In between Pandemic and Cthulhu land …
I’ve been going back and forth on what to write for this week, which explains the lag. It’s not that I haven’t been doing any board gaming; it’s actually quite the opposite! I’ve been doing a lot of gaming in the past week or so but it’s nothing new that I haven’t written about. So this be more like an update on the state of things.
My friends and I are knee-deep in Pandemic Legacy land. It’s hard to find time for all four of us to gather (we all have wildly different work schedules), so our games have been slow-going. We are about to start our second game in June, having miserably failed the month last time we met. This game is tough, guys! Not knowing what’s in store for next month gives us a lot of analysis paralysis on which characters to bring for each game. But, of course, we don’t know what’s in store for next month until we get there. I’ve been telling some of my other friends that after we finish December, this will probably be the last time I’ll play Pandemic in a long time.
And then I saw Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu on the Internet this past week. Gahhhh!! OK, so I lied. You know how much I love the Cthulhu universe, so I’m totally buying this when it comes out this summer. Instead of curing diseases, investigators are trying to seal gates so that the Great Old One doesn’t wake up. And it sounds like investigators will have a sanity meter. This sounds pretty awesome.
The other gaming I’ve been doing is even more Arkham Horror, with my buddy who will be leaving town in March. We actually played two games back to back, each with 7 people. The first game, we played against Glaaki, and it was brutal! He added a third hex monster to the board whenever a gate opened, and if you defeated that hex monster, you’d gain a corruption card. Through a series of unfortunate events, three of us ended up Lost in Time & Space at the same time. Then we were unable to resolve a rumor, which then triggered 3 mythos cards in a row that immediately needed to be resolved. We lost a lot of equipment, and then Glaaki woke up, and we were no match for battle at the end.
We then decided to play another game of Arkham Horror, and this one was against Ithaqua. We added Hypnos, which we didn’t have in the first game, and he was a great resource. And through a series of fortunate events, a lot of our encounters ended up giving us a lot of free stuff! We ended up sealing 6 gates easily without waking up Ithaqua! A pretty cool side note about the game — there was one newbie with us, and through the course of one day, she was able to experience two very different Arkham Horror games. Luckily, we didn’t scare her away after that punishing first game.
Toward the end of the night, one of my Arkham friends showed us he just purchased Cthulhu Wars. I seriously squealed and started hugging the box! This is the game I’ve been wanting to play for the last year and a half, but haven’t been able to because the game itself is about $200, so way out of my price range. The figurines are large and well-crafted, and each player has their individual set of characters. Anyway, next time this group gathers, we are totally tackling Chulhu Wars. Woohoo!
In non-board-gaming news, who else is excited about The X-Files? I grew up obsessed with that show, and it still is seriously my No. 1 favorite show ever, so reliving it the past two weeks has been glorious. It’s great to have Mulder and Scully back together again!
