OK this was a bit of a strange set-up:
Dave and I have had a few goes at the Thunderstone series now, and since his Resident Evil game is played in much the same way, we decided for the first time to use Randomiser cards, which as the name suggests randomly determine what Heroes will be available, what monsters they will face, and what items will be available in the village. It was a bit of a funny draw, we had Dwarves, Redblades, Amazons and Clerics for our Heroes, and Ooze, Undead: Doom and Dragons for our enemies. Our weapons seemed quite poorly equipped to deal with them…
Taking inspiration from what I’ve been doing (I don’t quite know why as Dave has won the last 2 games of this,) Dave immediately set to work on building up his magic power. As we only had Clerics who could use magic, he had to concentrate mainly on what items he could buy. He bought all of the Lightstone Gems and used the money from these to buy most of the Fireball spells while keeping his deck fairly small; on paper this meant that he could be rocking a lot of magical power at any given time and he wouldn’t even need to use a hero to do it. We’d made things very difficult for ourselves by drawing three very powerful dragons as the first 3 monsters in the dungeon and we needed an equally powerful attack in order to take any of them down; Dave’s combination of spells and light did him well enough to take an early lead, but I wasn’t out of it yet…
My strategy was to use mainly Dwarves. They’re not wonderful fighters in themselves, but they get a huge bonus to their attack if you give them an edged weapon. We only had one edged weapon in the game – the dagger – but having dwarves gain an extra 4 attack points every time you equipped one turned out to be invaluable in some stages. However, my deck grew so large that I couldn’t count on being able to draw daggers and dwarves in the same hand, so I took to recruiting Redblades instead, who have a larger attack bonus that isn’t affected by weapons in quite the same way. This took a long time to pull off, but when I did, I could sometimes bring more pain to the Dungeon using cards that have attack effects than Dave could ever hope to manage by drawing fireball cards.
Unfortunately it was too little too late for me. We reached the end of the night and Dave had to go home; we counted up the victory points and Dave had almost double the points I had. I’d have needed a miracle just to stay in the game to the end…
Reflecting on it, my strategy was a good one – I just went about it the wrong way around. Redblades always get +2 to their attack whatever happens, whereas Dwarves only get +1 unless you equip them with an edged weapon, which since the only one available was a dagger often made them little more use than the Militia that you start the game with. Granted, the effect of adding the weapon to Dwarves is huge and only a fool would fail to take advantage of it, but if I’d have brought Redblades first, then I could have done some moderate damage without it being contingent on buying extra weapons. I could have then got in some early kills, and bought some more daggers – and finally Dwarves.
Of course, the Randomiser cards make it extremely unlikely that we’ll ever play with exactly that combination again, but at least I know what I should be looking for next time. Also, checking back over the game we did misinterpret some rules with regard to what counts as a hero and what doesn’t, so we’ll have to concentrate a bit harder on that next time. Still, all in all a very enjoyable game and one day I will have my revenge on you, Dave. Oh yes. I will have my revenge…
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