Mail, Civilizations and Monsters

It was a small group that convened for Border Board games on Saturday night. We drew the usual crowd of Beth, myself, Homer, and Shannon and were glad that Rob could stop by as well. The night started with our second ever playing of Thurn & Taxis. T&T is a game I've been eying for a while so when the board game yard sale came to pass, Beth and I decided to bid on it. To our delight, we won it and picked it up at the Green Mountain gamers Game 'n Grill in Norwich.

We made some mistakes on our first play-through, mistakes we noted and vowed to not repeat. Luckily we managed to avoid the problems this time. Everyone earned the carriages in the right order and we negated points for having leftover bird houses errr, post offices. Beth seemed to have a pretty solid system in place from the get-go. Her houses popped up throughout the region in no time and her routes quickly earned her reams of bonus points. Homer went to big-route way and amassed a tidy sum of bonus chits himself.

Being his first time through, Shannon seemed a little lost leading to the dissolution of a promising 4 city route early in the game. While it didn't help his fortunes, it seemed to be the turning point at which he began to understand the subtle nuances of the game. I plugged away trying to fill up the big honking grey area and actually managed to trigger end game with my #7 carriage. Homer and I tied at 23 points apiece while Shannon had a dismal showing at only 4 points. The leftovers really damaged his score on his first time through. Beth won the game with an impressive score of 26, even without the #7 carriage in her possession.

Our next game involved breaking out 7 Wonders. The appeal is the game's ability to support a large number of players coupled with a relatively quick game play assuming everyone has played it before. This turned out to be a fairly tight match despite four wildly different strategies. Homer presented a surprisingly balanced point spread ranking 1st or 2nd in every category to score a 54 point win. Beth followed close behind mainly on the strength of her blue bonus points to finish with 47 points. Shannon and I ended up tied at 44 points each as Shannon went heavily on the military and I went the science route due to having Babylon B as my city.

Our last game of the night was a venture into Wrath of Ashardalon. While game play is similar to Castle Ravenloft, the monsters, challenges and some features are unique. Luckily the differences were so easily grasped that Rob and I being the only ones to have played both systems, still didn't need to explain much of anything. I believe Shannon may have been the only newcomer to the Wizards of the Coast D&D based game series.

With a full crew, we ventured into the subterranean lair of some evil Kobold dude (whose name I clearly cannot recall). As is often the case, we had barely stepped into the dungeon when things began to fall apart. Homer the Paladin and Beth the Fighter quickly went one way battling hordes while my Wizard, Shannon's Cleric and Rob's Rogue went the other. Before too long a cave in had reduced travel to a crawl on the north end of the dungeon while monsters streamed out in poison dealing masses to afflict Homer with curses and poison. The Blood-Raging Cleric continued to take damage owing to his inability to actually reach any monsters in time.

The environment cards are the biggest advantage the game has over the players (beyond always getting to attack first). As soon as the lava walls appeared, the Wizard was doomed. A curse would cause him to take damage for every tile he moved through while standing by a wall caused a single point. Standing still triggered yet another encounter that caused something to explode and the Wizard to tumble into a heap. Meanwhile the blood rage started to drain the Cleric of vitality, in spite of his starting with a Tome of Experience.

Over on the other side of the map, a giant boulder slammed into the Paladin and Fighter who, between them, seemed to be in a perpetual state of cursed, dazed and/or poisoned. When we finally came back together on the south side of the map, things continued to sour. The Legion Devils made their first (and second) appearance while Duergar and Kobold sentries opened more tiles and brought in more monsters. Oddly enough, we had only TWO tiles remaining when the trigger tile was finally pulled. This is a testament to the tile summoning monsters drawing everything from the bottom.

It was an error we caught late but we realized that we had not been activating like-named monsters as often as we should have. Given the difficulties we'd experienced to that point, it was probably for the best even though it did somewhat tarnish the end game. Knowing that he wasn't long for this world, the Paladin rushed ahead hoping to bring out the final encounter. It worked though it brought along a host of new monsters to go with it. Then with the Paladin down we used our last Healing Surge.

With hordes surrounding him and three of five party members in the eastern end of the dungeon, we had to orchestrate a complex and somewhat insane plan to somehow kill the Kobold Dude before the Paladin's turn came about again (for he had been swamped and died once more). As the Rogue and Wizard rushed to help the Paladin, the Fighter and Cleric orchestrated a careful fighting withdrawal from the Devil infested eastern caverns.

The Rogue and Fighter delivered some punishment to the Kobold Dude even as he slashed his way through our ranks leaving him down to 2 HPs with only the Wizard standing in the way of victory. Wielding an impressive arsenal of magic weapons (which, quite frankly could have better served someone else), the Wizard hypnotized the Orc Archer into attacking his commander allowing the coup de grace to be delivered via Flaming Sphere. The Kobold Dude fell to the ground as the Wizard's flaming balls tea-bagged him to death. Huzzah!