Friday Night Gaming Pre-Season

(Note: I've gotten bored with posting the creamy hot reportage that's made up the bulk of this blog so far. Since I'm not gaming as much as I was when I started State of Play, I've got less raw material to write about, but that comes bundled with more time to think about the games that I do play. As a result, I'm going to shift the focus of these posts to session-summary rather than -storytell, and focus more on strategy and musing about the games played.)

The New England Chowdah and Cahdboard Society hadn't met all summer long, since one of our inaugural members has a very busy schedule and has had all of his free time consumed by being half of the organizational committee of the brilliant Sub Rosa Drive-In. But I've been jonesing for some gaming, and the threat of my stealth/attack cyberdrones makes for a very convincing argument, so I convened an early meeting of the Society, minus our fifth associate. This was unfortunate in that it meant there was no point in playing Galactica, but it did mean that we had the correct number for playing Chaos In the Old World. So gangway for evil deification!

Game One: Blood Fever Sex Magik
Larry (Khorne) -> Richard (Nurgle) -> Kiarna (Tzeentch) -> me (Slaanesh)

Khorne hit the ground running, and the other three of us didn't do enough running of our own to prevent him from getting double-ticks on his advancement dial during the first turn. That enabled the blood-god to continue to harass us everywhere we set up camp, though he took a long time to get to Tzeentch's northern stronghold and was delayed a turn further when the magic god teleported his expeditionary daemonmans back to the south. Nurgle wasn't able to hold Khorne off enough in Bretonnia and Slaanesh suffered just enough casualties in the southern three regions for Khorne to continue to double-tick. He managed to get two dial advancements every turn except for the last, giving him a win by turn five with the rest of us not particularly close to ending the game via victory point win. It certainly didn't hurt his chances that Khorne's dice were as bloodthirsty as he was, giving him at least one kill every time that he rolled dice during the game except twice, but I blame our failure to derail his progress on our own tactics rather than chalking it up entirely to bad luck.

Conclusions: Khorne needs to be stomped on early. But "stomped on," in a game in which fighting usually only helps him, doesn't have anything to do with combat. Instead, it seems to me that the other three gods need to dance around a bit on that crucial first turn, which should be easily accomplished since Khorne's daemonmans cost twice as much to summon as everyone elses' cultistmans. So everyone else should deploy next to the territory that they actually want to occupy, moving to the one that they want only after Khorne has dropped one of his three daemonmans into the region that they currently occupy. If possible, somebody should also play chicken with the initial cultistmans that Khorne normally starts his game with: by placing a cultist of your own in that territory, you either tempt Khorne into also dropping a daemonmns there (and thereby limiting himself to three starting territories, rather than four) or else you'll get to safely wreak your own havoc there. Since Khorne normally airdrops his first mans into populous country, Nurgle is probably the best bet to start staring down that first Khornemans, since Nurgle can just as profitably decamp to an adjacent populous region free of fighting or stay there and reap the rewards. Whether or not Tzeentch or Slaanesh would want to get in on that action will situationally depend on where the nobles and warpstones are, but they might want to try this if they decide early on to play for a victory point win.

With a little luck, this strategy will prevent Khorne from being able to roll any battle dice during the first turn, meaning that it'll be at least one more turn before his cultistmans gain the ability to attack and all hell breaks loose. This will make it nearly impossible for anyone to get more than one dial advancement on the first turn, but since I've only ever seen Khorne to get two on turn one anyway, this doesn't seem like much of a disincentive to anyone else.

For turns following the first, anti-Khorne tactics are going to be a bit more difficult to employ. Since Khorne will already have daemonmans camped out in three regions, those regions won't be safe for anyone else (barring a lucky Slaanesh draw of one of his Fields of Sextacy or Tzeentch zapping somebody away via Teleportation), and Khorne can easily expand from there if no one is crazy enough to come to him. Given that I haven't had a chance to harangue people into trying the first-turn strategy outlined above, I'm not really sure what the gameboard will look like if it's a success or what those of us who aren't trying to killkillkill should be doing to try to keep the skins of our mans intact. I've begun to wonder if Nurgle shouldn't throw some of his daemonmans into regions in which Khorne is attacking cultistmans, even if those cultistmans aren't necessarily Nurgle's. This seems counterintuitive - Nurgle doesn't want Khorne to win by dial advancements, but he also wants to spend his power points to further his own agenda of winning by victory points rather than helping Tzeentch or Slaanesh - but since the dial wins tend to happen more quickly than the VP wins, it might be worthwhile to slow Khorne just to ensure that the game goes on long enough for Nurgle to have a chance to scoop up those late-game VPs that he tends to start accumulating in the last few turns.

Games Two and Three: The Sheriff Isn't Checking His Email

Kiarna had to leave after we were done with our game of Chaos, and none of the rest of us had the mental fortitude to start a game of Fury of Dracula. It's supposed to be a good game for three players, but it's got a playing time of two to three hours and none of us have played it before, so it would of course end up running even longer. Richard had brought his copy of Bang, which is one of the old-school ones that has no English text on the cards, and the expansion Dodge City, which has rules for three players.

In three-player Bang, rather than having hidden roles, everyone knows who everyone else is. Each player is trying to kill one other player, and if he does so, he wins. If his target is killed in some other way (accidentally blows himself up with dynamite, or gets indiscriminately mowed down by a Gatling gun, &c.), the remaining two players duel it out. Distance isn't really an issue, though it can turn into one if somebody gets sassy and tries to ride off into the sunset before the final reel.

In our first game, Richard blew himself up with dynamite and I got thrown in jail in spite of being the deputy. Due to a mysterious* confluence of events, I was shot up really badly while trying to hide behind a barrel inside my cell, even though the jail itself was hidden away somewhere in the wilderness. Unsurprisingly, death.

During our second game, Richard blew himself up with dynamite again, but this time the explosion didn't prove to be fatal. I got thrown into jail again and then shot repeatedly until I died. Apparently, jail is a bad place to be when people are shooting at you.

Conclusions: Bang isn't much of a game with only three players. It's the hidden roles that make the game interesting, and without that it's mostly just a game of who draws the most beer and bangs, with a small side helping of who draws the character with the best special ability. The distance mechanic isn't really a crucial part of the normal game - it seems to be there to keep people mostly in their own corner rather than going cross-table all willy-nilly, rather than fulfilling some more elegant function - but even the loss of that made the proceedings less interesting. I'm not sure if there's some kind of house rule that could make things feel less predetermined, like maybe making a stack of six roles and keeping them secret somehow until characters get killed, but as the rules are written I think I'll keep looking for some other short three-player game. I've been hearing good things about Death Angel, and FFG is good enough to give away their rulebooks for free, so I'll probably have a gander at that.

*Okay, not so much of a mystery: I'm a doofus. Even though I'd made the exact same mistake last time we played, and then recorded it here, and then was told what the mistake was and looked it up, I still managed to make it again. Twice more. Maybe I'm just secretly illiterate.