[Vince, Pt. II]

Keeping this thread alive...

So my buddy picked up a pair of new games and we checked them out over the weekend - Resident Evil: The Deck Building Game and The Walking Dead.

Resident Evil is very similar to Dominion in style - start with ten cards, deal yourself five, play an action, buy something, discard all and then draw five new cards. The wrinkle in the game is that you have the option every turn of exploring the mansion.

In the beginning, each player chooses a character from the Resident Evil games to play as. Each character has a set number of health and two special abilities that become available as the game progresses. Your deck consists of your typical currency and action cards, but there are also item cards. Items are typically weapons, but there are some 'Green Herbs' and 'First Aid Sprays' to be had (healing items, for those unfamiliar with the Resident Evil franchise). Currency doubles as ammunition in this game, and weapons are only useful if you meet their ammunition requirement. For example, the base currency is +10 Ammo/Gold - it counts as both 10 ammo and 10 gold when played (the two upgrades are +20 and +30 of each). A pump-action shotgun (a pretty powerful weapon) costs 40 ammunition and does 25 damage. For it to be useful, you have to have at least 40 ammunition showing that turn. Before you explore, you play all your actions and your weapons (no limit to weapon usage, as long as you have the ammo for them), then you explore by flipping a card in a special separate mansion deck. The deck consists of enemy creatures and bonus items - there are 5 bonus items in the deck and about 30 or so creatures. Creatures have three values on them - health (how much damage you need to deal to kill them), damage (how much damage they do to you if you fail to kill them) and commendations (how much they're worth when you kill them). Typical creatures have 10-25 health, a select few have 40, one has 60 and the "boss" has 90.

The other change from Dominion is that from the get go there are 15 non-currency cards to purchase from, as opposed to Dominion's 13 - and none of them are "victory points" cards. In Resident Evil, the game ends when the boss monster from the Mansion Deck is defeated, rather than when the supply runs out. Also, the only value that matters is the worth of the total enemies you have killed throughout the course of the game (tougher enemies are worth more).

All in all, an interesting twist on the game style of Dominion. I prefer Dominion (a lot, to be honest), but the immersion factor of the style is nice, and strategy changes not only based upon what cards are in play, but also what character you're playing as.

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The Walking Dead is a game from Z-Man, the same guys who did Agricola and Pandemic. The game is modeled after the AMC TV series of the same name. The game is a typical board game with pieces representing your characters that are moved around the board. Throughout the game, various dice roll checks to pass encounters make up the guts of the game. The object of the game is for each player to "investigate" three separate locations on the board (out of about 13 or so). When the game starts, there are three "active" locations that are free to be investigated by anyone, and each player has a private location that only they may investigate. Once a public location is investigated, it is removed from the board and a new one is added. The trick with the game is that every time you move, the hexagonal tile you leave is immediately occupied by a horde of zombies (of an undisclosed number). As the game goes on, the board is progressively filled with Zombies and it becomes much more difficult to move around. If you have the misfortune of wandering into a zombie occupied space, you flip over the token, find out how many Zombies there are, and then you fight them.

Players randomly select a character from the game as their main character and then draw one follower from a separate deck to begin the game. Each character has one or two special abilities (sometimes dependent upon having specific followers in your party) and a "dice pool" of three dice that they use for resolving encounters. Followers typically have one to two dice which they add to the player's dice pool, and occasionally have a special ability as well. Acquiring more followers happens randomly through encounters, and they are quite powerful - more dice equals more chances to succeed at encounters and get more resources. The game includes three resources - food, ammunition and gas - that each player keeps a running track of throughout the course of the game. Food is used to replenish party members who have been "fatigued" (wounded), ammunition is spent to help clear out zombies if you fail to do so during an encounter (but is dangerous because it may attract more zombies), and gas helps you speed by groups of zombies without encountering them, or allows you to move further on your turn. Scattered throughout the board are resource icons - when you move onto a space with resources, you draw an encounter card, resolve it, then collect the displayed resource (even if you failed the encounter - unless the failure condition says not to). What I found to be the most entertaining part of the game was the variety of the encounters in the game. Encounters vary widely - while some are as mundane as simply killing 2 zombies, or surviving an attack by 6 zombies, the most fun encounters are the ones that prompt interaction between the players.

For example, an encounter we played through last night had the drawing player choose two players playing. Each player selected has to secretly choose to Fight or Flee. The drawing player succeeds at the encounter if both players choose the same answer - in this case, the drawing player gains a resource. If both players choose to Fight, they each receive a resource of their choice. If both players choose to Flee, they each take a fatigue counter. However, if the two players choose differently, the drawing player fails the encounter and loses a resource. The player who chose to Fight takes 1 fatigue, and the player who chose to Flee gains one resource.

So basically, the players selected have to think about several things -
A) Do I care if the drawing player succeeds or not?
B) What can I get out of this?
C) What is the other person going to pick?
D) Can I afford to choose wrong?

Meanwhile, the drawing player has to pick two people that he thinks will choose the same answer - so he has to go over their motivations as well. There are more basic versions of this as well - "Choose one player. That player decides whether or not to lose two fuel. You succeed in this challenge if they decide NOT to lose the fuel, gain one resource. You fail if they decide to lose the fuel, lose one resource." So the player chosen can sacrifice some resources to make sure that the drawing player doesn't gain any themselves.

In any case, they make for very interesting mechanics and strategy decisions. I really enjoyed the game, and am looking forward to trying it again.