We started the day with the plan to go to the DEQ and get some mini pies. The DEQ closed two minutes before we got there. This was very frustrating. It was a good thing the pie place was not stupid. Just before the lovely pies, we ate burgers and played...
Pass the Pigs 2-10 players
I got this as a stocking stuffer, I think. It's hard to remember. It was a long time ago. I never would have gotten this game of my own volition.
In the game, you roll two rubber pigs and score the result. If they land in less likely ways (on feet, back nose ears) they score more points and you continue to roll until you feel you are done or you have a bad roll. If they land on opposite bellies, you lose all progress for the turn. If they land touching each other, you lose all points earned in the game. If the land stacked on top of each other you are eliminated from play. First to reach 100 points wins.
We played and I won. Nothing really interesting happened. Of all the points scoring variants to see, we saw 7 of 28.
This game is a lot like
Farkle, but much stupider. In Farkle, you have a few questions to answer. Do I keep rolling? How many dice should I roll? What are the odds of that happening? In this game, you only have the first thing to think about. You will always roll both pigs and there is no point in thinking about the odds, because there are no odds. These are the definition of unfair dice, because the aren't dice. In Farkle, you occasionally see people making giant leaps and bounds. In a normal game, you will probably see 75% or more of the point scoring variants. In this game, you will see the same 5 low scoring or turn ending rolls and maybe one big hit. In summation, this is a boring game and the first one I will trash whenever I run out of space and "the great purge" comes.
Later in the day I met up with the "Descent group", but since we didn't have the whole gang again, we played other games. We started with...
Pixel Glory 2-4 players
Since this was a short game to teach and play, Bryan felt comfortable starting with this.
It's kind of a deck building game, but all the deck building is done in the first half of the game. The game is in two phases: bidding for cards and killing demons. In the first half of the game, you each have 9 bidding cards (1-9) and you bid on dibs order for a set of cards with powers. The cards you're bidding on come in 3 flavors: Fire, Water, Earth. Each card tends to give you attack or drawing bonuses and also give you extra basic element cards. The flavors will become relevant in the next phase. Once all 9 bidding cards get used up, the cards you won now become your wizarding deck. In the second phase, you use your deck to attack any of three demons from the demon deck. You draw 4 cards and play all (or you can reserve one) to attack demons. You can attack multiple demons if you want or you can focus on one. Most of the demons also have a flavor and if the flavor you attack with paper-rock-scissorses correctly (i.e. water beats fire, yada yada) you get bonus hits on that monster. If you kill one, you get the points from it and a new one comes out. Anything you don't kill keeps all hits for the next player. Once the Big Boss card is killed (the last card in the deck) the game ends and the player with the most points from demons wins.
I built a deck of mostly water and a little earth. I felt pretty good about my deck and I should have. Near the end it was a race between me and Bryan. I had a slight lead and I just needed one more monster to clinch it. I got lucky that Bryan was one attack point short on his last hand. Victory was mine.
I like the game, but I felt it was too short. It would have been nice to have twice or 3 times as many demons to kill. I didn't even get through my whole deck of attack cards before the game ended. It's possible that Bryan had set it on a shorter/easier variant. At least I hope so. The game comes with extras cards in all of the deck,s so if we wanted to we could have added more.
We the decided to play a heftier game and also one none of us had played before.
Dungeon Lords 2-4 players
In fact, this wasn't even punched out yet. While we got to putting the game together and organized, Bryan read off some rules.
The basic idea of the game is that you are trying to build an efficient dungeon. One good at killing the heroes that come to conquer it. It is a worker placement game that takes place over two years and at the end of each year you must defend against the warriors, wizards, clerics, thieves, and possibly paladin. During the year, you are giving orders to you minions to get things like gold, food, tunnels, rooms, traps, monsters, imps, and "goodness". As the year progresses, you'll need to pay taxes and you'll also attract the heroes based on how evil (not good) you are compared to the other players. It is a delicate balancing act that requires you to not only make your own plans, but also have an idea about what other people plan to do since the cost of the resource you get depends on how many people also need those resources and when they decided to get them. At the end of two years, the player with the most points, based on a rubric of elements, wins.
We all had our own strategies and most of us were keeping pretty level. At the end of the first year, Bryan and I were doing peachy. Robert wasn't doing too bad. Josh had been beaten pretty badly (and by that, I mean hilariously), but he wasn't out. The second year got a bit tighter for resources and saw a number of us get no resources in particular areas. In the last battle, Bryan and I came out fine, Robert wasn't too hurt, and Josh was again beaten to a pulp. Once the scores were tallied, we had all scored positive points, but Bryan was just one point in the lead of me. Very close.
This is a great game. It gets you thinking and planning. Things get tense, but not so tense you feel doomed. And when things go wrong, you aren't out for the count, but it makes it entertaining for others to see your tribulations. Josh made his turns quite enjoyable. He has a way of whimpering with a smile that says, "What the crap happened" and "No! Wait wait... I got this" all at the same time. I would gladly play this again.
Tally: 116/173 Bonus: 29/50
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