Double posting today to go along with my Friday Night D&D post, but I just felt like it and it’s about what I have focus for thus far on a Friday. This time we’re looking at two games that have a bunch of dice chucking, though for one of them, only as much dice chucking as you want.

Oathsworn: Into the Deepwoods

Oathsworn: Into the Deepwoods is one of those epic campaign games that has you delving through a big story, fighting massive monsters, all trying to figure out what is going on, but this one has a few twists on it that are really interesting to me, and one twist on their kickstarter that I liked a lot.

The twist on the Kickstarter is that you don’t have to buy the pledge with a million monster minis making it cost a couple hundred dollars if you don’t want to. And as much as I love minis, I didn’t want to, I wanted to get a standee version so that I could save some money and still have basically the same gaming experience as everyone else just without a mini on the board, and I’m cool with that. It’ll take up less space because of that and sometimes shelf space is a premium commodity.

There are some game play things that interest me as well. Firstly, the game is split into two parts which is cool. One part is a big story as you explore areas, interact with people and make decisions on how you’re going to go about getting through everything. The other part is a tactical minis and standees on a board, grid movement battle as you try and deal with the monster in the deepwoods that is causing the issues. So that is interesting to me that it does those different things, a lot of games just focus on one or the other, but this one is trying to do both.

Another part that interests me is how tests are done in this game. It can be dice chucking if you want, and generally you can roll a pretty large number of dice, but if you ever break the failure threshold, you fail, no matter how many success you got. But you don’t have to chuck dice, you can instead draw cards. Now the card deck doesn’t reshuffle until it’s been gone through, and you can know the distribution of the cards, so it’s random but less random than the dice. You’ll know when the bad stuff is passed into the discard, but you’ll also know when the good stuff is being depleted as well. So you can choose to do a combination of both if you want or stick to one or the other, and you can change every check adding to how much you want to push for a result with a die roll or how much you want to play it potentially safer.

The other thing with combat is the cards have cool down periods. But it isn’t the standard cool down, it’s more like a push down process. When you play a card it goes along your board in one of four spots, I believe. When you play a card that goes into a slot, if there are other cards there, it pushes those down to the next lowest spot, and so on and so forth, so you have to strategically think about how you play cards in order to get them to move around. I like that these dungeon crawl or fight a monster type games are doing more than just dice chucking now and adding more strategy into how you have to play the game.

Overall, I think this is going to be a fun game. I can see the mechanics working in the background to make it interesting, and the world seems a little bit different than some of the more generic fantasy games that we’re seeing.

Excitement Meter: 8/10

Village Attacks

This is a game that I got a chance to play at Gencon last year, and we got a promo pack for the game. So when I saw they were going to be doing a new Kickstarter, since the game was hard to get, with some new material and expansions, I decided that I’d get it.

In this game you aren’t playing the villagers defending against the monsters attacking, instead you’re the monsters who are trying to stop the pesky villagers from overrunning your nice little castle and destroying the heart of your castle or whatever else they might be trying to do in the scenario. It’s a fun concept and while the artwork is a bit gross, the game actually plays much lighter than it looks because the premise is kind of goofy playing the monsters.

You roll dice to determine what actions you get on your turn, and in between turns, waves and waves of villagers are going to come in and try and destroy things. It was a pretty fun time playing at Gencon, but that wasn’t so much the games fault. I was with a good group, but it being a learning game and they being more role players than board gamers, they didn’t pick up on everything as fast as they might have had they been board gamers.

This game just works for me, it gives you a tower defense and almost dungeon crawl feel, but does more interesting things than that. And the game didn’t take too long to play, now there is some set-up work that needs to be done, but for a game night where you know you want to play that, you can easily fit it in and another game. I also like that it isn’t a campaign game. Now I love campaign games but I like that I can get that feel of something like that without having to play mutliple sessions.

Excitement Score: 7/10

Which of these two seems more interesting to you of the Kickstarters that I’m waiting on?

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