Interesting one here...
I was asked to try out this card game from AEG (No idea what it stands for, presumably the publisher.) I played it once again with Dave, who is the only person I know who would play a game like this so the choice of opponent was obvious really! This is going to be in two parts - a recollection of what went on in the game, and because I was asked to comment on the game I'll offer my comments here. I'll give a description of the areas I was asked to comment on and you can decide for yourselves whether or not I gave it a high score...
So the idea of the game is that your party is trying to obtain the "Thunderstone," a mythical artefact that will help protect the world from impending doom. The game is for 2-5 people and whoever gets the most victory points - achieved by killing monsters or having particularly powerful artefacts, spells or heroes - is the winner. How it works is that on your turn, you can either "go to the village" and use the monetary value of the cards you have in your hand to upgrade your deck by buying new heroes or better equipment, "Enter the Dungeon" and kill any one of 3 possible monsters that are in play with penalties to your skills depending on where in the dungeon you are and what equipment you have, or "Rest," where you stand and do nothing or throw one of your cards away. Each time you kill a monster, another monster is drawn from the 'Dungeon Deck,' until eventually you come to the Thunderstone (shuffled into the last 10 cards,) and when that reaches the first level of the dungeon, the player that caused it to do so claims it for his own. As far as I know there are no victory points available for it, however it hands over the game to the player that owns it in the event of a tie.
If that sounds complicated, well, it is for about the first half an hour, but once we'd got used to the game mechanics we were merrily building decks and entering dungeons as much as you like. More complicated - but all the better for it - is the strategy of building decks. You start of with some basic cards which are useful but of fairly low power. When you start buying different monsters and equipment, you need to try and balance your need to have reliable cards with the fact that if your deck gets too large, it will take far too long to get the card you need. Almost certainly at some point you'll come across a 'disease' card that will give you penalties to your party as they attack, and the smaller your deck, the more likely they are to come up as well. Monsters that you kill are added to your deck and are counted for victory points, but they rarely do anything to help you once you get into the dungeon; is it worth throwing some victory points away so that you can increase your draw rate?
Party-building is interesting as well. I should point out here that Dave and I were using a fairly basic 'starter' set of cards that the game recommends which gave us a selection of fighters, thieves, clerics and wizards. While the monsters we had to face gave the impression that a balanced party would be the most useful (some monsters can only be damaged by magic, for example, or can't be attacked by heroes that don't have any weapons,) the reality is that this isn't practical. It's unlikely you'll draw a party to enter the dungeon that is both balanced and powerful enough to do any significant amount of damage - a fighter, for example, does not do the same kind of damage as a wizard, so while two fighters would probably make one very powerful attack, a fighter and a wizard would result in two not very powerful attacks. No, it is more useful to focus on one or the other and be aware of what your opponents are doing so you know which one to go for. I chose to focus on magic and built my party around wizards and clerics; Dave went down the fighter route and got mainly fighters and thieves.
We made it quite difficult for ourselves because after a preliminary scramble to get into fights in the dungeon, we found ourselves having to face three extremely hard opponents and had to slink back to the village to regroup. This was when our parties began to take shape. However, Dave had the advantage in that he had killed more monsters than me, and could use the experience points he'd gained as a result to improve his heroes; it therefore took him less time to get back to the dungeon and take out two orc warlords who are worth a huge amount of victory points. We carried on - by then our attacks were powerful enough to take out most comers - until we came to the monsters that stuck a significant penalty for attacking them, at which point we were forced to play a bit more carefully. Eventually the Thunderstone appeared and went to Dave, and as he'd earned more victory points than me, so did the game.
So, what do I think of the game?
In terms of build quality and value for money, in general it's very good indeed. The box seems sturdy enough and allows room for the upcoming expansions, and the artwork on the cards is beautiful. The 'board' is a nice touch, not crucial but if you've never played a card game before then I guess it's useful as a guide. Coming from a background of Games Workshop and Yu Gi Oh cards, it's a great change to be able to explore aspects of each of the heroes/villains that you come across in the game without necessarily having to spend hundreds and hundreds of pounds on a new deck or a new army. One slight aspect that niggles - we noticed that the cards were bending quite easily, even after one game, and the way they are stored does not lend themselves well to deck protectors. My advice? If you get the game, keep in mind the cards are going to take a bit of looking after.
In terms of theme and originality, there's not much to go on here if I'm perfectly honest. Heroes and Wizards, Orcs and Zombies, Dragons and Magic Stones, I've pretty much been aware of all of those things since the age of 4, and nothing will surpirse anyone old enough to have read Lord of the Rings. The Party Building system is interesting and I like it a lot; it's a new spin on the idea of building a party and going to war. But we've all done Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer before; there's nothing new here.
The game took a while to get going but once it had nothing could stop us. We'd grasped the fundementals of the rules and rarely had to reference them, which meant we could spend the majority of the time we were there playing the game. Never a bad thing! The instructions could have been clearer, I think, at exactly what means what. For example, we didn't know, and pretty much had to work out for ourselves, how 'Strength' affects the heroes. You use 'Attack' values to attack monsters and Strength didn't appear to have an effect until we discovered that you need a certain amount of strength in your heroes before you can use some of the game's more powerful weapons. An index or glossary would have helped. But for how often we have to reference the rules in the games Dave and I usually play, it was a refreshing change to see a game that, once we had got it, we could just pick it up and have a play should we wish to.
Is the game balanced? Difficult to say on the precedent of one game with two people. With hindsight, Dave had me on the back foot for most of the game, and we're used to playing card duelling games so we were looking for ways to hinder one another's progress; it's not a strategy you'd necessarily employ in a game like this but we like it! The game can have up to five people, at which point I would suggest the ways in which you can build and upgrade your party become far more limited, i.e. there are rarely more than 2 top-level cards for each hero type, which means that only 2 players can ever have the top level of any given hero. This will lend a competitive edge to the game but I do wonder, if the game ever featured the full compliment of 5 players, whether one or more of those players would find themselves out of the runnings quite quickly.
All that being said, we had a top laugh playing it, we really did. There's a nice sense of achievement that we get from killing the higher level monsters, and while we're hardly working together to do it, it's not like we're killing each other's monsters either which is a nice change. It is what it is - a great way to spend a couple of hours playing a fun game with some friends (though I doubt games would actually take a couple of hours to play once you know the rules) and I can't fault it for that at all. Dave loved it, and went home promising to look for ways in which to get hold of a copy himself.
If he does, great, but this copy of the game is being returned toda so I doubt I'll be playing this game again in the near future. But, here's to hoping; the game has a lot more to offer than I had time to explore and I'd love to give it another go.
Roleplay tonight, look forward to my next story about my life...
No comments:
Post a Comment