We played a few games last night – here’s what I could write about them before breakfast. Expect longer coverage at some point in the future (you know, November-ish).

Spellcaster

Super fast tactical game, takes 10-15 minutes to play. Each player starts with 10 power (yellow gems) and 2 sapphire gems. You can win in two ways: 1) acquire 15 gems OR 2) reduce your opponent to 0 power. Game is totally card based. There are 4 different suits of cards – and 4 mats on table to match suits. On your turn, you draw a card, and then can take 2 actions: play a card from your hand (which you orient towards yourself), activate any card that is oriented towards you, draw an extra card. All of the cards are pretty straightforward, and each of the 4 suits has a particular theme – red is usually a drain attack on your opponent, blue usually gets you blue gems, etc.

I’ve played in 4 times now. In a 4p game, there are 2 teams and play alternates between sides. In a 2p game, it’s simply head to head. Lots of fun seeing what the different cards do. Clearly there is a lot of luck involved in drawing the right card at the right time, but for a 10 minute game, that’s just right.

Dungeon Bazar

This is a new one from Cranio. Players take on the role of adventurers exploring a 3×3 dungeon. Each room in the dungeon has a deck of cards which provide different sorts of equipment. Your goal in each of the 3 rounds is to get these equipment cards in order to try to sell them to the 2 heros looking for stuff. These heros will buy equipment in a proscribed order, and usually from the cheapest source – until they are out of money. While you are searching the dungeon for equipment cards, you can also try to find some spell cards which may help change the way the heroes behave when they buy cards. There are also a few other characters in the dungeon (an ogre, an accountant and a lost baby dragon) which can be found to get you more money or to help influence the card acquisition.

The game is randomly setup each game, so the geography will be slightly different as will the location of the different decks of cards. The heroes are also chosen from a deck, and the spells ensure that you’re never 100% sure what they are going to want to buy first.

We setup and played a 2p game in about 60 minutes – which included reading the rules. The translation is admittedly a bit rough, but we didn’t have too much problem working through it. There are still a few questions that I’ll try to ask at the booth to clear up for our next play. This is a nice light game that I think my boys will enjoy playing with me.