I can't resist a session report mostly because of the first game that we played. It had the most interesting ending of any I had played.
Shadow Hunters - Six player game This one started slowly with a lot of green cards being drawn to find out who one another was. It wasn't long before I discovered that my wife was a Shadow (I was a hunter). When she was close to dead I decided to reveal myself and do a six sided die of damage to her and rolled exactly what I needed to kill her. I then attacked Raphael and killed him. He hadn't realized that I had killed Melin first and jumped up excited thinking he had won because he had the neutral character that's win condition was to die first. He was a little disappointed to discover he had lost. Jeremy then revealed himself in order to fully heal (he was the neutral character that only has 8 HP but heals once). His win condition was to be alive at the end of the game. Ben was the other hunter and Jeff was the other shadow. Jeff ended up stealing some of my good weaponry and in short order landed on my space and killed me with my own cursed katana. Sad day. That left him, Ben and Jeremy. both Jeff and Ben were 2 hit points each from death so it would pretty much be whoever landed on the other persons area first. Low and behold Ben drew a card that did 2 damage to another player and 2 damage to himself. Thus both the Hunter and the Shadow went down on the same turn. So what just happened? Well the Hunters won because the Shadows were all dead, the Shadows won because the Hunters were all dead, and Jeremy won because he was the last person alive in the game. Out of 6 players 5 of us won. We had a good chuckle over that one. Defenders of the Realm - 4 player game I will admit I thought we were going to lose this one. The game started horrible with minions blooming in all the wrong areas and within 7 turns we had 7 tainted crystals on the board. Not only that the Demon Lord Balazarg was ONE space from the Monarch city. We were scrambling BIG time. We knew we had no choice but to kill Balazarg and between all four of us we ended up just BARELY killing him. Our savored victory was short lived however because no sooner was Balazarg killed then we drew a "darkness spreads" card that moved the Undead Lord Varkolak one space away from Monarch City. The only silver lining was the fact that since we had all participated in the killing of Balazarg we all got three cards each and the BULK of them were actually black cards! Two turns later Varkolak lay dead at our feet. The tides had turned. Neither Sapphire nor Gorgutt had moved from their starting positions (well one had but our valiant barbarian queen had played a special card to move Gorgutt back to his start position). I had about 8 green cards already and between all of us we rapidly collected the cards we needed and dispatched the last two leaders and declared ourselves victorious. We could have very easily lost at several points in the game as we had also almost completely drained a couple of the minion piles. It was a satisfying win. Wok Star - 4 player This has been on my wish list for some time so as you can imagine I pretty much begged Mark Tyler to pull it out after their epic game of Egizia (that they had played while we were playing Defenders of the Realm). The game was even more fun that I had anticipated and this has now moved to a must have for me. We played a couple of the rules wrong which probably would have made it more difficult for us but that is a good thing. Essentially there are timers on the board and between the four players you have to whip out customer orders as fast as you can while also preparing the ingredients everyone will need to be able to make the orders. It is fast paced, chaotic and I loved it. Hopefully there are still some copies of the second run available for purchase. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "utah county boardgamers association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/ucboardgamers?hl=en.
