I played 1.5 new games on Saturday!
Dead of Winter: The Long Night
I'm going to provide a little rules explanation here, but some of it will assume you are at least somewhat familiar and/or able to infer some stuff from context.
The Long Night (TLN) is a stand-alone expansion to Dead of Winter (DoW), a game I already own and like a lot. DoW is a semi-cooperative game set during a zombie apocalypse. In each game, there is a scenario with a main objective, plus each player has their own secret objective. In order to win, you need to fulfill your secret objective, most of which also requires fulfilling the main objective. There is a possibility of a traitor, in which case they want the main objective to fail (among various other things). Players control a party of characters that explore a town, searching for items and killing zombies as they try to survive and do what they need to do.
TLN changes the game up in a few ways. Along with a new roster of characters, updated item cards and a new deck of Crossroads cards (events/stories that may trigger on each player's turn), the game also features 3 modules: bandits, improvements and the Raxxon Corporation. We played a 4-player game with the latter two modules, without mixing in the original game.
The improvements module provides a few more options for building items with permanent bonuses. The improvements we saw in our game were all positive, almost strictly so (as know on f.ds, there are always edge cases). Worst-case, we could just never build them and the game continues on as if the module were not there. Thus, this module just makes the game easier.
The Raxxon module does a lot more, and it was way better than I expected it to be. This module adds Raxxon as a new location. Raxxon was essentially a research facility where they developed some ridiculously great tech, but they also experimented on people and created some unique zombies. Every round, some of those zombies threaten to break out unless players collectively contribute 2 dice each round to cover specific numbers on the card. Dice are limited and used to perform many other actions, so this added responsibility makes the game a lot harder. However, this is balanced by the powerful item deck at this location (which is counter-balanced by having to roll for exposure with every search here). As a group, we felt that the balance was good. Chaotic as a whole, but it evened out very nicely.
Our early game was plagued with bad luck. Early on (second round, IIRC), I was hit with a Crossroads event which gave me 3 options -- 1 with a bad penalty, 1 with a risk to avoid the penalty, and 1 with a bigger risk to avoid the penalty AND gain a huge benefit. I chose the third for the sake of excitement and atrocious luck killed BOTH of my starting survivors. Over the course of the game, our group as a whole would have bad luck with dice. We rolled Bites on the exposure die something like 7 times, with one player rolling it twice on consecutive actions. 2 or 3 times we had someone gain a new character, only to have that character immediately die during the move out of the colony. It was unbelievable.
But we also had some good luck. One player had Blue the Chimpanzee as a character. As a test subject from Raxxon, Blue has improved searching ability at that location. This player did not suffer from the bad luck the rest of us had with the exposure die, so he was able to support us with powerful Raxxon tech throughout the game. He also had luck from getting certain items early on to help snowball that particular advantage.
We had some good luck with our set of improvements. We pushed hard as a group to get some nice Bedding for our colony, which provided every player with an extra action die each round (or a way to remove Despair, but that didn't actually come into play for us). This was essential for us to keep the special zombies locked away. Also, my two early character deaths pushed us to build the DVD Player -- a cheap improvement to build which had a large cost to use -- 2 fuel and 2 action dice to raise morale by 1. As luck would have it, we triggered a Crossroad on that same turn which resulted in us obtaining a box of good movies on DVD, so that using the DVD player would raise 1 additional morale. Over the course of the game, we used it twice to raise morale a total of 4.
For me, my initial loss was very disappointing because one of my characters was an explosives technician who could place explosive traps. She died before I had a chance to use that ability though. My replacement character (a blind Motivational Speaker with a boring power) immediately moved to Raxxon because I had a number needed to keep the special zombie contained that round. One search at Raxxon provided me with a buffed second character to give me some much needed utility. This new setup stuck me into a specific role for much of the rest of the game -- my one character stayed at Raxxon with Blue the Chimp to continue locking away special zombies, usually with each of us contributing one die. Blue searched Raxxon for items to support people all over the colony (passing a few items to my character as well) and my other character stayed outside to find items and kill zombies as needed for food and the crisis, the main objective, and my personal objective (in that order).
In the end, we managed to complete the main objective, but only I and the player with the chimpanzee completed our secret objectives. My objective was relatively easy to accomplish and I did it on the last round. The Chimp player had a tough objective, but his abundance of Raxxon items gave him the control to make it work. One player's objective was to have exactly 4 characters, but a character death and little luck with Outsiders cards kept him from success. The last player needed there to be more survivors than zombies in the town, but numerous deaths and a zombie-adding crisis on the last turn undermined his efforts.
There was no traitor. Even so, our group as a whole tends to be too cooperative in this game. For example, the players who were not able to fulfill their secret objectives could have been more selfish, withholding items needed for the main objective until their secret objective was complete. Instead, they contributed to the main objective fairly significantly. Granted, one of those players is a lot more concerned with good story moments than winning gameplay.
And we did have some excellent story moments. Early on, his character entrusted his pistol over to the chimpanzee - a ridiculous act if you think about it in-setting. That chimp proceeded to arm itself with various gadgets and improve himself by reading various books. Later on, it passed the pistol on to the blind man -- perhaps more trustworthy with a firearm than the monkey, but probably not much better.
I could go on. Suffice it to say, it was a good time. Lots of excitement, many ups and downs with luck, good tension, and a nice dash of humour. Our luck with the Raxxon items was great and it let us overcome some major setbacks, but it felt balanced overall. We managed to lock away every special zombie so I don't know what they would have been like. It would have been more difficult if there had been a traitor, or if the group had been a little more self-serving, or if Blue had not found a force-field generator early on. Other swings in luck could have made the game much easier or much harder, which may be a negative for some. I enjoy DoW more for the story elements though, and TLN certainly delivered on that.
Mansions of Madness
I think we played the second edition? It's the one that uses an app to essentially act as a DM.
MoM is like an RPG where players are various characters trying to solve a Lovecraftian mystery. We played the introductory scenario. I won't go into much detail because I expect that there are major spoilers here, but players start in the lobby of a mansion and the app guides us through various setup and story elements, showing us points of interest to Search and doorways to Explore. At first we have little idea of what's happening beyond the fact that unusual and frightening things have been happening, but we learn more as we explore the mansion.
I enjoyed it a lot. The writing was solid and the app was easy to use. It was a longer game than advertised on the box so there was some fatigue there, but I personally remained engaged throughout. By coincidence, one player ended up solving all the puzzles (I mean this literally -- sometimes you encounter puzzles which you solve in the app as a mini-game, e.g. solve a code-breaking puzzle to open a locked safe) and another player ended up fighting almost all the time, almost always against the same type of monster. But since it was a cooperative game, we all discussed general strategy together.
My biggest complaint is that the app had no undo button. At one point I accidentally clicked to end a phase when one player had not yet taken her turn, and there was no way to backtrack. I don't think this had a major impact after all, but it's hard to say because there is a fair amount of stuff that happens behind the scenes in the app.
We won without much difficulty, but the scenario was only 2/5 difficulty anyway.
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Topic: A bunch of games I played this weekend (multiple session reports) (Read 9134 times)