Quick notes on DeanCon 11:
Really great bunch of guys. It’s been a while since I’ve been around a group that was so consistently funny and good-natured, as well as being so in-tune with each other culturally (mostly game and SF culture, obviously). I’ve been in a couple of gaming groups in the past that were not this way, so it’s notable. My particular thanks to Kevin and Jason for making the trip enjoyable.
Conquest of Nerath obviously suffers from some serious downtime issues. I think the basic mechanics are mostly OK, it’s that every player starts with a huge, badly-dispersed army. The idea is clearly to start big combats off on turn 1 without any build up, but the result is that the first turn plays like a late-game turn of Civilization (the computer game, not the board game). It would play better if everyone started with nothing, I think.
The game seems to favor offense strongly over defense. In theory the slow but cheap infantry should give the defender an advantage, but in practice fighters are just more cost effective overall. Yes, they cost twice as much and die just as easily as infantry, but have three times the offense (50% hit chance vs. 16%), can fight at sea, can enter dungeons, can get significant upgrades from artifacts, and with 2 speed can give you a more mobile defense. Since the game rewards force concentration, the only real way to defend is to have a bigger stack to counter-attack an invading force. There’s also the way the rules reward invading enemy territories, but give no reward for reclaiming your own.
There’s no simple fix to that. Honestly, I think it would require some serious thinking and a near-complete reworking of all the units to do something about that dynamic.
The miniatures, while fun, are really much too large for the board. The simplest solution would probably be army markers, with a player mat for the miniatures in each army. That doesn’t work well with the wildly dispersed initial setup, but that’s clearly really terrible strategically anyway.
It’s possibly a better 2-player game than 4 player game. With 2 players, at least both players are involved in every combat, rather than watching.
I know there was a lot of love for Dune in this group, but frankly, I really don’t like it. At all, despite the excellent use of the theme. And that’s not just because things went badly for me early in the game.
I mentioned that I thought the mechanic where you must kill every unit you actually commit to battle sucked, but the biggest problems seem to center around income problems and a lack of territorial boundaries of any kind.
The Emperor and the Guild don’t have income problems since they end up with most of the money being spent by the other players. The Bene Gesserit gets the 2 spice per turn income, which isn’t really enough to do much, but better than the situation of houses Atreides and Harkonnen. Both of those factions can only really get income from harvesting spice, which is frankly extremely iffy. Harvesting spice requires a substantial on-planet force. Eventually the game will wipe out all your armies on the planet one way or another, either through the screwy combat system, the Coriolis Storm, or sand worms. This can result in the sort of death spiral I experienced since you need a fair amount of money to land enough troops to harvest spice, and there’s no way to collect enough to recover once your initial reserve is gone. The other four factions can recover from this sort of wipe (which is nearly guaranteed by the game), but the Atreides and Harkonnen can’t.
The Fremen have the income problem as well, but can recover from it because they don’t have to pay to move their reserves on planet. Adam had a significant cash shortage, but probably could have fixed that if he’d focused on gathering spice a turn or two instead of combat. The only reason Dean didn’t suffer from cash problems as the Harkonnen was he was allied with the Emperor and the Guild, and because everyone was thinking in terms of teams instead of temporary alliances and later betrayals, he didn’t have to pay for anything meaningful.
The unpredictable all-or-nothing nature of the Traitor cards and the way shipping reserves from off-planet makes defense impossible didn’t endear me to the game either.
I did like Death Angel. I think that with a largish group like ours, you really need two things to have a chance: at least one previous play, so you know how the game evolves, and a group agreement to rules of engagement before you enter the Hulk. In particular, a system where you make sure that enough people are shooting each turn, and enough are reserving their attack for the next turn. Kevin’s Librarian was the only Marine that could really help us survive when he wasn’t using an Attack action.
