I had some friends over yesterday and we played some games. I’ll start with the ones that didn’t make that strong an impression, and move on to the ones that were more fun.

My friend Chris showed me Set. While I recognize the potential for this set-finding game to be a lot of fun it is, unfortunately, not particularly friendly to the color-blind community. I mean, come on; red, green, and purple? Were you guys even trying? How hard would it have been to make the colors something more easily to distinguish, like blue, red, and black?

We also played Bang!. I like the theme, and I can see how it would be fun with a large group, but with three players it pretty much falls flat. It is technically playable with three, but it really isn’t that interesting. Also, some of the cards are simply broken with only three, where you already know who is in which role (and thus, who to kill). Willy the Kid can use any number of Bang! cards on his turn, while everyone else is restricted to one. This meant that our first game ended before I even got a chance to act, because the Tad (playing Willy) had more than enough Bang! cards to finish me off and there was nothing I could do. Not a fun outcome, really, but I’d be willing to try the game again with, say, five or six players.

We played some DS games, too. New Super Mario Bros. has some minigames which are kind of fun, but I wasn’t really all that impressed by them. Mario Kart, on the other hand, is a blast in multiplayer.

Finally (actually, this is the first game we played yesterday), we played D&D Miniatures, which I got for my birthday. We played using the starter set and one Dungeons of Dread booster pack, for a total of thirteen minis, not all of which were used. We had two 100-point warbands with two players on a side, and we played on the Dwarven Ruins map. It was a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to play this game again, and to get more minis. The sculpts themselves are pretty good for the most part, though some are better than others. The grick, for example, has a pretty unimpressive paint job, while the young green dragon and the balhannoth look fantastic. As far as the actual gameplay, this is one of those strongly exception-based games where you have to play it a couple of times before synergies between minis start to reveal themselves. We disregarded alignment and faction restrictions because we otherwise probably wouldn’t have been able to construct very big warbands, so some of our synergies probably weren’t tournament-legal. That said, the yuan-ti swiftscale combined with the dwarven battlemaster is a pretty devastating combo, even if it isn’t strictly legal due to opposing alignments. I also think that the dire wolf and goblin picador go well together, though by the time the poor goblin was able to immobilize something for the wolf, the wolf had already died.

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