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fearmeforiampinkSo, my work has a weekly board games night (which I used to always miss, when it was on Wednesdays, but now it's on thursdays, I can make it). Tonight, because we didn't have that many people, we played Building An Elder God, which was alright but seemed a bit simplistic (though I think it might be better when we know it better and can play much more quickly, and Cold War, CIA vs KGB which I found rather awesome.
The game is set in the depths of the cold war; America and Russia are fighting their conflicts through proxy states, through trying to appeal to third parties, through tech races and winning Nobel prizes. These proxy states and other targets are your objectives. Mostly they give you points (of which you need 100 to win), though a few have other abilities the person who's won them can use later.
Your agent infiltrates/bribes/otherwise recruits various groups to his side to help him gain control of that objective. These groups have both a value, a type, and a special ability based on their type (basically, destroy/tap or untap/take or give control of a group/look at the next card and choose what to do with it).
You need to get as close as possible to the objective's target, with a maximum number of groups equal to the people icons, without going over. If you go over, your agent's interference in that state becomes obvious, and your organisation disavows him (and you lose that objective). Maximum number of groups you can recruit for an objective is the number of people icons on the
The last factor, is your agent.
You have a hand of six agents, after the objective is revealed, you secretly choose one of them to be your agent on this mission, after that mission said agent goes on leave for the duration of the next mission, rendering them unavailable. Each has a special ability, but you lose them for the rest of the game if they're disavowed or assassinated. There's a couple of informational abilities, an assasin, extra points if you win, one that's immune to everything, and my favourite — the one that makes you win the objective if you would normally lose (if they're not disavowed).
So, you start playing a round. Each turn, you can recruit a group (if you've not hit population cap), use a group's ability, or pass. First draw or two aren't usually too worrying, but after that they are — it's quite like blackjack with the whole 'going bust' thing. Then the group's abilities come into play. The 'look at the next card, decide what to do with it' one is relatively simple, but the destroy and give/take ones get much more complicated, as you can use them on yourself or your opponent, raising or lowering scores to get what you want. Because you only do one thing each turn, there can be a very definite "I'll play that, then he'll destroy it with that, then I'll…" It can look like it's all sewn up, but if there's spare population cap, you can keep drawing and destroy half your own cards to get that one point closer to the objective number.
Basically, the game is about two things; assessing your opponent — what agent they've played, which of their cards they'll use, — and assessing risk — do you stick or twist, what do you push your opponent towards, etc. On one long turn, I won in at least part due to forcing my opponent to keep on drawing cards. when he was at about 6/8 or 7/9 (as I was one closer), and shooting down anything that got him better than me, until (IIRC) he hit the group cap. My favourite two rounds were the ones I won with the master spy, one the last round of the game, trying to play as close to winning whilst still usually having less points, waiting for my opponent to say 'pass' so I could do the same and win, and the other where I think he guessed I had it towards the end of the round, but I managed to keep him not totally sure, and his options were limited then anyway.
It has elements of the blackjack 'going bust' and 'where do you stop drawing' thing. Also slightly reminds me of CCGs, in terms of the choices you get of agent, and of making choices based on what you think you might draw. Downsides are that it's two players only, and if you don't get into the mind games part of it, it's probably not that great. But aside from that, I'd definitely recommend it.
The game is set in the depths of the cold war; America and Russia are fighting their conflicts through proxy states, through trying to appeal to third parties, through tech races and winning Nobel prizes. These proxy states and other targets are your objectives. Mostly they give you points (of which you need 100 to win), though a few have other abilities the person who's won them can use later.
Your agent infiltrates/bribes/otherwise recruits various groups to his side to help him gain control of that objective. These groups have both a value, a type, and a special ability based on their type (basically, destroy/tap or untap/take or give control of a group/look at the next card and choose what to do with it).
You need to get as close as possible to the objective's target, with a maximum number of groups equal to the people icons, without going over. If you go over, your agent's interference in that state becomes obvious, and your organisation disavows him (and you lose that objective). Maximum number of groups you can recruit for an objective is the number of people icons on the
The last factor, is your agent.
You have a hand of six agents, after the objective is revealed, you secretly choose one of them to be your agent on this mission, after that mission said agent goes on leave for the duration of the next mission, rendering them unavailable. Each has a special ability, but you lose them for the rest of the game if they're disavowed or assassinated. There's a couple of informational abilities, an assasin, extra points if you win, one that's immune to everything, and my favourite — the one that makes you win the objective if you would normally lose (if they're not disavowed).
So, you start playing a round. Each turn, you can recruit a group (if you've not hit population cap), use a group's ability, or pass. First draw or two aren't usually too worrying, but after that they are — it's quite like blackjack with the whole 'going bust' thing. Then the group's abilities come into play. The 'look at the next card, decide what to do with it' one is relatively simple, but the destroy and give/take ones get much more complicated, as you can use them on yourself or your opponent, raising or lowering scores to get what you want. Because you only do one thing each turn, there can be a very definite "I'll play that, then he'll destroy it with that, then I'll…" It can look like it's all sewn up, but if there's spare population cap, you can keep drawing and destroy half your own cards to get that one point closer to the objective number.
Basically, the game is about two things; assessing your opponent — what agent they've played, which of their cards they'll use, — and assessing risk — do you stick or twist, what do you push your opponent towards, etc. On one long turn, I won in at least part due to forcing my opponent to keep on drawing cards. when he was at about 6/8 or 7/9 (as I was one closer), and shooting down anything that got him better than me, until (IIRC) he hit the group cap. My favourite two rounds were the ones I won with the master spy, one the last round of the game, trying to play as close to winning whilst still usually having less points, waiting for my opponent to say 'pass' so I could do the same and win, and the other where I think he guessed I had it towards the end of the round, but I managed to keep him not totally sure, and his options were limited then anyway.
It has elements of the blackjack 'going bust' and 'where do you stop drawing' thing. Also slightly reminds me of CCGs, in terms of the choices you get of agent, and of making choices based on what you think you might draw. Downsides are that it's two players only, and if you don't get into the mind games part of it, it's probably not that great. But aside from that, I'd definitely recommend it.
