Board Games on Tuesday

Last Tuesday came and went and I was able to make it out for a night.  Between my wife’s birthday last week and our anniversary next week, finding time to game is a bit tough in September.

Since I’m still on the post-Gencon gaming cycle, I packed my car with some of the new board games I had and hit the road.  I had Mage Wars, hoping to get a game in with Dan, and I brought Level 7, Zombicide, and Flashpoint.

When I arrived, I quickly had a group of four people (led by Skill-less Brian) who wanted to give Level 7 a try, so we started there.  Since none of the other three had played it yet, I dropped us back to the second mission.  The first mission is alright, but it’s a pretty watered-down mission just designed to show you how the game works.  The second level was where things started getting fun.

In this mission, the power to the elevators had been cut off.  We had to find three generators, activate them, and then book it back to the elevator before things went to hell.  Of course while we were doing this, Clones and Guards would start swarming, trying to find us.  At the beginning of the mission, the Guards and Clones would play nice with each other, but if the Clones ever found a knocked down Guard, they would kill him.  And if the Guards ever outnumbered the Clones in a space, they would kill the Clones.  Then all hell would break loose.

We started this game out and I tried to influence the other players as little as possible, just to see how things would go differently.  The last time I had played, the players were very careful about avoiding the Threat, but in this game, we had quickly dropped our available Threat Pool from 5 down to 2.  At that point, we were all very careful about what we did and managed not to trigger Lockdown from pulling too much Threat.

Additionally, this time we were far more careful about setting up our vents.  By the end of the mission, we could jump along almost the entire board through the vents.  This proved instrumental in our escape, as we were able to find the three control panels and turn the elevator back on, then jump in the vent and drop back near the elevator at the end of the game.  However, it was also a huge danger earlier in the game as the Clones could also travel through the vents and would often drop on whoever had the most fear and kill them off quick.  Before we had gone around the turn cycle a half dozen times, we already had three of us die.

The game stalled in the middle as we struggled to get away from the Clones and bring our fear under control, but the Guards moved in and helped us out with the Clones.  Two of us were headed in one direction, luring the Clones and Guards away while the other two of us were exploring fast and furious for the last panels.  Finally we reached them and jumped into the vents to make our way back to the front.  The Guards that had spawned cleared out chasing the Clones and we jumped into the elevators, moving on to the next level.

After that, Dan had finished his game of Warmachine.  There were three of us ready for a game (Dan, Skill-less Brian and me) so we played Zombicide with more-correct rules.  I say “more” because we still did not play it completely correctly, though we came much closer.

We tried mission one, where we have to find rice, canned food, and water, and we have to find five different objective points on the board.  We each racked up our characters and started playing.  Dan took to exploring while I took to clearing out zombies and Brian split between the two early on.  With all the zombies in the buildings, we became swarmed quickly, especially with an early Abomination hitting the table.  It wasn’t long before I was surrounded by a swarm of zombies (already in the Orange experience level) and killed.

I started laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing was and one of us made the comment of how much the difficult ramped up from 4 characters down to 3, since you have less activations before the zombies go again.  Which made us think… we were supposed to have more characters?  Sure enough, the rules for three players were two characters each, so I pulled up a second character and joined the fight.  Brian was quickly overwhelmed and killed so he took a second character.  Then I was killed again, as was he, while Dan kept skating for each of the objectives.

Without support, he got mobbed by about 80 walkers and killed.  His new character lasted one more turn after that.

Had we started the game with all six characters on the board at once, it would have been a much different battle.

Still, two very fun games, both of which I am ready to pull out again.  I have to say I am very pleased with my Gencon haul this time around.  Level 7 was an excellent purchase, and Zombicide arriving from the Kickstarter was a great boon.  Add in Flashpoint, Mage Wars, and Timber Peak and I’m calling this the Gencon that had the best stuff.  If I had managed to get the IK RPG, and if Wyrd had the Misaki or McHammish box out, I would be in a huge dilemma of what I wanted to play most right now.  But until 10 Thunders becomes more varied to play, and until the IK RPG comes out, I’m on a pretty big board game frenzy.