The Kid and I vs the Temple of Elemental Evil

The kid and I play a lot of games against each other, but if you want my honest opinion I think what we prefer are co-ops. We recently acquired the D&D Board game, Temple of Elemental Evil and have, so far, completed the first two adventures.

The Temple of Elemental Evil is a Board Game by Wizards of the Coast and is designed to be used with the other games in the Dungeons and Dragons Adventure series including, Legend of Drizzt and Castle Ravenloft, however, it also works beautifully as a stand-alone concept. This is a co-op dungeon delver where each player takes on the role of one of several heroes. I chose Talon, the Ranger while the Kid chose Nymmestra the Wizard. These choices are pretty standard for us but after doing a bot of research before starting I found that a higher player count would help us out so we added a third hero to the mix that we play jointly, Alaeros the Fighter. With both the ranger and wizard being ranged based units having a HP soaking melee fighter seemed necessary. I'm glad we did as I'm not sure how we would have completed adventure two without him!

The basic gameplay involves our heroes starting on a single start tile, investigating the rooms around them, building the dungeon as they go. Each new room contains traps, monsters or encounters, and usually in combination. However, each room and its contents are decided at random making it statistically impossible to have the same setup again. The replay value on this is high.

The final moments of the final encounter in adventure 2.

Each adventure has certain rules and victory conditions as well as ways the treasure and encounter decks get modified based on how well you did in the adventure. For example, in each adventure you get two healing surges that can be used to bring a character back to life. If you complete the adventure without using any surges (we didn't) you get additional bonuses and rewards. In the second adventure we rescued a little wyrmling that gave us a positive card to add to our encounter deck (most of the cards in the encounter deck are bad.)

We're enjoying this run. After the first two adventures we're getting a real feel as to how the characters are meant to be played. I wish the trap system was a little easier to manage and have seen some solutions online that I may incorporate into future plays. (Like replacing the traps tokens on the board with gamer stones and putting all the trap tokens in a dice bag and drawing when we need to disarm or trip a trap.)

Overall a good co-op that we will see to it's conclusion.

Dungeons an Dragons: Temple of Elemental Evil
Me: 7 out of  10
The Kid: 8 out of 10
Wins- 2
Loses- 0
Critical Wins (no surges used)- 0

Overall Games Record:

Me-1 

The Kid-0

Co-Op Wins-2

Co-Op Loses-0

Coming soon: Beware the Tides of Time!

Queendomino: Living in the Red

For my birthday I received a copy of Queendomino, Bruno Cathala's stand alone follow-up to 2017 Spiel des Jahres winner, Kingdomino. The Kid and I had an opportunity to play Kingdomino earlier in the year at a local gaming cafe and we both enjoyed it despite liking deeper games. Queendomino is essentially Kingdomino for that type of gamer: itching for something deeper.

The basic gameplay involves each player taking turns placing a "domino" on a 7x7 grid (5x5 if you're playing more than 2 players). Each domino tile has two types of land on it, either fields, forests, lakes, grazing grounds, marshes or mountains. The idea is you want to create vast areas of the same types of land, hopefully with a few crown multipliers to help boost your score. Queendomino adds red squares, which allows you to build structures that can be purchased from the market for additional bonuses. These include straight up victory points, knights (which help you gain more money), towers (which help gain the favor of the queen, who give you a market discount and a bonus multiplier if you have her at endgame) and tiles that give you extra victory points based on how many of a specific tile type you have. There's also a dragon that can be used to control the market.

We cracked it open tonight, assembled our little castles and took to building the best 7x7 kingdom we could, each employing a different strategy to our madness. I've found that The Kid and I take different approaches when playing a game for the first time. I typically aim for what appears to be the safe strategy. In this case that involved me focusing on the primary mechanics of Kingdomino by working on increasing the number of crowns I have in a couple of focused land types. I'd buy structures that helped with additional scoring of these specific lands an try to get at least a few extra knights to keep my income decent. The Kid.... 

When The Kid plays a game for the first time he really latches onto the theme and the aspects of the game that he thinks is cool. In this case he was obsessed with keeping the queen's favor for the game by controlling the most towers while building LOTS of red tiles since mayn of them had victory points attached to them for endgame purposes. He did have a well constructed forest system on top of this. 

I was certain his focus on towers would be his downfall while his belief that I was just playing Kingdomino an ignoring many of the new scoring features would ensure his victory. It was substantially closer than either of us could have predicted. My lands with multipliers and the few red squares I had with bonus victory points gave me an end score of 193. His vast amount of victory points from his red squares plus the favor of the queen giving him an extra multiplier in his forests boosted his score up to 192. Being honest, he had one snafu towards the end of the game where his tile placement prevented him from placing his second tile of the turn cost him the game. If he had placed that first tile of his last turn slightly different he would have won.

Regardless, we both enjoyed the game quite a bit. The addition of the market and red tiles makes the game just deep enough and adds just enough replayability that I'm certain we will see this hit the table quite a bit in the future.

Queendomino: 

Me: 8 out of 10. 

The Kid: 9 out of 10

Me-1 

The Kid-0

Overall Games Record:

Me-1 

The Kid-0

Co-Op Wins-0

Co-Op Loses-0

Coming soon: The Kid and I take on the Temple of Elemental Evil!!!