On 10/18 I finally got to play Starcraft, a massive (but a bit smaller than their usual MASSIVE games like Descent and World of Warcraft) space race to develop your tech to conquer planets, while impairing your opponents' plans to do the same with battles. Grant, Mark, and I duked it out and had a blast while doing it. There are so many ways that you could develop your particular race that will determine what kind of strategies you will focus on for battles, that I don't see myself getting tired of it any time soon. For my Zerg race (think a cross between the classic Aliens and the insects from Starshio Troopers), I focused on developing super strong Queen units that could make battles pretty deadly for my opponents... Unfortunately I didn't get a good chance to use them. I could have focused on strengthening other unit types. In general, there are probably 4 different 'paths' in the tech tree that you could follow for each race, that will determine your fighting style (and they all fall in the sprectrum that goes from 'brains' to 'brawn'). Cool stuff. I'd love to play it more...
Then this last week, JD, Lance, Andy and I took a trip to the town of Arkham. In this game, players are investigators that move around town trying to control the invading horde of monsters, and sealing the portals they use to enter our world. You do all this while trying to prevent a big bad monster from waking up and wreaking havoc. There are many expansions out there, including a Penny Arcade one!. We played with the Pharaoh expansion. Well, we tried our best gathering spells, weapons, sealing portals, but alas, that wasn't enough. The big daddy woke up, and decided to have us all for dinner. We probably scored about 5 hits of 12 on it before we were all reduced to a bloody pulp. Next time, I'm paying more attention to what the requirements for effectively fighting the big boss are. Some of use were caught with our pants down when it woke up... These types of games are a nice change of pace. I haven't recently laughed as much as I did while playing Arkham Horror this past week. Just because some call them Ameritrash, it doesn't mean they are bad games. Heavy-theme-with-a-dash-of-luck/randomness games like these are not bad. The euro may be king in my book, but these games hold their own... just in a different kind of way.
2 comments:
I thought you played SC with us last year at BGG?
Exactly.... so it's been too long for such a cool game. If you qucikly browse around (or do a search?) using the word Starcraft in this blog, you'll see how many times I've tried to setup a game of it. :)
BTW, I don't recommend a 3 player game at all, but it was good to satiate. As in any conflict game, once 2 players fight each other, the third player gets to attack the weaker of the 2 with his 'fresh' forces. Not cool.
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