Gaming Convention Season, Part 2

Here are some more games I played:

Space Hulk:
In this game, there are two sides: the Space Marines and the Genestealers. The Space Marines are invading a spaceship that has been taken over by the evil alien Genestealers, and the goal of the Space Marines is to complete their mission before getting killed. The Space Marines have the advantage of ranged attacks and special abilities, but the Genestealers have the advantage of improved melee capability as well as numbers (new Genestealers come in every turn, but the starting Space Marines are all the Space Marines get). So the Space Marines have to be aggressive in getting to the objective, because they are going to lose a war of attrition. This tendency was even more pronounced given that we were playing by the wrong rules: we were spawning 50% more Genestealers per turn than we were supposed to, but we also made a mistake in how the Genestealers move that was equivalent to giving the Space Marines a one-turn head start. We played two rounds, once where my team was the Space Marines and once where my team was the Genestealers. As the Space Marines, we didn't realize this strategy and tried to advance carefully, but were soon overwhelmed. As the Genestealers, our opponents rusjed forward, taking advantage of their head start, and we managed to sneak in from the side and kill them but not until after they had destroyed one of the two objectives.

Rating: 8 out of 10. This game has significant strategy, and it is also fast-paced and exciting, and is designed to reward aggressive play. The one thing that isn't so good about this game is the pieces: some of the pieces break easily, often fall over, and are hard to fit on the board spaces.

Goblin Supremacy:
This is a card game in which players form a goblin army from cards that have goblins on them. There are three "ranks" of goblins, and the higher level goblins are worth more points but you have to have lower level goblins of the same type in order to play them. You can only have five goblins of each rank, but if your row is full you can "mutate" goblins by discarding cards, that transforms them into another goblin from your hand. The carsd have abilities that go off when they are played, when they get mutated, or when they are "activated" by spending "activation tokens." A significant element of the game is figuring out how to "combo" different abilities together and in what order to do things to maximize your cards - creating a sort of "Magic: The Gathering" like gameplay.

Rating: 7 out of 10. I liked the "Magic-like" gameplay, but the main problem with the game was that there were just *too many* decisions at each step - for instance, a typical turn might have you with 6 cards in hand, then deciding which 3 of them you want the least so you can discard them to activate a "zombie mutation" which lets you search through a 30+ card discard pile to decide which one card you want to mutate your guy into. This sometimes makes the game take a long time - I think we started playing this one at about 9:30 or 10:00 and had to end early when the room closed at midnight. Especially near the end of the game it gets slow, because what often ends up happening is that you keep finding ways to discard cards to draw cards so you can cycle through the deck to find the one card that fits in the few spots you have left.