Gaming...Wednesday?
Shaterri got a spare invite for me to attend a semi-open board game night at Popcap’s downtown office. It’s apparently only the second time they’ve done this. They had a stack of games and invited people to bring their own as well. Beer, soda, and pizza were on them. Also tea, but the only cups I could find were compostable plastic and melted with hot water.
For my first game, I played an abysmal session of Dominion with four other players. I think I had 4 points when the game ended. (The two real contestants scored in the mid-to-high 20s. The total newbies had scores of 9 and, I think, something in the low teens.) I never got a consistent strategy going. Money was a major problem. For one thing, I thought Gold - the most valuable of the money cards - cost “9” instead of “6” because they were upside-down (and the other money cards weren’t). Also, two other players were playing Thief cards, which let them either steal or permanently destroy money cards from all other players’ decks. Between these factors, I made the unorthodox decision not to bother buying any Gold and tried going the Thief route as well. Problem #1 with that strategy is that I thought I bought two Thieves but really only bought one. Problem #2 is that everyone’s Thieves were heavily neutralized by the Spies that multiple players also ended up playing. (A Spy shows you what everyone’s upcoming card will be and optionally lets you discard it immediately. Also, a Spy is essentially a free move since it replaces itself with a bonus draw and lets you take another action, so there’s no reason not to play it every time.) So I rarely got to play my Thief, and if I had bought Gold, it would have been safer from the other Thieves. The net result is that I was unable to purchase the largest victory point cards, which anyone who’s played Dominion knows are the only ones that matter.
Game two was a three-player game of Sentinels of the Multiverse, a co-op card game of superheroes beating on an archvillain. The game was easy to learn, particularly since we all chose low-complexity heroes. The villain and each hero has his or her own dedicated deck of Powers and action cards. There is also a deck of random situational events. Each turn, each player plays one card, uses one Power from a card in play, then draws a card. That’s it. Once all players have gone, the top cards from the situation and villain decks get played on autopilot. Repeat until done. The game definitely benefits from player coordination and isn’t complicated, so I’d call it a good game for low-key socializing, especially with random strangers. It did seem to have the flaw of not scaling difficulty well to different numbers of players, which is a bit of an issue since it claims to support 2 to 5.
Things were breaking up by that point. While Shaterri played word games, I wandered and caught the last minutes of a homebrew spaceship miniatures game being demoed by its creator. He calls it Star Crashers and has the rules online. I’ll give it a read-through later.