New to Me: Fall 2014 — The Season of the Mediocre

Sadly, Fall 2014 just wasn’t a great season for gaming for me — and especially not for new gaming. A few plays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas kept some gaming nights from occurring, while rain and rioting cut other game nights short. Even when I did play there were six plays of current obsession Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (more on that next year!), six plays of prototypes, and three plays of Kickstarter prereleases. I’m actually pretty surprised I managed ten totally new games, which I’ve detailed here (plus one that was only new in my mind).

Also sadly, the games that I played weren’t (on average) that great. This wasn’t another season of the very good … but instead a season of the mediocre. Ah well. Maybe winter will be better. Continue reading

A Deckbuilding Look at Demonslayer

demonslayeroverviewDemonslayer: The Siege of Mt. Kunlun (to give its full title) is rather uniquely a deckbuilder that was published in China a few years ago, and is just now making the jump to the United States, thanks to the folks at EOS SAMA.

The Game

Demonslayer is clearly a deckbuilder from an earlier generation. It owes the most to two early games in the genre, Dominion (2008) and Ascension (2010). Much as in Ascension, you have two types of currency: money (“clarity”) and attack. You also have two types of cards available for “purchase”: a set tableau of action cards, plus three special attack cards for each player (all either “spells” or “immortals”), and a random tableau of monsters (“heart-eaters”) — which comes out in waves of nine monsters, each of which includes eight acolytes and one tougher boss (“overlord”). As you might guess, money buys action cards, while attack kills monsters.

Continue reading