Transitive Determination

When I turned up Cult was pretty empty. It looked like the freshers hadn't arrived yet. We had about fifteen people turn up, enough to hold our own. Sam had brought A Game of Thrones and started setting it up on his own before gathering players. I think it has a bit of a reputation of being a very long game and no one thought they could get through it before closing so it never got played. Instead I saw a game of Bang! and Love Letter being played on top of the laid out board.

This week Alex had brought along Shadow Hunters. No Libertalia for me this week! But I didn't mind because Shadow Hunters is another game I'd been wanting to play. It's a hidden role game with three teams; the shadows, the hunters and the neutrals. In a lot of ways it's a lot like Bang! which I've never been a huge fan of. I know a lot of people enjoy that game so maybe it's just me that doesn't get it but to me it's just too random and can really drag on, especially as there's player elimination. With Shadow Hunters there's still player elimination but there's one important difference. On your turn you draw a card and these will either buff your character or, if you draw a green card (and this is the game changer), it can reveal information to you about another player. This means you can figure out what team they are likely to be on and, by seeing how they interact with other players, which team the other players may be on. It's all about transitive determination. I was taken out of the game first due to no fault of my own. Okay, a little of my own fault because my character's power was the ability to lie about the green cards which I totally didn't realise. I then spent the rest of the game agonising (not whining) about why people weren't attacking Craig (he obviously had a hidden agenda) and why people weren't drawing enough green cards. That game is so all about the green cards! An interesting twist is that none of us knew any of the character powers or win conditions. I guess after a few games they'd all be learnt which would add an extra dimension to the game.

After Shadow Hunters I played Ghost Stories. This time I'm pretty sure we broke no rules. As usual we were playing on the easiest setting but the game beat us pretty hard. As Wu Feng came out of the deck three of our monks were down to their last tao token. It wasn't long before the three were dead and there was no way we could reclaim the board. The third tile was haunted and the game ended with only one monk left standing and a full board of ghosts.

While I was playing Ghost Stories others were playing Fluxx and Small World. Steve won Small World and we finished up with a couple of games of Coup with Dan winning one and someone else winning the other. Maybe Steve. Let's say Steve. There's rumors of Adventure Time Munchkin next week. Mathematical!