Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Only Lady Hanbrook lives to tell the tale

Today I managed to play a game of A Touch of Evil.

It's been way too long since last time.

Anyway, I had a new player to introduce to the game. No other players, though, but Touch of Evil is quite fine as a two player cooperative.

As our villain we got the Scarecrow.

Heroes that were destined to fight this monstrosity were Katarina the Outlaw and Victor the Playwright.

The game had rather easy start. Shadow track didn't seem like it was moving at all, only nice items were drawn from Location decks and only Katarina was knocked down during whole game, actually. Progress seemed almost too easy. Except one suprise showdown (double 1's on cooperative chart) brought some early excitement to the game, though to be honest, it's a bit lame if game ends way too soon.

However, the "being cinematic" mention goes to Doctor Manning. Very early in the game Order's Influence was drawn that made Doctor backstab anyone in his office at the start of mystery phase if a cunning test was failed.

Event card that was used to remove Order's Influence failed to take effect.

Then Doctor Manning performed some "Late Night Experiments", which resulted in one horribly mutilated horse.

Not long after that it was found out that Doctor was actually the villain's most trusted servant. No-one was actually suprised at that.

A word to be said about the crows, too. Damn those things. They were somewhat easy to get rid of as both heroes had good enough Cunning, and they were a nice source of investigation points. However, they were easily ignored and as we had only two players, more crows seemed to spawn than we could shoo them off.

Though a honorable mention goes to our playwright, who practiced his theaterical entré's on them.

Game was almost a walk in the park until "remains in play" card The Horror was drawn. It made the cooperative mystery chart to be rolled twice each mystery phase.

At that point the shadow track started taking huge dives closer to zero. Victor had found a musket from Abandoned Fortress to help him raise his self-esteem and Katarina had found a Sabre from somewhere and bought a crossbow from monastery, which was funny as they are exactly the weapons that appear on her model.

Scarecrow's hiding place was found out to be the Bog.

After general hanging-around and last ditch secret-peeking showdown was ready to begin.

Because the shadow track took such a nose dive late at game the scarecrow was beating heroes with whopping 11 combat dice, as well as having 19 wounds.

However, the hunting party proved to be ridiculously powerful. Lady Hanbrook was a Reluctant Hero, thus giving +2 combat dice. Reverend Harding was the one who gave +3 combat dice. Inner strenght or something like that.

Stacking all possible extra dice at Katarina, she dealt 12 wounds with one fell swoop. Scarecrow rolled four wounds in, yet Oath of the Hunter kept Katarina standing upright.

Victor gave admirable 4 additional wounds in, despite his starting Combat rating of 1 and giving hits only on fives and sixes. Villain, however, ripped Victor's best play to tiny shreds of paper and Victor got so depressed he shot himself. Lady Hanbrook, who accompanied Victor, survived.

Katarina was still rolling over 10 dice (well, her armament was something like dagger, book of death, sabre, flail and a crossbow as well as Reverend Harding), so Scarecrow was eventually killed, but as it's last stand it killed both Katarina and Harding.

Anyway, during the games I've blogged A Touch of Evil games this one was the first real victory, the other one being a solo game that was just as close as this one, only one town elder living to tell the tale.

Really, need to play Touch more often.

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