Game(s) Played:
This month's meet up was one of those one in a million situations where everyone unfortunately has to cancel to take care of life's responsibilities. As the group has grown over the years, we have thankfully managed to avoid a total wipeout (1 year 3 months and counting) and today we have Henry and Moses, just the three of us meeting at my home instead to enjoy a few hours of boardgaming goodness.
Session – Famiglia
Game: Famiglia
Designer: Friedemann Friese
Players: 2 Players
Playing Time: 30 minutes (This Play: 20 minutes)
Main Mechanisms: Card Drafting
Player(s):
I play Famiglia fairly often with Moses as a filler in between our usually heavy games. I just don't usually end up documenting the game in my session reports. For the life of me I cannot remember on whose recommendation I decided to buy "Un gioco di carte che non potrai rifiutare!" or "A card game you cannot refuse!" but I really like this Mafia style card drafting game although I've never won a single game against Moses.
Whilst waiting for Moses to show up, I decided to introduce Henry to a quick game of Famiglia. And with the start of our first game of the session, it would appear that I must have been afflicted with "Teaching -10" because I got so many, many rules wrong all throughout our sessions.
This is basically the entire underlying mechanic of the game and I somehow got it wrong
Our first time around, I taught Henry to play the game where the acquired card also goes into the play area instead of your hand. We played through the entire game never being able to acquire gang members higher than level 1 because they all ended in the play area with no way of coming back into our hand. *major facepalm*
The second round went much better and much quicker as well once I realized my mistake. Henry favoured the Brutes in his gang whose job was to go around beating up higher level guys to kidnap them into their gangs. Whilst I (so typically) preferred to have Accountants in my gang, having them around helped to bring guys back from my play area to do a sweeping pick up of the members of the "La Famiglia". Although this eventually came at the cost of end game recruitment for me but it was more than enough for me to win the game.
Results Of Game(s)
Winner – Justin "Recycling Gang Members Like Dirty Money" (71 VPs)
LAST – Henry "Beat 'Em Then Capture Them (Like Pokemon)" (62 VPs)
Session – Mage Knight
Game: Mage Knight
Designer: Vlaada Chvátil
Players: 1 – 4 Players
Playing Time: 150 minutes (This Play: 180 minutes)
Main Mechanisms: Deck Building, Role Playing, Modular Board
Player(s):
Mage Knight should belong on my shelf of shame since my only play (ever) of the game was a solo one. This is a really tough game to bring to the table but when the stars aligned for our meetup this month, I decided it was time to dust it off and set it up and it only took an interval of 3 years and 5 months for this to happen. Even with three Players and playing only the introductory scenario takes up a whole lot of table space as you can see in the timelapse video below. My apologies that the video is sans the first and last 10 minutes or so, excitement precluded the beginning and battery the ending. Enjoy!
So let's talk about what happened before I go into the seven different rules I got wrong which would have made the game no less fun but totally different had we gotten it right.
I played as Tovak, some guy with a sword and a shield, whilst Moses decided on Arythea, a lady in red who delights in wounds and Henry chose Norowas, an elf like humanoid with a long two-handed sword. Unfortunately Mage Knight lore appears rather inconspicuous in the game as well as online so there's little else I can talk about besides the miniature used as your player marker. So the objective in Mage Knight differs from scenario to scenario, in our "First Reconnaissance" scenario we are just supposed to scout out the countryside until we discover a city then the game ends.
Moses was hyper aggressive right out the gate, running along the edges of the map, picking off baddies every step of the way. Realizing that I wouldn't be able to keep pace with Moses, I decided to veer off towards the middle of the map and explore down that way. Unfortunately Henry got caught surrounded by forests when the night cycle came around where moving through forests at night costs a tonne of movement points and I think he should have gone towards the left much earlier and braved the summoner in the mage tower which was blocking the left side.
We looked for siege weapons high and low
Siege / Range attacks were all the rage in our game in our efforts to ensure that we could bring down enemies without taking any damage ourselves. The unusual thing about Mage Knight is how all enemies appear to have a single hit point and all you need to do is get past an enemy's armour value to deal lethal damage. By the same rationale, you can't exactly wear down an enemy with a barrage of attacks like how you would expect in a normal RPG. Consequently we also did not do much healing since we hardly, if ever, got hit by an enemy creature.
I had read online that efficiency is key in Mage Knight where you always want to be moving and doing something on each of your turns. This was incredibly difficult to achieve, especially moving and attacking in the same turn. You just didn't have enough cards to accomplish both in one single turn. My mistake was also not creating more mana crystals when I could since mana crystals could power up your cards which could make me more efficient.
! *Exclamation sound from Metal Gear Solid*
As the game was going into the third hour, I decided to push forward to complete the scenario by putting all my cards into movement to reveal the final map tile with the city on it, triggering the end game condition for this scenario. I was struck with a dose of luck as the second last map tile revealed a ruins with an altar that required 3 white mana to gain 7 Fame (Fame is super important as it makes you level up and acts as Victory Points). And guess what mana was available in the Source? 2 white mana plus my 1 white crystal equals… Jackpot! Revealing the last 2 map tiles gave me enough Fame to edge past Moses at the finish.
Although technically categorized as a deck building game, Mage Knight didn't really give me that sort of vibe. Strangely enough it felt more like playing Diablo the boardgame but with cards, since most of the time we were going around trying to one shot enemy creatures around the map.
We found this city! With only a minimum of looting & pillaging done along the way
Results Of Game(s)
So before I go over all the rules I got wrong, I'm going to let the result stand since we played according to the rules as I explained them, so technically we did play a proper game, perhaps with some house rules thrown in.
Winner – Justin as Tovak the Explorer (20 Fame)
2nd - Moses as Arythea the Slayer (18 Fame)
3rd – Henry as Norowas the Wanderer (8 Fame)
And your Winner!
So let's run through what we got wrong:
#1 – I lay out the first map tiles in the wrong orientation. This resulted in a super narrow choke point that Henry got stuck behind since he was going after Moses & me in the turn order. Which led to #2…
#2 – Because of this choke point I decided to house rule the rules of engagement where you could sneak past enemy units as long as you didn't enter their hex. In reality moving from a hex adjacent to an enemy to another hex also adjacent to an enemy triggers aggro.
#3 – This choke point issue was further exacerbated by me forgetting the rule that to interact with a location you need to enter the hex itself and not merely be adjacent to the location.
#4 – I also did units tanking totally wrong. By right when a unit tanks, it takes damage then you reduce the damage to your mage knight by its armour. Healing the damaged unit is also based on the unit rank not the amount of damage it has. Not too impactful on our game since we hardly took damage.
#5 – This is a baddie. You fight multiple enemies in the same location AT THE SAME TIME. We were fighting them like they were lining up all prim and proper like. So yes, I should not have won the free unit I got from the ruins which I KS from Henry.
#6 – Fortification also doesn't mean that you can ONLY use siege attacks to attack the enemy unit. It just means only siege attacks work during the range attack phase, after taking damage from the enemy, you can use normal attacks to damage the enemy unit.
#7 – And the big whopper is that I totally forgot to do end game scoring! Players are supposed to earn Fame for things like Spells, Advanced Actions, Artifacts, Units, Crystals, Shield Tokens and penalties for Wounds.
Sigh, what a lovely day indeed! SO many rules wrong!
Still, what a really fun and engaging time!
So, instead of a medium weight euro, we ended up with a RPG monstrosity this month. I'm going to stop predicting what we're going to play next since it is rather obvious that my foreshadowing skills aren't up to notch.
Until next time, keep calm and play better.
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