Chaos in the Old World is a game that a lot of local VTES players (and non-VTES players in the same extended circle) have been raving about for months, and especially recently. They love playing the game so much, they want to start a whole League to play over and over and over and over.
I have been trying to arrange a time to play it for a few weeks, and TempleCon was that time.
After the finals of the VTES tournament on Saturday, at 10-something PM, I sat down to play Chaos.
We got random characters. I was assigned Khorne, the Blood God.
I was basically told "Your job is to kill things. When you kill things, your dial advances, and that's how you win. Ignore all the other rules."
So I followed the advice of the experienced players.
Every turn, I sent out my armies to kill guys. I upgraded my Cultists to be able to fight. I smashed and smashed and my die rolls were awesome and I got Dial Advancements. Phases went by with "Corruption" and "Domination" and I zoned out.
It was basically just following a script, and that script missed a turn because of an Event Card that said "discard this and draw a new Event Card".
So, the last turn started, and I was 3 "ticks" away from victory, and you can only advance 2 "ticks" in a turn. So I couldn't do anything to win.
I passed in the "buy phase", got up, and started setting up BSG (See Post #3).
This was one of the most boring experiences I've had with a game. I don't feel like I made any choices that made any difference.
What was I missing? Comments are welcome.
I'm willing to give the game a second chance, playing a different god, and seeing if those other mechanics improve my enjoyment.
But so far, Chaos in the Old World ranks a mere GR in my book.
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First, I do agree that Khorne can be the least interesting role in Chaos, but he's not as boring as you've made him out to be.
ReplyDeleteWith Khorne, you do have a choice of going for dial advancement victory (the easy way) or by points (the hard way). When you're playing your first game, you generally get stuck with the first choice.
The other strategic part of Khorne's gameplay is to make sure that other players aren't getting as many dial advancement tokens as you are. This means you need to figure out which regions players are going to use to get their advancements, and target cultists in those regions. While it isn't Khorne's job to be the 'cop' when a certain player is winning, you can maximize your disruptive power by spreading out as much as you can into the other 3 players' turf.
True, when you're 3 ticks away from victory and the event deck is empty, you can't win. However, if no other end-game conditions are met, then the humans win and Chaos loses. The game we played Saturday night only ended in Chaos victory because there were 5 ruined regions. So you could have played for the tie and tried to kill cultists in vulnerable regions to keep other players from winning.
OK, so there are some things I missed.
ReplyDeleteFirst (as khorne), being better at identifying who is going to get more dial-ticks than me, so therefore *not* actually "ignoring all those other rules". I guess there were some of those rounds where I got 1 tick and someone else got 2 and I didn't realize that I could have done something about it.
Second, the fact that if it looks like nobody is going to win, the game turns into "coop vs the board"; I really thought that the comment about the Humans Winning was one of those things they put in the rules to cover the thing-that-never-actually-happens-unless-everybody-sucks situation.
I'm still not sure that I care who wins if I'm obviously going to lose, in this or any other game that has any sort of "single player can win" mechanic, though.
But I will keep it in mind in the future.
I'll try playing at least one more time, hopefully with a different god.
I've never seen the humans win, but in that particular case it might have been possible if you planted some Bloodletters in the right regions and got some good dice rolls.
ReplyDeleteYou definitely need to try the game with a different god. I recommend Slaanesh or Tzeentch.
Yeah, it's not really a game where you can win by outracing everyone else, unless all three of the other players are completely ignoring you (in which case, they suck and you'll win). That's probably the strategery part that you missed.
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