Monday 22 April 2013

Resident...Evil...

Thought i'd post up a quick recap of some recent unplanned gaming.




Visited Roy recently and tried out the Resident Evil deck building game. Its a few years old now, but theres definitely some recognisable mechanics from other deck building games i've played.
The basic premise of the standard format of play sees 1-4 players start with identical decks. In their turn they can play out their cards, use the joint ammo/gold cards to buy extra ammo, guns or events (kinda like sorceries(always comes back to magic terms!)). Each turn a player can buy 1 card from the central inventory based area (kinda like the central line in ascension, but it never contains baddies, just piles of the different card types), play 1 event and explore the mansion once. Exploring involves revealing the top card of the mansion deck, it could be a creature or a piece of equipment (its usually a creature) to kill the creature you have to have enough damage output from guns in your hand for the turn AND enough ammo to use those guns. otherwise you take damage from the creature. The mansion deck contains 1 super tough final boss, once the final boss is killed, the game ends. All players total up the points on the creatures theyve killed over the course of the game and the player with most points wins.
Thats basically it, it seemed a bit more linear than ascension in that all players are basically going to be attempting to win via the same route (get better guns & 'bigger' ammo > kill critters) but i have to say i felt more engaged on a thematic level than i've ever felt with ascension. I have a lot of appreciation for the mechanics of ascension, but there doesnt really seem to be much drawing you in to the world (especially with such wild variation in art quality), however with Resident Evil, im familiar with the world and the characters the art is very solid (if all CG based), i felt i could get into it more and really wanted to kill the big baddie.
There were a few expansion sets released but with everything we play, im pretty sure just getting the core game would be enough for an occasional run out, as such i'll be keeping an eye out for copies going cheapish.


3 comments:

  1. I listened to a few reviews a while back and it received some very positive feedback. The only complaint was that Jill Valentine was completely broken when you played in a specific game mode (I believe it was the PVP fights). Sounds like a fun game though.

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  2. Munchkin meets deckbuilding? Bit derivative but the theme sounds really good :)

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    1. having never played munchkin, i cant comment. but i enjoyed it. keeping an eye out on ebay, if i can nab it for under £20 i'll pull the trigger.

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