Some more games from my boardgame marathon.
Art Society
I got to try out a new game for me, called Art Society. Players arrange a gallery from paintings they get from auctions and score points based on fluctuating trends.
To me it looked like this game exemplified the "easy to learn, hard to master" -trope. We had three players for the first game, which ended in a real close race of 82/80/78 points. I didn't have much of a plan except for hoarding decors and trying to maintain cityscapes as the vogue trend. Sure enough it ended up to be the top trend, although it did not secure me victory.
Later I played a couple of two-player games. In the first I wanted to try if playing strategically would be any good, and decided to maximize my vogue-factor. Sure enough I got five paintings to the eyeline which were of the trend I was lobbying for... but that trend didn't end up being in vogue after all. It was a loss because of that.
In the second two-player game I went back to reactive gaming style, not trying to force an outcome. It worked way better, since I won that game.
Monster Pit
Monster Pit with three players. This was first time playing this game for each of us. Here and there we played some rules incorrectly, but guess the misplays balanced each other since some were in favour of the monster, and some in favor of captains.
Anyway, Vaiel the Enchantress was the monster since that was the recommendation.
I was playing Nova, the Ice Princess captain. Other captains were Kei the Querling and Quatonor the Rakshasa.
Early on the King's Emissary was replaced with the outlaw creature thing, which stalled entire round's worth of captain actions. It felt like we had had zero progress, and the monster had already waltzed through one third of the vengeance track. Rakshasa was our only captain worth anything, although Querling was doing decent support. Ice Princess just got injured and wasn't able to heal for like an eternity, essentially losing her captain ability. The white tower was blocked by some kind of an enemy.
Thanks to captains bumbling around, the monster didn't even get wounded until it was way past 50% of the vengeance track.
But then... something changed. Rakshasa captain got beefy enough to start attacking the monster, and wounding it more often than not. Even Ice Princess stopped being useless after she got a champion that was able to switch one monster result to captain result from ANY dice roll. That stuff alone was responsible for at least three crits.
Querling captain was cleaning up town from spawned monsters, and eventually took some hits against the monster as well. After such a difficult start, it began to look like we were breezing through the fights... But as it happened, we almost became to victims of our success. After a couple of utterly miserable progress rolls, the monster was suddenly standing four spaces away from it's victory. But it only had five health remaining.
That's when we had to resort to sacrificing people for the statues. Barracks went first, taverns next. Ice Princess had become filthy rich from completing two quests, and was able to trade a bunch of champions from Querling to attack the enchantress herself, dealing two points of damage with a crit. Rakshasa was doing crits as well, so the monster was sitting with last health remaining. However, the "must change districts" thing made it so that only one captain would be able to attack through Watchtower. Better make that one count, because our progress rolls had so many dice that the monster might leap to victory with some bad progress rolls even after we pushed it back ten spaces with a wizard.
Rakshasa was able to put down the monster, kingdom was saved!
