Citadels

Citadels is quite an entry level game by Bruno Faidutti, and apparently published by Fantasy Flight Games as well. It's basically a card game where the players have to manage their gold and their cards in hand, in order to build 8 buildings. The objective is to score points through your buildings, with points awarded for the cost of the buildings and combinations of those buildings, usually. This game is strictly head to head, no cooperation at all, and pretty much a highlander-style game in that "there can only be one!"

The main tactical line from round to round is the choice of different character roles, each of who has different special powers - here I show you Ah Ping as the King.


The strategy is more like a choice between two roads - franctically building small buildings to get to 8 and the bonus points, or building a few large, high-point buildings slowly to overwhem the opponent with the sheer size of your buildings at the end.

Overall, it's quite an easy game to learn for newcomers to gaming, quite recommended!

Fury of Dracula

The second game we'll be looking at is Fury of Dracula, which Ah Ping and I played with Key-jie-jie's Rifle friends last weekend...



Fury of Dracula is actually Fantasy Flight's rework of the original game by Games Workshop. The plot behind the game is that several years after the events of the Dracula novel, Dracula is setting plans for world domination, and is traveling around Europe planting minions and seeding vampires. The vampire hunters (4 characters from the novel) suspect that something is up after they hear of a rash of mysterious deaths. and set out to hunt Dracula down.




The game mechanics carry this story very well! In the game, Dracula moves around from city to city in secret. This is accomplished by using location cards placed face-down on Dracula's Trail, which means that players will not know where he is unless they cross his trail or find other means of revealing the cards. However, once they do reveal some of the cards, they can attempt to deduce Dracula's path and track him down.

The players' primary means of finding Dracula is to walk around the cities trying to find evidence of his trail. As both Dracula and the players are constrained by road and rail movement (they can't teleport!), the players have to decide how best to search the continent, and how to rush down on Dracula once they find out where he is. Dracula's part on the other hand, is to be as devious as possible in making the players mis-guess his location.




Down here, for instance, we managed to track Dracula (played by Raymond-kor-kor) down into Eastern Europe, and were closing the net around him, which is why we're all in that corner of the map. However, we made a mistake and he was able to flee through the northern part of Eastern Europe - at this point in the game we'd just realised he had done that, and were about to play a "Consecrated Ground" to keep him from running away. It didn't work out, but I'll get Zim-kor-kor to explain some of the tactics and logic behind the game.

(Zim-kor-kor: I'll find a chance to insert some posts about the tactical considerations for the hunters and Dracula)



Well, in the end, if we hunt Dracula down, we get to fight him! The fight system is kind of strange, and reflects that the game is not primarily a fight game but more one of deduction and hiding. Basically, each player selects what he's going to do in secret, and then reveals it before rolling a dice to see whose card takes effect. In this case, Ah Ping is using a pistol against Dracula's Mesmerize. It's a little bit like scissors-paper-stone....

Well I really like this game, because there's a lot of interaction between the players, plus it's mostly cooperative, except for one person who has to be the bad guy. Only bad thing about it is that it's so looooooong. We took five hours to play our game... Nevertheless, my rating for this game is 5 oinks!

Arkham Horror highlight reels - Hastur and the Hound of Tindalos

You can't underestimate the importance of elder signs in a game of Arkham Horror. We had a recent game with Zim-kor's family, with the Elder one set at Hastur which we almost lost.

The last turn of the game, the doom track was at twelve! And we had to draw one more card, which, if it opened a gate, would end up with us fighting Hastur itself. If not for the three elder signs we'd dropped, we would've lost long ago - and of course those seals helped us to win by stopping new gates from opening on those locations.

There's a character in the game who basically looks like Indiana Jones, right down to the equipment he has - a Bullwhip and Revolver. See the picture here? Because of his special ability, he can cycle through the special items deck really quickly and help find those elder signs. However, he has one major disadvantage - his starting sanity is just three!


So in this case, he was in real trouble, running into a "Hound of Tindalos" - which is a really cute themed monster from the game. Kind of like Er-lang-Shen's Celestial Deity... except, of course, that it looks much much uglier!



The Hound is really special - it doesn't move along the streets, it just teleports directly onto investigators. Which is how Indy ended up fighting it in a science museum. It's a really bad matchup! Fail one horror check and Indy goes nuts, and in addition, the Hound is immune to physical weapons! Scratch one bullwhip and revolver...