Did I get your attention? That’s the trifecta, right? D&D (devil worship, of course), video games (creating the violent youth of tomorrow), and prostitution. Only ‘prostitution’ isn’t what I meant by ‘solicitation’. No, sadly this is just a post where I talk about a few things that I’ve been playing, reading, and/or thinking about lately. To wit:

D&D Essentials
I’ve read the Red Box and played the character creation adventure that comes with it. I liked it. The adventure does a good job of introducing the mechanics of the game and getting your character started, and it comes with virtually everything you need to play, except for maybe some pregenerated characters, or a method of character creation besides playing through the adventure. There’s a full-on adventure in the box that can be played with first-level characters, and with all the other stuff in there, dropping some pregens in makes it a ready-made DM kit for introducing new players to the game. Here’s what I did to solve that problem.

I’ve also started reading through Heroes of the Fallen Lands, which I’m really liking. I like the mechanics of Essentials; they’re streamlined and simple for the new players, but they’re different and interesting for the existing players. What really excites me about the whole thing is that it’s another indication that WotC is not planning on resting on their laurels. They consistently demonstrate that they’re not afraid to mix things up, that they’re not going to do things a certain way just because it’s the way they’ve been doing them up to this point. This willingness to switch things up mid-game is what’s going to keep D&D growing as a game, and will likely keep it from going stale. A side-effect might be that 4th Edition, because it continues to evolve without obsoleting existing mechanics, will likely have a longer life than 3rd Edition did.

Video Games
There are a few video games I’d like to talk about. First, I’d like to highly recommend a little independent title called Delve Deeper. If you like D&D, board games, or dwarves, you owe it to yourself to try this game out; heck, it’s only $5. You can get it on Steam; I believe you can also get it on Xbox Live (though I can’t confirm that, as I don’t own a 360). The game is a turn-based strategy game with a very board-gamey feel, and tons of references to various elements of geek culture. You take control of a band of five dwarves, and you are competing to mine more riches and plunder more relics than the other teams of five dwarves. You can play competitively on the same computer, with up to four players. It’s great fun.

I’ve also been playing Civilization V, and it’s been dominating my gaming time. I’m not going to talk about it at length; if you really want to read about the game, you can do that almost anywhere else on the Internets, I imagine. Suffice it to say that it’s very good, and I’ll likely boot it up as soon as I’m done with this post.

Solicitations
Finally, I’d like to officially state that I am soliciting guest posts at this time. If you have something to say about games and you want a forum to do it on, send me an email (engard at gmail dot com), or post a comment on this thread. If you have something you want to talk about, let me know, and I’ll let you know if I’m interested. There’s not a lot I won’t say yes to, provided that it’s about games and more-or-less meets the standards of this website.

I gave some brief initial impressions of this game a little while ago, and regular readers have probably gotten the impression that I like this game quite a bit. I just got done playing a few more games yesterday and I thought, with about twelve games under my belt (since last Tuesday, by the way), ranging from solo games to games with a full compliment of five players, it was about time I actually reviewed Castle Ravenloft.

For those who are unfamiliar, Castle Ravenloft is a D&D-based board game that draws its inspiration from the original D&D module. The rules of the game incorporate elements of 4th Edition D&D, but the combat is streamlined and simplified so that it goes quickly and keeps the game moving. The whole affair is more-or-less a dungeon crawl, albeit one that can have interesting and varied goals and mechanics depending on the scenario you’re playing. It can be played in about an hour (though times can vary from that mean by about thirty minutes, depending on events within the game and the number of players at the table), and it can be played with one to five players.

Overall, I like this game quite a bit. It scratches the D&D itch, it reinforces cooperative play, and it even plays well solo. There are thirteen scenarios in the game (two of them designed for solo play), plus two additional scenarios that Wizards of the Coast have released for free on their web site. Monsters, encounters, treasures, and even the dungeon itself are all randomized in the game, meaning that playing the same adventure twice in a row elicits different play experiences. This leads to a lot of variability in play, which in turn leads to a high degree of replay value. In addition, the game is extremely modular; it would be easy to build your own adventures, characters, monsters, villains, and so forth for the game, leading to even more replay value. In time, I fully expect the online to community to rally around this game and create some really cool stuff.

It’s not all great, though; there are a few issues with the game. First and foremost, the rules can be a little unclear at times. They don’t always spell things out in a comprehensive and unambiguous fashion, and while most of the time this can be mitigated by interpreting rules as strictly as possible, sometimes that just isn’t enough. Furthermore, some cards interact with each other, and with scenario rules, in strange ways that require some interpretation. It would be nice of WotC would create and maintain an official FAQ for the game, so that people can get official answers to some of the questions presented.

There have also been reports of people missing components from their boxes, or having components misprinted, or even having extra components. I didn’t experience any of those problems personally, but the possibility exists (I even heard an account of someone’s game missing all of the cards in the game, rendering it effectively unplayable). Luckily, WotC will replace any lost or damaged components, so if this problem troubles you, contact them.

Finally, there have been complaints about the quality of the components. Specifically, some people think that the cards and tiles are bland and uninteresting. I can definitely see where these people are coming from, even if I don’t agree. The artwork on the monster cards is black and white line art, and there is no artwork aside from a simple design on any of the other cards. The tiles are mostly lacking in any kinds of features or dungeon dressing, whit the exception of the named tiles. As I said, none of this bothers me. Artwork on treasure cards and encounter cards would be nice, but would likely drive up the price, and at $65 the game is already expensive enough. I’m also not convinced that such artwork would really enhance the experience past the first few games; it would cause the game to make a better first impression, but after while you’d probably stop noticing the artwork and paying attention to the rules. As for the artwork on the monster cards, I find it to be clear and communicative, as the depictions of the monsters exactly match their miniatures, leaving little room for guesswork. The tiles are similarly functional; there have already been quite a few questions as to whether things like altars and coffins block movement, and if there were more of these kinds of features on the tiles, those questions would be even more present (of course, this might have prompted WotC to address such a thing in the rulebook).

At this point I’d like to talk about a few of the highlights in the adventure book. I’ve played most of the adventures at this point, and enjoyed them all, but a few really stand out and deserve specific mention.

The game features two introductory adventures, one for solo play and one for group play (“Escape from the Tomb” and “Find the Icon of Ravenloft”, respectively). These are easily the two simplest adventures in the game, using straightforward goals and very few modifications to the core rules. They work well for their intended purpose: to introduce new players to the mechanics of the game. Once you’ve played them a few times, though, there are much more interesting (and complex) adventures to play, and you’ll likely only use them to introduce more new players.

“The Final Transformation” is a fairly complex scenario that sees the players escorting a townsperson, Kavan, into the crypt to find the fountain that can cure his impending vampirism. The catch is that, if he’s left alone or if monsters get too close to him, he turns into a vampire and attacks (temporarily). It’s a tense scenario, and probably one of the more difficult scenarios in the game. It is, however, extremely memorable, and even has a finale sequence that sees a large number of monsters spawning and attacking the party while they defend poor Kavan.

Perhaps my favorite scenario so far is “Horror of the Howling Hag”. This one stretches the mechanics of the game more than any other scenario, using an alternate setup for the board, a specific subset of tiles, and different spawning rules for monsters. The players start the adventure apart, in opposite corners of the crypt, and must find each other and the arcane circle that the hag is using to keep them there. Being isolated is a little scary, especially since the alternate spawning rules allow up to two monsters to spawn on a single tile simultaneously. The hag, herself, is an interesting villain; she doesn’t do a lot of damage, but she continues to keep the heroes separate by teleporting them around the dungeon. It’s a very interesting and challenging experience.

Finally, let me talk about the difficulty of the game. This is a hard game. I’ve lost more games than I’ve won. That said, I’m itching to play more. In Castle Ravenloft, when you lose you’re usually on the verge of winning, which makes you want to try again and do it right. Further, when you win you’re usually on the verge of losing, which makes your victory all the sweeter. I should mention, though, that there are some minor scaling issues in the game. The game scales probably about as well as it can be expected to; monsters, encounters, and villain actions all scale with the number of players in an appropriate way, and keep a fairly consistent level of challenge across numbers of players. There is one thing that the game really can’t account for in scaling, though: diversity of abilities. With one player, you have only a single character’s abilities to pull from, meaning that certain monsters or types of encounters will always be very difficult for you to handle. With five, you have everyone’s abilities to draw on, allowing you to react to events within the dungeon much more effectively. I think that the sweet spot for the game is probably three or four players; there’s enough diversity to allow you to react to a lot, but not so much that you’re prepared for everything. That said, the game is still a lot of fun with one or five, and it does scale much better than many other cooperative games that I’ve played. The scenario that you choose will also affect the difficulty, so with five players, it’s probably best to choose one of the more complex and difficult scenarios.

What I Liked: Almost everything. The game is quick-playing and fun, scratches the D&D itch, plays will with multiple players or in solo play, had a wide variety of adventures to choose from, and has a high degree of modibility and replay value.

What I Didn’t Like: The rules could be a little clearer in places. Hopefully WotC will post a FAQ at some point to mitigate this problem.

The Bottom Line: If you like D&D, you’ll probably like Castle Ravenloft. Even if you have no interest in playing D&D, Castle Ravenloft is a very well-designed cooperative dungeon crawl with a much shorter playing time than other cooperative games (like Arkham Horror) or dungeon crawls (like Descent). I highly recommend it.

I’m not calling this a review, per se, even though I’m including it in the reviews category. I’m also including it in the session reports category, because it’s going to be a bit of both. I’m going to talk about some of my initial impressions of the game after playing it five times, and I’m going to describe (briefly) what happened in each session.

Let me start by saying this: my win-to-loss ratio in Castle Ravenloft is not what you’d call “good”. In fact, at one win and four losses, I’d say it’s pretty bad. That does not, however, mean that I think the game is bad. Quite the opposite actually; I enjoyed each game quite a bit, particularly because I never really felt that losing (or winning) was a foregone conclusion until, once or twice, right near the end. Another thing that I’d like to mention is that this game plays very well solo. Three of my five plays have been solo (using the included solo adventures), and they’ve all been a lot of fun.

Game One: Escape from the Tomb
I played the introductory solo scenario as my first game, using the dragonborn fighter and his recommended-for-beginners loadout of powers. I rolled badly initially and wound up swamped by a bunch of monsters that I hadn’t taken care of, but my dragon breath power got me out of that sticky spot. I used a wand of teleportation to get a wraith out of my hair and ran down a hallway, but I drew too many tiles with white triangles on them (in the initial scenario, these advance the sun track by a step, bringing you closer to Count Strahd’s awakening), and the vampire lord awoke and came to get me. I continued running down my hallway while Strahd and the wraith chased me, and eventually found that it was a dead end. I doubled back, but got stuck in a room with a crushing walls trap, and the two baddies quickly caught up to me. Between those three sources of damage, I went down pretty quickly. Game over.

I feel I made some tactical errors in this game, the most notable being that I had eleven or twelve experience points at the end, and hadn’t spent a single one. I could easily have canceled that crushing walls trap, which would have made things considerably easier, but forgot that I could. Lesson learned: spend your XP, don’t hoard them.

Game Two: Escape from the Tomb, Redux
This time I went in with the ranger. I was a little worried because of her relative squishiness compared to the fighter, but she more than makes up for it with offensive power. Careful attack is easily one of the best at-wills in the game. It may not seem like much, but the ability to automatically deal one damage to an adjacent monster at will is pretty big. Sadly, she didn’t fare much better. Strahd didn’t awaken this time, but pure attrition brought the ranger down. I do feel that, if I had had twin strike as an at-will instead of hunter’s shot, things might have gone better; there was one situation where it would likely have saved my life.

Game Three: Adventure – Impossible
This is a great adventure. It gives you the opportunity to play all (or most) of the characters, and gives you some experience with the villains, too. I started off with the cleric, and very quickly ran into the werewolf. What I discovered in short order is that the werewolf is extremely hard to kill if you don’t have a silver dagger or an at-will that does more than one point of damage. He regenerates one hit point every round, making it very difficult to make any headway against him. I mostly avoided him and explored, and soon ran into the zombie dragon. While the zombie dragon lacks the werewolf’s regeneration, it does have thirteen hit points, which is a challenge in and of itself.

The wizard followed the cleric, and he managed to deal some decent damage to the zombie dragon and take out a number of monsters before he went down. He didn’t last that long, though. Next came the rogue, and she was the one who finally bested the werewolf. A well-timed sneak attack, combined with a snipe shot and a riposte strike, took that beastie down. She also made some decent headway against the zombie dragon, and even leveled up, but failed to kill it. She went down, making way for the ranger.

Because of the ranger’s strong offensive capabilities, I was able to finally slay the zombie dragon, but not before an encounter card drew a tile from the bottom of the stack and teleported the dragon to that tile. Interestingly enough, that tile happened to be another villain-spawning tile, bringing the young vampire onto the board. The ranger killed the zombie dragon while the vampire slipped past her toward the entrance, and when she pursued, he killed her quickly.

Last was the fighter, and I was pretty sure I had it in the bag. Famous last words. Although the fighter is durable and can deal pretty good damage, the vampire heals himself every time he hits, and he was hitting a lot. He finally whittled me down and dropped my last hero.

Game Four: The Icon of Ravenloft
I finally convinced my wife to give the game a try, and she enjoyed it. She played the cleric while I played the rogue, and the two of them make a good team. Between my backstabbing and her lance of faith, we could one-shot pretty much any monster that got in our way, and we did so. We were getting a little worried when we got down to our last two or three hit points each, but we still had both of our healing surges when we found the chapel. We killed the two monsters on the tile (a wraith and a gargoyle), and made off with the Icon for my first win!

Game Five: Klak’s Infernal Artifact
Immediately after playing that game, I convinced her to play again. It wasn’t hard. This time she played the wizard to my fighter, and we went after that sneaky kobold sorcerer. We drew some nasty monsters early (wraiths, blazing skeletons, and gargoyles), and I had the misfortune to pull a spear gauntlet trap that did some significant damage to my poor fighter. We ran in the other direction, leaving it to do its thing. We started down a corridor and ran into a blazing skeleton, but by that time we each had two hit points and we had used both of our healing surges. Actually, I had used both of them; I had taken the tank role a little too seriously. The skeleton took the wizard out, and it was curtains for our mission.

Again, there was a tactical error that we made there. I had the bodyguard utility power, which would have allowed me to turn that hit into a miss. The next treasure card I drew (I killed the skeleton in the hopes that I’d get a healing potion for her) would have allowed us to heal one hit point every time we hit a monster, but that was too little too late. By the time we had figured out our error, though, the game was cleaned up.

Conclusions
I’m enjoying this game so far. I’m going to play some more over the weekend, probably both solo and group play, and I’m itching to try some of the more elaborate scenarios. I like that each of the characters feels different and has powers of varying complexity to use, and the monsters really wind up feeling pretty different from each other. I like that traps are deadly and nasty, and the encounter card system is a nice touch that makes it so that you never know what’s around the corner. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I may have rose-colored glasses on when I look at this game; I’ve been pretty excited about it for a good long time now. On the other hand, I’ve built it up in my head for quite a while, and so far it hasn’t disappointed me. Time will tell, but so far, so good.

I just got done reading the new 4e treatment of the Tomb of Horrors, and I am totally psyched to run it. I don’t want to go into too many specifics, as I do plan to use the material in my game, but I’ll tell you a few things about it.

First, it’s a very intelligently designed dungeon crawl. That is, most of the adventure takes place in dungeons, but it’s rare that an encounter is purely combat, or is even what it appears to be on the surface. Many combats include traps, and many encounters act more like puzzles–very lethal puzzles–than traditional encounters. Your group will have to think and be on their toes to get through this adventure.

Second, it’s really not a single adventure. Tomb of Horrors is actually a series of four adventures that take place between levels 10 and 22, but not consecutively. There are gaps between adventures of about two or three levels in which you can put whatever you want, whether it’s adventure material to play up the Tomb of Horrors, other published adventures, or even completely unrelated adventure material of your own devising. It’s designed to be woven into your existing campaign, a recurring theme and threat that keeps coming back to haunt the group throughout their careers.

Third, it’s got a high degree of lethality. There are a lot of “three strikes” effects where, when you fail a few saving throws, you die, are petrified, are permanently aged, and so forth. There are also more than a few interesting instantaneous effects that, while they are not immediately lethal, are extremely nasty. Tomb of Horrors doesn’t pull any punches, and is not for the faint of heart. There’s a good chance that, if you run it, some or all of your PCs will die. Be prepared for that. Further, if you want to enhance the lethality of the adventure, there are guidelines for that. Use them at your own risk.

Finally, I’ve heard rumblings about some mistakes in the adventure, particularly in relation to cartography. I noticed a few of them, but I don’t see these mistakes as deal-breakers. They are at most minor annoyances in an otherwise brilliant product that I had a blast reading and can’t wait to delve into.

Also, if you’re a player in some evil DM’s game, and this adventure is on the menu, do yourself a favor and don’t read ahead. It’ll spoil the surprise.

I wasn’t sure what I thought of How We Came To Live Here, by Galileo Games, at first. It certainly wasn’t what I expected it to be. Before receiving my review copy, I really didn’t know anything about the game. I thought it had something to do with telling stories about people who were founding new communities in the wilderness.

As it turns out, How We Came To Live Here is quite a different game. It is a game that draws its inspiration from Native American history and mythology, and has a grounding in both the reality and mundanity of that history, and the fantastical mythological aspects of those peoples’ beliefs. The world of How We Came To Live Here is a fictionalized version of the American Southwest, and the people of the game world (referred to simply as ‘the People’) are a fictionalized chimera of a number of different Native American peoples, primarily the Anasazi. The People live in a great, expansive place, but are beset by Outsiders and monsters, as well as their own human failings and susceptibility to corruption.

This is seems very much to be a game about the juxtaposition of the mundane and the fantastical. Characters must deal with the day-to-day issues of making sure that the community has enough food, that the young People enter into appropriate marriages, and that the People get along with others in the community and in other communities. At the same time, monsters are very real, and are a very real threat. Sorcerers and witches live just outside communities, summoning evil spirits and placing curses on people. The gods are everywhere, and some members of the community can even speak to them, allowing them to see into the future and even let gods and spirits ride their bodies for short periods of time.

The rules system seems robust enough to handle this, but simple enough to learn quickly. The conflict resolution system at its core is used for any conflict, whether it’s an argument, a physical battle, or metaphysically wrestling with an evil spirit, and it is flexible enough to handle all of these things because of its strong narrative focus.

There are two things that stood out to me as a potential limiting factor as far as the mechanics of the game go. The first is that the game uses Fudge dice, and while the book does tell you where you can get them (and you can simply use normal six-sided dice in a pinch), those who don’t own Fudge dice will have to either spend some extra money and time getting them, or get used to reading those d6s a little bit differently.

In either case, this is not a major limitation. The other thing that struck me, however, is that this game requires two GMs. Called the Inside Player and the Outside Player, these two players are responsible for threats originating inside the community and outside the community, respectively, and correspond roughly to the Inside Chief and Outside Chief within the Peoples’ own power structure. Thematically, this mechanic makes a lot of sense and has a nice sense of symmetry. From a purely mechanical perspective, however, I’m not entirely convinced that it’s necessary. Further, not every group has two people willing to take on the responsibility of being a GM, and playing with such a structure will likely take a bit of a shift in your thinking, which may slow things down initially and cause some awkward moments as the Inside Player and Outside Player coordinate. There are a number of optional rules and variants listed in an appendix at the end of the book; it would have been nice if there had been some guidelines on playing the game with a single GM instead of two.

Overall, I can appreciate How We Came To Live Here as both a game and a method of creating compelling fiction. I like the mechanics a lot and, while I wasn’t sure what kinds of stories I’d tell in the world initially, I started to get some ideas the more I read about how the game actually plays out. It should be mentioned, though, that this is not a game for everyone. Some of the themes within the game (particularly the strictly enforced gender roles) might make people uncomfortable, and it might be difficult for some groups to figure out how to play in this world.

Unfortunately, I think that’s the case with me and my group. While I wouldn’t be opposed to trying this game, it’s not on the top of my list of games to try, and I think it would be a very hard sell for my group. It’s pretty different from traditional fantasy, and the game system requires a lot more collaboration and narration than I think my group is really comfortable with. Sadly, I think this might be the case for a lot of groups out there who are used to a steady diet of D&D. That said, I do think there’s a lot to like within this book, and I’d recommend giving it a read at the very least before making any judgments.

My wife and I had a barbecue yesterday, and it was a blast. After most of the guests had left, those of us who remained decided to play a board game. We decided on A Touch of Evil
because it was one of the only games I owned that would accommodate enough people for everyone to get to play.

This was, perhaps, the third or fourth time I’ve played this game since picking it up. For those who are unfamiliar with it, it’s a game in the same vein as Arkham Horror
, except that it’s shorter and simpler, can be played in either cooperative or competitive mode, and has a colonial-era horror theme (less Lovecraft, more Ichabod Crane).

Overall I think that, for what it is, A Touch of Evil is good. It’s not great; given the choice between the two (and the time, and people who also enjoy the game), I’d probably rather play Arkham Horror. I think that game does what it does a little bit better than AToE does. AToE is, however, much shorter to play, and easier to teach, than Arkham Horror is, which is good when you’ve got a larger group with mixed experience levels in gaming.

I’m glad that I bought A Touch of Evil. It’s not Flying Frog’s best game (I like Last Night On Earth
quite a lot more), but it is a good game, and I can see myself playing it again.

My husband has kindly agreed to let me do a guest post here on his blog.

First thing you need to know about me. Before meeting Brian in college the only games I played were minesweeper, solitaire and Oregon Trail (the original). I am not a hard core gamer, and when I play games I play them over and over. When I met Brian I used to sit with him in his dorm while he played on his computer. The game he was playing most often Freshman year was StarCraft and I asked him to teach it to me. Soon after I surpassed him in StarCraft and became totally addicted. Since then I have played many other real time strategies and have loved most of them.

It just makes sense that Brian would come home on Tuesday with a copy of StarCraft II just for me! I installed it immediately and proceeded to play whenever I have time. I have to admit I was worried. I thought that Blizzard was going to go the route of World of WarCraft and make the focus on massively multi-player, but I was pleasantly surprised. They were able to keep the old StarCraft feel while still introducing new features. I love that you can now choose which missions to do and in what order. I love the idea of mercenaries and the fact that you can choose your own upgrades and research projects. I love the single player game play in general.

That said, I completed the game this morning and am a bit disappointed to find that the time spent in single player is no where near as long as you’d expect. It took me longer to finish the original StarCraft and I was in college – aka had tons of free time – then. I was re-playing StarCraft before this release, and it took me less time to finish StarCraft II than it did to finish the Terran campaign in StarCraft. So my fears that Blizzard would put the focus on multi-player were not unfounded. Apparently they were hoping that you’d be online playing so much that you wouldn’t realize that you just paid $60 for 3 hours of game play (maybe I’m exaggerating, I didn’t keep track of how long it took me – I will the second time through).

Let’s top all of that with the DRM that Blizzard thought they’d add to the game and I’m wishing there was a money back guarantee. What DRM? Well apparently in order to play offline you must authenticate (don’t ask me to define this) your game on Battle.net. I signed up with Battle.net and registered my game. I signed in and played single player for a hour or so. Then the next day I took the computer with me on the road (with the disk in the drive) and tried to play offline. This was no possible. The game kept telling me to authenticate my copy in order to play offline – but no where does it define ‘authenticate.’ I checked the support forums and the web, everyone says you should only have to sign into the game once while online and then be able to play – but I did this and got no where. I wrote to support and got a form email telling me that I had to authenticate my game every 30 days in order to play offline – once again no explanation of what ‘authenticate’ means. I tried to call support but it was a 45 minute wait and I was not going to waste my minutes on that.

So – final verdict. The game play is pretty darn cool and the improvements well done without losing the real StarCraft feel. The price tag is an insult – and an obvious ploy to get us to play $180 for a full game instead of $60 for all three campaigns in one. The DRM is nothing but trouble and there are plenty of hacks out there I can use to bypass it (legally I might add) but should I have to do that when I paid for the game? Maybe I would have paid $30 for the game and been perfectly happy, but as I said earlier – I’m wishing I had a satisfaction guarantee and could return it.

I just got done playing a game of Magic: The Gathering with my wife. It was awesome. See, we got all of the theme decks for Rise of the Eldrazi, and we’ve been playing around with them some. The thing that I like a lot about the Eldrazi decks is that they do a good job of bridging the gap between theme decks and deck building.

We’ve tried our hand at deck building in the past, and the results were never particularly gratifying; we’ve always had a lot more fun playing with pre-built theme decks. The nice thing about the Eldrazi decks is that they come with a 41-card, pre-built theme deck, as well as a booster pack. We bought all five theme decks, and spread the booster pack cards amongst them all, effectively getting five decks that are mostly pre-built and designed with a lot of synergy in mind, but with some level of customization.

At any rate, our most recent game lasted more than an hour. My deck was red/green, while hers was blue/white. We spent most of the game at a stalemate, having creatures in play that effectively countered each other and discouraged attacking from either side. Occasionally one of us would get the upper hand for a little bit and make a push for the win, but such an advantage only lasted for a round or two at most before the other player got the right cards to counter the push.

We also spent most of the game at the same life point totals: she had 7, and I had 30. I had drawn some nice healing cards that had topped me up beyond 20, and she had suffered from some early attacks on my part before her defenses had really been shored up. Despite this seeming advantage on my part, she wound up winning the game in brilliant style. My heaviest hitters had been affected by Narcolepsy, a blue card that causes them to remain tapped indefinitely. I had some good blockers, but nothing that could really deal significant damage. Add to that the fact that she had some serious blockers–including one creature that was, I think, 5/12 by the end of the game–and I just couldn’t get through to deal those last 7 points of damage.

Then, she lured me into a trap. She moved a Narcolepsy card from one of my powerful, durable fliers to a powerful but fragile creature that I was less likely to attack with. That creature had a card called Splinter Twin on it, though, meaning that I could create a short-lived duplicate of that card every round and attack with it, even if it was always tapped. Puzzled, I decided to capitalize on what I perceived as a tactical error on her part (or her simply wanting the game to be over), and I attacked with my 7/1 Fire Boar and my 5/5 Conquering Manticore. She had 6 hit points at this point. She blocked the Fire Boar by letting one of her 2/2 creatures die, but let the Manticore through, bringing her down to 1 life point. I thought I had the game well in hand at that point; after all, I still had 30 life points.

Then, she played her ace in the hole, a card she had been sand-bagging since the beginning of the game: Near-Death Experience. It’s a card that’s very situationally useful, and hard to use effectively. Quite simply, it’s a sorcery that dictates that, if you have exactly 1 life point, you win. Which she did.

All in all, it was probably the best game of Magic I’ve ever played. So often in Magic, the strategy of the game is hampered by one player having too much or too little mana, restricting their ability to play effectively. That wasn’t really the case in this game. There was a lot of push and pull, give and take, and even though our life point totals were pretty far apart, there was a clear sense that it was anyone’s game most of the time; we were just waiting for someone to get a trump card. I assumed that it would be me: my deck was heavy on Eldrazi–large, high-cost, extremely powerful creatures that force you to discard permanents willy-nilly when they attack you–and I figured I’d eventually draw one and that would be that. I was not counting on Near-Death Experience (a card that came from a booster pack, by the way), and my wife used that to her advantage brilliantly. If only all games of Magic could be this epic.

These condition cards are pretty awesome. They list everything, they’re fun, and they’re a great reminder. I might wind up using them at my next game. My only concern: maybe there are too many cards at my table. We’ll see, I guess.

I’ve been playing a lot of different games this week, and I’ve got some stuff coming up; I figured I’d give little capsule reviews of what I’ve been doing, and talk a little about some stuff that’s upcoming. In no particular order:

Dead Space: I’m possibly a bit late to the party on this one, but I picked up Dead Space for a really good price around Christmas and just now got around to playing it. I’m not finished with it yet, but I’m eight hours or so into it and I’m really enjoying it. The atmosphere is suitably creepy, and while it doesn’t really create fear (what video game does, really?), it does succeed in creating an awful lot of tension. The fact that the main character, Isaac Clarke, doesn’t speak is a little bit strange considering how much he gets spoken to, especially when you take into account that there’s a character in the game who is supposed to be personally important to Isaac. The game spins a good yarn, though, and the combat is pretty good.

The Humble Indie Bundle: This is a group of indie PC games, for which you can name any price you want, pay it, and get them all. You can choose how much of your money goes toward the developers, and how much goes toward Child’s Play. There are some worthwhile games in the bundle, and while I haven’t liked all of them, I like enough of them that I’m happy I paid for the bundle. Plus, it’s for charity. Go buy it.

Of the games in the bundle, I’ve played World of Goo, which is excellent (I own this on Wii, too). It’s got a great Tim Burton-esque aesthetic, and even has Danny Elfman-esque music, and the puzzling is very, very good. I’ve played about twenty minutes of Aquaria, and I really like what I’ve played. Simple controls but apparently deep gameplay, and the music and art style are fantastic. Gish is sort of a mixed bag; it’s got a really neat premise and some cool mechanics, but the controls are frequently fiddly and annoying, and I feel that the game gets in its own way a lot. Samorost 2 is a Flash-based adventure game that is visually very charming. The problem is that there are a lot of pixel hunts in the game, and some of the puzzles are a little obtuse. Worse, there are puzzles that you can bring almost to completion over the course of a few minutes, screw up one thing (without realizing that you’re doing anything wrong), and have to do the whole thing again, from the beginning. It is very short, though, so you should at least give it a try. The other two, Lugaru and Penumbra: Overture I have yet to spend any real time with.

D&D Encounters: I got to play in Encounters again, and had a blast. I’ve played two different characters so far, both from the Player’s Handbook 3. First I played a human monk, which was very satisfying. I like the monk class quite a lot; very mobile and capable of some pretty spectacular stuff on the battlefield. Flurry of blows is also one of my favorite striker damage-spikes because of its versatility. The second character I played was a longtooth shifter seeker, which was also a lot of fun. I didn’t do a whole lot of damage (I was using a javelin, meaning that all of my attacks dealt 1d6+4 damage, even encounters and dailies), but I really felt like I was effective at controlling the battlefield, and my daily power made a significant difference in how the encounter played out.

My Home Game: My friend Dean isn’t going to be able to DM his mini-campaign for a while, so the campaign I’m DMing is resuming. I’m very excited to get back into the DM’s seat, and I’ve got some stuff planned. I’ll be updating the wiki as we play, as usual, and I’ll probably post some of the more exciting encounters on this blog, for your own use. Game day is the 23rd, which is only a week away!