MEK OP Game Night: WotR with Expansion

This Saturday we amazing had no Warhammer tables going, and so instead we set up for a 4-person War of the Ring showdown. I played Free Peoples for a change this time, and most of the other players had at least some familiarity with the system. I elected to add most of the optional characters and minions (and their dice) from the expansion set, but not any of the optional Fellowship cards or other rules.

As with my past experience, the game fits rather perfectly into a four-hour time slot. The game was resolved by a very narrow margin, driving through Mordor in a single turn due to military pressure, with a final corruption level of 9 at the end of the game. A bad tile draw for hunt damage would have resulted in a loss. Instead, we finished with only the second Free Peoples win I've ever seen. Virtually every member of the Fellowship ended up dead (or for the Merry and Pippin, lost in the wastes north of Mordor), and Minas Tirith went down before the Fellowship had even reached Lorien. Things were getting frantic by the end, and the final turn featured the use of all three elven rings!

And yet somehow I won with a deck
containing only two heroes

Then today (Sunday) my wife and brother-in-law played a few rounds of the DC Deckbuilding Game. That's just what's it's called, which perhaps suggests it's not the most original concept in the word. It's a simple single-resource system with streamlined play relative to other similar games. It probably compares most directly with Ascension, although thematically it seems intended to compete with Marvel's more complicated deckbuilder, Legendary. Overall it had the same basic qualities of other games in the genre, but the art was clean and set-up was easy. My BIL was relatively pleased with the thematic integration of the DC universe, which I gather is based on the New 52 reboot of the primary comic titles. There's probably some sense in which I'd feel more comfortable with a more classic Silver Age implementation of the theme that resembles the stuff I remember from my youth, but that's not likely to ever happen. In any event, all the official comic versions of DC heroes are likely to be washed away by the arrival of the new movies in the next decade, which will create new definitive versions of the familiar roster.

I won both games, as Hawkman each time. But as with most deckbuilders it's mostly a matter of luck to grab an early lead and then simply not doing stupid things to squander it.