What I Played Today: March 20

Descent: Road to Legend, Rock Band, Ghost Stories, Dominion

We started the advanced campaign of Descent today, and it went really well. I was given the magic character, a slow but powerful character, and got the skill that allowed me to use another player as my starting point, which means that I was never anywhere close to the front line. I took a total of 2 points of damage the entire game. It was great. The randomly generated dungeons in the game are fairly creative; each stage has a special thing to keep track of, and they are great little vignettes. We had an odd one with two named creatures, which really helped us get quite a few experience points, but the overlord caught up with a few quick kills on the last floor. It took a long time to get that far though, so we called it quits before we could go to the market to train our next skills.

Then I got to play some Rock Band, a few new songs. It was fun, but that’s really I got to say about it. Then I got an opportunity to play Ghost Stories. I use the word opportunity because the game continues to be the most difficult and frustrating coop games I’ve ever played. In it, you play a monk in a village that is constantly being besieged by ghosts from all sides. Each turn another ghost shows up, and you can either attempt to attack it by rolling a group of dice, or use one of the villagers to get a benefit. Each monk has a special power to move more effectively, get better attacks, etc. The game is brutal, with the monsters coming every single turn and we got behind really quickly and fell apart, including the death of two monks before the village was finally overrun.

To unwind from the slaughter, we played a couple of games of Dominion. I play this game so often that it’s hard to have a new comment...although I have found that I try to trash at least four or five cards a game if I have the option to. I just like slimming down the deck, being able to get what I want. I also bought a lot of provinces in the second game...every single one in fact. No idea what I did right, but it was a pretty impressive thrashing. I only lost a province from a saboteur.