Fresh from losing at Villagers Attack last week, we tried it again this week. It was a sound theory from my gaming partner, to try a game again that we were still familiar with, to see if it is really as bad as I think. I mean it is possible that I have missed some nuance of the game, and that repeated play will make it 'better'. Well this time around I am thinking this is just not a game for me.
As mentioned above, we also played an old favorite, Sentinels of the Multiverse, a game that we have played 18 times. Like Villagers, it had taken me a while to get into Sentinels, but unlike Villagers it is a game that I will play again.
Villagers gave me a nice chuckle when describing the scenario, something about the villagers having a tough time with monsters in the area, and they had to send for heroic help to combat the evil. Well in the first two games it was all we could do as monsters to harm the villagers! The previous games were a study in frustration and contradiction. Here we are, portrayed in writing as these fearsome monsters that can swat aside the poor helpless villagers, but in game play we were victims of the dice.
This time around we now had to contend with heroes each capable of receiving and delivering more damage that the normal rif-raf that we have struggled against. Well the best laid plans of monsters and men, were shattered by the dice. We lost, although it was closer than I thought it would be, but it was pretty much a certainty that we were going to lose right from the start. Now, please understand, I do not care if I win a game, so long as I have had fun, and feel that there was at least a chance to win.
This game does not make me feel like I am a powerful monster. All too often I would roll the dice I find that I had results that just could not be used to do anything. Many times I had turns in which I could not attack anything, nor could I do anything to stop the hordes from advancing, and this game needs you to do something every turn, or you lose. Every turn more villagers arrive, every turn the villagers advance, and they start only three spaces away from their victory target, the heart of the castle. Bottom line if you cannot stop them you lose, well we lost. We even played slightly more experienced monsters, so in theory we had more powers, but the powers tend to rely on the same dice face to be rolled to be used. So I needed to keep rolling 'suns' to activate my powers, and I needed multiple suns to activate all my powers. Well I only had the chance to activate all my powers one time in all the turns we played, and when this option finally became available, it was of no value to use more than one power that turn.
I could, but will not, go on at greater length about the issues I have with this game, but suffice it to say it has been a dissapointment.
Sentinels is also a challenging game, but one that does reward good play, and planning. It too has a random element, plenty really, in that you are drawing cards from your own deck to see what you can do, but you also have to contend with the random draws by the villain form a villain deck, and from the environment deck. We have now played 19 games winning only 7 of them, but they were, for the most part, challenging, fun games, where the game system made you feel like you were playing as a superhero, and that you had a chance to win. I have been utterly destroyed a few times in the game, sometimes because of my bad play, other times the combination of villain, to hero, to environment would combine to make the game extremely difficult. Some regular players of this game know which hero are a better match for any given villain, we on the other hand pretty much grab heroes and villains at random, sometimes it works in our favour, sometimes not so much...
This time around, our heroes did not have a real challenge with the villain, or the environment. The villain negated most of the impact of the environment deck, as no environment card remained in play long enough to hurt us. The villain, was a challenge for the first half of the game, as he kept healing himself, but we stopped him from dealing any significant damage to us, and once he got his required 5 special cards in play, he lost his regeneration ability. After that it was just a matter of time before we won the game.
While we did win, the game itself was not one of the better sessions that we have played. As stated, there was no real threat. Sure there was a challenge to deliver damage, but unlike many other sessions, we were never at risk of being defeated. On the plus side it was a new villain and a new environment deck, well new to us, so it was interesting to see what each deck contained. It was also nice to get a better feel for the heroes that we played.
But even as lackluster as this session was, it was still much better than any of the three sessions of Villagers Attack!
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