What I Played Today: March 28

Puzzle Strike, Nightfall, The Resistance

Game night that was dominated by Dominion clones, first Puzzle Strike, which went well enough. I got knocked out first and then walked away from the table, so I could not tell you who won, but I do notice that the ticking clock of the game ending makes the game a lot harder to build an effective deck. You are constantly adding things to your bag and given no real or useful options to get rid of them, and spending time with Self Improvement or other similar chips just waste your time. It make fighting important, but it’s also not nearly aggressive enough, because you do not get enough chances to actually attack.

A game that does offer a lot of opportunity for attacking is Nightfall, which I played with a full table for the first time. The players who have been in this situation before have pointed out that in this environment, you don’t want to dogpile on a single player, because while that person will definitely lose, there’s a higher chance that someone else will win. They also talked up cards that dealt damage to all opponents, so of course the player to my left got one of these in his private stash, putting the impetus on me to make sure he didn’t get a chance to chain it. I think this was a little unfair, so I let it happen as much as possible and tried to field as many minions as I could, to make me less of a target for attacks. The strategy worked, as I avoided a lot of aggro and only soaked the occasional stray hit and won with 7 wounds.

Then a couple of games of The Resistance, which is a game lot like Werewolf, except everyone is involved the entire time. Each turn, the leader (who constantly rotates) nominates a set number of people to go on a mission, and everyone votes on the choice. If a majority agree, those people go on the mission, and they determine if the mission succeeds or fails. The spies want it to fail, but they can only force a failure if they are on a mission. So it’s a game where you’re trying to figure out everyone’s motives, who’s lying, who’s not, and trying to make three missions succeed or fail.

Both games went about the same way, back and forth failures and successes, followed by the spies lying their way into the last mission and winning the game. I think the game isn’t very well suited for five players, because if you aren’t sure who the spies are for the last mission, it’s going to fail, and during the missions with only two players going, there’s no incentive for the spies to force it to fail, leading to a sense of false complacency. I got confused by this in the first game, assuming the player who was on the team both times a mission failed was the spy without even considering the guy who was sent on every mission. The second game went about the same way, with the law of probability confusing us and making us assume the same people couldn’t possibly both be the spies again. I definitely want to play this with more people, if only so the game feels less cloistered, and because I like playing games where I get to lie.