I got a chance to play a few two player only games today. The first was a game of Warhammer: Invasion, one of the Living Card Games. It’s a fine idea, having all the elements of a collectible card game while having the low budget of a board game. The only problem I find is the fluff they keep trying to take onto the games, stuff like alternate game modes and big, expensive components. It could have been done for a bit cheaper if it was run by anyone by the kings of expensive damn components themselves, Fantasy Flight.Anyway, to incorporate the newest “Chapter Packs” I had gotten since we last played, we played the draft variant, which...isn’t that great. There are a lot of cards to get through, and you only end up with 40 of them, so we didn’t even get a chance to draft half of the cards. And it is tough to draft when the cards aren’t as simple as Magic: The Gathering. Most likely it’s an experience thing, but the costing system of Invasion is just a bit too complicated to know what’s good or not.
The game was fun, though, as having the balance the three factions in your deck adds a unique problem in the game. I managed to get a good resource system going, but was unable to keep the rampaging army at bay. And just when I got my strong defensive unit on the board too.
So, we transitioned to Space Hulk, an old game that got a small low-run reboot last year that the other player just couldn’t resist. It’s a small army game with very different playstyles per side, as one player handles the cocksure but limited Space Marines and the other plays the weak but endless Genestealers. Have you seen Alien? it’s a lot like that in a completely copyright independent way. My friend always plays the Genestealers, who have the advantage of winning pretty much every damn time.The mission we choose has the marines trying to get from one end of the map to the other. Simple enough, as well as having plenty of tricks to cut off the ever approaching aliens. It was a lot of fun, even though I knew I was screwed from the beginning...because I’m always screwed from the beginning. But I did get in a good groove, managing to cut off his huge Broodlord a couple of times and able to rip apart a lot of his little broodlings with my Wolverine-inspired lightning claw Space Marine. (On a note, why would you send a soldier equipped with 1500-pound, extremely expensive battle armor armed only with his cosplay foam weapons? No idea.)
But eventually I got surrounded in the middle of the map, and the lack of a marine with a regular damn gun prevented me from being able to gun down the approaching mob, and in a last ditch effort I was down to one man, my Wolverine, who proceeded to jump straight into the maw of a waiting alien. Game over, moving on.
We played a quick game of Thunderstone to finish up, which we finally are really comfortable playing. It’s still a lot crunchier than Dominion in a bit of a negative direction, but we managed to pull just the right number of cards that we got into a good groove and were able to wipe up a lot of monsters, a problem that we had in the first couple of games. It was probably the easier time we were having, but I enjoyed this session, and finally felt what the flavor of the game was trying to do. If only the presentation was better.
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