Played a few games last night;
[unknown Game..Can maybe check with my housemate]
Premise was it's a post-apocalyptic scenario (of your choice, we went with nuclear). You're playing through a year of the community, essentially taking turns to do a weeks worth of actions and decision making. Each turn you draw a playing card (they're split into suits, for the seasons) which relates to a set of instructions, so something like "A new person has arrived in the camp, who are they" or "Someone has left the camp, what caused them to leave" (Nicolas Cage arrived at the camp, and promptly died a few weeks later after schizophrenic Johnny Blaze episode and a freak lightning strike). You have a sheet of paper in play which is the community map/history. So each turn you're building up the map with structures you build and places you visit and find. It's less a board game and more of a structured role playing game. Though without too much structure, one major comment we had upon winding the game down mid-way through was it felt very unfinished. As you're playing you can draw black dice to yourself indicated "contempt/tension" with a decision made by another player for the community, but nothing was done with it. i.e "if there's mroe than 5 contempt tokens in play, then blah-blah happens".
We felt it was quite interesting, my housemate got the name off the guy that brought it along so she could look into it. I think we might take it and refine/make-up some rules for it. Oh we think it'd probably also work better for a group of 4 instead of our 8. Meant long time between your turn, and 4 would make sense given weeks in a month.
Werewolves of Miller's Hollow
I quite enjoyed this, was one of the few successful Werewolves despite being called out almost immediately by another player. Basically you each get given a card at the start that defines your role; werewolf, villager, defender, hunter, witch, fortune teller, thief etc. During each day you carry out your action (with a Narrator guiding play and instructing who to opens their eyes when) then you're either dead the next day or not. And you can vote as a village who you think the werewolf is.
It was quick set-up, quick to play and the varied cards meant the gameplay and tactics changed quite a lot between play. I also think I've played something very similar in primary school (that involved winking though). We found Defenders would always die on the first round. Pretty much every way possible too. I was hunter twice which ended well for no one as I was lynched both times and chose my vote as my victim. Wrong both times.
My only complaint, which I raised in-between rounds and was quickly resolved, was that due to having your eyes shut your hearing is quite good, and the Narrator tends to have the natural habit of talking to the person whose turn it currently is to be awake, kinda helping you pinpoint who it is. Hence my successful round as a werewolf.
Cockroach Poker
This is a bat. You pass cards on to people telling them what is on the card(can tell truth or lie), they can choose to say you're lying/telling the truth(guess correctly and they get the card, fail and it ends up in front of you) or look at it and pass it on to someone else telling them what's on the card. Pretty simple to pick up and play, just an issue if you have someone not quite paying attention who tries to pass off the card to the originator. Loser is the person who has a set of 3 cards in front of them.
Machine of Death
You have to kill 4 people (might change with how many people are playing) in creative ways based upon how the Machine of Death says they'll die, and what tools you have at hand for the job (be it rolling pin, robot spare parts, a cat, etc). It's mostly a story-telling game, convincing the GM (not sure there's a name for the role) that your plan with the three items will work, then you have 60 seconds to execute it by rolling the dice based on the difficulty the GM defines each stage of the plan. The arbitrariness of the difficulty was really my major issue with the game. Could have just made everything have a difficulty of 2 and hey we'd have breezed through easy peasy. If the item cards or method of death had some kind of scoring on it then might have seemed a bit more rigid in the rule set.
The Resistance: Avalon
Really disliked this game. Just seemed ridiculously complex, way too many phases of play to many cards and tokens to keep track of what was going on and all along you're meant to be figuring out who's who, but as a long game instead of almost immediately like Werewolves. As best I got from it the only folks who really do much anyway is the Assassin, who can kill Merlin though not until the end and...well that was it. No one else seemed to be able to do anything special. I was both good and bad lancelot but apart from meaning I know who the other Lancelot was meant nothing. Especially when at the start of the second round I was declared as bad lancelot before we'd even started which kinda threw everything and everyone off on how the game was meant to play from there. The Lady of the Lake also made everything pretty screwy too and I still don't understand the point of that action. TrjnRabbit is telling me it's pretty easy, but while the cards are easy enough to go "this is what happens here", the actual interactions between each of the phases of play and the characters is/was hardly explained.
Aye, Dark Overlord
Another I wasn't keen on. One player is the Dark Overlord who has set you with a task and you've got to explain why it wasn't done while passing the blame on to someone else. Another story game. I lost on this one, but I think largely due to it just grinding and wanting the game done and dusted with. Much like Machine of Death it seemed another one where the GM/Overlord, just decided the difficulty on a whim. I think there was more to the game than how we were playing it though since the descriptor text had highlighted words and all the cards had a variety of symbols in the top corner (of which only the skull symbol was introduced as meaning something).
We also played CAH (with another guys deck, had the expansions as well as his own custom cards) and wound up back at ours for a couple rounds of Sentinels of the Multiverse. I played Unity both rounds, first against...abaddon or something (dark angel type dude) who we lost against due to "Apocalypse" practically resetting us to zero, and then against Spite, who we slugged it out against but eventually won through but on our last legs. Unity was quite hard since first round I had loads of bots but all the Equipment was on the bottom, and second round it was reverse (Though at least Equipment can do interesting things. Bots stay in my hand)
So yeah, at the end of this I think I've found I'm not a huge fan of games with loosely defined rules or story-telling games with no overall eventual aim.
With regards to Firefly guide: I ran a word count. 11,000 words man.
