I thought Descent was preferable to oversimplified popular titles like Ravenloft, but it’s still an awful lot of setup, details, and moving parts for very little payoff. For tactical depth I think the 1v1 classics have it beat, and for group experiences I’d much rather have something with interaction and cooperation beyond what actually occurs here. To be fair, I have yet to play 1 vs all game that I would consider owning or playing as the 1, but Mansions of Madness came closest.
We played a beginner/teaching game of old Twilight Imperium + Shattered (Tracy’s copy from when he sold it a while back, on its maiden voyage!) and the new expansion, with Reldan as the most experienced player by a significant but not overwhelming margin, myself as a previous victim of a brutal intro game, and 3 others who’d never played it. We went with the TI3 official alternate preset board for 5 that uses wormholes to create adjacency across that empty gap left by the sixth player, and house ruled out all wormhole cards and made them 100% equivalent to normal adjacency. We also removed the new Creuss from the running (wormhole specialists), cut out the worst random planet and space tiles (nukes, supernovae), and removed the leaders from the game (which I’d like to keep doing, because I don’t see a benefit to that additional complexity). Finally, we capped the game at 8 VP to try to ensure going home before midnight.
We drew an even spread of red special zones, and I got a huge advantage early as the Jol Nar with the new gravity rift next to me combined with the tech needed to traverse it safely to provide me with a +1 to move everything that was next to that rift. My preliminary objective (to build six planetary defense at one time) led me to focus on deep space cannon prematurely, I think, but more importantly I got served on my first planetary invasion and lost a planetary defense in the process (the classic Jol Nar-Distant Suns “lose all your groundforces in first turn” scenario). That ended up leading to a lot of bogging down, and while I remained tenaciously in second throughout it combined with a catastrophic failure on my part to realize the possible consequences of a law that could neutralize my gravity rift when I could have easily stopped it or beat it in the assembly.
Reldan drew the end game, winner high VP card and then it was over. Overall, I had a great time and I think we all have a pretty good handle on the game now, apart from minor errata. We’re probably aiming for another game (with 6) within 2-3 weeks to make sure we have a break but not too long a break. I think it was especially important that everyone was a good sport, even when one of the new players got completely boned by the classic one-two of impractical aggression alongside unbelievably poor dice rolls and left himself in terrible shape that just kept getting worse. Both the game I was in and the game I witnessed recently featured at least one massive near rage quit from a player who’d lost their home planet to their own folly and some unsportsmanlike manipulation of newer players against their own interests, so it was great that we were able get so much player screwage accomplished within the bounds of good play.
I think for <6, though, the now more flexible Chaos game (4-5!) is going to be my default choice for a Big Game, because if I’m going to lose a whole day it’s going to be with the optimal balance of players.
