the third best thing

Having a one year old daughter and a full time job that requires me to get up at four in the morning means I don’t get to game as much as I want to. Instead I read a lot about board games, and there’s a lot of good stuff here on F:AT, but not quite enough. So I’m gonna do the next (third?) best thing and write a bit about games I do get to play rather than complain about you guys not producing enough for me to read.

Yesterday I got to try a game of DOMINION, which is a very fun, boring game. The concept is quite simple. Every turn you draw five cards from your deck and then use said cards to take actions and/or buy new cards from a common, face up pool of cards. Then you discard and draw five new cards for your next turn. The twist being that the cards you buy make your deck larger, thus expanding your opportunities while diluting your draw. The goal is to be the player who’ve bought the most Victory Point cards when the game ends at a rather arbitrary moment.

The basic idea is sound, you get to play some nice combos, and the gameplay is fast. I had fun planning my turn, and I also liked that I had time to talk as there was zero reason to watch the other players take their turns. Oh, I would maybe have fared better had I taken note of their strategies and so on, but then again; actually having to watch every single step of another player’s turn would’ve made the game excruciatingly slow.

But ultimately the game was also very, very boring. Not that I didn’t have fun playing with my friends, and I certainly appreciate the very gamey game, but I had no sense of story, no sense of theme, there’s almost no interaction in the basic setup (you can customize the cards available for purchase, and one of the suggested setups is called “more conflict” or some such), and I remember absolutely none of the cool combos we each managed to pull of as we played. The friend who owns (and loves) the game told me he was attracted by the fluff intro which is something about you being a ruler wanting to carve a big dominion out of all the small duchies and provinces around your kingdom. And yes, the introduction does make it sound like it’s a tongue in cheek cut-throat kinda game, but it’s not. It’s an interesting engine you have to optimize, and at no time did I feel like a king while playing. Yes, some of the cards make sense thematically (Militia forces the other player to discards cards, for instance, while a Moat protects you from Militias), but I simply cannot connect the core mechanisms of the game with the theme. For instance: I get that your deck is in fact your dominion, but why, then, is my Militia only available every now and then when I draw it? In other CCGs you at least get to keep it in play until it’s destroyed.

I’ll no doubt play DOMINION again if asked – I like the gamey parts of it and how I can concentrate on chatting with friends when it’s not my turn – but it’s nothing like the other game I played recently: RUNEWARS.

My first two games of RUNEWARS wasn’t a complete success. We didn’t realise that you draw a new quest upon completing one (which would have made the pace of the game way faster), and I felt it kinda lacking in the conflict department since you could more or less stock up on dragon runes and go into turtle mode. But I’m dying to play it again. And again. Combat is cool, fast, and vicious, you have to make a lot of agonizingly careful planning, the board looks fantastic, building units is so much faster than in STARCRAFT and TI3, and even with only a few games behind me, I already have stories of epic moves to tell.

I think (and hope) that RUNEWARS can deliver that oomph-feeling that I also get from STARCRAFT, TI3, and A GAME OF THRONES. However, it looks to be shorter and simpler than STARCRAFT and scales better than the two others which means it’ll fill a different niche. But more on that when I return to blogland sometime in the near future.