Holiday Game Action

It's going to be a fun holiday vacation. We aren't going anywhere this year (staying home for Christmas for the first time in eight years!), but we'll have plenty to do. We'll have The Cloud Dungeon and Ghostbusters for new tabletop options, an old Lego Heroica game that Matthew desperately wanted for Christmas, some new Imperial ships for X-Wing, Shadowrun: Dragonfall (thanks, Matt!) on the computer, and, if I can muster the fortitude, the last round of battles in the iPad Injustice: Gods Among Us. Can't wait to get started!

I hope you all have a safe and enjoyable holiday season!

Nathuz

Last night Matthew and I tried Nathuz, another set in the Lego Heroica series. This adventure takes place in a series of caverns and puts the heroes up against giant bats and golems(!). Nathuz adds another character class (the rogue) and incorporates rules for purchasing additional weapons and magic items. Heroica is starting to shape up as a pretty robust dungeon crawl for kids. The only downside: epic freak-out when the five-year-old lost after a hard-fought game...

Draida

Matthew and I cracked open the first of our two Lego Heroica boxes. This set is called Draida, and the storyline is that the heroes have arrived to liberate the kingdom's harbor, which has been overrun by goblins. The Heroica game rules as presented in Draida are pretty simple, even for a kids' game. Matthew and I played through the scenario three times in a row. He mastered the rules quickly and had a blast. Still, there aren't really enough options to give this set a lot of replay value (for instance, there are only two hero characters, the barbarian and the wizard), although we can mix things up a bit by re-configuring the areas and the placement of the monsters. We're likely to see more advanced rules (such as purchasing items with gold obtained during the adventure) when we open the larger of our two sets. Good game so far...with a bit more complexity, it could be a great gateway to D&D.

Lego Heroica

Timothy, my Lego-lovin' pal, this one's for you!

Lego has a number of board games (the intended age group varies depending on the game) in which players build the board, the game pieces, and other components, and then sit down to play the game. I just found out about their series of fantasy games, known as Heroica (official site here and more info here). They looked like pretty cool dungeon-crawl quasi-roleplaying games, so I picked up a couple of them in the clearance aisle at Target this afternoon. Matthew and I will run through them this evening to see how they play. He's familiar with the basics of tabletop RPGs (character classes, rolling dice to hit, moving miniatures around a map, etc.), so I think he'll pick up Heroica quickly even though, at five, he's a bit younger than the recommended age of seven-plus.