When New Player Comes

Am I really going to have some super-lame pun as topic whenever I play When Darkness Comes? Looks like it.

A few days ago there was a new experience on that game: a third player.

We two oldbies continued with our earlier characters Ninton Kanton and Rick Harrigan. This duo was bolstered with Amé Stinger and her dubious past as an anarchistic gang member.

We played the Out of the Frying Pan scenario, with few additions.

First, the D12 dice was a turn marker, and every time it was turned back to 12, every player took a failure token. If this happened four times, everyone lost.

Second, outside encounters were placed on ! -marks. Forests and starting tile were unaffected by this. Though forest thingy was house-ruled during game. After all, it would be rather weird to find a bad case of traffic that slows you down from a forest...

Of course, the "story" behind scenario tells us that there is this martial law going on within the village. I guess I didn't take that into account when deciding to use outside encounters in this game. After all, there were plenty of Civilians and Tough Guys around wandering the streets.

Also, all the police characters were found inside houses, which raised some questions about the state of this martial law. Had civilians actually claimed the streets and forced police inside?

During first rounds of the game, a peek through window by Amé and a good perception roll by Rick Harrigan told us that the whole frikkin' City Hall was full of zombies. Who had actually forced martial law on the village? Who was behind the schemes here?

Ah well.

Game went by without encountering almost no adversaries except Tough Guys on the streets. A lot of items and allies were found though, most of them from forest and/or streets.

So characters were quite well-equipped. But lack of true adversaries and a few unlucky Oh Crap -rolls (a mention here goes to Rick Harrigan, who spent two turns in a row just looking at the ceilings in one house because of Oh Crap -table rolls) meant that they didn't have too much Victory Points. Especially when no amount of additional dice and re-rolls actually gave results at times.

D12 had almost turned twice, when people started rushing around in attempt to find actual adversaries. And, eventually, they sure did.

The elder heroes Ninton Kanton and Rick Harrigan thought they could tackle anything alone, and ran alone to different tiles in the city (Ninton went to the City Hall, Rick to random places in Arkham campus area. That had a gun shop as a store-next-door. Go figure.)

Both of these pompous characters faced a D4K monsters. Which means you have to roll 4 same numbers with your dice roll to defeat the beast.

Ninton survived one round of combat, but was left with only one Defense/Health.

Then Rick faces his own adversary, and despite his handgun, he dies. Ninton dies too, since everyone takes one damage point when another character bites the dust, and he had only one health left.

So Amé is the only character left on board, with just one health remaining, and both damage tokens being unhealable.

Amé had impressive 7 Attack dice with her pistol and RMW skill, and had enough Victory Points to actually fight adversaries even with only one health left. That required that no random dice screw ever took place.

Well, dice screw came with first adversary she encountered. The very same adversary that had killed Rick.

So... everyone died.

I had thought that this games difficulty doesn't scale much when additional players join the fray, but when 2/3 of characters manage to kill themselves, it's a whole lot worse situation than when this happens with only 2 players.

Inspired by this I finally managed to compile a better skill table for players to use. The one behind character sheets gives next to no details on how the skills actually work and where they help. Also, when skills usage is scattered between 4-5 rule books and leaflets, it's a pain to check how they actually work. This was actually somewhat of a problem now with three players, when different situation and different skill interactions came up more often.

Enough of ramblings, waiting for next time.

Spycraft in a cyberworld... why not?

Finally some random writings.

Some time ago I got two expansions for When Darkness Comes.

I bought Spycraft and This Is Not Happening... boxes. Though Spycraft is somewhat of a stand-alone game.

Considering the price tag I guess I didn't do a good trade, because I'm more interested in the horror theme of When Darkness Comes. I can mostly mix and match elements from both sets to the original.

However, the new elements seem actually quite nice and will surely expand the gaming experience of When Darkness Comes. For instance, there will be a good pool of outside encounters now in the form of vehicles, civilians, "foil", street encounters and even human thugs. Also monsters from This Is Not Happening look like they will fit right in, except for the weird techno ball. Traps from the same expansion also look good and refreshing change of pace if included in horror setting. Who knows what kind of dark magics and such are present when there are undead around?

I hope these will, in a way, fix the problem of streets being mostly "safe zones".

One thing I consider is making adversaries from This Is Not Happening to work like those from Nameless Mist. That would make Willpower more of a game element than just a curiosity.

Also PSI from This Is Not Happening needs to be converted to Willpower, probably.

Now I'm only missing the two "main" expansions. I wonder if I'll actually get them ever if this games goes out of print or something soon. There hasn't been support for it for ages...

When Skinwalkers Come

A couple of days ago we played a game of When Darkness Comes with out newest duo of characters, Rick Harrigan and Ninton Kanton.

They are the pair who both have only 3 health/defense.

We played the first scenario from The Horror Within expansion called "The Skinwalker".

To make the scenario a little more interesting the Nameless Mist adversaries, security, allies and a few items were added to the pile of usable disks. I had learned from the "I Want My Mummy" -scenario that much that game can become a little boring if there are very little adversaries around.

Because this meant that there were more disks than ? -slots in the 8 tile town, a houserule was invented. Once unexplored tiles run out, remaining disks are added to first tile heroes visit that doesn't have the maximum number of disks on it.

Also, D12 -house rule was made too. In this scenario it represented the evil skinwalkers growing power and attunement to the totem animal spirits. First time the dice was restored to 12 the totem adversaries got +1S and +1 Target Number to Iniative. Second time the dice was used up, they gained +1 TN to Attack score. If the die would go down to 0 for a third time, spirits would gain +1 TN to Defense score. If dice would be turned again for a fourth time, all players would just brutally lose.

With these additions the scenario was quite enjoyable.

Especially Ninton Kanton, the superior ninja fighter had to adapt in this scenario. His Persuasion skills are really rather horrible, and most often there would be only security disks around, and the scenario forced to persuade some allies to bring final victory.

This meant that he had to attack just about every security he happened to come across. Well, except for one dog. All humans he did kill, but couldn't bear to watch a rottweiler die by his hand.

This all gave him tons of victory points, but also a troublesome number of failure tokens.

Rick Harrigan didn't rush all over the place the same way, he took his time to watch his surroundings and advance more cautiously. This paid off, when it was he who found the navajo allies who would make it possible to kill the totem animal spirits.

D12 was flipped over two times during game, so at least 24 turns were played.

Game was actually quite tough contest between heroes - but Ninton had to buy off way too many failure tokens to really be a winner. He scored 17 VP's in the end, and Harrigan had over 20 but below 30. I've forgotten by now how big the total number was.

When Frying Pan Comes

Today I played a game of When Darkness Comes.

It was with a new player who had no previous experience with this game, so I thought it'd be best to play the introductory scenario first. "Out of the Frying Pan" being its name, if memory serves.

I created a new character, who was dodgy and attacky as hell, but had really lame Intelligence, Persuasion and Medical as a result. Funnily enough the other player had created character, who was also speedy and had as bad defensive statistics as mine. There was some potential for interesting game here.

Main difference was, however, that my character had Attack 4 + 2 dice from martial combat, when his character had base attack 2. He had in intelligence what my character had in attack.

With this we started to hack and slash zombies.

We used the D12 house rule thingy, which in this scenario meant that every 12th turn all players got a failure token from the rising suspicions of townsfolk.

Game went fine and nobody died. Higher Speed statistics seems to actually be a nice assett when running away from too tough enemies. With earlier characters this has rarely been an option, but now with both characters at Speed 4 it was something that could be relied on, though both characters had only Defense/Health 3.

Hopefully we will get some new games in soon, I'd really want to test some totally new scenarios from expansions.

Oh, Rick won and my character lost the scenario, Rick gaining 2 skill points and a statistics rise, while I got only one skill point.

When Explosion Comes

Today I played a game of When Darkness Comes.

It was a grand ending of scenarios from The Awakening. We played the last scenario, The Enemy of My Enemy, where heroes need to first kill Dubois, the Mega-Adversary and after that find a bomb he has set up to blow the entire town to bits.

For this scenario I hadn't made any changes in the form of D12, because the scenario looked challenging enough. And for two players I think it was, all things considered.

The game had an easy start when heroes raided the Gun Shop and got pistol and both shotguns. This time around it looked like my character would win here big time. She totaled an amazing amount of zombies with the new ranged attack rules from second expansion.

When things had gone to the point that the bomb was found and my character was going in to library to blast Dubois to smithereens, but then some unexpected things happened.

For starters, Dubois in fact blasted my character. She was killed. Absolutely.

And then... then it was left to the other hero to kill both Dubois and then, in two turns, actually "find" the bomb and then dismantle it. This character had less victory points than I did, and he was less proficient with ranged weapons than my character had been.

And he killed Dubois, though all this had resulted in two damage points to him.

So, bleeding as he was he ran to next building next turn where the bomb was and succeeded to find it (needed 3 straight). Then next turn, which was last turn, he succeeded to dismantle it (needed 4K to dismantle it).

All of this pretty much drained all of his victory points, but still. He managed to do it, despite the permanent injury from my characters death.

This was somewhat funny, as the player is moving out of town soonish. Good ending, I think

When Tauloks Come

Okies, today we played another game of When Darkness Comes.

Lately it's been the only game I've been able to play, really. But that should be fixed soon enough as I will have a lot more free time at my disposal.

Anyway, we played the Brain Freeze scenario where the players hunt invisible tauloks that they can see when they have drank enough of Lilly's Special Drink. Go figure.

This scenario was nice in that there was a slight timing pressure from Lilly's drink, which rewarded the Speed stat for a change. But to make Speed stat truly shine we used a home-brew rule for this scenario that followed the 12-sided die I introduced in last game. The idea in using a 12-sided die was that it goes down one number at the end of every round, and once it drops below 1 it is turned back to 12 and something "bad" happens.

In this game, when the die first time drops below 1, dusk/light rain Line of Sight effect takes place. If the die drops a second time below 1, it becomes a full night/heavy rain.

Well, about the game itself.

My team member got the ball rolling real quick - well, her character's lucky number happened to be 4. My lucky number was 6, which was probably the worst lucky number around. In fact, her character had already killed and returned two tauloks all the while my character was trying to climb through windows and open doors with zero victory points.

In fact, had not a lucky WooHoo -table rolled a random item for my character (a knife from the other player) I think I wouldn't have gotten any kills during the whole game.

After getting that, however, my dear little character was able to beat up one measly taulok and return it to Lilly, managing to get just over 10 victory points to get at least a little character advancement.

Next, as the person we've been playing When Darkness Comes with is going to move away in a couple of months, we're going to play the scenario "The Enemy of my Enemy" next where you have to kill both Mega-Adversary and after that dismantle a tough bomb, where the bomb will explode and kill everyone if it's not taken care of soon enough.

That scenario will be a fine ending, and looks like it's challenging enough so that it doesn't need any additional 12-sided die. Maybe.

Ah well, I'm tired and writing erratically. Better go to sleep now.

When Skeletons Come

Today I played a game of When Darkness Comes with two players. Same continuum than in couple of earlier WDC posts, too.

Scenario was the Skulls and Bones or something like that, where you need to kill a certain number of skeletons and then dump their remains in the ocean.

Now, this was first time that I used a home brew rule that I've been thinking for quite some time. In every single game report I have complained how WDC lacks pressure and feel of hurry.

This was the home brew rule that I used and I plan to have in every other scenario too (modified to scenario specific needs, of course!):

You have 12-sided die, and at the end of every full round you reduce the face number by one. When it falls below 1 you turn it up again at 12 and place the monsters on the board as if first gun had been found. If the monsters are already on board, move ALL of them their SPD stat closer to Gun Shop. If at the end of those movements enemies have LOS to player characters, resolve combat as usual. If the first gun is found before the die has spawned them, reset the die pointing to 12.

Additionally, when first monster reaches the last row of tiles, every player receives a failure token.

Now, as I have played the game, I think it will be a perfect sense of small hurry if I modify above rule so that you also get a failure token when first time monsters enter the middle row of tiles. Reason for these failure tokens is that the villagers start to slowly wake up and there is always some early bird who sees the walking dead around, which in turn raises suspicion...

Anyway, randomly picked "town" was kinda nice. I tried to take all woods tiles away from randomisation, but I don't know how I still managed to blunder the shuffling so that the shore was behind a cabin and a woods tile. Ah well. At least the mysterious ship was well hidden!

Also, one of the randomly picked adversaries was the Mega-Adversary, and to be honest, all of this summed up (difficult terrain in between the skeleton bodies and ocean, a little bit of hurry and Mega-Adversary) made the game quite entertaining. Though the only real excitement came when all the other adversaries were killed except the Mega one. My playing friend had to move the Mega-Adversary so it got a Line of Sight to my character, after which it obviously charged, not giving us enough time to plan for it and pick our own fight.

It did horribly maul my character, despite her trying to shoot it down with both barrels of a shotgun. She had just one health remaining, when it was other players characters turn to try to save Camomile's already fried arse.

And, well, that he did, though he wasn't as skilled at using shotgun as Camomile was. Fighting the Mega-Adversary cost my character 8 victory points and the other character 7-8, so it was a costly fight.

But after that it was just a race to dump the skeletons to ocean. My character had 14-15 victory points when game ended, and my friend's character had 17. Damn. Her character has now more advanced character than I do.

(By the way, which is another point I have to check a bit. Now these character have played 3 games, which means that there is quite a bit of progress under them. Is the game too "easy" because of that?)

When Mummy Comes

Today I got to play a two-player When Darkness Comes.

As the two of us had earlier played the introductionish scenario where you kill five zombies, it was time for something new.

Scenario was the one where players hunted the mummy.

And it was a totally lame scenario.

First, there were no real enemies around, except for the mummy itself. And once a lucky "Woo Hoo!" -table roll revealed the building it was in, the players could avoid going there and focus on getting the students & mummy's orb to school instead.

Well, maybe scenario was less thrilling because of our characters. Both had lousy dexterity, which meant that it was a pain to get into buildings. Other attributes were okayish, but again the same thing happened that I complain about every time.

There was no hurry anywhere.

Because of crappy rolls the "heroes" spent 4-5 rounds trying to pick one doors lock, and eventually they had to resort in kicking down the door. It was a bit ridiculous, really.

So, as with the vampire hunt scenario, the mummy scenario requires more suspension to work out.

Anyway, I had shuffled some of the Nameless Mist security disks into the scenario, and they worked really fine. They brought some variety to encounters that the scenario lacked anyway.

About the game itself, it was quite entertaining at least.

My character seemed like the obvious winner for a long time, mostly because the other player had poor luck and collected a good share of Failure tokens and had to spend fortune to get rid of them.

However, if something good is to be said of the scenario, it must be the fact that it was really stingy on victory points. My character, who earlier had a lot more victory points, found the orb and almost all of the students. But still when the game ended she had only 14 victory points, which translated to only one skillpoint.

The other player, however, managed to snatch the victory at the last possible moment, really. When my character had found the last student, opposing player convinced that it was better to hang with her character. Then she rolled an additional turn from Woo Hoo! -table and ran way past for my character to persuade the student back to me.

Once opponents character dropped off the student at the high school, her character had 17 victory points.

After being frustrated enough at the vain attempts of lockpicking, she raised Dexterity of her character. Wise choise, really.

When Expansion Comes

I got two copies of When Darkness Comes expansions today that I had ordered through local gaming shop, Fantasiapelit.

I don't usually write too much reviews or things like that, but right now I'm in the mood for that.

As I said, I got two expansions. First was The Horror Within, and the second one was The Nameless Mist.

First, the packaging sucked. But I guess they had in mind keeping the expansion sets rather cheap. But still it just looked plain bad and messed up, when rulebook and expansion tiles formed a sandwich that had a pewter figure filling, all wrapped up in plastic and not in very neat way.

However, Nameless Mist looked a lot more professional, though still the packaging looked ugly. But at least there was a small, colored "paperback" covering up the insides.

But enough of that, you don't play with actual packaging.

Once you open up the expansion, you can actually see a huge rise in quality over the base game. Rulebooks both look a lot more durable than the leaflets that look like print-outs, which came with the base game.

Now.

What I specifically look into, is expandability and how things work together. As much as I'm a statistics freak, I'm a megalomaniac collector who wants the games to be a huge mess of rules that just happen to work together.

My dream is to have a good home-brewn non-GM run semi-campaign system for When Darkness Comes. And that in mind I looked into the scenarios, additional rules and additional disks.

Scenarios for non-GM run games in The Horror Within look both plenty and nice. Though I didn't read them thoroughly except maybe for the first one, they left a nice impression that they were nicely different. Which should read: totally different.

Line of Sight rules have no problem whatsoever in incorporating them into "the Big Game". Probably because they were designed to expang the basic rules, heh.

But things in the Nameless Mist expansion look a bit more difficult to fit into this collection of The Awakening + The Horror Within.

First, the disks that come with the set have a lot more refined graphics in them. But that's only a minor detail.

However, at the moment I lack the actual Willpower rules. Sure, I can download them from the official website which I probably have to do, but I'd like to have a physical copy of them in my hands too, with all the disks and whatnot that come with the expansion.

That much said, I'm sure it will be entertaining enough to use only partial willpower rules, it makes a couple of new adversaries interesting and different from the base game's adversaries!

Now, at least 3 of the 4 new allies look good enough to be put straight into the base game. But security and item discs pose a real problem... it makes little sense for these Cthulhuesque "security" members to wander around in towns, guarding a café of something. They might need some house-ruling not to break the "illusion".

Items, then. As of now they are kind of a waste. Once I'll get complete Willpower rules I'm sure they'll be usable, but as of now adding them to base game would just dilute meaningful encounters. One Elder Sign and both Black Lotuses could see some use if I take enough new adversaries and house rule some of the security disks into the game, but otherwise no-one wants Necronomicon when they can get the Shotgun.

But the book items have Search values of 3S, 3K and 4S, so they could be substituted to some scenario items instead of the uglyish numbered disks.

And last thing: the tiles. Nothing to say here, really. They all fit in and don't look too much "off" from the base games tiles. Miskatonic University campus with all the small buildings is a nice change of tile design and thus may look a bit weird in the middle of town, but really, nothing wrong there.

I guess this was all.

Adventures of Sympathy Sam and Jennifer

Yesterday we played a couple of games of When Darkness Comes with two players.

We played the zombie shoot-up scenario and Last of the Tzimovars scenarios, and I guess playing other scenario than the first opened up some thoughts about the game's workings.

However, brief summary of the games.

Both Sympathy Sam and Jennifer were characters who sucked at combat and were slow, but good at persuasion, particularly at flirting.

Sam was better at medical skills and was a huge tank with defense/health of 5 and Jennifer was more dextrous.

This lead to a funny start - without weapons or victory points, neither character could beat any monster, no matter how good rolls might be. Whoops.

Also, Sam quickly found out that there was a Mega-Adversary in the town hall/jail with a perception roll. So characters quickly escaped.

But once Sam found a shotgun and a pistol and a wrench for Jennifer (Jennifer had hand-to-hand combat skill and Jennifer was horrible at searching things), things started rolling.

This scenario was played a bit wrong, which must be forgiven, since this was third game of WDC ever, and first for my friend. Somehow I had been thinking that you could buy 3 dice and 3 re-rolls per fight round, when in fact you could buy such things per your whole turn.

Well, it burned out victory points with our characters' measly attack skills, but at least made some victories possible.

In the end it happened so that Sympathy Sam killed the last of the five zombies. He scored only a couple victory points more than Jennifer, but still, he gained the attribute rise. Which went into dexterity, Sam was frustrated enough at banging at the doors and yelling someone to open them.

Anyway - after two good plays of the first scenario, I feel that it needs some sort of time restriction or something. Even with horribly slow characters once you hit around 10-15 victory points, you don't have to walk on the tip of your toes so much. I don't know how much this changes when there are more players, but at least when both players are low on speed, there's no real penalty to it.

Then, the Last of the Tzimovars scenario.

This scenario was pretty simple and straightforward, but it did involve some good rolls of 3 straight with only 3 dice with no re-rolls. Sympathy Sam raided the church and packed himself full of holy water and crucifixes and then rushed to the mansion of Tzimovars.

He had cleared whole outside of the building when Jennifer was just leaving the doctor's office... He had used a couple of vials of precious holy water though, which was a bit risky thing, since killing Mega-Adversary was required for victory.

Anyway, Sam came to Gun Shop and helped Jennifer find a crossbow for her and took one for himself, too. Then the duo found their way into the mansion itself. Jennifer started acting unsportingly. She started flirting with Sam's allies, and as she had persuasion 4 + 1 dice from flirt versus Sam's persuasion of 2 + 2 dice from flirt, she managed to steal them more often than not.

Only comfort for Sam was the fact that he had nailed five zombies, where Jen had killed none. But that was about to change, when Sam stumbled upon Mega-Adversary.

He tried to fight the queen of the Tzimovars, but didn't manage to kill it with 10 dice + 3 re-rolls. Jennifer came around to help, but her next round she attacked the Mega-Adversary. She decided to stake the Mega-Adversary, because that way she would benefit from 2 sets of 2 re-rolls without using victory points.

She used all her holy water and bought three dice with victory points and started rolling. After 4 re-rolls she had 6,6,6,6 on board, and Mega-Adversary needed 5 of kind to kill it. Last roll came out as 6. Now, thinking of that, had Jennifer failed there, both of our wimpy characters would have needed astonishing luck to bring the main antagonist down.

After that fight it was a race for victory points. Offensive power had dropped pretty much as we had no longer holy water around and crossbows were starting to run out of ammo.

Last real excitement came with the last vampire, who needed 4 of kind to be defeated.

Jennifer, being the drama queen, did the same she did with Mega-Adversary. Last possible re-roll came out as 5, when there were already three 5's on the board. End of Tzimovars and a victory for Jennifer.

Anyway, after four games it feels like there isn't enough "pressure" in the game. It might change with more players, and especially with different character builds, when you need to take more into account who seems the probable winner. But at least now I feel like there should be some element of urgency, when there are two slow characters playing it feels like they got all the time in the world to, well, kill supernatural monstrosities that are terrorizing civilians?

Still a good game though, and having played only two different scenarios I won't judge everything just yet.

When Christmas Comes

I just came home from playing a game of When Darkness Comes with a friend. That makes it two player experience, then.

This time around the game lasted a bit longer than first.

Actually we managed to finish the first scenario, so I can evaluate the game a bit more.

Both our characters were horrible at lockpicking, speed and medical. Because of that the game lasted longer than it usually would have, I think. The countless tries at lockpicking and healing were a bit hilarious at times.

However, one the ranged weapon specialist found a pistol and the hand-to-hand fighter found a wrench, winning battles started to go steadily enough. So much in fact that it ruined some of the tension in the game. But maybe that was because both characters had Defense/Health of 4, which allowed lots of tries with 5-6 attack dice against adversaries before things looked critical. A couple of times characters got down to 1 health, but even then it was a solo fight without assistance from another player.

Maybe we were just lucky to find such good weapons, but really, killing off the zombies was actually easier than surviving guardsmen at library. Those guys were pro bouncers, throwing once a lone player out, and next turn both of us. That resulted in one of the players getting three failure tokens, which kinda made me the victorious player.

So, once players get some weapons, it seems the hardest challenge is dealing with failure tokens and stuff like that.

But, really, need to get some more games in, and obviously some more complex scenarios.

Here be heroes

Today is also the day when I finished all pewter miniatures that came with When Darkness Comes.

They were a nice change of pace, and I'm quite pleased with the results.

But since they're pewter, it comes with a slight problem.

Paint tends to chip away quite easily from such a hard material. And since they're playing pieces for a board game, chances are that they'd find themselves stored at some very inconvenient places at times.

So that's the reason why I made them a little home too where only hard hits should threaten their colors, as they don't really shuffle around in their little house:

Harsh. (When Darkness Comes)

It took quite a while to actually get to play When Darkness Comes.

I'm not sure if this can be called a good first take on the game, but it surely taught some valuable lessons about the nature of the game.

We had two players and we created our own characters.

We entered the city hall, both players separately. First mistake. This game really needs coordinated teamwork most of the time.

No-one really bothered to make a perception roll to check for one random encounter that was next to door that had to be walked through. Second mistake. That encounter happened to be the second-toughest adversary in the game (if we don't count the mega-adversary).

Combat proved to be horrifically brutal and merciless. Maybe it gets easier if you have some items and victory points in reserve, but as it happened, the adversary number 5 brutalised one of the characters to 1 health remaining.

The other character ran to rescue him and managed to survive the beasts attacks with only one wound taken, so the other character was able to escape.

Next round it was the rescuers attempt to escape. Failed and she was killed outright. And because other character lose one health when someone else dies, it was game over for us.

So, really.

It's not a walk in the park when darkness comes.

Because if there is no time limit, you really must take every precaution you can before entering into the unknown.

Also, the "pseudo roleplaying" style of the game was a tough nut to crack for someone who has played mostly miniature games, where "on the go" house rules are a big no-no. But to counter that I think it would be good to come up with a list of skill uses that are "approved" within my box of When Darkness Comes.

When Darkness Comes

I used a gift token to Fantasiapelit brand of gaming stuff I got from Ropecon to buy a new game.

Eventually I chose the game "When Darkness Comes", mostly because it looked like it had miniatures as gaming pieces and it looked different enough from games I already own. And, heh, it has plenty of expansions up to date, and they're very affordable, too.

Obviously I haven't played it yet and only vaguely read the rules, but it looks like fun. It's "pseudo-roleplaying".

I mean, it's competitive game, only one player wins. But you're still a team, you can all always lose if you lose the scenario. And if one character bites the dust, it hurts the other characters permanently.

So there is a nice little tension between players. You can't win just by yourself, and not without other characters help, but if you sacrifice too much for others it's still game over...

Also, players got cellphones they can only use during their own turn.

So, players are encouraged to plan their actions and cooperation and trade for stuff and whatever, but only within the confines of cellphone's rules. I don't know if there are dead zones in the game, but it would be cool if there were. Oh, and if players are close enough they can just speak aloud, you don't need to call for a friend who's figuratively within arm's reach.

Anyway, I'm looking for a first game of When Darkness Comes.