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ˈgɒθɪk | adjective: portentously gloomy or horrifying

I played another couple of games of Dark Gothic, the Spooky Hollow deck-building game.

This time I played with two random heroes and drew Charlotte Dubois the cutthroat smuggler, and Adrianna of Zartha the foreign traveler.

Charlotte Dubois and Adrianna

Charlotte’s main ability is that she draws seven cards each turn. This is a very powerful ability as you always want more points and so every card counts.

Adrianna has a neat ability in that she can convert up to two cards a turn into silver resources, which can be any colour. This is great early on, but less useful later when many of your cards are worth two or three points on their own. Also it only applies to fights.

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The Perils of Pre-Order

The nice protective art sleeves for Netrunner have finally come out. These have lovely art from some of the cards and I have been waiting for a long time for these to arrive.

Here are two of the designs, Deep Red and Posted Bounty.

Deep Red is a console carried like a backpack. It is used to run programs which are named after chess pieces, hence the pun on ‘Deep Blue’.

Posted Bounty is a corp agenda that allows you to tag the runner on your own turn and opens them up to nasty meat damage shenanigans.

You will notice I have two sets of each design. These packs were first announced way back in early 2014. It seems that what happened is that I went ahead and preordered a set of each from amazon.

Then of course I forgot I had done this and when the actual shipping announcement came out at the end of the year I ordered them again.

Now they have shipped both orders together and I am getting two of each 🙂

Race to the pole

The explorers from Miskatonic University are racing to Antarctica to stop the cult sorcerers from summoning Yog-Sothoth.

I played a few games of my new MU deck against the Yog deck. It was a bit swingy. The MU deck needed to win quickly, while the Yog deck was better in the longer games once it had a bunch of Yithians and a Lost Oracle or two in the discard pile.

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Game over, man, game over

I really like the Alien deckbuilding game. The second scenario is the Aliens movie, so I had a go at hunting the alien queen in the lost colony.

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In the Cold Waste

Stephenson has not returned.

Today the temperature dropped below minus 40 and the blizzard brought visibility to zero. Stephenson left before dawn, I heard the dogs barking as he passed them. It has been nearly six hours and he is certainly dead. He was weak and we are better off without him.
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Tentacles at Dawn: Cthulhu vs Yog-Sothoth

I built my new Cthulhu deck from The Sleeper Below expansion and tried it out against my Yog deck. The Yog deck hadn’t been doing very well, and the Cthulhu deck is only my first version, so hopefully they should have been able to square off against each other.

It was a pretty fair fight.

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Yog 2.0

Doing some work on my Yog deck, I came up with some more changes.

This is more like Yog 4.0 or 5.0, but ‘Yog 2.0’ is the name of a very popular Netrunner icebreaker card. The card was actually named after Yog-Sothoth (him being The Key and the Gate and all), so it seemed funny to go with 2.0. 🙂

I need more characters. The Yogs themselves don’t really count as they are more like combo cards and not meant for putting into play generally. So I added in a couple more Yithians, the Keeper of the Great Library and the Scientist from Yith. These are cheap characters who have some synergy with the discard and each other and will help bolster my ranks. They aren’t sorcerers, but I am already using all the sorcerers in the set.

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Early rising?

I’m having trouble with my Yog deck. It can’t hold up against the Silver Twilight deck’s bouncing and control effects. I keep tweaking it but the Lodge keeps tromping all over them.

To take a bit of a break, I will try building a Cthulhu deck made up entirely from the cards in the recent Cthulhu large expansion, The Sleeper Below.

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I can’t hear you, I’m in space.

I liked the Dark Gothic game, so I thought I would try the Legendary Encounters: Alien game. This is another deck-building game and is a spin-off from the superhero-themed Legendary Marvel games. I’m not very keen on superhero games, but the Alien theme sounded good, especially as it is cooperative.

In this game you play the crew and are defending against advancing hordes of aliens while trying to complete the objectives of the films. There are four games in one, as there is a completely different set of crew, objectives, and aliens for each of the four Alien films. I’m not sure I would bother playing the third and fourth scenarios, though.

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It be dark in here

I got around to playing a couple of games of Dark Gothic, the Touch of Evil deckbuilding game.

I haven’t played much in the way of deck-building games, except Thunderstone which I quite liked although it was a bit fiddly. I do like the theme of this one.

I played two heroes in the competitive mode to start with and to get the hang of the rules. In the first game I payed the scientist and the smuggler, and in the second I played the monk and the noblewoman.

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