Already a month of 2023 has been and gone. It’s a fresh start for the various lists of games. Let’s see what happened.
Living Card Games
It was a strong start for the co-op LCGs, 3 out of the 4 games most-played by hours. In Arkham Horror, we’ve started a Scarlet Keys campaign, playing 2 scenarios, with another due in early February. It’s been an interesting experience doing the blind play-through as a group of 4 with some friends, rather than just 2 of us at home. Too early to really have much to say on the campaign itself.
Marvel Champions was a little behind Arkham in hours, but is once again the game that has been played the most times. A bit more experimentation with the new X-Men characters and scenarios, my wife and I finished off our Storm and Wolverine 2-player run-through of the Mojo mini-campaign, just in time for The Card Game Cooperative to catch up with expansion designer Tony Fanchi. I’ve also been going back and filling in a few gaps in the history of Hero/Villain match-ups: She-Hulk and Captain America both getting their first plays in quite a while, going up against old favourites like Rhino, Ultron, and Mutagen Formula.
Lord of the Rings didn’t get played as many times as Champions, but is still riding fairly high on the by-hours chart, thanks to an epic 4-player game of Challenge of the Wainriders.
This is a scenario from the final cycle of the game where the heroes are pitted against an enemy, literally racing around a loop of locations, and having to pass tests to pass from one quest card to the next. After a poor start where we found ourselves far behind, we’d put on a sudden burst of progress, overtaking the Wainderider Champons, and looked to be heading for victory. Sadly, we failed 2 Race tests on the final 2 rounds, losing by a single card – as the Hero responsible for that final test was ALEP’s Nob, best known as the barman from The Prancing Pony in Bree, there’s probably an important lesson here about why you shouldn’t drink and drive…
On a role…
It was also a pretty good month for my RPGs, managing to get sessions in for both my D&D games. The Curse Strahd party offered a reminder of why you should never trust adventurers (they “helped” a villager get rid of the Vampire Spawn in his loft by fireballing his shop to ruins) The other game (Out of the Abyss) really struggled for sessions in the second half of 2022, and didn’t get a whole lot down, other than wandering, lost, around some tunnels, but it’s good just to have everyone back at the table. Fortunately, I have months, if not years worth of material in the bag for both of these games, so I don’t need to worry about whether or not it’s ok to buy D&D products from Wizards of the Coast again…
It was also exciting as a month where I got to play in multiple RPGs. Our Call of Cthulhu (7e) Masks of Nyarlathotep game finally completed the Prologue, and we’d just been summoned back together, finding our friend/contact dead next to some suspicious looking cultists when a string of other commitments cropped up. We’ll be continuing this one in a fortnight, and are looking forward to getting stuck in.
I also had the session zero for a new game I’m going to be playing in, of the Avatar RPG. We were mostly just establishing the era and area for our game, as well as pencilling in the broad outlines for character-creation, with the game proper kicking off in February, but it was good fun, and it looks like a fascinating system to play – very different from any of the major systems I’ve played before. I’ll post more on this one once there’s actually something to tell.
I’m hoping to get another game session up-and-running soon, namely a The One Ring campaign. I’ve got 4 players and a vague slot in the week lined up, now I just need to finish learning the rules well enough to teach and learn it…
New
There wasn’t much that was brand new in January, but all of the new games from December got played again. Mists of Carcassonne continues to be extremely difficult (I’ve now attempted Level 3 a couple of times, but not gotten anywhere close to beating it), so lots of short games of this, but I also played Call of Cthulhu a few times (a 2-handed solo game, and a proper 1v1 game with a friend), so the next step is definitely to start some proper deck-building, and print off the bits I need for the proper solo mode. The Clone Wars has been played a couple more times, and it feels like we’re starting to get the hang of it, although we’ve only played against the introductory villain and on the easiest difficulty, so there’s plenty of scope to keep playing this one with little danger of getting bored.
Challenges
It was a good start to the year for both the solo challenge and the Hardcore Multiplayer challenge. All 10 games in the Hardcore got played in multiplayer at least once, and several got played multiple times: Arkham, Marvel United, Mists, Zombicide are all at 4 sessions, putting me on 25/100 already.
New games is, unsurprisingly, some way behind, because I don’t have any new games yet. As I think I mentioned in an earlier article, I’m strongly leaning towards counting the things I got for Christmas as “new” for 2023, given that they were only owned for 6 days of 2022 – by that reckoning, 2 sessions of The Clone Wars is a notable stat, but I can’t quite bring myself to include Mists Over Carcassonne, given that it managed 10 plays in that end-of-year week last time.
Money
January was a good month money-wise, as I didn’t spend anything! Obviously, that’s not going to last long, and the Marvel United: Multiverse Kickstarter is currently looming very large on the horizon. After the X-Men campaign, I hadn’t expected them to do a third one, but they’ve come back with a stated theme of “Multiverse” and a remarkable focus on Marvel Cosmic.
Overall, I’m feeling a little torn on this one: on the one hand, there are some characters included who feel like they fill in a lot of gaps that were previously missed, but there are also a good number of characters that I don’t find that interesting.
Couple that with the fact that they’ve announced a “Spider-geddon” direct-to-retail Core box coming in late spring, which will have SP//DR, Spider-Man Noir, Silk, Superior Spider-Man and others, and there’s a temptation to leave some or all of this behind.
I suspect that the things that will probably sway me into getting most, if not all of the KS content, are the various new card decks that they’re adding: Items, Team decks, Campaign Mode. These look very cool, but they’re definitely going to require a sprawl of content from across the various releases.
Next
February kicks off with Ned’s birthday, and there’s always the hope of a new game or 2 there. I also hear rumours that the Aeon’s End: Past & Future campaign is about to start UK fulfilment, ideally timed, as I’ve just got to the point where last year’s Kickstarter has been played enough to get under the £5/hour mark. Hopefully February will see Rogue and Gambit come join the line-up for Marvel Champions, and I’ve got a few other bits and pieces planned.
fistfulofmeeples 