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So yesterday was my birthday man-day gaming-day - as always we had an amazing time! We tried out a couple new games yesterday that are well worth quickly reviewing.
First, we began with a standard but thoroughly enjoyable game of Puerto Rico - 5 players as we waited for others to arrive. I'll blog separately about how strongly I feel this game is one of the best *truly* strategic games on the planet. Suffice to say it was a great beginning to an awesome day.
More folks arrived, and something I had hoped would happen did - more people came that were interested in playing than our typical large-scale go-to game, Battlestar Galactica, would support. We had 10 people, with mixed company and gaming skill-levels, and so this was a perfect opportunity to finally try out The Resistance. Thank god we did!! I had already known that this game, as well as its ancestor games Mafia and Werewolf, were essentially stripped down versions of the same form of loyalty system that BSG prides itself on (and I presume BSG's loyalty system was also inspired by Mafia and Werewolf). Well, I must now say I feel that The Resistance succeeds in creating even deeper situations of tension and intrigue than BSG does! Certainly it doesn't have the game depth that BSG boasts, nor the rich theme and atmosphere, but it does create a pure inter-human interaction and dynamic that is extremely fun and memorable. We played about 6 games in a row, and then came back to it again later on for another 3 or 4 games - everyone was loving it! I remain confident that the added human dynamic of a loyalty system based game enables it to transcend straight-forward rules and "calculable" tactics, and provide an immensely rewarding game experience.
With that all said, it is not perfect. We played several games with the plot cards and several without. At first we weren't sure if we really liked the plot cards, but in the end all agreed they were necessary to avoid the game being too predictable, even with the uncertainty of the human element. I read on the forums quite a bit, and it seems like the community is 50/50 in terms of whether the leader gets to see and read the plot cards before handing them out to other players. Again we tried this both ways, and concluded that at least for our group we liked the randomness of simply drawing and handing them out without looking at them first. This also reduced the time it would take for each round to commence. If there was one complaint we had it was that the games can be so short that, especially in a 9 or 10 player game, often was the case that some players never got to play - they were never the leader nor were chosen to be part of a team. Ultimately I don't consider this a huge drawback, since the games are so short that we could just fire up the next game which would more than likely involve new people. Have you run into this issue with your game group, and if so how did you handle it?
We did end up playing a couple great games of BSG after dinner, and as always that was the highlight of the day in terms of gaming depth and enjoyment. Then from 1am to 3am we ended up trying out Quarriors! - this was surprisingly similar to Dominion, just with dice instead of cards. I believe I like Dominion better, but Quarriors! was indeed a fun game to play and I will look forward to trying it out again soon. More on those two games in a later blog.
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on The Resistance and loyalty system based games in general!!
Gaming rules!
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Just in case you're wondering, I love space games. 
What do I think of loyalty system based games in general? I personally enjoy the gratification of being able to "read" my fellow gamers. Not everyone has a talent for it though. 
