Golden Anvil

Well, I wasn't planning on extending yesterday's post another day, but I kept thinking of other things I wanted to mention about the game, so I figured maybe having a follow up post would work well. For this post, I just want to list a couple of things I really like about the game. These are in no particular order, but I'll try to provide some context to each so that they make some kind of sense.

First of all, the board of the town is split up into neighborhoods, each of which have a street area and (usually) three locations in that neighborhood. There are nine neighborhoods in the base game. When you end your movement in a non-street location, then you get to draw an encounter card. Here's the cool part. Each neighborhood has it's own deck of seven encounter cards (this is doubled to 14 with the expansion that we have). In addition, each card has a specific encounter for each of the three locations in that neighborhood. That means that there are (with the expansion) 14 different encounters for every single encounter location on the board. That means that every location feels unique, and you never know (until you've played much more than we have) exactly what's going to happen when you go to a given location.

Second, the game lends itself well to custom rule changes. We've already implemented one (which we'll likely keep) that makes it so you don't know where a gate leads until you actually pass through it. You can go out to the official forums for the game and find custom challenges that have been set up by the publishers. These include a few rule tweaks to give the game a specific feel. The game is just easily open to that kind of thing. That's nice because if you play a lot, you can customize the difficulty of the game to fit your own needs.

Third, the expansion we bought adds on an Injury/Madness mechanic. Normally, if your character is knocked unconscious, or driven insane by the unearthly monsters you encounter, you lose clue tokens and items, and wake up at either the hospital or insane asylum with health or sanity points at the minimum of 1. With the new mechanic, you can choose to draw an Injury/Madness card, keep your clues and items, and wake up at the appropriate place with full health or sanity. The trick is, that the card gives you some kind of handicap. This tweaks the rules in some slight way for your character (such as "lost one arm" makes it so you can no longer use two handed items). That's definitely more entertaining!

Fourth, the giant alien monster who is the main bad guy is drawn randomly from a stack of different available ones at the beginning of the game. Each has some rule tweak, and each fights in a different manner if it comes through the gates and you are forced to fight it. This combined with the random characters and their special abilities really gives each game a different feel, even if you excluded all the random encounters and such. This game really does play different every time. That really keeps it feeling fresh.

Well, that's enough gushing on the game for now. Next time we play, I'll try to remember to do a play write up for you all.