Now Playing: March 15, 2013

I'm going to start posting short write-up's of game's I'm playing under this "Now Playing" heading. These games below were played at a friend's house yesterday over an inordinate amount of time. There's probably a maximum of 4 hours worth of gaming contained in what I played (add a half hour to learn Star Wars), but in a total of about 8 hours. I felt the whole experience of spending this day gaming unfulfilling as a whole, even though I enjoyed all the games I played.

First a friend and I played a game of Magic: The Gathering: Danger Room. The Danger Room is a variant of Magic that really gives me much of what I want out of the game. Players play from a common deck that's built to emulate the feel of early Magic. Each player has a "Mana Cache", a set of 5 basics, and 5 allied ETBT duals. This is my second time playing my Danger Room and I really think this is the format for me. I'm going to hold onto my cubes, EDH decks, and pauper decks for the time being, but I'm ready to chuck the rest.

Got in a bunch of rounds of Toc Toc Woodman. This game is a jenga-like dexterity game. You take a toy axe and swing at a tree to knock off pieces of bark, the bark is worth positive points and the center of the tree is worth negative points. This is pretty fun, but I wouldn't recommend playing with more than 4 and probably it's best with 2. Our 2p games were pretty tense back and forths, the 3 and 4 player games were more swingy as whoever would collapse the tree would of course lose, however the other players would be left with scores between 2-4 points and it seemed almost at random who would win when someone would lose. A fun time killer, something to break out if you're waiting for a game to wrap.

Played one game of Star Wars The Card Game. This game is a breeze to learn, which is very nice. I can't comment on it much since I only played 1 game but it was pretty tense, and came down to the wire with the rebels winning with the death star at 11.

Then we played two 5 player games of The Resistance: Avalon. This is my favourite game, and I LOVE the roles Avalon added to this system. in both games we played with the setup of Merlin, Percival, Plain Old Rebel, Morgana, and Oberon. This setup made for a pretty good game, though I think I'd like to swap out Oberon for Mordred in this 5p setup. The original game played fantastically with 7-8, but 5-6, and 9-10 felt like it needed something, and what it needed is these roles. They add so much to the game, you can have a tight 5p game where almost everyone knows something, or a wild 9 player game with accusations flying. Giving players information about the game REALLY helps liven it up, if you're at all interested in secret team/social deduction games this is the best by miles.