MOBA isn't for Video Games only

Hello everybody!

Today I want to talk about a game I bought at last Years ESSEN - the fair about boardgames.
It is called "Guards of Atlantis" and is a MOBA boardgame for 2-10 players. "What" some of you will ask, followed by either ", how should that be possible?" or maybe "is a MOBA?"

So, for the latter of you (these that don't know what a MOBA is or maybe do know but never heard/read the term).
MOBA is an abbreviation for "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena", a video game subgenre where two teams of players compete against each other with the goal, to be the first to destroy the other teams main building (the actual name differs from game to game). The first MOBA games where actually Custom maps for Starcraft (and later Warcraft III) where players controlled mighty heroes, which are aided by weaker minions, which are (endlessly) send by the AI to fight off the minions and heroes of the other side and to destroy the opponents defense fortifications and ultimatle the main base.
What began as some custom maps for real time strategy games became something bigger. Actual MOBA standalone games were made, the most known are probably League of Legens or Heroes of the Storm, and MOBA games became more and more popular as ESport games.

So, now you know what a MOBA game is. But how should you translate a game concept like this to a boardgame?

There were already a couple of tries to bring the concept of a MOBA to a boardgame, but so far, nobody has been as successful with this as publisher Wolf Designa with their title Guards of Atlantis. To be honest: Yes, it is still an abstract version of the video games, but it comes close enough to say, that this is a very good transportation of the main idea!
In Guards of Atlantis players are divided in two teams and every player controls a hero. Each hero is represented by an very good sculpted miniature and a deck of cards. While the miniatue represents the hero on the gameboard, the deck of cards represent this heroes abilities, skills and equipment. Every hero has five cards: A basic attack, a "Hold" card and three upgradeable cards. Every time a hero gains a level he can chose one of these three cards and exchange it with a card of the same color from the next Tier (of there are always two). The card that is not chosen is added as an item, which gives the hero a permanent bonus.
Also, each team has a number of Minions, which "spawn" at fixed positions on the board and don't move by themself. Minions also don't attack heroes, but minions of the same team give some defense bonus and minions of the opposing team give some defense malus while standing next to them.

Goal of the game is to push the battle on the board to the opposing Base. The battle gets pushed forward if at any time one team has destroyed all minions of the other team. As soon as this happens the gameflow will be interrupted and minions spawn one field further toward the opposing team. Then the game continues.



The heroes are controlled by the five cards each players has for their hero. Each round of the game, four of these five cards are played. At the beginning of each turn of the four turns during a round each player chooses one card and puts it face down in his play area. After everybody has chosen a card all players turn their card and each action will be resolved in Initative-order. This can lead to situations where the hero, you wanted to attack moves away before you can strike, or that the minions you wanted to kill are no longer there, because the lane was pushed. Also you can interfere with the plans of your opponents by blocking pathes or move minions (an ability only a few heroes have), because you decide which card to play at the beginning of the turn, but as each card can be used in more than one way you choose in which way you weant to use it when its your turn in the Initiative order.

Another plus for this game is the fact, that all the heroes play differently. Each have their unique skill set and because you have two cards to chose when you gain a level, each hero can be played in at least two different ways. This allows for a lot of customization, which is always a good thing for games like this one.

So, if you like MOBA video games and have at least a bit interest in boardgames give this one a try. And if you are a boardgamer, that is not interested in video games at all, but you like strategic board games I also would recommend to give this one a try.
But be warned: As there is no random element involved you are alone responsible for everything bad happen to you in this game. If you loose, you probably will loose because you made mistakes, or at least because the other team played better than yours. No blaming the dice or a bad card draw.
I like this a lot, but there are people, that aren't into this kind of game. So, you have been warned!

Enemies from the mist and out of space

Hello!

It's been some time since I last posted something but I'm quite busy at the moment.
And there is so much I wanna write about! Two weeks ago I met with some friends for a long weekend and of course we played a lot during those roundabout 2,5 days.
About two of these games I want to write about in this post.

The first one is Mistfall.
Mistfall is a cooperative adventure game for 1-4 players which is set in a fantasy world full of magic and mystery. In Mistfall each player represents a hero, each with their own skills and items and all players as group must defeat the special encounter at the end of a map. On their way to said boss battle (because so far it was always about a boss battle, but then again I only played three games so far) they must defeat multiple other encounters. Each encounter has a number of opponents the heroes face (or... encounter, because those enemies can (and will) get reinforcements!) and also some special rules which are in effect as long as the encounter lasts. Also, each encounter has it's own condition how it will end (besides killing all opponents, which is (so far) always a second condition).

The mist clears ...

By killing monsters heroes earn "Resolve" which acts as the currence in this game. For resolve players can learn new skills, gain items special to their hero or can scout the locations around them before they move.
Most of the game is played in encounters and therefore: combat! So the rules for combat need to be quite solid. In my opinion they are not groundbreaking, but serve their purpose.
 

... and enemies emerge from it!

Heroes act during the round and can do actions, with which they are using their weapons, cast spells or use other useful skills to either reach the special goal of the encounter or defeat all their opponents. By using actions they gain enemy focus. Usually the more powerful the action is, the more focus they get. At the start of each round (after reinforcements have arrived) the enemies engage heroes in X against one battles. And those buggers alwys choose the hero with the most enemy focus, halving the amount of focus in the process. Therefore the next enemy sees, that this hero is dealt with and chooses another hero. I think that this is quite a good way to distribute enemies to the heroes and also gives the heroes some sort of control about, who will get an enemy after the next reinforcement.


As I said, I only played three games so far, but after we played on that weekend (and got defeated by the boss) I realized that I should play this more often! There is also a campaign system, which you must buy, because it is not included in the base set, but at least it does have a camapign of some sort. I have to be honest: I own it, but never looked into the rules or cards for it, so unfortunatly I can't tell you right now if it is any good or not. But as I plan to play it sooner or later, I will keep you updated on that!

The other game I want to talk about today is Battlestar Galactica!
This is simply my most favourite semi-cooperative game! So far I haven't found another game, where one player (or more, depending on the number of players) is a traitor and tries to sabotage the attempts of the rest of the group to fulfill his own agenda. And I don't say that because I really liked the show! (which I did) But the game is so good and most of the times gives you so much tension, because you know there is a traitor (or two) but you don't know who it is, sometimes not even before it's too late!

The Mainboard

et's start at the beginning: Battlestar Galactica (short BSG) is a science fiction semi-cooperative board game which is based on the television series of the same name. In the game humanity treis to flee from their pursuers, the Cylons while finding a new home. The Cylons, robots originally created by man, on the other hand try to erase mankind from the galaxy. But not only are the ships of the human fleet are pursued by a robotic army. The cylons were able to create a species of their own, which look like humans. They walk, talk and bleed like humans do and sometimes, these "skin-jobs" (as humankind calls them) doesn't even know that they are Cylons until they are "activated".
Im the board game this is represented by so called loyalty cards. Each character gets two of these cards. One at the very beginning and a second roughly at the half of the game. These cards tell you, if you are a Cylon (and therefore a traitor to the human race) or not.

Ressource-Wheels

On their way through space humanity doesn't have to deal with the Cylons alone. There are all sorts of crisis to deal with and this is done mainly through hidden checks. For these all players may throw any number of their hand cards (which come in 5 different colors) in a common pool. Then those cards get shuffled and the stack is evaluated. This is one of the possibilities for the Cylon player/s to harass mankind. But they also have to be careful, as it is common knowledge which character draws how many of which coloured card! And even if two random cards gets shuffled into that stack too, they can give valuable clues to the human players about their true origin. That's what happened in our first game of BSG on that weekend: We had two Cylons from the very beginning, we made our first check and thwere were two cards in the stack which could only come from the two Cylon players.

For me BSG is more about the way to the goal than actually win the game. Sure, it's always nice to win but the tension, the (often false) accusations and the constant doubt, who the Cylons are is the meat of the game. But the rest is also very good! With it's three expansions BSG delivers a lot of different variants itself and most of them I haven't even played, because for the main game is already very good on its own. There are however a couple of extras I take from the expansions (besides the additional crew members players can choose from) which I don't wanna miss like ever again, because they really add to game.

So, if you like semi-cooperative board games and you haven't played BSG before I can strongly suggest to try it if you get the chance! It is also highly enjoyable if you never watched the series (as friends of mine show me again and again) and maybe you will watch the show after you played BSG once or twice. And I can just encourage this too! Even my wife watched BSG and she is definatly not the sci-fi type. Because BSG is not (only) about flying around in space and dogfight with some aliens, but it's the drama and the constant tension mankind experience on it's flight from the Cylons and towards a new home...

After the Miscatonic Museum we visited a Fortress

Yesterday we continued with our Arkham Horror LCG campaign.
According to schedule we entered the Miscatonic Museum in the third scenario of the Dunwhich Legacy campaign. As always, to avoid spoilers scroll down to the [END OF SPOILERS!!!] tag.

This scenario kept us on our heels, as they is only one enemy to fight in this scenario, but this fiend comes back again and again and every time he does come back he becomes stronger (even gets massive at some point). We collected the two clues at the Entrance and got the attention of the guard that let us in and tagged along with Skids (played by me). We struggled a bit with getting the clues from the Security office, as Skids is the best investigator with just Lore 3.... But Flashlights, Streetwise and last but not least Duke helped a lot with this. The first Exhibit Hall we explored forces every Investigator that enters it to discard two cards at random. Zoey lost her last cards by this effect and then drew an Arcane Barrier for a treachery card, locking her in.

Damn Arcane Lock!

Surely Agnes could free her, but doing so she would also loose two cards at random. Finally Ashcan Pete was able to enter the Exhibit Hall, discarding the Arcane Lock, only to put another into the same location in the following Mythos Phase... Unfortunatly for us I drew an Elder Spawn token for a skill test just when I had no Assets left other than the poor museum guard and so we got a gravestone token for our chaos bag. Yay!
The Hunter kept coming back and got pretty big pretty fast. We were able to fight it off every time, but it got harder with each defeat and we knew, that if we would loose this scenario, it wouldn't be because the Agenda would running out, but because at some point we wouldn't be able to deal with this shadow anymore!
Luckily for us the fourth Exhibition Hall was the right one! The Hunter engaged us (gaining his thrid token in the process, getting massive) and hindered us to investigate the location. Unfortunatly we had to collect all eight clues from it to win the scenario.

The found the right hall!

Zoey had a hard time dealing with the beast, as the most of her skill cards were discarded by multiple treachery cards. But she managed to hit the beast with her Machete at least once.

Zoey facing the Hunting Horror in the Restricted Hall

Agnes tried to shrivel the Hunter, but also without success, but ultimately inflicted one point of damage because of the retaliation of the hunter. Well... what should I say? Desperate times justify desperate measures. Skids was standing in the Museum Hall and threw a package of dynamite into the Exhibit Hall, inflicting 3 points of damage to friend and foe alike. This almost killed Agnes, but definatly killed the Hunter. Now it was time to get those clues! In the following Mythos phase we prayed that the Hunter would not come back and got lucky. Then, using all tools we had available (and last but not least the upgraded Rite of Seeking from Agnes) we collected all clue tokens in theRestricted Hall and therefore found the Necronomicon. Then we argued what we should do with it. In the end we decided to destroy this unholy book (which hurted me a lot, as I would liked to have it for my Skids deck). Everybody gained 4 XP and nobody received a trauma! Zoey finally got her shotgun and Agnes aquired the second updated Shrivelling. Pete took a Burglary and Scrapper and for Skids I chose the second Sure Gamble.
Next time we hop on the Essex Country Express!

[END OF SPOILERS!!!]

After we finished our game of Arkham Horror, we played Fast Forward: FORTRESS by Friedemann Friese. When you open the bos you see a deck of cards and a Zip bag. That's it. No rulebooklet, nothing. And that's the charm of the game: You learn the rules by playing it! Every now and then when you draw a card, there is a rule text on it, which is depüloyed in the middle of the table and these rules are now in effect. The rest of the cards are used to play the actual game. I was a bit suspicious, but the concept of the game really works!  Fast Forward: FORTRESS is a fast paced card game, where a single games lasts for 5-15 minutes. I won't spoil any rules, as you should discover them for yourself (which is part of the fun), but if you like fast paced games I can definatly recommend this one! We played five games and are roughly through half of the deck.
After you have finished the whole deck, you can restore the right order and experience the whole thing with other people (or the same ones)!

A shadow skulks through Mordor

I know, I know... I'm quite late to this party!
And yes... the sequel is already out for a while. But I bought this game 13 month ago and I wanted to finally play it before I dedicate myself to other Videogames (and man... I have a lot of them in my gaming backlog!).

For those of you, thast don't know what I'm talking about: I'm actually playing Shadow of Mordor on my PS4. As far as I can tell this game has nothing to do with any of the LotR books, but plays in the same scenario, some time between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. An ranger from Gondur, who held watch on the Black Gate got killed together with his family by the Black Hand of Sauron. But he didn't found peace, but is trapped in a shadow world, where he meets an old elven spirit, which is also trapped in here (conjured by the Black Hand). They are certain, that they have to avenge their deaths, so that they finally can find peace, so they combine forces and start their search for the servants of the Dark Lord.
On their way they slay uncountable amounts of orcs and even take part in the power struggles of their captains until they finally find clues where their tormentors can be found.

Shadow of Mordor is an action RPG and it satisfies a lot of things I like in this genre: Combos, fast paced combat, an upgrade system for weapons and skills (even if it only small, but you take what you can get) and a good story, which runs a bit in the background (well.. at least how I play it). What I really like is, that all locations of collectible items are shown on the map and must only find the spot, where to pick them up. And even this is a lot easier than in other games of this genre (e.g. Tomb Raider, where you have to make big detours sometimes, just to get to the spot where the shiny object of your desire is located).
I'm already somewhat into the game, having collected all collectibles and finished 29 of 30 side missions to upgrade my weapons. I've done 18 of the 20 Main missions (no spoiler, these statistics can be seen In-Game right from the beginning) and at the moment I take preparations to get the Platinum Trophy for this game, which is quite easily obtained. Well, at least if you take a look at the trophy table. There is one that I'm not certain if it really is that easy and three others, that take some prep-time, but the game is fun enough that I'm willing to try to get them, even if I'm told myself that I would stop playing for trophies, now that I have a lot less time to play than before the birth of my son. But honestly: (and now comes a bit of a spoilerish thing, so if you want to avoid that, just skip to the next paragraph): Branding the 5 Captains, which are the bodyguards of a warchief, so that these are loyal to you know and when the cowardly warchief finally appears, after you laid waste to his stronghold or killed enough of his followers let all his "bodyguards" turn on him sounds just too much fun to not do it!

Well, Isaid that my gamingbacklog is somewhat huge. That is true! I won't start to write about my Steam-Library (well, almost every dedicated videogamer who has a Steam account knows what I'm talking about!), but also on my PS4 there are a lot of games that want to be played!
The next game I will definatly tackle is Final Fantasy XII - The Zodiac Age. This is a remastered version of the old PS2 FFXII game, which I (and as a FF-Fanboy I'm ashamed to say this) never finished! So I still have a debt to settle with this game. But after that... well, december was kind to me: Not only because of christmas, but it's also the month of my birthday and some friend of mine and I have the tradition of secret santa for New Years Eve. And I got three games I had on my list for quite some time: Elex, Nier: Automata and The GotY Edition of The Withcer III! Also, I still haven't played Resident Evil 7 (which also got a GotY edition... 1,5 years ago this wouldn't have happened to me!) so there are a lot of games that are waiting for me (beside all those other games, especially some nice KS-games that got delivered last year...). And 2018 will come with some more games, that I have to play, starting with the new Gods of War for PS4.

So, also videogame wise 2018 will be a busy year for me!

Something strange is going on in the Arkham University

Hi all!


Finally we were able to continue our Arkham Horror Campaign.
For those of you that don't know what the Arkham Horror LCG is: It is a narrative card game that plays in the Mythos by H.P.P. Lovecraft. Each player (one or two (or up to four with two core sets)) represents an investigator in the 1920's. All investigators had encountered or experienced something strange in the recent past. So strange that they can't help themself but believe in the supernatural, or at least investigate it.
The deck of cards each player has represents the skills, abilities and tools the investigator owns. But each investigator also has his own weakness, which can probably hinder him or her during gameplay. The main aspect of Arkham Horror is not a single scenario, but a campaign of eight scenarios, which could be lenghtened by some available side scenarios. In each scenario in a campaign the investigators learn more and more about whats going on around them, solve puzzles and fight enemies, both mundane and supernatural. Between scenarios investigators may spent earned XP to buy new cards to strenghten and develop their decks. But the world is full of dangers and if an investigator gets too much hurt, or if he/she sees too many horrible things that let them doubt their mind, they can get a trauma, which weakens them for future scenarios.


So, back to our playthrough: We played the scenario "Extracurricular Activity".
Again, if you have not played this scenario by now and still want to play it and therefore want to avoid any spoilers scroll down until you see the [END OF SPOILERS!!!] tag.


We spent our XP's and setup the game. Zoey improved their Beat Cops and also got some extra ammunition for her .45 caliber, Agnes aquired the Book of Shadows and a Bind Monster spell, Skids got the upgraded version of de Luca and Ashcan Pete... I totally forgot what he got! Shame on me!
So we started the game and while the other three investigators went to the library and the Humanities Building, I thought that Skids should go to the Students Union to maybe ask some of the students if they have seen Prof. Rice. That was a bad mistake! While the others got some strange happeneings and encountered a Whippoorwill, Skids was enganged by a Yithian Observer. My bad luck of the first round, where I only found one clue, because a drew an autofail continued when I had to spend two actions to flee from the abomination (drew a -4 the first time). Time went by and we collected clues left and right. Then we got the info to look for the janitor. Last time I played this scenario I managed to shuffled him to the last three cards of the encounter deck. We drew cards, discarded clue tokens to discard more cards and the Experiment already appeared when we finally found Jazz. It was the last but three card. The others decided right then, that I'm forbidden to shuffle any deck in this game like... forever!

So we had a tough decision to make: The Experiment (with its whopping 18 HP) was on it's way to the Dormatories and we had to decide to look for Prof Rice and run for it or try to stop it. I didn't took part in this discussion as I knew that the Prof. wasn't there anymore (we played The house always wins beforehand). Luckily the others decided to fight! It was a tough battle and only because of a Dynamite Blast from Skids and the relentless effort of Agnes and Zoey was Pete able to finish the beast off! Not before time, as the best woukld have walked right into the dormatory in the next Mythos phase....


 [END OF SPOILERS!!!]




After our visit in Arkham we played a game of "Once upon a time" where I was able to jump in in the middle of the fairy tale, because Sven wasn't able to continue and made a steamrolling victory as nobody was able to stop me. But we had a good laugh. This game of storytelling is really, really good, if you play it with the right people and don't play it too often.

We closed the evening with a game of "Fantasy Realms", which is not the next installment of White Wizards Realms series (Star Realms, Cthullu Realms and Hero realms), but a simple and yet intriguing card game by Wizkids, where you have a hand of seven cards and every turn you must decide to either draw a card from the common deck or take one of the cards from the open discard pile. Then you have to discard a card from your hand to said discard pile and as soon as the discard pile contains ten cards the game is over. All cards have a basic score value and some sort of bonus and/or penalty. And here it is where the game gets so interesting: The relation between the cards and to get as much bonus and as less penalties as possible to maximize the score out of your seven cards is challenging, especially because there aren't all cards in play (as the common deck would not be depleted). I got this game last year in Essen on the SPIEL 2017 and I'm really happy that I bought it. Could even be the best game I bought last fair (from a pure cost-benefit ratio). But this game was won by Maik (who plays Ashcan Pete in our Arkham campaign).


All in all it was a fun evening and I'm looking forward to wednesday, when we four delve into the Miscatonic Museum to get hold of the Necronomicon!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone!

The new year is already three days old and I still hadn't had the time to write a New Years entry in my blog. Such a shame!
I hope that everybody had a great New Years Eve! Mine was really good. As the past few years I celebrated the change of years with my wife and some of our best friends. We started having some nice food from the raclette grill, watched a short film I have to see every New Years Eve (it's called "Dinner for one" and is some sort of tradition in Germany) and then we had our secret santa we do every year. And what should I say? A friend of mine gifted me the Witcher III GotY Edition for my PS4! I was absolutly stunned when I opened my present, as I never would have guessed to get such a great game! Well, I haven't played it by now as since my son was born I don't have as much gaming time as I used to have. But now as I own it... Well, I do have to play it! And I'm really looking forward to it!

Afterwards we played a game of Concept. But as we played it with a group of friends which stoick together for quite some time now and which also form our Pathfinder RPG group we decided to write our own Concept cards with terms that we link with our friends. It was a blast! Have you ever tried to describe things like "Critical Hit" or "Blacklight Miniature Golf"? Not as easy as it seems. But funny as hell! 23:55 we decided to end the game, as one of my friends was in lead with 22 points and the first runner up had 6 or 8...

The next morning after breakfast we decided to play a round of "Eat, poop, you, cat", because we didn't manage to play it the night before. Eat, poop, you, cat or "Das lustige Heftspiel" as we call it (the funny notebook game) is something we play more or less regularly and we have these big Notebooks we use for it. I'm not sure but in every book there are at least something  like 10 games at least and it's always a blast to look through them again before the start of a new game. Unfortunatly right now I don't have any pictures at hand that I can show you, but I will make sure that I will take some of the great pictures that have been drawn, as we have to friends in our group of six that can paint really, really well!

Last but not least I started my playthrough of "Shadow of Mordor" yesterday (yes, yes, I know: I'm quite late with that one too!) on my PS4. I'm only 6 or 7 hours into the game by now (I didn't had to go to work yesterday and also had some free time in the evening) and so far I like it. I think the Nemesis system is quite clever and I created some new captains until I finally got the combat system right. Since then I'm somewhat of a menace of the Uruks in Mordor. Well, let's hope that it will stay this way! But I won't continue this game before tomorrow evening as today I have my regular boardgaming group and we plan to take on the second scenario of our Dunwhich Legacy playthrough.

Welcome!

Hi!

And welcome to my Blog. What this Blog is about? It's about games. Boardgames, videogames, probably RPG's and eventually I will write about miniatures I paint for board- and wargames.

As the name of this blog probably already reveals I am german. "But why write an english blog?" you may ask. Well, I don't write this blog purely for myself, but I want to use it to share my opinions about and experiences I made with games of all sorts with others. And even if there are surely quite a lot of people out there which are interested in games and are able to understand the german language, I bet that there are even more people out there, which are also interested in games and are not able to read german but english texts.

So, I'm not a native english speaker, but I'm confident that my english is good enough to write this blog.
But... there may be errors. There may be bad grammar and some words will be paraphrased in an unnecessary complex way. I bid your forgiveness if this happens! I will do my best!

But for now enough from me and on into the wonderful world of gaming!

Welcome... to Arkham!

I have a regular gaming group which meets every wednesday.
And despite the fact, that some people in this gaming group doesn't like co-op games that much, we decided that we will play the Arkham Horror LCG. Mainly because they really like the whole Mythos and because Arkham is a great narrative game, which doesn't only gives you a big multiplayer puzzle you have to solve, but while doing so it tells a story.

For those of you, that don't know this game: The Arkham Horror LCG is a narrative co-op card game for 1-2 (or up to four players with two core sets), where every player  takes the role of an investigator in Lovecraft's Mythos. While it is possible to play single scenarios the most interesting part of this game is the possibility to play multiple scenarios back to back which form a whole campaign. While inside the campaign the investigators gain better cards for their decks so that they can stand a chance against the bigger growing threads the game throws at them. At the same time they can gain traumas, which lets them start a new scenario with damage of some sort, or get so called weaknesses, which are cards with negativ impacts on the game (and which, most of the time, must be revealed as soon as an investigator draws them). Before and after a scenario the players can read a text, which continues the story of the campaign and while the text before a scenario is almost always the same (for that specific scenario) the text for the conclusion of the scenario depends on the outcome the investigators achieved. Sometimes a bad resolution or even a decision made during a scenario comes back like a boomerang in a later scenario. So many decisions are really important and should the thought through before making them...

I had a solo run through the Dunwhich Legacy campaign (which is the first full campaign of the Arkham Horror LCG) with two investigators. But I fold after the sixth scenario, as I got too many traumas and in the next scenarion my guardian would very likely get insane. Because we already decided that we want to start a 4-player playthrough I don't made a new character to play the last two scenarios, but let my playthrough unfinished so that we could start. And after a couple of weeks, where we always wanted to begin with the first scenario and there always was something different why we couldn't play AH (one time I forgot the Dunwhich Legacy box in which I store all the scenarios for that campaign), we finally started last wednesday.

As I said, we play a 4-player playthrough. We use my copy of Arkham Horror for building all four decks. Luckily I own two core sets, otherwise it would be ... challenging to build four decks that would stand a chance to get through the whole campaign.
We chose the following investigators for our party:

We decided to start with scenario 1-b "The House always wins".
ATTENTION! The following text will contain some minor spoilers for the scenario 1-b! If you don't want to read any of those scroll down until you see END OF SPOILERS!!!

The scenario started quite good. We fetched the first 4 clues at the entrance to the casino and Skids (played by me) went to the bar to get a drink for another two clues. With four investigators we had to collect 16 clues to advance to the next act! So Pete decided to cheat at the gaming table. Even by doing so getting all clues took us until the third agenda was revealed! Luckily for us (almost) everthing went well from here on: Zoey and Pete managed to keep the monsters and criminals at bay while Agnes managed to find the exit and get some clues using the "Rite of ". Skids didn't had that much luck. He found the VIP area, but drew the ´-4 token twice while investigating it (with Investigation 4 against a shroud of 1 (thanks to the Flashlight)). Also, we drew the "Something in the drinks" treachery card like five times, which let me with only two actions for half of the time!
In the end we managed to get the Dr. out of the club with two rounds left. It was a narrow victory, but a victory nonetheless! We got 5 XP, which is quite a lot and are now looking forward to our next adventure, at the Miscatonic University!

END OF SPOILERS!!! 


 Unfortunatly I haven't made any pictures of the gaming table, but I promise to do so next time. I don't know when we will continue with this game, as now is Christmas and we are all are quite busy between Christmas and New Years Eve.

If you read up to this point I have to say thank you for your interest in my blog and I hope to see you soon!