Anachrony, The Grizzled, Wrath of the Lich King, The Thing, Plague and Pestilence, and Shadows Over Camelot

 Anachrony, The Grizzled, Wrath of the Lich King, The Thing, Plague and Pestilence, and Shadows Over Camelot

It's Game Day, y'all!!

Thanksgiving is fun and everything, but seriously: Game Day, y'all. My friend Roger and I had set this up a little while back, having decided there were SO many games we still needed to hit. And knocking out a couple of them in one day is the best way to make it happen. Because then we can play what we have been jonesing to play in addition to what we *need* to play. See, gamers know what I'm talking about. But if you're not a gamer, then first of all, I'm thrilled you're here reading my gaming blog! Thank you!! But secondly, being a devoted gamer is also a responsibility. How's that? Well, there are mechanics and themes that may not generally attractive to some of us (I personally am not inclined toward polyomino games or western themes, for starters), but for those of us who are pretty hardcore gamers, we kinda have a responsibility to try some of these things because they might be the exception that prove the rule. It might sound silly, but there it is. So I think every gamer has a list of games we "need" to get to or are "supposed to get to." Having a day full of games allows us to chip away at that list as well as "play what we really want to play."

To that end, our post-Thanksgiving Game Day more or less followed a schedule we set up to ensure that all 4 of our planned players would get to play at least one or two things we really wanted to play. Our planned day is outlined below:

1. Five Tribes (12pm-1:30pm)

2. Anachrony (1:45pm-3:45pm)

3. Plague and Pestilence (4pm-4:30pm)

4. Cartographers (4:45pm-5pm)

5. Quacks of Quedlinburg (5:15pm-6pm) No Chad

6. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (Pandemic variant; 6:15pm-7:15pm) No Chad

7. The Grizzled (7:30pm-8pm) No Chad

8, Shadows Over Camelot (8:15pm-9:45pm)

9. The Thing (10pm-12am)

I'm sure the first thing you notice if you have played any of these games is that my time allotment for the day is...ambitious. To say the least. So I knew we wouldn't get through all of it. But scheduling it out that way helped us keep a focus on what we wanted to ensure we got to, if nothing else. Plus, it meant we weren't losing time equivocating over which game we would play next! 

As per the schedule, we were supposed to start the day with Five Tribes. Five Tribes is a game we had all played before, but of which we're extremely fond. It is a great deal of fun, it's decently easy to set up and play, and it had been awhile since we had played it. So it felt like a nice, light-medium game we could play to start the day. But upon a bit of a late start, we decided to kick off with Anachrony instead. It's a big damn box because Chad owns the Infinity Box, which includes everything. But Chad is very familiar with the game and so taught us, emphasizing that the game isn't terribly complicated to play once players wrap their brains around the notion of borrowing resources in the present against the future. The idea behind the game is that we're all factions in a post-apocalyptic world preparing for yet another cataclysmic event. Whichever of us have best prepared for the second apocalypse by using our Exosuits to collect resources or otherwise act in the toxic landscape and using time travel will win the game!

Naturally, I planned on taking pictures of every game we played because I knew I'd be writing up this recap, but I managed to forget to take them for all but one game. Good job, me; you're great at this! So enjoy this picture of Anachrony that I found online instead!

We played with four players: myself, Roger, Chad, and Ted. I don't think I'd want to play with more than that, and the designers seem to agree, as they limit the player count to 4. I played as the Path of Dominance, but as is most often the case for me with new games, I wasn't entirely certain what I should be doing in order to win. So I tried not to think too hard or too long about any of my decisions because I didn't think it would help me much anyway, and ultimately, while I want to win, I'm playing to learn right now rather than to win. My leader was some captain who allowed me to trade 2 water for a generator or a generator for 2 water, so I decided to go in hard on water buildings and generation at first to facilitate other buildings. This ended up being prudent for me as a new player because the water and buildings based around water use allowed me to be extremely flexible as to how I could pursue victory points. I managed to build the Quantum Chameleon super project decently early (third or fourth turn, I think), and though I only used it a handful of times, it was absolutely essential to what I was doing. That super project allows me to use a genius specialist to utilize the projects (buildings) and super projects of other players. Huge for when I wanted to do something I otherwise couldn't do. At some point, though, (around the 6th round), it began to feel as though I'd be getting diminishing returns for my endeavors (I was unlikely to have the most water by the end of the game because I'd be using it, I couldn't get the most projects or super projects built, I wouldn't have the most specialists in total, etc., all of which would've netted me more VPs). So I chose to start playing it a bit safe: I paid off resources I had borrowed from the future as quickly as possible, and simply being able to trade 1 gold for 6 water and a VP was huge for me.

One of the things I really appreciated about this game was that we genuinely didn't know who was going to win. Roger thought he was completely out of it by about turn 4 (of 7), and Ted was really micromanaging his board to squeeze every possible VP out of every possible action. But we didn't know just how close it would end up being. Roger did end up losing, but with 58 points. As he said, once he figured out he had 58, he assumed the rest of us would be in the 80s or 90s. But Chad came in third with 60 points, and Ted and I scored for first with 63 points. I'm sure there was a tie-breaker of which we were unaware and Ted probably won it, but we had already started cleaning up the game before Ted realized his math was wrong and he had 63 points instead of the 62 he originally counted. As a result, we shared the victory rather than going back and figuring out if there was a tie-breaker. Especially because by this time, despite having started the day with Anachrony, we were already behind our schedule! I really enjoyed Anachrony and would absolutely play it again. Ultimately, I think the actions are extremely easy and straight-forward, but there's a lot of depth to the game and a lot of different paths to victory. And those are two things that will nearly always win me over as a fan.

Chad had to step out for a couple of hours, so we knew we'd be without him for a bit. So we decided to use that time to play The Grizzled. Yes, we were already jumping around, but three things dictated the decision:

1. I knew Chad wanted to play Plague and Pestilence, so we knew we'd wait on that.
2. Cartographers wasn't a priority, nor was Quacks of Quedlinburg. They just felt like fun, familiar choices to break up new plays.
3. Our friend Rahul was going to join us pretty soon and very interested in playing Wrath of the Lich King, so we didn't want to get started on it just yet.

While Roger set up the game, he had Ted and I watch a video on the YouTube channel, "Watch It Played," to learn the game. "Watch It Played" is terrific if you don't like rulebooks, aren't good at explaining rules, or are simply more of a visual learner. Give it a look-see! In The Grizzled, there's a campaign option, but we really just wanted to play the single game and see how it would go. It's a cooperative game, and the players are soldiers attempting to survive in the trenches during World War I. I decided to play as Anselme Perrin because his charm is much like my own (see: facial hair-based charm). The characters are all basically the same, except their "good luck charm" abilities vary from character to character. It's a small thing that mostly doesn't impact how players select characters, but Roger has the minis to go with his copy of The Grizzled, so that added a little bit of fun flair to the game.

 

Hey look! The one picture I remembered to take all day!

It's a pretty straightforward game when you break it down; it's a card game focused on hand management and pushing your luck. That said, we got off to a pretty horrific start and lost horribly, and so we decided to play again. We lasted longer on the second run, but just got backed into a corner (partially through our own misplays, partially through luck), and ended up losing again. I'm pretty sure that both times we lost, it was because one character (Ted in the first game, then me in the second) had too many negative personality traits and triggered the loss condition. I had fun playing and would play The Grizzled again, but it's not one I would necessarily pick off the shelf of my own accord.

By the time we were losing our second game of The Grizzled, Rahul had arrived! So as soon as we had gotten beaten and battered enough, we packed up The Grizzled and set up Wrath of the Lich King! I had picked this up at Target because I thought it could be a fun riff on Pandemic and worth a couple of plays. Much like any other Pandemic variant, there's not a ton that's different here, but it's different enough that it's worth getting if you're a fan of World of Warcraft. The biggest change is the introduction of combat, as instead of trying to eliminate diseases, players are trying to stop the spread of the Undead blight and lay siege to the Icecrown Citadel and defeat Arthas, the Lich King. There are other elements that have been changed, but not so much as to be unrecognizable. Even though we roll dice to tackle quests now, we also contribute cards from our hands with matching symbols in a way that's reminiscent of a core Pandemic mechanic. We take four actions, reveal Scourge cards that tell us where the Undead spread to, and we risk outbreaks (or, in this case, having locations overrun).

Enjoy this stock photo!

I played as the dwarf because I love the dwarves in this lore and his usefulness as a warrior and a tank felt relevant in combination with the Human knight (Roger), the Night Elf archer (Rahul), and the Orc with a Chain Lightning ability (Ted). The game was fun, and we did have a pretty crowded board toward the end of the game, full of Ghouls and all three wandering Abominations. It came to 9 Hero cards left in the deck when we won with a couple of big swings. I sacrificed myself to keep questing at the end of the game, but mine was the only death; the Despair Track had only advanced once up to that point when one of the locations got overrun in the late game, so it felt like a risk worth taking, even though my roll was terrible. It was a satisfying victory and much fun was had! At the end of the day, I'd be happy to play this again. But I'm really unlikely to suggest it unless I know someone is a WoW fan and might appreciate the game more because of the WoW theme. It was decent overall! Just not necessarily a game that would approach the top of my list at any given time.

Chad had returned by the end of Wrath of the Lich King, so the timing worked out pretty well! We had already determined by this time that we weren't going to get around to Five Tribes or Quacks of Quedlinburg, but there was also a good chance Ted was going to have to leave sooner than he had anticipated. As he was the one who had brought The Thing and had really been itching to get it to the table, we decided to set that game up next. I keep referring to it as The Thing (and the game is, in fact, a hidden identity game with traitor and hand management mechanics based on the John Carpenter's movie), but the game is actually called "The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31." I'll keep it short, but wanted to clear that up in case anyone went looking for a copy of the game and couldn't find it because they didn't have the full name of the game.

Ted walked us through how to play the game, which worked out well, as Ted very much has a head for rules and was the only one of us who had played the game before. I picked Childs just because he's damn cool. Like just about any game I'm playing for the first time, I end up picking a character who draws my eye rather than basing my choice on the ability of the character since I don't fully understand how the game works just yet. One thing I'd like to point out is that I really dig the character selection part of The Thing. I'm not sure how often this type of mechanic is used in other hidden identity games, but for The Thing, there are different character classes. The stack of character cards are passed around the table as players, one at a time, select which character they will use. When a player chooses a character, that class is unavailable for the next player to select, and so skips to the next player (for instance, after I chose to play Childs, who is an Engineer, Rahul was sitting to my right and thus unable to select an Engineer). This helps ensure a balanced party to handle missions during the game. I really appreciated this! I'm sure it's more common than I know, but it was still an aspect of setup that I liked.

The players are the humans trapped in Outpost 31 when The Thing gets loose and attempts to assimilate all of us. However! At the beginning of the game, players are randomly dealt identity cards that designate them either as Humans or as Imitations. Any player who receives an Imitation card is actually The Thing in disguise and must attempt to sabotage the missions so that the Human players lose. However, as Imitations are outnumbered and can be caught and destroyed, they must convince the others that they are not Imitations, but Humans. There's also a point later in the game at which new identity cards are dealt to each player a second time. And while a player who is already an Imitation cannot become a Human, a player who was designated as Human at the beginning of the game can absolutely become an Imitation halfway through! I'm not always all about the traitor mechanic because it sometimes really throws the balance of a game and feels like it leads the game toward an arbitrary conclusion. It's really cool in theory, but I think it can also be very difficult to incorporate into a game in such a way that it works well.

In our case, I was dealt a Human card at the start. Which, for me, was kind of a relief because it meant I could just play the game and not worry about deflecting suspicion or figuring out how to be subtle in my sabotaging the group's efforts. I'll play the traitor and have in the past, but it's more fun for me not to be the traitor. Anyway, we started out with good success, our first two missions being easy successes and quickly moving from Sector 1 of the Outpost to Sector 2 (Human players are trying to get through all three Sectors and then escape without any of the Imitations being along for the helicopter ride). We started running into some issues in Sector 2. I was decently confident that Chad was an Imitation, but not confident to voice that out loud. However, it was in Sector 2 that things started to go wrong. Just as things started to fall apart, Roger and Ted both began accusing one another of being Imitations. Here's the thing: Roger is quite good at poker, so it's hard to read him in games such as this. Ted's apparent surprise at some sabotage and then his apparent outrage as he accused Roger of being an Imitation came across as a bit rehearsed. So now while I didn't know if I could trust either Roger or Ted, I was more inclined to believe Roger was Human and Ted an Imitation. Ted made a unilateral decision to use the Rope and tie up Roger so he couldn't go out on a mission. Normally, that's the kind of thing that warrants a discussion and a vote. But that didn't happen here. So now, I'm convinced that Ted is an Imitation and Chad is probably one. Though Rahul might be one as well. At this point in the game, however, only two of the five of us can possibly be Imitations. So someone I suspect is a Human.

We manage (after one destroyed room and some other bad stuff) to get from Sector 2 to Sector 3, but then the wheels really come off of the dumpster fire. We start running into failed mission after failed mission, and finally, The Thing wins when a final mission is sabotaged. Here's the funny thing: Rahul had mentioned that, hypothetically, a Human could screw over a mission if they had a hand full of Sabotage cards. It turns out that's exactly what he had! Unfortunately for us Humans, it also turned out he was an Imitation as of our entrance into Sector 2. So it was easy for him to Sabotage us while still claiming he was Human. Chad was an Imitation from the beginning of the game. Turns out Ted, Roger, and I were all on the same team. Good win for The Thing, tough beat for the Humies.

Still horrifying after all these years...

Ted had time to play something short and Chad had been wanting to play Plague and Pestilence ever since I had shown him a game design I was working on that utilized a game phase mechanic similar to Plague and Pestilence. After briefly explaining the rules, our 5 person game got underway, and it was a good one! Only Chad and Rahul had never played before, but as it's a fairly simple game, it moved along. The Prosperity phase lasted for quite a long time! Then the Death Ship came, and at that point, things turned a little ugly for me and Roger on dice rolls (losing population points at the beginning of each turn on bad dice rolls feels pretty terrible after a minute), and ugly for everyone else on cards played against them. High rolls net players more population points in the Prosperity phase, but those same high rolls lose players more population points during the Plague phase. Since the aim of the game is to be the last player with any population points left, this can be devastating even when not being regularly targeted by card plays from other players. Every time I rolled a 10 or higher (out of 12! And it happened a bunch of times!!) during the Plague phase, Roger would go right after me and roll the same or higher. It was brutal.

So Roger went out first. Chad had hung around this long because he always seemed to have a City Walls improvement card he could play, even after someone else managed to destroy them. I think he played 4 City Walls cards in total over the course of the game? Bonkers...but it wasn't enough to save him, as he went out second. I had to choose between targeting Ted and targeting Rahul. I chose Rahul, hoping that Ted would go out on a bad roll. Ted rolled well enough to stay in the game, then Rahul rolled badly and lost his last population points. It came down to me rolling a 4 or less in order to lose zero population points (as I had an improvement on the table). If I could do that, I could play a card that would cost Ted the last of his population points. It was suggested that this would be so close that I should roll only one die at a time. On the first die I rolled, I got a 5 or a 6, thus ensuring I'd lose the last 5 population points I had, handing Ted the win. He breathed a huge sigh of relief, as he only had 5 PP left. Big win for the last man standing! There had been a lot of shouting and laughing during the game, and that's as Plague and Pestilence should be.

To close out the night, we finally got Shadows over Camelot to the table. The premise of this game is that the players are knights of Camelot looking to save it against threats both external and internal, as this game also features a traitor mechanic. Players go on different quests and fulfill them by using cards in our hand and rolling dice. It's very similar to The Thing. The loyal knights win if at least 7 of the 12 swords placed on the Round Table are white by the end of the game (white swords are often a reward upon completion of a quest), and the traitor(s) win if at least 7 of the 12 swords placed on the Round Table are black by the end of the game (black swords are usually the result of failed quests). Additionally, if any traitors are undiscovered by the end of the game, each undiscovered traitor can flip over two white swords, making them black instead.

Once again, I was relieved to discover that I was a loyal knight and could just play the game to win! But DAMN, were we off to a rough start. According to Roger, he had not seen a game start like this before, and the hole in which we started was much deeper than he had previously seen. It didn't help that the very first "bad card" (I don't remember for the life of me what they were called) we pulled was a persistent effect that said our Merlin cards could not be used until a quest had been successfully completed. Given that Merlin is a bit of a more powerful wild card that every player starts the game with, this was a pretty unwelcome blow to our cause.

We thought we'd start by throwing Grail cards because each of us had started with them. But then we ran into another bad card that forced us each to discard a Grail card. Between that and sudden pushback on the quest, we felt it was a little pointless to stick there because we weren't having much impact on the quest. At this point, we split off in different directions: Rahul went to the Excalibur quest because we were suddenly losing ground there consistently, I met up with...someone? I can't remember who...over on the battlefield, and then I don't remember where other people went. Good recap, right? Right!

Honestly, we just started an insane slide we couldn't break out of. We ended up calling the game when there were 3 black swords on the table and only 1 white, 9 catapults on the field and no real way to push them back (I think once there are 12, that fight is lost?), there were 4 of 5 cards on the Black Knight....we just got absolutely buried. We learned that Chad and Rahul were the traitors. Again. So another win for them, waaaaayyyyy bigger than their win as Imitations in The Thing! But Chad and Rahul both said they also didn't actively try to sabotage the party; things were already going so poorly that they were confident they would win no matter what they did. So Rahul sort of phoned it in by working on the Excalibur quest because it was difficult to peg him as a traitor, given that he was, in fact, contributing to a quest. He just wasn't optimizing his turns. Chad was basically in the same boat, choosing not to bother sabotaging and risk revealing himself, since things were already going so poorly.

I was glad we finally got around to playing Shadows, as Roger and I had been talking about getting to it for years at this point. I would play it again to compare that experience to my first experience, but it wouldn't be my first choice to hit the table, I don't think. Chad mentioned the next day that he thought Shadows Over Camelot might even work better as a fully cooperative game because it was already so difficult without a traitor mechanic in there. And thinking more on it, I think he's right. I couldn't definitively say one way or the other without at least another couple of plays, but I'm inclined to agree with him.

Ultimately, we played 6 of the 9 games we had intended to play throughout the day. We did not get around to Five Tribes, Cartographers, or Quacks of Quedlinburg. I thoroughly enjoy those three games and would've been very happy to play them, but honestly, this worked out just fine. I play plenty of Cartographers on my phone, and the other two are fairly easy to get to the table because of their relative game weight (they're not particularly complex and aren't on the longer end of games I often play).

Of the 6 games we did play, I had only played Plague and Pestilence (and about three rounds of Wrath of the Lich King solo so I understood the game well enough to teach it) before our post-Thanksgiving game day. Anachrony, The Grizzled, WoW Pandemic, Shadows Over Camelot, and The Thing were all new to me. So it was a very enjoyable and productive day of gaming! If I had to pick one of those 5 that I really want to get to the table again, it's absolutely Anachrony. Looking forward to messing around more with different technologies and such that come with the various expansion components!