Pipes, Pints, and Polyhedrons

Over the last couple of days, Quinn and I have broken out several of the board games I've had sitting on my shelves, taking some of them for a spin.

First up, Endangered Orphans of Condyle Cove.


This one is a lot of fun to play and I could see the hilarity that would ensue if we had 4 players instead of just two. The premise of the game, is that each player has an orphan trying to survive by not encountering the Boogeyman while traversing The Cove. Initially, the Cove is comprised of a Cul-Da-Sac card (this is the center card of the map) and four surrounding location cards. Each location has a special aspect about it, which is written on the card. On a player's turn, they can choose to move to a new location (or not) and play cards from their hand (or not), however they MUST draw 2 cards before ending their turn. The two cards can be drawn from either the standard card deck, or the Cove deck. Drawing cards from the standard deck gives player's their hand of cards to play throughout the game, the Cove deck cards are used to expand the "map" of card locations, thereby giving the players more places to traverse. Many of the cards from the standard deck have effects for a specific location or effects outside of a specific location.

As the game progresses, the players begin an attrition of the card decks; if on any turn, a player attempts to draw cards and there are no cards left to draw from either the Cove or standard deck, then they lose and are out of the game, unable to keep the Boogeyman at bay. Standard cards played from one's hand can either help their own orphan or try and hurt another player, by making them discard cards either from their hand or their own standard draw deck.

There are also six special cards called "Acts of Desperation" which are set up randomly, face down on the table. Any time a player starts their turn while standing on the Cul-Da-Sac card, then they must turn over an AOD card. Most of the cards allow players to shuffle discarded cards back into their standard decks, but one of the cards is the Boogeyman card. Turning over the Boogeyman means you lose and are out of the game.

Play continues until one orphan remains, thereby winning the game. Quinn and I really enjoyed this game, there are some expansions I received during the kickstarter that add new options, locations and even game mechanics which we've played with briefly. Looking forward to getting this one back on the table before he leaves.

Second game we played was Escape the Dark Castle.

The game is a nice dungeon-crawler board game in which 2-4 players take up characters who have been imprisoned within "the dark castle". Making their escape, the players crawl through the dungeon in an attempt to reach the "boss" and defeat it to earn their freedom. Players use specially marked dice to resolve outcomes, such as random events, traps, or combat with a variety of denizens within the castle.

The castle is comprised of 15 chapter cards. Each turn, a player flips over a chapter card from the deck and reads aloud the text, to the party members. Sometimes the card has the word "YOU" in the text, describing an effect or situation that only affects the players who drew and read the card.

Combat is interesting in that the monsters encountered have a series of symbols located at the bottom of the card. Players place matching chapter dice under the monster card and then each player rolls a chapter die, the symbol rolled is then also added to the monster's dice pool. Players then roll their own character die, trying to match symbols rolled, with symbols on the monster's dice. Matched symbols are removed from the monster pool and when none remain, the monster is defeated. Monsters attack back automatically doing a set amount of damage (listed on the card), players suffer damage unless their character die rolled, shows a shield on it or they use an item in their inventory to mitigate the damage. Characters can carry two single items or one two-handed item (in the case of some weapons). Characters which lose all HP die, and the players is out of the remaining gameplay.

The base game has 45 chapter cards and 3 bosses which can be encountered, this ensures replay at least three times before mixing all of the cards to randomize the encounters during a play session. All in all, we really enjoyed this, we played through the three expansions and each one added new mechanics, new characters, and new items to the game in really interesting ways. Play time is about 30 minutes per run.