Resident Evil Alliance: 18/9/2012

There's not been much going on with games with Dave for the last couple of weeks because we've been busy building and painting some of our models. It's been a laugh doing that as well but we decided to take a break from that today and go back to playing some games. In this case we went with the expansion to the Resident Evil Deck Building Game: Alliance.

Fundementally the game works the same as the old one so I won't go too much into that. The difference is in the actual cards. The weapons are a lot more powerful, and allow for more risky manuevres into the mansion. This version also encourages a degree of teamwork; I guess that's why they call it Alliance but with only me and Dave playing, we were never going to use that particular aspect of it.

Everything about this guy suggests badass...

One thing I really like about the Resident Evil games is the random character selection. Rather than picking your favourite and spamming their tactics, the game forces you to decide how you can best use your character for any given situation. Dave drew Carlos Olivera, and I drew Jack Krauser. I didn't pay too much attention to Carlos' special rules, but Krauser...

You see it's a bit funny, because I don't actually know enough about the Resident Evil mythos to know who Krauser is. However, most of the characters who I recognised from the video game have special rules in their card counterparts that fit the theme for their character. The one that immediately springs to mind is Barry from the original Resident Evil game who is quite tough and an ace with magnum weapons. The rules for Krauser suggest that he is a complete and utter madman. In the old game his rules related to adding extra power when you use kives. However in Alliance he is absolutely deadly. He doesn't start off that way, as his rules prohibit him from using more than one weapon. I'm not sure whether it means per turn or per explore, hopefully that's been FAQ'd, but the fact is you cannot safely go into the mansion unless you buy another couple of weapons first. But when you manage this and get 6 commendations, his other rule kicks in, where you get +10 attack for each card in your hand. Combine that with what I think is the Fierce Battle card that allows you to draw another 4, and this makes Krauser unstoppable...

I bought a load of assault rifles as well. These work slightly differently in Alliance; the amount of damage you do is dependent on the amount of ammo you have, up to a maximum of 20. It doesn't make much tactical sense given Krauser's rules, but I was looking for the Signature Special that brings that limit up to 60. This took up lot of ammo cards and we really did need to flush out some of our other cards to speed up the deck, but this combined with Krauser's rules meant that I was often going into the mansion with 130, 140 attack power, which is more than anything could stand up to in there. I found Wesker quite quickly, dispatched him, and won the game easily, we didn't even count the score.

So, I really do like Alliance. If you're getting into it for the first time it's probably better to go for the core game first, but I do like the extra depth the rules give the game. I also like the more kick-ass versions of the weapons, and I'd love to be able to try the partner rules as well, although as it's still only me and Dave after more than a year I'm not holding my breath for this. All in all, Resident Evil is a really good card game, and there's enough depth and tactical variety in there - thanks largely to the characters - to keep me coming back for more for a long time yet.

17/8/2011: Resident Evil

I'm actually thinking of writing to Bandai and asking them to rename their Resident Evil Card Game like this:

RESIDENT EVIL: NEW AND EVER-MORE INVENTIVE WAYS FOR MATT TO GET HIMSELF KILLED.


Not hard to see how this one went, but it's worth noting that Dave had decided to play the hard version of the game - where all the monsters do 10 more damage than they're supposed to, and any effects are applied twice. This - plus my overconfident stupidity - is what cost me in the end...

At least it won't take so long to set up now that we've got it - there's 6 core items that are included in every game, and the remaining 12 can either be a pre-set that the game suggests, or 12 of whatever the hell you like. I think Dave was all for the latter but I think that could lead to a very unbalanced game if you don't know what you're doing so I insisted that we follow the 'Classic Horror' pre-set, at least for now.

Because we knew how ferociously hard the enemies in the mansion could become, we didn't venture in there for about an hour, instead using our turns to build up our collection of weapons in to something we could actually use. My character was Claire Redfield, and her effect is making her ammunition count as 10 more than what it actually is - invaluable, as I then don't need to draw so many ammo cards in order to fire the big guns. I had to make sure I got my hands on the full-bore machine gun - you need a lot of ammo to use it, but I had the character that would have made it all the more easy.

I have a peculiar gaming mantra: while I tend to play defensively, I'm also aware of the benefits of taking risks - after all, as I'll happily tell anyone who'll listen, not taking risks is how Napoleon cost himself Russia. So after building up a sizeable collection of weapons I was the first to enter the mansion, and I was building up a good set of kills and commendations. I never got so far ahead of Dave that he wouldn't have been able to catch up if he'd killed the Uroboros plant - that monster is worth 8 commendations and as soon as it dies, the game ends. The fact that it can kill most of the female characters and a significant number of the males in one fell swoop usually decides the matter without the need to count up your commendations, and I only avoided this because I'd come across some herbs earlier in the mansion that boosted Claire's health from 70 to 90. Nonetheless, for a while it all seemed to be going my way.

This was never going to end well for Claire...

And then it happened - I went into the mansion with 45 attack points and came across a Hunter. In the normal game, that would have been fine. In the Hard game, I fell just short of being able to kill it, and it wasted me for 50 points. In a moment of intense stupidity I decided to go back to the mansion without healing myself, with about the same amount of attack points, and came across a Licker. And again, had this been the normal game, I'd have gotten away with it. But no. There was the licker with 50 attack points, and me with 45 and about half my health. The ensuing battle was very short.

So, another game handed to Dave via my reckless abandon. To be fair, going in to the mansion again without healing myself was the worst idea I'd had in a long long time, and it cost me, but in all other respects I think I played quite well. Always looking forward to the next one, which won't be for a while because I'm extremely busy in the evenings and probably most of the days next week.

Painting blog coming up next, see you soon...

26/7/2011: Resident Evil

No, not the video game. Completed that years ago when my old friend Matt Marr was good enough to lend me his Playstation while he went on holiday. If you follow this blog with any degree of regularity you'll probably have guessed that this is another game that I play with either cards, dice or boards, and in actual fact it's a card game. Hence the name Resident Evil: The Deck Building Game. I should probably have put that as the title but to be honest I think I might get more views if people come on to this site thinking I'm on about the actual video game. So now that you're here, you may as well read on...

So this is something that Dave put me on to. The mechanics of the game are not dissimilar to Thunderstone: Dragonspire that we played a few weeks ago, but is just different enough to make it feel like a different game. Probably the most significant difference is that there is a genuine risk of death, as I was to discover. For another, the strategy of the game is set in place by the character you play (chosen at random from characters who appeared in the video games, though I don't recognise some of them,) and the cards you buy; there are weapons but it's not like you're building a balanced party or anything like that, it's a case of get tooled up, go into the Mansion and kill things. But it's the same thing that you have to do to win; kill the boss (in this case a plant called Uroboros,) and the person with the most points at the end of the game based on how many monsters you killed wins the game. There are other differences but I won't bore you with the details.

So how did I get on? Well... not all that well actually. The character I drew was Rebecca Chambers, who's special ability allowed her to 'trash' cards (throw them out of the game so there is no chance of drawing them again) and hand cards over to one of the other plays. Playing competitively, this skill is invaluable later on in the game when you've got a lot of cards to draw and several useless ones to get through before you find the card you need. I was prepared to use the skill, but not before I'd made a couple of foolhardy journeys into the mansion early on and nearly killed myself. I did this wondering how bad it could possibly be; in some cases I was still playing Thunderstone but the fact that in Resident Evil you can't actually see what you're attacking until it attacks you compelled me to test the water (or mansion) as it were.

Now at that point Dave and I decided to play the 'realistic' version of the game, where once your character is dead you are out of the game. The other version is basically you miss a turn if you die and come back the turn after with full health. I chose 'realistic' because there's a lot more at stake when you're about to die, and therefore the game is more fun... but it was time to regroup and it was a long time before I headed into the mansion again. I built up an impressive collection of cards to use once I got in there, and decided to risk it. After all, by refusing to take risks, Napoleon cost himself Russia... I actually managed to pick up a herb that healed me a bit, and took down several monsters, maxing out Rebecca's ability (which came in very handy later,) and giving me a nice selection of commendations (points) with which I could comfortably win the game were it to end at that point. Dave was trying to pull it back but the monsters he was fighting were of relatively low power and he wasn't getting all that many rewards for his efforts.

Then, as I prepared myself for another excursion into the mansion, disaster. I came up against Uroboros, and found myself 15 points short of killing it. It, therefore, killed me, and Dave won the game by default.

So what to do next time? Well, I won't be ne-he-hearly so quick to go into the mansion next time, knowing that the weapons you get at the start of the game really aren't up to much without at least some augmentation from some of the other cards. The Uroborus monster takes a whopping 90 points of damage before it will go down so I need to be sure that I'm capable of delivering such a blow before I venture in too many times. What I'd really like to see though, and this is very little to do with the game, is more players. The game carries up to 4 people and right now it's just me and Dave. It's great and we really do have fun playing it, but a 3rd and 4th player will lend a new element of strategy to a game like this that we just don't have at the moment.

Still, not complaining, it's been a great night and I'm really looking forward to the next one! Incidentally, I might be buying Thunderstone before too long. Games like this are really too much fun to let slide.

Off to Plymouth for a week next week, so unless I complete Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance or finish painting some models before I go on Sunday (Not likely, it's taking me ages to do both) that'll be the last you'll hear from me for a bit. See you in a couple of weeks!