Another board game night Sentinels of the Multi verse & Darkest Night

 

So another board game night, another disappointing evening, well maybe just not that great... We played Sentinels of the Multiverse and Darkest Night. The Sentinels game worked out to be another slow slag as the villain git some lucky card draws that stymied our attempts to defeat her. However we are nutters and kept playing even though it was going nowhere very slowly. Ultimately we called it a day after 3 out of the four heroes were knocked out of the game. 

For no good reason we selected Darkest Night (1st ed) for our second game. Never having played this before there was a learning curve involved not aided by the rule book. The rule book is a mess and much of the rules and the enemy counters are not really all that intuitive. The game is for 1 to 4 players. Regardless of the number of players you always use four characters. We each selected our two hero characters, selected our powers, placed our standees in the starting space (the monastery) and settled back for what worked out to be a painfully slow death. 

The game has simple mechanics and apparently lots of optional powers for your characters (I only got one power boost for one of my characters but I did have two decks that promised more powers) So I went through the game pretty much as I started. There is a lot of dice rolling in this game, a lot, rarely for good reasons, usually to avoid death. These dice rolls have a target number which all too often is 4 or 5 (many 5+) Often you will find yourself rolling only 1 die which all too often will result in a failure. Each turn you will encounter a random event (which is usually bad) Then you get one & only one action. With this action you can move one space, search, attack, rest etc. Then your turn ends. This worked out not to be all that satisfying. Each turn the evil necromancer tries to track you down to attack you. He also places random nasty encounters like vampires and spies. The pressure is on the players and we never felt that we had a chance to defeat the evil. 

In the end we failed. The necromancer placed four encounter tokens in the monastery and mercifully the game ground to an end. 

I had heard good things about this game, but in further review it seems it is a good game if you have the add-ons. Well it is not a good thing that the base game is so bad that the only way it is fun to play is by spending more money. 

Apparently there is a second edition that includes all the expansions and while it fixes a lot of problems I think I will give it a pass.