Legend of Drizzt - After a few playthroughs (Pictoral)

Legend of Drizzt Board Game -

a pictoral summary after a few playthroughs

Finally got my copy of Dungeon and Dragons - The Legend of Drizzt board game. After playing it with a friend, I could not wait to get my hands on my copy. Unfortunately, my circumstances meant that for the next 3 months, I will be away with my wife to a foreign land. Which meant no board game nights for 3 months! 

For the last 3 weeks, I have been playing this game solo until yesterday night when Wifey agreed to join me on a dungeon crawling session. Wifey is more into casual games like Dixit, Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. So dungeon crawling would be a significant step up for her. We did not do so well together in our first game though with more plays, we might improve our strategies. 

Here, I will post some photos and summarize on a few sessions. Unfortunately, I cannot remember all the details to every session. But all the pics I took would go to waste if not posted. So just for my entertainment and yours, I will do a quick summary of some of the games that I managed to get some pictures from.

What a finished board looks like. After winning this game, I decided to lay out all the monsters I encountered during this session on the board and take a pic. Looks like Catti-brie is in trouble. Let's hope Wulfgar gets there in time...

Catti-brie stumped to find a Feral troll after failing to defeat the monsters she had stumbled upon. IMO, kiting is child's play to Catti-brie. With her ability to move an extra 2 spaces after exploring, the whole board can be filled with monsters and she will still survive after exploring again.

The Feral Troll, the most formidable monster in the whole game, not counting villains. Look at it towering over our hero. If its swipe hits, your hero goes flying out the window (if there were windows in caverns)

A close up shot of the Feral Troll's nasty grin. Looks like our hero is getting an arrow to launch at it.

In this session, Wulfgar and Athrogate team up to find and defeat Shimmergloom, the dark dragon. Our first explore brought the drow wizard who teleports to a tile with the most heroes and attacks all the heroes. Then a Feral Troll pops up to join the fight. "Tempus!", shouts Wulfgar to the God of Battle.

Athrogate quickly summons Snort, his pet boar, after being surrounded by spider swarms.

Snort goes down after an encounter with a water elemental. Snort goes in for the attack, deals one damage and dies beside the water elemental. His sacrifice will not be in vain!

The battle with Shimmergloom. A close call. Athrogate is knocked out while Wulfgar uses the last healing surge to get up and deal the killing blow to the fiery dragon! That was a lucky session, yes it was...

Bruenor goes after Yvonnel Baenre with Dinin, the drow-spider mutation of Drizzt's brother, by her side. A secret tunnel lies nearby for Bruenor to escape. "Juz 'n case me shield is not enough for protectin".

Wulfgar toweing ove a Goblin Champion. Goes who wins, Thor's hammer or big axe...

This was a memorable one yet. The dice were killing us with lousy rolls. And how lucky for us to land on two Feral Trolls at opposite ends of the hallway. Run, heroes, run!

Wulfgar standing up against another Feral Troll after defeating his first Feral Troll.

And that's all folks...

Tune in for more session reports from time-to-time.

Pandemic Playthrough - Researcher, Quarantine Specialist & Researcher

A Sunday evening with some free time to kill. Score! While the wife is busy with writing her book (she has to meet her deadline), I thought I should rejuvenate my brain tank with a board game. The only solo game I currently own and enjoy is Pandemic, ergo another session report from me...

Solo 3-player Pandemic Playthrough
5 epidemics (normal mode)

Random roles according to sequence:

• Researcher
• Quarantine Specialist (QS for short)
• Scientist

Our starting lineup

5 Epidemic cards shuffled into the player deck

Board at the start of the game

I have heard that there is a power combo between the researcher and the scientist. The researcher would pass her cards to the scientist to find cures.

But looking at this lineup, I can see that I'm going to have a hard time moving around the board without an operations expert nor a dispatcher. And when it's hard to move around the board, the likelihood of the researcher and the scientist meeting up while treating diseases is highly improbable.

But I decided to take up the challenge anyway. So cards shuffled and cities infected. OMG, red cities are swiftly being infected? But I really shuffled my cards! Anyway it looks like the cities infected with 3 disease cubes are at different parts of the board - Chennai (black), Ho Chi Minh City (red) and Johannesberg (bottom yellow). Looking at my player hands, it is going to be very hard to reach all three critical cities.

Starting infections

Our researcher starts by ferrying from Atlanta to Tokyo and manages to treat the patient there who begs her to go over to Seoul to treat his cousins there. The quarantine specialist makes his move to Ho Chi Minh City but has no more moves to treat anyone there. Our scientist decides to use his flight ticket to Cairo, walking to Johannesburg and treating one patient there. Fortunate for out heroes, our quarantine specialist was able to prevent an outbreak from occuring in Ho Chi Minh City and also prevent a cube in hong kong.

I'll save you the trouble of reading the details so I'll just skip to the summary of the playthrough (though my mind is itching to tell you all the details).

Our scientist's first turn produced an epidemic. New York got critically infected but I used the event card Resilent Population to take that card out if the game. That way, it will never appear again in this game. One less city to worry about. 

1st epidemic by the Scientist

Playing the quarantine specialist, common logic would be to place her at critically infected cities. From previous experiences, the QS is most effective when we predict where the cities will infect so I decided to bring her to wherever there were plenty of not so critically infected cities around her. By knowing which cities were already hit, I positioned her where I thought the infections would strike next and this worked wonders like pitting Chuck Norris worth a bunch of diseases. Before her turn came again, she had already prevented 3 cities from having another cube.

I was lucky when during the 2nd epidemic that the QS was next to Kolkata and Kolkatta was drawn as the city critically infected. The QS kicked the disease square in the face out of that region. It's nice to have feelings like this when playing QS.

Our first cure was an amazing feat. I saw that I could cure two diseases in one turn if I moved the scientist to a research center and sacrifice any attempt to treat diseases. The photos show it all. My researcher went over and gave the scientist 3 red cards (the scientist now had 4). When the scientist's turn came, she found the cure for red, took two yellow cards from the researcher and found another cure for yellow. Holyacaroni, two cures in one turn! That's like hitting jackpot. I love having these moments of shear brilliance in Pandemic. 

Shear brilliance - Finding 2 cures in 1 turn! 

First cures. Woohoo! 

Our first outbreak happened 3 epidemics in, in Lima (yellow). The epidemic card pulled out Lima to critically infect and after shuffling the infection pile and placing on top of the deck, Lima was drawn again! Yes, there are always these moments where you will feel helpless no matter how you plan and strategize. Only an event card can turn these situations to "ha I got you this time, game system". So yea, I cud not do anything about it.

1st Outbreak in Lima

The QS managed to set up our second research station in Bangkok, so now we can fly from one side of the map to the middle of it. Our researcher took the opportunity to shuttle a flight over there and pass a blue card to the QS, who managed to find blue's cure on her turn.

After finding the cure, QS quickly ran to Mumbai to pass the Black card to the researcher on the researcher's turn. That's when the 4th epidemic happened causing an outbreak in Johannesburg.

Finally the researcher received the black card from the QS and ran to a research station to find the last cure clocking our win at 40 mins.

Researcher found the last cure

Victory!!!

Summary:

Play time - 40 mins
2 outbreaks
4 epidemics drawn and 1 left in the deck
4 cures found (VICTORY)
Scientist - 3 cures
Quarantine Specialist - 1 cure

Board view at the end

An awesome game for an awesome night with many memorable moments of brilliance and fortune.

I hope you enjoyed the session report. Click on "like" if you'd like to hear more session reports from me or drop me a comment on what you think about this session or about the Pandemic games you've played. Were they as exciting as mine?

Till next time, Kudos!

Pandemic Board Game - Session Report 1 [Medic, Dispatcher, Researcher & Contingency Planner]

Here's to the best combo for Pandemic!
We played 3 games last night with 4 players. The 1st game was set on normal difficulty (5 epidemic cards), 2nd and 3rd games on hard (6 epidemic cards). We won the 1st and 3rd games, both we were lucky enough to have the same combo but with different players holding the different roles.

Below is the session report for each game

For how Pandemic is played, you may refer to my review

Game 1
Contingency Planner (Me)
Researcher
Dispatcher
Medic
(NORMAL difficulty)

This was a first game for my friends. After going over the rules, we were pumped. Well I was pumped. So pumped I forgot to inform them how to win, just how to lose, haha... This was probably because the only other two games I've won before this was one solo game and a 2 player game with my mom (apparently 2 player games are quite easy). And I've played tons of pandemic, already 10+ games, solo and with other 3-4 players.

We started with me, the contingency planner, as I had to show them the ropes. After treating a few diseases, drawing cards, infecting the board and ending my turn, everyone already knew how the game was going to be played. So bonus for me :) (I never liked to keep teaching everyone how to play again and again).

The dispatcher was all in, moving the medic immediately to treat diseases at locations the were most populated with red and blue cubes. As events were played, the contingency planner would bring those events back from the discard pile again. The airlift helped a bundle. No one needed to build a research station throughout the game as the dispatcher kept teleporting us to different parts of the board. No research station built!!! This is definitely a first.

It was exciting because after everyone collected roughly enough cards, we strategized and everyone came back to Atlanta for a conference meet thanks to our dispatcher. Our researcher shared enough knowledge to the medic to find the last two cures. And we won with lots of player cards to spare and 4 outbreaks in.

Our dispatcher friend said that this game was easy. I found it surprising because it was never this easy when I played the game before this. I can only conclude that this roles combo was one of the best!
So we upped the level to HARD! and thus the next game continues...


Game 2
Operations Expert
Scientist
Researcher
Quarantine Specialist (Me)
(HARD difficulty)

We decided to let the Operations Expert go first after strategizing. Our effective friend, flew and built two research stations, one in red and one in yellow. Pretty neat trick.

It got easy for us to run over to where the disease cubes are and treat them first. However, as time went by, infected areas got stacked together and outbreaks chaining everywhere that we barely managed to find the first cure before the game wiped us out.

The Quarantine Specialist never did her job well, preventing only one outbreak from occurring. The Researcher had no good cards to give away and the Scientist went too far from the others.

We were terribly destroyed this round.

In the middle of the game, we decided to call the disease cubes "Zombies". Oh no, the zombies are coming out of Paris! Kill them, Scientist!


Game 3
Medic (Me)
Dispatcher
Researcher
Contingency Planner
(HARD difficulty)

Ooh I got the Medic!!! My fav character in the whole game. So I decided to use my ticket (player card) to fly over to Red and start treating diseases. After collecting enough cards, the black cure was found by me, followed by the red cure by our Researcher.

This was a closer game for us. We had a hard time figuring out how to win when our player cards were dwindling down so fast. Almost at the end of the game, the infections grouped in the middle of the world. All the blue cubes sprouted out causing outbreaks and chained outbreaks till we were at 7 outbreaks (our last outbreak before losing the game). We also placed our last blue cube on the board. Referring to the rules, we were still safe (until another blue cube is needed).

We paused for a breather and counted our turns left - 6 more turns before the end (4 players which means only 1 round to go). Our dispatcher sacrificed his turn to find a cure to allow the Contingency Planner to find her cure first. Fortunately, no epidemics happened between them and we were able to win the game before losing. This was a really close call (we had one last epidemic card hiding in there)

Summary
3 memorable battles with lots of strategy. That is what makes Pandemic one of the classic games that never fails to entertain medium-heavy gamers like me. And with a gaming group like this, oh joy..

This combo has given me my first 4 player win, and my first HARD difficulty win. So I'm inclined to agree that there are character combos that make the game easier to win. All in all, a good night's worth of gaming.

Memorable times
Like remember that time....

• when the chain outbreaks almost killed us and we were left with one outbreak to go and used our last blue cube but still won in the end
• how our dispatcher called for a conference meet at Atlanta
• all hell broke loose when two epidemic cards were drawn in turns back-to-back?

Oh Joy! Till next time, KUDOS...