Mage Wars!

Finished my second play through of Mage Wars on Saturday. I love this freaking game. I find it hard to believe that Wizards of the Coast never came up with the idea for selling ‘spell books’ – books with four plastic sleeves a page for conveniently storing your cards and thumbing through them. Mage Wars had me right there when I read about this concept. But the spell books are only the beginning…. I played the Beastmaster mage and my wife played the Priestess (because she had a unicorn). I’d looked over the cards ahead of time and figured I was in trouble before the first spell was cast. (We played apprentice rules – a simplified version of the game with fewer spells, half the game board, and the special abilities of mages are not used.) Somehow she managed to hold off Cervere (think Guenhwyvar from the Drizzt books), a Steelclaw Grizzly (who attacked with 11 dice one round with Bear strength enchantment and a two dice bonus from the Beastmaster’s staff – to put this in perspective, most average cards roll 4 dice for an attack) and a timber wolf with just the royal archer and a Westlock knight. I got her down to within 4 hits of dying, but she wouldn’t go down. Then she summoned the bloody unicorn that grants regeneration 1 to all friendly creatures in the zone, cast a bunch of healing spells, and started picking off my creatures one by one. In the end it wasn’t even close. She was back up to full health and the Beastmaster was a bloody mess – full of arrows and singed from more than one blast of pure light. Some things I learned from the fight: - Don’t stand around toe to toe with the priestess in a zone that grants Aegis (takes away attack dice) - Don’t send a lone bobcat to harass the priestess and her royal archer. - Stunned mages can still case spells. Still my favorite game, even though I lost. Every spell has a counter (although not all mages may have that spell in their spell book.) I hear there’s a local gaming group in Madison that plays this. I may have to check them out, because my wife does not seem to share my love of Mage Wars.

I played Space Alert and I liked it

            Once a year a group of my wife’s closest high school friends gather from both ends of the county (from Hollywood to D.C.) to play… board games.  This year the gathering was on our home turf of Wisconsin at a renovated farm house with rooms and beds enough to put us all up for 4 days and 3 nights.  During the festivities we were visited by a chicken that escaped from a nearby coop.  Joining us this year for the first time was Lily, our 9 month old.

This practice is incomprehensible to a number of my wife’s coworkers, who think we play Monopoly and Scrabble for 96 hours straight.  Actually, prior to meeting my wife, the thought of a weekend of board games would have been pretty foreign to me as well.  I hadn’t yet encountered Munchkin, or Cosmic Encounter, or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game, or my new favorite, Space Alert.

This is not a new game, I know, but for anyone not familiar it is a real time game with a  soundtrack telling you in a monotone computer voice what threats (aliens) are appearing and when they will be draining your shields, blasting your ship, and eating your crew.  The first mission we played we were annihilated.  The second and third were much better.  I think we avoided getting hit at all on the third.  I’m looking forward to playing it again whenever I can wrangle the time and three other players together.

It’s been a long absence from this blog.  Been busy at work.  Planning another Pathfinder session soon.