What have we been playing this weekend? I’m glad you asked, disembodied voice on the internet. I’ve played a ton of games this weekend.
Gloomhaven Digital
We’re still burning through Guildmaster on Gloomhaven Digital although we lost two of our three plays. We’re struggling to win the Mindthief’s second story mission. This mission is a meatgrinder type scenario, where you are locked in a room with enemies constantly spawning. Our damage output is usually not sufficient to one shot the enemies, and with three new enemies each round we’re struggling to make it to round 7 when the enemies we need to kill will spawn.
After losing twice we switched things up and did a relic quest, which came close to killing us, but we made it through with the Berserker down to a single health and the Mind Thief completely exhausted.
Sub Terra
On Saturday I went home and we played a 5 player game of Sub Terra, on normal difficulty, but we pulled off a perfect victory. Things looked bleak mid game as every caver had gone off in a different direction, meaning we covered plenty of ground but as the cave started to fight back we found ourselves alone, on low health and facing mindless horrors in the dark.
I myself, as the happy go lucky Engineer, was busy blowing holes through the cave wall with my dynamite, I slid down two slides, crossed an as yet unflooded underground lake, a pocket of natural gas, before finally stumbling into a dead end of a horror cave. A Horror and Leaper promptly spawned and gave chase, I made it back by the seat of my pants, but it was close.
Marvel United
Next our band of heroes took the fight to Dormammu in Marvel United and lost… twice. Captains America and Marvel teamed up with Mantis and Moon Knight to take on the lord of the dark dimension. When facing off against Dormammu it’s a game of attrition. You need to run out his deck, meaning you need to survive 12 turns. Dormammu wins mostly via overflow so controlling the Thug/Civilian populations is key to victory. However, even knowing this in our second play we were still around 3 turns from victory.
I was playing Moon Knight, randomly assigned to me by my younger brother, but I had a much greater appreciation of his powers and abilities now having seen the new Disney+ show, which was excellent, if you ignore the fact that Disney+ can’t do endings to any of their shows.
Anomia
We capped off Saturday night with three hands of Anomia, a speed party category game I have been sent for review. I had fun with this one at three. I was a bit underwhelmed when we played at four, but the game is beginning to grow on me.
The game is very simple, draw cards until two players have matching symbols, the first player to shout out an answer to the category on the opponent's card scores a point. Most points wins.
I’ll have a more indepth review coming, but I still want to get some more plays in and I’d like to try instigating the “no repeats” rule to shake things up.
Marvel Legendary
Our weekly Marvel Legendary game was against Emperor Vulcan from the Realm of Kings expansion. Vulcan is all about the "Throne’s Favour". That’s a thing the players pass back and forth between themselves and the Mastermind and I say “thing” because Upper Deck is too cheap to include a punch board token to represent it, so you need to use a die or token from your own collection instead. Whoever happens to have the Throne’s Favour at any given moment gains bonuses from cards that say “While you have the Throne’s Favour”
It’s not my favourite mechanic in Legendary, and when used outside of the Realm of Kings characters having the Throne’s Favour as a hero is nearly useless, so taking it just removes it from Vulcan who would otherwise get +3 fight if he has it.
This was our second run against Vulcan but we beat him this time with several rounds to spare.
Zombicide 2nd Edition
This weekend I introduced the family to Zombicide 2nd Edition. We played with just four heroes rather than having players run multiple characters, this does amp the difficulty a bit, but 2nd Edition is a little easier so I find it kinda evens out overall.
That said, we absolutely lost the first game. In hindsight it was my fault. We played Mission 1 - City Blocks, which requires all players to grab an objective, find three food items as a group and then hightail it to the exit. All the spawn points are on the lower edge of the board, which is where we went exploring and then we got cut off by a horde and killed.
In our second play, we opened and cleared the buildings at the top of the board, while the horde built up slowly at the bottom half and we were able to escape fairly handily. There were plenty of cool moments though, Ned with a minigun mowing down runners and Bunny G, one of the new child survivors, armed with a shoulder mounted rocket propelled grenade obliterating an entire horde of Walkers.
Titan Race
We closed out the day with a play of Titan Race, a small box dice drafting racing game with a Mario Kart esque feel. Titan Race has been in my collection for years now, unplayed, and was part of my search for a fun racing with power ups style game. This one fell kinda flat for me. Players jostle over a very small board as they compete to do three laps.
The game sounds fun in principle as you attack each other with power ups but it just kinda bogs down, each racer has fairly low health and so you can be knocked out of the race within a round if targeted by multiple racers, forcing you to skip your next turn while you regenerate your health. Overall, when I’m in the mood for a quick, fast paced racing game, I’m going to pick Downforce over this one in a heartbeat.
What have you been playing this weekend? Got a suggestion for a Mario Kart style racing game? Let me know down in the comments section.