Games played: Cave Troll, Mage Knight Dungeons (incomplete), Magic: the Gathering
CAVE TROLL (0:21)
Chip: 72
Vitas: 46
This game has some interesting elements to it. It's fairly easy and quick to play, and the rules are pretty simple. The different character types allow for some interesting choices.
I think the scoring system could use some work. Scoring is done at three times through the game, the first two times are determined randomly (when a player flips over his/her Scoring tile), and then again at the end of the game.
In this session, Vitas flipped over his Scoring tile before any characters were on the board. As a result, the only other scoring tile before the end of the game was under my control. So, I always made sure all my characters were in scoring position before flipping a tile. I also went through my tiles more quickly then Vitas. As I was the first player to go out, I also determined when the final scoring took place.
The end result of Vitas flipping over the scoring tile early in the game was that I determined when the other scoring rounds would occur. This gave me a huge advantage.
Towards the start of the game, I placed my Cave Troll in a high-scoring room (5 gold), and placed a treasure chest in an adjacent room. I gaurded the chest with my barbaian (who counts as two adventurers) and a knight (which prevents other characters - with the exception of knights - from entering the room). With that combination, I was able to maintain a stranglehold on that room for the entire game.
Then Vitas brought out a dwarf. The dwarf doubles the value of whatever room he occupies. However, I put in an adventurer and followed the dwarf from room to room. If there is an equal number of characters in a room during scoring, no one gets any gold from that room. Thus, as long as my long character stuck to the dwarf, Vitas couldn't use him to score big points.
However, he did manage, later in the game, to send a knight in to accompany his dwarf. This combination locked out my adventurer, and Vitas was able to double the score of one of the rooms for the last scoring phase.
I'd play this game again as a quick filler game, more for the fun of the theme then the challenge of the strategy.
MAGE KNIGHT DUNGEONS (0:41 setup, 0:39 play)
In the time it took us to set up this game, we could have played another two rounds of Cave Troll (: I enjoyed this game, although I think I was at a disadvantage, caused by my own greed.
At the start of the game, each player chooses characters to make up a party. I went for the higher-costing characters and ended up with a party of 3, whereas Vitas took 4 lower-costing characters. The number of characters in your party, however, determines the number of activations (things you can do) each turn! If I used all three activations to move the dangerous creatures towards his party, he could move all of them back and still have an activation left over.
With that in mind, the player with the most characters, albeit weaker, has much more say in what the monsters do. Taken to extremes, I would imagine this to be a game-breaking advantage.
I look forward to playing this game again. The gameplay rules made it easy to get started, and the reference charts smoothly added a good level of complexity.
MAGIC (0:36) 17 turns
Chip: 10
Vitas: 0
I played my white/green B deck, and Vitas played my "Theft of Dreams" blue deck. I made that deck for the card "Theft of Dreams", that Sara got me for Christmas. This sourcery allows you to draw a card for each tapped creature that your opponent controls. The rest of the deck (obviously) focuses on getting your opponent's creatures tapped and then killing them off (albeit slowly) with Giant Oyster. This deck could be sped up a bit with some black cards that kill tapped creaures. Death Stroke, Royal Assassin, and Stalking Assassin would be good additions.
posted by FlyingSheep @ 2:03 PM
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