Jeff was Silhouette, and had the talent that all his ranged attacks counted as aimed shots (so he could re-roll if he missed or didn't like the result), so he hit a lot. Clayton was Battlemage Jass, who had the Vampire talent (get a fatigue after killing a guy) and Telekinesis (move minis around with fatigue) which worked well together. He also drew a healing Rune from the treasure pile pretty early on. While they had a guy to fill every role this time, they didn't gel quite as well as the group we drew last week. They also were having a heard time getting treasure that matched their particular character and spend a lot of time passing items back and forth or selling and buying new draws from the deck.
Some high points of the game: 1) Playing the Alarm trap on the first copper treasure chest they found which opened up the next room and made them lose the rest of their turn. Although this had the unfortunate consequence of making them TERRIFIED to open the rest of the chests. The didn't bother to open the Gold chest in the final room for fear of the traps I might have.
2) I played Ambush to make a Hill Giant and 2 Manticore attacks twice in a row. (10 attack rolls in all with Manticore quickshot ability) and rolled an X (miss) on 7 out of 10 rolls... and the rolls that did hit barely did anything. The heroes only had 2 conquest tokens left at this point so I could have won had I killed somebody here.
Again, a very fun night of gaming. Although I think I'm going to go for something shorter next week. Perhaps something with no dice.
-Jamie
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Post by wiltchamberlain on Apr 22, 2010 0:35:47 GMT -5
Wednesday April 21st, 2010
Attendance 3 Jamie Jeff Clayton
There was actually no board games tonight. We decided to give Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay a try. I'd read over the rule book and thought I had a grasp on the rules. I should have made up some characters before the guys arrived but I didn't have time as my wife was at parent-teacher interviews (she was the teacher) and I was alone with the kids.
I assumed character generation would be fairly quick as "fast character gen" was a selling point in a couple reviews I'd read/heard. This was not the case as Jeff and Clayton had to read EVERY card to make sure they were getting the maximum benefit possible. The 20 min process took about 3 hours.
After that we didn't really have time to get into the starting adventure proper so I just set up a mock "you are on the way to the town when goblins jump out of the bushes" encounter, just to see how the basic mechanics worked.
Thought on the system: 1) The dice pool mechanic is easy enough to pick up on although it is difficult to determine success without a little shuffling of dice around first. So it isn't instantly apparent if you've done well or not; no thrill of a natural 20.
2) The abstract range increments was a welcome change to the tactical combat that 4e has become (although I do like that too), and I think this free form combat will only appeal more once we get into the story of the game more. The irony that WARHAMMER uses abstracted imaginative combat and D&D is a minis game is fantastic.
3) Fantasy Flight rule books suck for quickly referencing rules. There were a few things I recalled reading but could not find while we were playing because they were in a section they should not have been. Also because we only have one "player handbook" only one of us can really read up on the rules outside of game night and then have to teach the others how to play.
That is all I have for now. Will post more thoughts after re-reading the rules. I'm hoping things make a little more sense after seeing the game in action.
-Jamie
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