Right, so with 40% of the expected Black Cursade group unable to play today, the rest of us ended up playing card games after a really nice and surprisingly inexpensive brunch. To be precise, we ended up playing Illuminati and Sentinels of the Multiverse.
Illuminati first. Illuminati is a classic card game based on the Illuminatus Trilogy, a set of novels from 1975 by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. They more or less cover the intrigues of a number of secret societies as they plot and counter plot to take over the world. It's technically more complicated than that, but that's kind of the gist of it.
Anyway, the card game features a number of Conspiracies who each have a special power and their own agenda. You take over various organizations, then use those organizations to take over other organizations, and so on. It's got a high "screw your neighbor" element to it, since you can spend your cash to screw with each other's take-over attempts. Whoever completes their faction specific goal or gets a certain number of organizations under control wins.
As it happened, there was only three of us playing, and as usual in a three person competitive game, the winner was decided by who can avoid getting into a war, while sitting back and watching the other two fight each other. Still, it was a fun game, if rather longer than I remember it being from my youth.
Our second game of the afternoon, which we played twice, was Sentinels of the Multiverse. Sentinels is a cooperative card game where you're a team of superheroes working together to try and defeat a supervillain and his or her minions. This game is a lot of fun, but swings wildly based on the luck of the draw. For instance our first game was an unqualified success, but our second had us wiped out in less than a half hour.
The mechanics are simple enough, but the details are not. In short, the villain pulls a card and does that, then the heroes all get to play a card, use a power, and draw a car, and finally you draw an environment card, and do what it says. It doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to make your own version of all of these, and even if they probably wouldn't be terribly well balanced, it might be fun to have your own guys in there.
Iron Knight and company vs Shiva, anyone?
Of the two games, I think I prefer Illuminati's deeper strategy. You have a lot of options vis a vis who or what to attack, and the combination of what Conspiracy you're playing and what your opponents are playing make a lot of difference in how the game plays out. And while which heroes, villain, and where you're fighting also matter a lot in the Sentinels, the problem lies in the very limited choices you have in any given player turn. You generally only get a couple of actions, and one of those is to play one of what's usually a very small hand of cards. If, as in our second game, none of the cards you get are what you need, or certain combinations of enemy cards come up, you have no chance. And the fact that there was little to nothing we could do about it was a little annoying.
Still, I really enjoyed Sentinels of the Multiverse, and I'm looking forward to playing it again sometime. Illuminati, of course, is a game I've enjoyed for decades. Either would be good for a purchase, so the question is, would you rather work together to save the world, or fight among yourselves to see who's going to rule it?
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