Just a small fraction of Loyd's game collection
For the past few years, I’ve made a pilgrimage of sorts to Kublacon, a local tabletop gaming convention that runs over Memorial Day weekend. This year was no different, except that I managed to get in even more gaming than usual. Most of the weekend was spent immersed in board games, but also had some fun with Dark Heresy, a tabletop RPG based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
I’ll split this into two posts, one covering Friday night and Saturday of the con, and the other Sunday. The focus here is on the games played, not so much the atmosphere or people.
More after the jump.
My younger daughter, Emily, also came, but as usual disappeared into the bowels of the RPGA (which once stood for “Role-Playing Gamers Association), taking her D&D 4th Edition characters into the Living Forgotten Realms ongoing campaign for the entire weekend.
Dominant Species
Friday night, I had the chance to tackle Dominant Species, designed by Chad Jensen. Dominant Species is a Euro-style game developed by GMT Games. It’s an interesting product for GMT, which has classically sold deep, hex-based wargames that appeal to wargaming grognards. Dominant Species has been well received, hitting 23rd on the BoardGameGeek’s list of games. I’d received a number of suggestions that I should try to play it there, and managed to get into a game.
Dominant Species overall theme seems like it’s about evolution, since it’s about the struggle of differing classes of animals to survive an impending ice age. In reality, it’s more like you’re manipulating the genetic structure of your class in order to force adaptation. But ignore all that; it’s just a great game, not a commentary on evolution.
The game is essentially an area control game, but with tight limits on the number of actions you can perform per turn. Six classes of animals – mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, arachnids and insects – vie for control of an ever-diminishing landscape. One of the many actions players can take controls the rate at which the glacier spreads in your little corner of the universe. The artwork is a little sparse – more functional than thematic – but the game mechanics themselves hew closely to the theme.
We had four players in my game; I ended up winning with my usual beginner’s luck, spamming reptile species all over the map and going broad, rather than deep, on “elements” (the main game resource.) I liked it enough to pick up a copy the next day.
Arkham Horror
Arkham Horror is one of the most complex board games I’ve played; I own the main game and all but one of the expansions. It’s not that the rules set is that complex, though they’re fairly hefty. It’s that all the little cards and bits can interact with each other in unpredictable ways, and no Arkham Horror game I’ve ever played turns out the same way.
However, my older daughter, Elizabeth, and I spent a morning playing an even more intricate, customized version of the game. The game’s owner, Jim, had spent much love on the game, adding interesting little bits. The first player token was a miniature bust of Cthuhlu. A tiny street lamp post model graces the general store. But it’s not just the added little flavor bits; custom rules have been added.
Modified and enhanced Arkham Horror
In Arkham Horror, you play investigators trying to ferret out and stop an impending doom in the form of a Great Old One (the Gods of the Cthuhlu Mythos, originally created in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.) If you can’t stop him from emerging, you must defeat him at the end or the world faces wreck and ruin. If you’ve ever played the Call of Cthuhlu tabletop RPG, Arkham Horror is a Call of Cthuhlu campaign in a box, playable in a few hours – if you can wrap your head around the rules.
One of the interesting custom rules Jim added to the game is a randomizer for the Great Old One. In a normal Arkham Horror game, the Great Old One is chosen before the game starts, so the investigators know what they’re fighting. Jim added a special clue deck. Investigators (the players) would draw cards based on clue tokens they picked up in their travels. These cards would whittle down the list of potential Elder Gods, until the true danger was revealed.
We played with five people altogether including Elizabeth and me. The whole affair took about four hours, and in the end, we failed to seal five gates and faced Y’Golonac. After a tense few rounds of combat, we defeated him, with all five investigators still alive at the end, although one investigator survived only by the slenderest thread.
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