30th October 2024
A slightly quieter half term session with a bias towards spooky games in reference to All Hallows’ Eve on the following night.
The first table got stuck into Incan Gold and were soon exploring the temple ruins and encountering spiders, zombies, snakes, rockfalls and sometimes treasure. Sophie was easily the most successful in this simple push your luck game finishing with a tent full of gems.
The second table chose the less spooky Harmonies which is about creating habitats for animals, last seen in session 80.
When everyone had arrived the group split into three tables playing Clank!: Catacombs with its Ghosts, Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game about surviving zombies and A War of Whispers an area majority secret society game.
Five players started exploring the haunted depths of Clank!: Catacombs. Visit Blog 73 for a summary of the game. The group had also chosen to use the characters from the Clank! Adventuring Party expansion, so there was a wizard, dwarf, elf, monkeybot and cat questing for the treasures. The group quickly spread out and started finding prisoners, ghosts and teleports and eventually the artifacts that would enrage the ghost dragon and so it was time to head for the exit. Monkeybot was the first out, with only one lifepoint to spare with a mid range artifact and a couple of monkey idols. They were closely followed by the elven collector who had amassed a good amount of money on their travels and spent it wisely in the markets. Then it was the wizard with a hefty pile of secret tomes and entourage of prisoners. Second last was the dwarf with their army of companions and finally Mr Whiskers sauntered out with the most loot having used his skills to evade the dragon whilst directing its ire at the others. With three new players introduced to this deck building game it took a while to play but left them keen to try their luck in the catacombs again.
Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game is a co-op horror survival game with, hey, you guessed it, zombies! The game is centred on a colony in a small town in the US with various scenarios to try and complete in short order. The board is divided into the main colony building to defend, and some useful buildings around about to search.
A game round starts with finding out the next crisis - which will need resources to fix or impose morale problems in the colony. Then everyone gets a turn using their rolled action dice to attack zombies, build barricades, search for items or clean the drains! Other actions (that don’t involve dice) are moving, dealing with the crisis, adding food to the colony supply or requesting help. At the end of the round you have to have enough food to feed the colony, check for overflowing drains, resolve the crisis, add more zombies (of course) and then check for objective success!
If all this sounds quite simple, there is of course the possibility of the traitor! Everyone has a hidden goal which could be to backstab the colony for some reason - but there is only a 50% chance a game has a traitor! The traitor can secretly make the crises fail or even attack other survivors. There is an option to exile someone from the colony to cope with this behaviour if you work out who it is. If that wasn’t bad enough there are all the zombies, if you attack a zombie or move a character, you generally have to roll an environment dice - this could, do nothing, give you a wound (3 status effects kills a character), give you frostbite (which will give you a wound every round), or you get bitten. Getting bitten is really bad, really, really bad. You will die, another person in the location with you will then get bitten, they have a choice of dying and stopping the infection or rolling to save. Rolling gives you a 50% chance to be ok or die AND then spread the bite to someone else!
This is also a crossroads game, which means that on a players go, someone else looks at a crossroads card to see if it applies to a character in the game or an action that player decides to do - then you get some mini-story with a choice of 2 consequences.
Right, so our ragtag band of leaders and followers (each person playing gets one of each) had to build enough barricades to repel a horde of zombies that has just turned up. Neil O. kicked off proceedings with Arthur (the Principal) going back to his school to search for useful stuff whilst Mike (the Ninja) was left kicking zombie butt. Matt luckily had Talia (the Fortune Teller) which met the crossroads story requirements, so that allowed her to start the game with some binoculars and a sniper rifle and recruit another follower, whilst he got Edward (the Chemist) to use some medicine to take out multiple zombies at the colony. Next up was Jeremy who sent Bev (the Mother) off to the Garage and on the way got side-tracked into going to her parents home and had to make the hard choice of killing her now zombie dad (Sean of the dead style). Back at the colony Brian (the Ex. Mayor) ended up cleaning the drains to stop morale getting any worse! James used Ashley (the Construction Worker) to start building barricades and sent Sparky (the Stunt Dog) out searching. Finally on Steph’s turn we hit some crossroads misfortune, before she even started her go, Rod (the Truck Driver) came down with icy chills - he had been infected - but unfortunately it would take 2 characters to take him to the hospital so the only option was to bury him. That left Andy (the Farmer) who tried to fight off some zombies and ended up getting frostbite!
This did not seem a very glorious start to the game, but at the end of the round, we had started the barricading, fed everyone in the colony and averted the crisis. The rest of the game was quite fraught with mis-adventure and strangeness which included: Mike getting bitten on his way to the store and then infecting Talia so losing two characters and all their stuff; Brian getting a mop from the dog and ended up on drain duty for the rest of the game; Bev finding a horse on the way back to the colony and turning it into food; Sparky having to be given to another player to stop the dog being killed off. In the end we managed to feed the colony, avert all the crises and complete the main objective of barricading the colony with 2 rounds to spare and only losing 3 characters!
A War of Whispers is one of those “there are armies on the board, but as a player you’re not one of them” type of games. You play as the “whispers”, people who pull strings from the shadows to manipulate the five warring kingdoms - hoping to get the factions you want on top. The game flows by putting your agents into the factions to act as “advisors”, directing how they recruit new troops, where they do battle, and gaining favours (cards) from the factions. The clever part of this dance is how each player has a secret ranking of the five factions, but once at the end of each round you can swap two of them… they must then be revealed to all the other players (and become fixed for the game). So if the initial faction you favour starts to look unlikely to stay on top, you can switch to backing a different faction… which is very in-keeping with the theme of the game. Lasting only four rounds, this game moves along at a quick pace; combat is entirely deterministic (and one-for-one annihilation), trying to determine who is working with you and who is working against you is part of the fun. The King Is Dead is a similar style of game (which has most recently been at the club back in Session 63), A War of Whispers has a few more moving parts, leans into the hidden faction ranking, and feels like a “fuller game” compared to The King Is Dead’s bare bones scramble.
The four players took the first two rounds to get the flow of the game, and then it started to become clear which factions some players were backing to do “well” and which they wanted to fail. Some pointless wars with lots of casualties were started to weaken factions, not to mention recruiting troops in the “wrong” place to be useful.
Then the Whispers group played Imperius a throne seizing Sci Fi card drafting game. Imperius is a short little card game about claiming victory points by controlling planets. The twist, each player has a similar set of character cards (minor differences in stats, but essentially the same power), these are shuffled up and each round consists of drafting the cards for the playing phase. This means in the drafting phase, you might end up with a handful of cards for the other players… which you then play. So you can try to get your cards to play them in the best way, or your opponents cards and try to play them in the worst way. Each of the cards has a “power”, mainly score points or add control to a planet, or assassinate another card. There are a few event cards thrown into the deck to mix things up. This is a very quick game, mainly of bluff and double bluff, while taking a gamble that the cards will fall your way. This is driven by the playing phase, where each planet can have two cards played face down… adding a sense of unknown to what character powers are at work on each planet. Reaching 20VP through in-game scoring triggers the end game and then final scoring each planet rounds out a short (30 minute) game.
Having spent A War Of Whispers working out how to manipulate unknown faction rankings, this game of bluffing and elbow barging was just what the table needed. The final scores were a wipe out, as one player stormed into a strong lead and everyone else fell over each other rather than stop them winning (although, in this game it’s actually quite hard to deliberately stop/target another player).
The next session is the 13th of November, do let us know on Discord if you have any game requests or watch out and sign up for games that have been suggested, or just join us and take your pick on the night.
- Total Session Attendance: 14
-
Board Games: