We just finished our second Agents of Mayhem game. I should have taken a picture. More and more, I’m feeling like it’s a solid translation of the videogame. Stuff blowing up, lots of objectives and options available, cool powers, and just enough wackiness to keep things funny without being grating.
In today’s game, a car drove into a pagoda, hit a Buddha statue, and exploded while it was trying to ram a scientist for victory points. The scientist escaped into a diner next door, but then Hardtack’s grenade launcher chucked a bunch of grenades into the diner, and the scientist retreated back to the pagoda, where one of my trooper’s grenades had set off another explosion that killed the scientist. That gave my opponent 5 points while I was up by 2 points. So I lost by 3 points, because my escortee leapt back and forth between explosions until one of them caught up with him.
We got partly set up for the next mission. There can be as many as six different objectives at a time, all formed by both sides playing campaign cards to determine how victory points are won in that mission. In the next mission, one of the objectives is for Fortune, the pirate chick who has a drone that stuns bad guys. She has to get to the top of the “skyscraper” – really, it’s a four-story building, but it’s the tallest building in the game – secure a kitten, and walk it back down the stairs. No superhero leaping off the building! But if she runs too fast, there’s a chance the kitten will run off and she’ll have to chase it. So that will be one way to get 5 points.
Some of the campaign cards that shape a mission are secret. They’re put face down until they’re triggered. In today’s game, I had a room trapped so that if one of his agents walked into it, he would be locked inside until another agent ran upstairs to release an electronic lock. I even placed some turrets in a very specific place to subtly encourage him to walk into that room. I thought I was so clever! But then he uses a dumb side door instead, so my trapped room did bupkis. After the mission he was all, like, “So what was your secret card supposed to do?”
As I mentioned on the podcast, I don’t know who this game is for. It’s an odd mix of streamlined and intricate, and it can be a real bear to teach/learn. But once you’ve wrapped your head around what it’s doing, it does a great job modeling crazy action movie stuff. Also, I think it helps that my friend was, like, the one other guy beside me who liked the Agents of Mayhem videogame. So it’s going over great as a play-for-an-afternoon-once-a-week-or-so game for two players. But I can’t help but think it would feel fiddly, random, and desultory if you just played it a couple of times as a standalone tactical combat game. And nevermind the tutorial missions, which expect you to play six times as learning missions before implementing a bunch of the cool stuff. Who’s going to play six tutorial missions just to learn a game?
Also, I never thought I’d say this, but I’m really sold on the 3D board.
-Tom
