With our Rouge Trader role-play session cancelled, due to the GM running out of prep time, it was time to hit the boardgames. With most of my games in storage due to the impending move into a new house my selection was limited but I was able to get my hands on the following…
Death Angel
Wiz-War
Race for the Galaxy
Doom: the Board Game
Typically the game we decided to play was the smallest of the lot and Death Angel made it to the table. Based in the Games Workshop 40K world this game has plenty of theme and tries to bring the Space Hulk board game feeling to a card game.
Now this box may be small but its packed with tears, frustration and the feeling that you are going to get you arse kicked. Being a co-operative game you think that all those 40K players in the group would help, but you would be sadly mistaken. Genestealers start to swamp your squad from turn one and the air fills with the sound of bolter guns going off every direction.
The aim is simple, keep killing the Genestealers until the one of their piles is exhausted then travel to the next location. When you travel the piles are refreshed so there’s another group to slay. Do this four time and complete the final location and you win… Simple huh? Well no!
Genestealers continually attack your squad. They in turn cannot fire every turn due to players not being able to play the same action card the following round. Attacks and defence are decided by the roll of a dice just to add that element of luck, its chaos, total and utter chaos . But then it’s also great fun to try to figure out what action you should choose next only to have it made redundant by another players action. Bugger! It really does capture that feeling of being inside a massive abandoned spaceship with multitudes of aliens trying to make your innards… well outnerds.
It’s also easier to fit it in your pocket than the original Space Hulk board game…
Disclaimer – The copy of Braggart played was supplied free of charge by Games Lore LTD for review purposes. At Drunken Goblin we will review products sent to us the same way as if it was purchased by ourselves.
Description
The box compaired to the size of a mouse
Imagine a old fashion Inn, then add a few heroes regaling the clientele with fantastic story’s of fighting dragons and saving damsels in distress. Are they really telling the truth or are they just trying to tell the most fantastic boasts so they don’t look like a weakling? Well with Braggart your the one making the boasts and setting other story’s straight.
Braggart is a card game released by Spiral Galaxy Games and supplied by Games Lore Ltd.
It supports 2 to 6 players aged 10+ and has a playing time of 30 – 45 minutes.
When Braggart arrived I was genially surprised. Other card games, like Munchkin and Death Angel, usually have over sized boxes and can be a pain in the arse to carry around. Not so with Braggart, the box is skin tight with just enough room to hold all the cards. It fits nicely in the pocket or bag for easy transportation but if your going to take this game anywhere secure it with an elastic band as it has a tendency to open in transit.
Contents
Inside the box there is 120 cards split between:
6 X Summary Cards:
One for each player with a summary of how the rounds are played.
1 X My Round Card:
Designates who goes first in the round and changes from player to player according to how low their scored was in the last round.
92 X Boast Cards:
14 X Scene – Where the deed took place.
32 X Deed – What the player did.
32 X Foe – Who were you acting against.
14 X Result – What the outcome was from your deed.
11 X Ploy – How to screw the other players by stealing their cards or drawing more cards from the boast deck.
8 X Liar – Allows you to interrupt another players boast and swap out a boast card.
2 X Outrageous Liar – The same as the Liar card but allows you to swap out two cards
The rules are surprisingly simple and all fit on a single piece of paper. This made a nice change after trying to understand the Mansions of Madness rulebook. The rules are explained in an easy to follow format and was only made complicated when I tried to explain it to the rest of my family, I’m not very good at rule explanations as anyone in my game group will testify.
The cards are of a really nice quality and feel they would stand up to a good battering without purchasing card protectors. The artwork on the cards match the fun feeling of the game and were continually commented on during play.
A selection of cards from Braggart
Play Time
So onto playing the game and it’s really simple:
Each player is dealt a starting hand of four cards from the boast deck. One of the players starts with a “My Round” card which designates which player goes first and changes throughout the game at the end of each round.
Draw Phase
A number of cards matching the amount of players are drawn from the boast deck and turned face up in full view. Then, starting with the player holding the My Round card and going clockwise each player takes a card from this selection and adds it to their hand.
Players Actions
Then each player takes a turn. During their turn players have the opportunity to either:
Go to the bar:
Draw the top three cards from the draw pile which ends their turn.
Make a boast:
Play any number of ploy cards, following the instructions as written on the card.
Play at least one Deed card and one Foe card.
They also have the option of adding a Scene and Result card to add points to the boast.
Other players can play Liar and Outrageous Liar cards:
Once everyone has had a turn the round ends and it proceeds to the scoring phase.
Scoring
Scoring takes place by adding together all the coin numbers on top of the played boast cards. The player with the highest scoring boast places all their played cards into their scoring pile. The other players are allowed to add one card from their boasts to their own scoring pile.
End of Round
The player with the lowest boast score that round then takes the My Round card and the next round begins.
End of Game
Rounds continues until the boast draw pile is depleted. Then at the end of that round each player adds together their boast cards in their score pile and the winner is the player with the highest score…Easy!
Overall
Braggart Box Art
The Good
Nice artwork
Easily portable
Easy to learn
Humorous
Can get quite tactical with the Liar Cards
Can get into the role of being the boastful cad
The Bad
Luck of the draw with the cards
After a couple of games the humour can get stale
I liked Braggart and I’m glad that I had the opportunity to try a game that usually wouldn’t peek my interest. The game was fun and the humour on the cards really adds to the game. It definitely fits into the “filler game” category as when we played the game a couple of times in a row the humor did start to fade and everyone began to lose interest.
I will be using this game in my Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay session as it fits in with the fantasy world. It will also raise their spirits before I crush them in the grim world of Warhammer. (Insert evil laughter)…
My Fiancée, being an absolute star, bought me Alan Wake on the Xbox 360 last week.
This game had been on my radar for a while as I’m a huge horror film / Stephen King fan and the trailers on YouTube made it look like a mixture of a King novel with a X-files episode.
From the very beginning the game is all about the story and with the main character being a writer it only confirmed my Stephen King theory. Hell, in the very first line that comes out of the main character mouth he mentioned King’s name. If Alan had been hit by an out of control van in the first 30 seconds I would of even thought King was on the writing staff.
Anyway about the game:
Alan Wake is having what can only be called a major creative burn out. So decides to take a holiday to Bright Falls with his wife, Alice. Unknown to Alan, Alice has set up a meeting with a local Doctor to help him through his writing block. This leads to a heated exchange between the couple and Alan walks out leaving Alice alone.
Next thing you know there’s a scream and Alice has been taken by an unknown dark entity. Alan jumps into a lake after seeing Alice under the water and the next thing he knows he wakes up sitting in his wrecked car with seven days missing with no memory of what’s happened.
The dark entity has started to possess some of the locals towns folk who attack Alan on his unavoidable woodland walks. Using handy torches, which have been left around Bright Falls like there was an explosion in a nearby torch factory. Alan can burn off the Darkness which surrounds and protects the attackers by focused the beam of the torch. Then using the handy assortment of guns, apparently the local gun shop exploded as well, he can plug them with a few holes to make them evaporate into the air like ash on the wind.
This game is all about story, but coming from Remedy, who made the brilliant noire games Max Pain 1 & 2, you know they were going to get the story and theme right.
Good Points
Theme – Dark and moody. Lovely!
Story – Plenty of it! Nice!
Effects – The torch light is brilliant and the mist around the trees really has you jumping at bushes. Excellent!
Character – There is some great comic relief from Barry. Whoop! Whoop!
This is a brilliant game and I enjoyed it………but there were a few downsides to the game.
Its short – I completed the game in a couple of sittings giving about 10 hours of play and I’m crap at gaming.
The ending – Its a cliff hanger and there are already two DLC’s for it. Lucky my game case contained a voucher to let me have the first DLC for free.
The faces – Not the best facial models ever.
Woods – The main theme of this game is that if you go into the woods at night guess what? Your going to get your ass handed to you by a axe wielding maniac. Can you keep Alan out of the woods? NO…..he’s like a friggin tree magnet and at the drop of a hat he’s off hiking in the foot hills AGAIN!
Even with these bad points I still recommend that you play the game. Also its been out a while so Amazon has it quite cheap at the moment. Go on, treat yourself.
So, I have done it, finally completed a game on the xbox! Much to the boyfs dismay. Hey even he has yet to complete a game. And I mean complete, 100%, all achevements complete! I really enjoyed it and seeing as it is the only game I have owned on the xbox it can only be a good thing. The lego games have always been fun with a quirky sense of humor. Star Wars was the first I played. The great thing is they appeal to your inner vandle, just smash everything and grab loads of studs. My kinda game. The cut scenes are great to, as an avid fan of the Harry Potter books and films it was great to see a different and fun take on them. Well J. K. Rowling did go all deep and depressing by the end.
The game may have been fun overall, but boy was it a pain in the arse at the same time. To get 100% and all the achievements I played it through a total of 5 times! Well, the first time I played it through to get to the end of the story, then I went back and played it through to get all the bits and pieces. All the studs for True Wizard, the Students in Peril and the House Crests. All was going fine until I realised I was missing a level. Yes I had made the mistake of getting fustrated with the Tom Riddles Diary level and just turining off the Xbox as lunch was ready anyways. Uh-Oh Spaghetti-os! Yep, I found my first majour glitch in the game. I could no longer access that level to complete the game 100%
So cue the second play through on a new saved file. I was a little bored this time. I also got really fustrated. Harry Potter as a franchise is aimed at kids right? So why were some of the levels so friggin’ difficult! I mean well hard, surly no kid would have worked it out. Mind you when I did fugure it out I felt like such an idiot for not noticing the obvious!
So but this time I had all the red boxes, so I had the cheats turned on in order to find the other bits and pieces. Cue another glitch with a massive hunt for a gold brick that never existed in the Restricted section of the library. Yep, at this point I gave up and broke out the laptop. I sat with a walkthrough guide next to me. To be honest I got 95% of it on my own, but I would have been wandering around Hogwarts Castle for hours without that walk through. Again, somethings are only obvious when pointed out. In Knockturn Alley there was a character token really high up. I had worked out the cart underneath would buck, but I could not get it to buck when I was on it. Then the obvious, dont just mash the keypad to set off spells which dont hit the cart, you can aim the spell at the cart to make it buck. Duh, felt an idiot after that one! Also, I was hitting pictures all over the place but didnt realise I had to keep hitting the quiddich players ones. There I was trying to get a dog on the very top floor to give up his bone thinking that would lead me to a gold brick! Thank goodness there are other gamers with more brains than me and willing to share them!
It was great to walk round the castle though, the Herbology Greenhouses with lego eating plants, flying on broomsticks, exploring the dormatories, the students doing strange things in the background. Honestly I didnt know which were in peril or which were twits!
I even managed to get into the room below the charms class with the dragon, and, wait for it, get back out again!!!!! Another major glitch. In fact after the first glitch I had read up on them and did this room as soon as possible with the new save just in case I buggered it up again. You see most people don’t get back out of that room. Very frustrating. Even more so is that the game makers know of the glitch and are not doing anything about it for the Xbox, they did for the PS3, gits!
So all in all I really enjoyed the game, got a little obsessive over it and hey went about killing every one as Voldemort as you do! I am well proud of my gamer points and am slowly catching up to the boyf!
When you first pick up this box you know that there are quality components inside by the weight.
Now, picture the scene. I’m at my Friendly Local Gaming Stores (FLAGS) just browsing the boardgames section looking for any new additions, when I came across Agricola. I reached up on tip toe to the top shelf where it had been placed only to find my fingers only just reach the underside of the box.
I look around, the Manager is behind the till keeping an eye on a bunch of squawking kids buying Magic The Gathering (MTG) boosters and flicking through the collectible rare cards folder while bartering like pros. The other way an assistant is in deep conversation about the Watchman film with two other customers. I look for the third assistant but he has disappeared into the gloom at the back of the store. How come you only get that kind of darkness in gaming shops?
It was no good I was on my own. I reach up and could just get enough friction on the cellophane wrapper with my finger tips to slide it closer to the edge. Here it come……almost there……… I changed my footing preparing to catch the box while trying to look half cool in the process. Then the box gave into gravity and slipped from between the two boxes where it had been sandwiched.
“Wow that’s moving faster than I expected” flashed through my mind as the box tumble through the air towards me. I reached up and grabbed the box with two hands. ”Oh balls” was the next thought as the box was not stopping, all I was left with was two hands full of cellophane. It had slipped through my grasp heading towards the floor. ”That bugger was bloody heavy!” I stuck out a foot to stop its on its way towards the floor. “Ow!” and then there was a loud clang as it hit the metal shelving making the assorted Warhammer miniatures dance inside their sale 50p brown cardboard box.
Silence. Then the bend of shame to retrieve the box from the floor where it has landed. The fiancée leaned out from the gloom to see what had happened, shook her head and then went back to her 3 for 2 Fruit Basket & Battle Royal Manga hunt. I looked towards the till to see all the CCG midgets looking at me with huge grins and laughter in there eyes.
“I’m going to have to buy this now” I thought as I inspected the back of the box. So I headed to the till with my head lowered in shame. Gave over my debit card, punched in the pin, sniffed and then went outside to wait for my other half.
And that was how I ended up with Agricola.
So this weekend I decided that it was time to open this heavy bad boy up. No wonder it was heavy it contains about half a tree in tokens. honestly, almost all the tokens inside the box are made of different coloured pieces of wood.
Then you take a look at the rule book. It starts out in nice large text on the first couple of pages and then it gets smaller and smaller and smaller until you need a magnifying glass to see the wording. It makes the game look like it is the most complicated rules system since StarCraft. Which is a real shame as when you play it you realise how simple the game is and how addictive it has to get the perfect farm.
Agricola is a game for 1 to 5 players and takes 30 mins per player to complete. You start the game with two farmers, mum and dad, but this can be expanded with children later if you have room in your house. You assign each person on your farm to tasks for each round. Tasks range from collecting grain, fishing for food, buying sheep, having children etc. etc. At the end of each round there is an extra tasks added so you have more options to choose from. If another player takes a task on the board the other players are unable to use it until the end of the round and all the farmers are removed.
At the end of selected rounds you have to feed your family with food produced on your farm, harvest grain and veg from your fields. Then love is in the air and the sheep, cows and boar have babies.
There is nothing quite like starting out with a two wooden rooms with a empty field and then ending up with a fully working farm with babies, veg in your fields and multiplying livestock.
At the end of the 14th round your farm is scored. The key to a good score is to have as much going on in your farm as possible. Don’t just focus on one aspect like crops. You need to start upgrade you house from wood to clay then to stone. Sow lots of fields and grow both Grain and Veg. Have a large number of pastures with sheep, cows and boars. Have a big family but make sure you have a way to feed them.
It really is Farmville, but much better as you can play it with actual people in the same room and not annoy the sh!t out of all your facebook friends. Am I bitter? Too bloody true I am.
Pictures will be on the way. We forgot this time due to eagerness to have our dinner. But by how addictive this game is and how Tamz is hounding me to play again that wont be long.
A word of warning, as with all Drunken Goblin reviews this is not going to be a rehash of the rules but just what I liked and thought about the game.
Arkham is under attack from multiple dimensions. Portals are being ripped open all over the city, spewing out corrupted evil monsters and other unmentionables who wander around the streets driving the locals mad and killing anyone who stands in their way.
It’s left to a small selection of investigators to fight the terrors invading the city. Close the portals before the large creature masterminding the attack fully awakes to bring destruction on the world.
Arkham Horror is a very story driven board game and has the players on the edge of their seat waiting to see what foul and depraved event is going to happen next. One thing that is worth mentioning straight off is that this game takes up a lot of space. The game board is fricking huge, then you need more space for all the stacks of cards, counters and a area for each player to run their character.
As with all Fantasy Flight Games products the components are made from quality card stock which is first class. The graphics are dark and brooding as it should be with anything based on H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos.
Players can be randomly assigned a characters or you can let them choose the investigator they want to play.
Almost straight away I decided to let the players choose who they wanted. This was because I was reading through the character when suddenly I came across a private investigator. I just loved the idea of playing a PI in the 1920′s.
Turns out that I just as well of chosen randomly as the first gate my PI stepped through got him devoured and I had to use a different random character, brilliant. So I ended up playing a professor who could not stand up to any combat as he was a older & wiser gentleman. This did leave me with a problem as he was not built for speed and could not move fast around the board. Then it also started raining reducing his movement by one giving him a maximum movement of just 2 without hardly any sneak skill.
When the next weather environmental came out it was a icy weather card which still reduced the character movement by one, exactly the same as the raining card. Balls!
Two monsters decided to camp in the street area next to me literally cutting off my investigator to the hospital location. I waited and waited but every time the monsters moved off the area they were replaced by another powerful monster that would of knocked me unconscious and sent me back to the hospital location where I would have to stay to heal. Then they just seemed to swap locations every time a monster movement card was drawn.
My fiancée was romping though the portals at this point closing them left, right and centre. She had 4 gate trophies in front of her and was putting the pair of .45′s (+4) to good uses stacking up a nice amount of monster trophies as well.
We did seem to be very low on the clue tokens so closing the gates permanently was difficult. I think we focused too much on getting rid of the gates and we should of collected more clues first then we could use them to seal them permanently.
Oh well! these are why we play these games. Learning is part of the fun, which is why I personally love games like Pandemic and Forbidden Island. Just having to take the time to play the game repeatedly so you know the best strategy to use is the fun part.
So for a first play it was a good learning experience. I am afraid to say that we did not get to finish the full game as my fiancée was a brave soul and hung in as long as she possibly could. 2 – 4 hours on a game is a huge commitment if you are not a devoted gamer, especially as we were learning the rules at the same time. I was stuck between a hospital and a unconscious place. Monsters started to surge out of every gate on almost every turn. This pushed the terror level up faster and faster, closing all the shops and causing Cthulhu to awake.
We were being humped hard, it has to be said. But do you know what, this does not make it a bad game. If it was easy we would not return to it again and again to it to see what would happen next time. All the story elements on the cards are awesome and make for a very story driven game.
When my PI first went to the Black Caves there was a swarm of bats which I had to sneak past or lose health (stamina). Rolling the sneak check and just making it pass the bats was great.
I also believe this game is best if you are into the H.P. Lovecraft books as there is a great deal of back story to pull from. I first got into his books after watching two great Horror films that were based on his short story’s. The first being Re-animator and the second was From Beyond. Now if you are going to look for these films don’t expect them to be very Lovecraftian as they are your typical B-Movie stuff with Jeffrey Coombes, boobs and blood, but they pointed me to the books which is why I always look back on them with fondness. I also love crappy Horror films and had to steer myself away from the Giant Shark vs Giant Octopus DVD when I saw it at my local shop.
If you are a role player you will also get a lot more out of the game as you already have the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and take on the skill checks with no problems.
This is a great game, if you know someone who owns a copy get them to play it with you and dedicate a day to play it, don’t pull it out after a dinner party as you will not be popular.
If spending hours and hours playing the same game fills you with dread then you might try Munchkin Cthulhu as its a blast as well.
So last night I decided to give the new iphone / ipod app from Fantasy Flight Games a try in our Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP) session.
Its called the WFRP Toolkit and acts as a virtual tray that you use to roll virtual dice for your checks.
After the annoying & un-skippable WFRP, FFG and Games Workshop logos have finally decide to bugger off your left at the front screen which has a nice graphic at the top and a current news section from FFG. Now I could go into the whole issue of “Why do I have to look at ads, I have paid for the app and WAAaaa WAAaa WAAaa”, but being a FFG fan I feel its a great little feature and every time it loads I excited to check it to see what’s new.
What can I say, FFG has part of my soul in their back pocked along with my pay packet.
So prodding the start button that rotates the screen and a virtual dice tray is presented with a nice chaos symbol etched onto the background. Along the top of the tray is a small bar containing the Characteristic (blue), Conservative (green), Reckless (red) and Skill (yellow) dice. Touching any of these makes the dice pop off the bar and appear in the tray in the centre of the screen. You can tap on the dice in the bar multiple times for more of the same dice. Swiping a finger across the bar makes it slide off the screen and another bar appears with the Challenge (purple), Misfortune (black) and Fortune (white) dice. These can then be added to the virtual tray in the same manner as the other dice.
Across the bottom of the screen is another bar containing a large red cross to remove dice from the pool, a reverse selected dice button and the menu button.
To roll the dice just a quick shake of the ipod set the dice dancing in tray with some very satisfying dice on wood sound effects. Now at this point last night I had not told the guys that I was using the ipod to roll the dice just in case the app was not as good as I hoped. With the sound effects off and being a bit shifty I got a couple of strange looks as I started jiggling behind the GM screen and had to explain very quickly what I was up to. OK FFG please for the next version can we have a option for a button to roll the dice as I quickly got frustrated with the snigger’s from the other players.
When the dice start to roll both the top and bottom bars retract to give the full view of the tray and reading the dice is exactly like checking for successes with the real dice. A nice feature is that you tap the screen with two fingers it will bring up a summary of the dice rolled which I found a lot easier to read than counting the symbols. This is a brilliant idea! When you are the GM and have to read the dice it can be like reading tea leaves, it takes a while and sometimes its not clear , but with the summary screen it obvious and it speed up your turn, getting your focus back into the game. The summary screen also gives you the chance to save the dice roll to the log or to see the results of only selected dice.
Holding one finger on the screen for a few seconds brings the dice and option bars back onto the screen to make a new dice pool or add more dice.
Under the menu screen you have a log page to see what dice rolls have been saved along with a page of statistics. There is a option screen allowing you to clear the dice roll logs, turn off the sounds / shadows, turn off the FFG Movie that displays when the app first launches (to be replaced by the FFG logo!…?). A page to read the instruction manual and the credits for the app are also available.
All in all I love this app. I think that for the cost of £1.79 it’s a bargain and cheaper than having to buy a load more dice.
One of my issues with the new dice mechanic of WFRP is having to reach over the GM screen to retrieve dice scattered all over the table. This App lets the players use the core set dice and I don’t have to bother looking all over for those elusive purple dice which I’m sure the players hide.
So is this App worth the £1.79 asking price?
Oh Yes! Especially if you are the GM. Though I must admit I will miss rolling that two hands worth of dice.
P.S. The gaming session was wicked last night and there was a brilliant twist in the story that I set up but the players executed. I love roleplaying sometimes!
Inception has to one of the best ideas for a roleplaying world ever. Going deep inside peoples dreams to steal secrets, fighting with their subconscious and with power over the world…..Oh boy! During the whole film I was thinking this would make an brilliant idea for a roleplay and it even made me start thinking about which system to use.
And there’s the rub, which system can be used to control a world where anything is possible? Not held in check by a genera but by what the person is dreaming. A system where everything can change.
Inception was written and directed by Christopher Nolan of Batman Begin’s and Dark Knight fame. I think it was also inspired by a film I loved from my childhood in the 80′s called Dreamscape.
I am going to have to give this some thought and will get back to you if I can find a system. By the way SEE THE FILM. Angry Joe is SOOO right it has to be seen on the big screen.
Also does anyone have any suggestions on a system to use, I have been looking at Savage Worlds….Darn it, a Matrix roleplay would be almost perfect.
This weekend I had the chance to get a few card games to the table, including a few that I had not played or had not seen table time for a while.
First up was Magic the Gathering. My nephew had been asking about this game and as I had a few packs laying around I thought “Why not give it a go?” I had a pack of green cards which were given away free as a promotion when I purchased the Xbox 360 version of Magic the Gathering and while I was picking it up from my friendly local game store (FLGS) I also took the chance to pick up 2 more core sets. The pack of free green cards were exactly the same as the cards used in the Xbox game so switching to the table top version was quite a easy experience.
Now, I have not played Magic before as I have a tendency to stay away from the cult of the popular, let’s just say I’m more Android than iPhone, so I also wanted to show him some other alternatives to the collectible card games available. So I grabbed a handful of boxes including Warhammer Invasion, Munchkin Bites, Race For The Galaxy, Dominion and I was off. I also took Starcraft the board game along just in case we overdosed on card games.
The story behind Magic the Gathering is a massive fight between two wizards on a battle field. Both players take turns summoning creatures and use them to attack each other. When you are being attacked you can use any of your creatures, which had not been used to attack during your last turn, as a meat shield to stop your wizard taking any damage. There is also different effects and artifacts that can be played to effect your wizard, creatures or spells in play. Power can be generated by playing lands to the table which can then be spent each turn to trigger new cards.
For the games we played I stuck to the green cards from the free pack and also added any other green cards from the core sets. My nephew tried different combinations of colours over the three games and it looks like sticking to the one colour makes things a lot easier.
As with most card games I feel that winning is mostly down to luck and having the right cards come up at the right time is everything. Making sure the deck you are pulling your hand from is well balanced with a good variation of lands, creatures and spells can make all the difference. The pack of green free cards looked to be well balanced even with the extra cards that I had added. The balancing issue was proven right as during the first game as I dominated due to my nephew having a lack of any creatures to play. Literally a hand of basic lands, power sources, are fine but once they are on the table you need something to spend them on.
The next game was more balanced and I started on the defensive as there were quite a few power cancelling cards in my nephews hand and he was able to get more creatures to the battle field. But again I was able to weather the onslaught by putting a few lower power creatures in the way to soak the damage until I had enough power to take him down. This made it two wins to me.
The third game was all over the place with the most amount of creatures being summoned but again I was able to get the win by storing power to get the bigger creatures on the field with spells adding to the damage dealt.
So the real question is am I going to jump into the mainstream and start playing Magic as my main game? The short answer would have to be no. I have done the collectible card thing before and while I loved the Garbage Pale Kids I also remember the amount of money you had to spend to collect the sets. At least with the Garbage Pale kids you get chewing gum and they had a funky smell. Also I have seen the teen pandemonium that is Magic tournaments at my local FLGS. I think that honestly has to be my idea of hell.
So I think I will stick with my roleplaying and board games for a while longer before I join the cult of Magic the Gathering.
