Danielle and I had Erik over tonight for dinner. I experimented with making some turkey burgers, which I would classify as a good first attempt. I’ll make them again, and maybe I’ll make them better.
A more solidly successful venture was the game Erik brought over that he purchased at Aero yesterday after the Theros Prerelease: Lords of Waterdeep. Erik had discovered it watching Tabletop with Wil Wheaton, which is definitely worth watching if you’ve never checked it out. The game caught his interest in part because it was a resource management game—and we like Settlers of Catan—that is themed around Dungeons & Dragons—and we like Dungeons & Dragons.
I was a little apprehensive about the game. The game is made by Wizards of the Coast under the Dungeons & Dragons brand, and the last licensed game I played (DC Comics Deck Building Game) left a lot to be desired. I was also worried because I haven’t been the biggest fan of Dungeons & Dragons the brand since they dropped 3.5 in favor of 4th Edition, which, they announced not long ago, is on its way out too (and good riddance). I’ve been playing Pathfinder, and actually thought I had left Wizards of the Coast completely behind me until my friends (including Erik) started luring me back into Magic again. I was prepared for disappointment.
I’m happy to report that this game was really solid. Danielle did not join us for the maiden voyage, because, just by looking at it, it’s easy to tell that this is a significantly complicated game. And it took us about an hour and a half plus to play through our first time, though the mechanics weren’t hard to pick up after one read through the rules. I did find myself on the first turn thinking, “Okay, so I can do all these things… and I have no idea which one to choose.” With all the different strategies available to play the game, I ended up just picking my first few moves more or less at random, and must have gotten very lucky, because I picked up an early lead that I managed to hold onto until the end of the game by a significant margin over my esteemed opponent.
This game reminded me once again though that most good complicated games like this are best with three, four, or five people. With four or five people, you have enough for some alliance dynamics to come into play, and Erik and I both agreed that there’s a lot of potential for some great alliance (and dickery) gameplay in Lords of Waterdeep, especially with the ability to buy buildings and benefit from your opponents using them. With just Erik and myself playing against each other, giving a gift to your only opponent is a big turnoff, but if two of you are working together to bring down a third dominant player, using each other’s buildings becomes a very attractive play.
I’m really looking forward to playing this game again with another player or two or three. Danielle has also expressed interest in playing Settlers of Catan after hearing us talk about it so many times, so there might be another game night coming up this week!
Oh, and my Theros deck was pretty terrible. I made really bad choices building my deck. But Erik went to another Prerelease tournament today and went undefeated, so congrats to him!
No Free Parking Money 
I’ve been itching to get back in to paper magic. I bought the Duels of the Planeswalkers game a month ago or so and I’ve been having a blast with the new Bant exalted deck in the expansion.
Is the point of the Waterdeep game to build Undermountain or Waterdeep? I’m imagining in my head the unholy spawn of Settlers and Mousetrap.
I’ve heard good things about Duels of the Planeswalkers. The big downside to paper Magic is the investment you have to make in buying the cards to build your deck, i.e. the collecting part of a collectable card game. It’s for this reason that I much prefer Limited format when I play Magic. Erik even put together a collection of cards that we can use for our own sealed/draft tournaments, so there’s no cost to play anymore.
The city of Waterdeep is already built, but one of the actions you can take is to build more structures that you own. There are no physical constructions either; just wood and die-cut cardboard markers to represent things. (The rulebook lets you know at least three times that these pieces were die-cut.) The main mechanic of the game is to send your agents out to collect resources, which are most gold and adventurers, and to use these resources to complete quests, which earn you victory points and other rewards.
I forgot to mention that this game seems remarkably well set up for an analysis of the game based upon equivalences. I.e. one turn = two rogues/fighters = one mage/cleric = four gold. The game could be played by riding the changes in equivalences as different quests become available. It probably would not be very difficult to write a computer program that could quickly calculate all the equivalences, one they’re set up, and design an optimal simple strategy, at least for two-player games.
But this deserves its own post, at least, at a later date.