boardgames

Mh, we had a round of boardgames with friends two sundays into the past. I'll chalk that up to rounding errors.

The session started with Flashpoint: Fire Rescue. It's a pretty simple and straightforward opening game about a burning house and rescuing a bunch of people from there, which is why it's one of our openers. If you know action-point based games, you know half of the rules already.

You spend 4-ish action points on running around, dousing flames, carrying or healing people and such. Afterwards you roll dice to select a field on the board to escalate the fire. Usually, you place smoke on empty squares (and in our case, the toilet was on fire so damn much...), but if you roll a square with smoke, that field and all connected smoke fields turn to fire. If you roll fire, that field explodes and damages walls, doors, spreads more fire in the cardinal directions. If you roll a specially marked field - a fire hotspot - you roll again.

We played on a medium difficulty setting because we had a new player and won that round, but everyone agreed that it was teetering on a knifes edge at 1-2 situations in the game - how it should be. Next time, heroics will be up :)

And afterwards, we tackled our current raid boss, Dune: Empire. This was our third or fourth session, and we found another 2-3 rules we had been doing wrong - one or two of these mistakes being a rather huge one nerfing cards like the Bene Gesserit very hard.

But as a game loop: You have rather normal deck building ideas. You draw 5 cards from a private deck and play one of those cards to send an agent to places - like cities on Arrakis, places at the guilds and the Landsrat, which gives you resources like money, water and spice, loyality with the guild and optionally armies. However - and this was the mistake we made - this card stays in play until cleanup. This repeats until all players have used their 2-3 agents, at which point you play your entire hand to get the final turn bonuses on them, money practically. This allows you to buy cards from the market, improving your deck a bit. Afterwards, the current combat strengths are evaluated based off or garrisoned or active armies, as well as some instant-cast spellcards to ad some spice to the fight and the winners get rewards according to the current conflict. At the end of the game, victory points decide the winner.

It's very much a bigger game and you can expect to invest 3-4 rounds into the game to understand all the rules, to get familiar with the cards and the pace of the game and to get some understanding of some meta of the game.

Like, I approached my first run with a dominion mindset. Get some trashing, get some value, thin the deck and win.The issue is - you only have 6-8 shuffles available based off of the pace of the game. This makes the usual trashing setup too slow usually. Most trashers also have conditions on them like "Have another Bene Gesserit Card in Play", and if you discard your cards in play too early, that also becomes harder.

But it's a very fun game once you get into it and it's going to be the main staple for the near future of your boardgame rounds.