What I Played Today: October 6

Dominion, Castle Ravenloft, Summoner Wars

Played a couple of games of Dominion tonight, using mostly the base set and Intrigue. I took away the first game easily. The second game was closer, but I managed to get some sweet cards from the Black Market such as the Smithy that my opponent couldn’t use and complained about every time I played it. (To be fair, I was pretty excited every time I saw the Smithy.)

Then it was time to go into Castle Ravenloft. First was the gauntlet of death, in which we had to kill 20 monsters before they poured out of the dungeon and killed the townsfolk. We did pretty well, mainly being held that my rogue’s dagger barrage recharged twice, which helped me kill a great many monsters. We completely ignored one wing of the dungeon though, which made the last few monsters hard to spawn without spawning way more than we could handle, but it went well.

And then we fought the Howling Hag. I like the design of this level a lot…each hero is stuck in a random corner of a 5x5 grid of tiles, and must work their way to the center to try and stop a ritual, while each new tile revealed could bring the hag herself down on the group. She doesn’t hit very hard, but she pushes and teleports players away, which is a problem when you can only attempt to stop the ritual if you start and end your turn on the center tile. It’s clever, and requires a lot of teamwork and a bit of luck. Unfortunately both adventurers met their end when a crushing wall trap spawned in the center room…and of course the hag misses with both her attacks so we die against the wall.

Then a game of Summoner Wars, and I continue to not get it. Oh, I understand the game, but the universal appeal of this is not universal to me. The game is sticky, in which your forces and your special events are based on what you draw, but you are going to go through your full deck every time, and it’ll come down to who ran out of cards in the best position. Let’s just skip the middle of the game then if that’s all that matters. I played the low cost goblins, and unfortunately drew all my 0-cost forces early, where they were slammed by the dwarven forces. I accidently buried my two berserkers in order to ramp up to buying the Eater, in hopes of getting him next to the Dwarf summoner and unloading with a goblin rush (increases dice rolled based on number of allies next to target), but my Eater got walled in constantly, unable to keep the murder up at the end of the game, and I lost badly.