September 25, 2007

Only three people tonight: Phil, Eli, and myself. We played two games.

• Infernal Contraption - This is a humorous card game for two to four players. The deck consists of contraptions, upgrades, consumables, and power sources. Each player gets a power core to start. The deck is then divided up equally between the players, so each player has his own draw pile (called a “parts pile”). Each player then draws an initial hand of cards from his parts pile. On each player’s turn, the player gets a chance to add parts to his or her machine by playing cards from the hand. Then the machine is aimed at an opponent and activated, and each part is evaluated in order. Contraptions do things like take cards from the opponent’s hand or parts pile, or give the player parts from the “scrap pile” (discard pile), or remove parts from the opponent’s machine. Upgrades make adjacent contraptions more powerful. Consumables are powerful one-use-only cards. Power sources are necessary for other cards to operate. When a player runs out of cards in his parts pile, he is out of the game. The last player remaining wins. Phil built a machine with a contraption that stole one card from the opponent’s parts pile, and added that card to his parts pile; he then attached three x2 upgrades, so he was taking 8 cards a turn! This gave Phil the lead early in the game. Both Eli and I attacked Phil. Phil concentrated on me, and eventually ran my parts pile out. But, Eli was able to take Phil out, and won the game.
• Wiz War - This is an old favorite (from 1983) in which each player is a wizard, running around a dungeon, trying to steal treasures from the other wizards. Each player has a hand of spell cards to use against the other players. Early on, it looked like it was going to be an easy win for Phil. But then I played “Swap Home Bases” on Phil, and turned the tide in my favor. Eli set up Booby Traps to stop me, but to no avail. I created a skeleton, and sent it through the traps, and then walked onto my home base (formerly Phil’s home base), dropped my second treasure, and won.

Our next session will be on October 9.