I got the original Thunderstone game for my Birthday, and we gave it a go tonight. Actually it was a dice roll between that, Resident Evil, or talking about a novel that Dave wants to write about Tau and Orks. But I'm glad we gave this one a go. It's been far too long...
OK so there are some differences between this and Thunderstone Dragonspire that I played with Dave a few months ago, but they're mostly aesthetic differences and the general flow of the game remains the same. It's been a while, though, so for the uninitiated: You take a party of heroes into a dungeon to take out as many monsters as you can. You need to find the Thunderstone - shuffled into the last few cards - which stops the game immediately, and you gain a number of points based on the amount of monsters you kill and how many points they are worth; the one with the most points at the end of the game is the winner. Instead of going in to the dungeon you can spend some time in 'the village,' where you buy upgrades and more powerful heroes to aid you in your quest, and is literally the only way to deal with some of the game's tougher monsters.
I should mention that we started off with the basic starter set of cards. Normally they would be randomised but the starter set gives you a fairly balanced set of heroes with enough nasties to provide enough of a challenge. We started off with a basic party which would, as ever, needed to be added to. My tactics centred around building up my magic abilities, so I bought a lot of Elf Wizard and Clerics. Neither of their effects are all that much good until they get levelled up; the Cleric's effect of swapping a Disease card for another card is useful but a bit of a gamble because you don't know what the next card will be, and by the time you work it out your already committed into walking into the dungeon; you have to fight something, regardless of whether or not you can win. The attack power of the magic cards are fairly low at first and there are no magic cards in your starting hand, so it was a long time before I could venture into the dungeon to kill any monsters. The upshot of all of this is by the time I finally did, Dave had already got a lot of kills and levelled his heroes up quite a bit.
I began to pull it back when it transpired that because I was so dependent on magic, I no longer needed my militia or any of their associated effects; dropping those cards gave me a more efficient deck and there were a lot more options open to me for attack. I maxed out one Elf Archmage, which certainly helped but I can't quite figure out their effect; you get to put a monster from your hand back in to the dungeon. You don't get to fight it again because the Thunderstone will come up long before you see it, so all you're doing is throwing away victory points. The only reason I can think of for doing it is removing some low-reward monsters to speed up your deck, and in a game with more people that might be a reasonable tactic but it wasn't really going to help against Dave; if I didn't kill something, he would. So, I kept blasting the monsters with magic and whittling down the dungeon, until the Thunderstone was revealed...
Between the Thunderstone and the two of us there were two Nixies, who considering how proficient our decks were by then were very easy to kill. I killed one, and then Dave drew a bad hand so I killed the other, claiming the Thunderstone and ending the game. But did I win? We counted up the victory points, Dave had 39, I had 36. It was a close run, but in the end the game went to Dave.
So what went wrong? Well, Dave spent the earlier part of the game building up an attack force of Squires and Knights, even managed to get a Lord at one point. However, their effects relate to Militia and he'd thrown most of those cards away, making their effects next to useless. He was building up some magic in order to tackle some of the better monsters in the game I was nonetheless making a meal of, he did get an Archmage in the end and it was helping. His fighters, however, were of far more use when it came to dealing with the only monster in the game that halved the magic damage and couldn't be hit by weapons. Worth a whopping 6 victory points, the game was going to go to whoever had that one, and it was only really Dave who could have done it.
So, tactics for next time? Well if I play with that particular combination of cards again I'll think about building up some fighting skill as well as magic. It might be an idea to start off collecting some fighting cards and build up the magic power later in the game. It all depends on what gets drawn in the next go... but it will be interesting to find out.
Well done Dave, it was a close one but you won fair and square.
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