Board Gaming - DC Deck-Building Game, & Machi Koro
It's been a while since I've written about board games, mostly because I'm away from home and not going out weekly to play things. I did however play some games with my Canberra based friend that I stayed with on my way through. Sometimes we've had other friends of his join us, but this time it was just the 2 of us. Not my preferred style of play, but better than no gaming for sure!
DC Deck-Building Game
looks pretty early in the game, but it's almost a month ago so can't remember for sure
As the name suggests, this is a deck building game. We played it with the Teen Titans pack, and in our first game used the Crisis I pack. In the second game we swapped that out for Crisis II. Each of these packs add extra theme(s) to the base deck, which on it's own isn't too bad but it's a lot more fun with some of the extra things.
The basic gameplay involves purchasing cards from the active row to improve your deck and allow you to have better and stronger turns in the future, allowing you to start defeating (purchasing?) the super villains from the top of the stack on the side of the mat/play area. Defeat all the villains and the game is over. Have more points in your deck than the other player and you win.
Being a licensed product, if you're familiar with DC comics you'll find a lot of familiar characters, but if you aren't it's still a lot of fun, and fairly easy to tell if certain characters go together or not. Building a deck with super heroes, villains, super hero equipment, themed locations and more is quite enjoyable, and the game moves along pretty quickly. It can suffer from an early leader dominating, especially if there are some good attack cards come out early that can really clog up your opponents deck with weaknesses, but for the most part our games (this wasn't the first time I've played it) have been competitive. It is also fairly consistent across the various expansions/theme packs from what I've noticed, so pick some theme or themes you like and give it a go. The craziness that Teen Titans adds is very recommended.
Machi Koro
possibly at the very start of the game
A quick and easy card game that I'll always play to fill in a bit of time, or to break between heavier games. We played it with all the expansions, adding some extra length to the game with 6 monuments to build instead of just 4, as well as more variety in the industries you can buy. With this, a good game is even better, and we won't play it without the expansions in the future.
You start the game with 1 dice, and 2 industries (I forget their names right now). One of the industries pays out if anyone rolls a 1, and the other pays out if you roll a 2. Roll the dice, spend coins on new industries that activate on different numbers, or invest more on some numbers. After you've got a bit of money, you'll be able to buy one of your monuments, one of which gives you access to a second dice, but be careful as rolling a second dice moves your more likely result and may not be advantageous to you.
For a game that is very much a dice rolling game (your turn is 'roll dice, collect rewards, buy something'), there is a lot of ways to mitigate the randomness. Selecting a wider range of numbers gets you a better likelihood of getting something on your turn, and investing in blue industries that pay out when anyone rolls the number helps give you more opportunity of getting money. There is also some industries that steal coins from your opponent, and a few other things too.
With the randomness, there is also what is actually available to buy. To setup the game (as in the picture above) you start turning over cards from the main deck until you have 10 different available industries. This could be just 1 of each, or there may be 3 or 4 of one of them, but there is always 10 options. If you buy the last available of something, cards are turned over until there is 10 different options again. This gives each game a different feel, and not allow the same tactics to win every game.
