Another six-player session of Dune. We only had five hours to explain the rules and play, so we cut it short after the sixth turn.
Players were Dagon (Atreides), Shelly (Bene Gesserit), Brian (Emperor), Cade (Fremen), Romeo (Guild), and Brain (Harkonnen).
The first alliance opportunity appeared early (turn 2?). Atreides, Emperor, and Harkonnen all had solid garrisons on one stronghold each, and the other two were lightly held, so I suggested a three way alliance and a quick push to victory.
Fearing the power of our combined prescience, money, and treachery, the three lesser powers allied to oppose us. We *almost* managed a turn three win, but Ro used the voice on my leader in the final combat and I came up one troop short of victory, leaving us with just four of the necessary five strongholds.
We'd pretty thoroughly depleted our troop strength going for the quick win, so the lesser factions were able to temporarily push us out of two of the strongholds. The remainder of the game was a more methodical crawl back toward control of the necessary five strongholds.
We called the game after five hours, with our alliance controlling four strongholds. Another couple of hours would surely have brought the win.
Here's a fun fact: The combination of the Atreides ability to look at all treachery cards before they are auctioned, the Emperor's power to gift money to allies and receive all auction payments, and the Harkonnen eight card hand size meant that our alliance dominated the treachery card auctions. If a card was crucial, we could get it for essentially no cost. On several occasions, we managed to bluff our opponents into paying way too much for entirely worthless cards. Oh, how we laughed!
Here's a not so fun fact: the BG voice power is really annoying, especially when shared with allies.
So that's a totally unbiased account of our second game of Dune. No clear winner when we called it, but things were heavily tilted toward the glorious A-E-H alliance.
Game on!
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Great recap, Brian .. enjoyed reading it! BG voice power annoying .. lol :)
ReplyDeleteIs the increased playtime over Cosmic Encounter worth it? How did the experience compare to AGoT?
ReplyDeleteHi Steve. I think that Dune and CE are too dissimilar to compare in that way. AGoT is comparable, as both it and Dune are fundamentally the same kind of game.
ReplyDeleteI think Dune is the better game, for two reasons (that I can think of right now). Amongst my reasons:
(1) AGoT had brutal downtime. That killed the game for me.
(2) Dune is much more thematic. Every faction has its own set of special powers. Even more importantly, once you're in an alliance you share part of your powers with your allies. For example, everyone who is allied with Bene Gesserit gets to use the Voice in combat. Which pisses me off!
I think that the asymmetrical and shared powers is really what makes the game shine. However, not everyone agrees. Shelly got really frustrated by the way that Dagon, Brian, and me were combining powers to limit her alliance's access to treachery cards (which play a key role in combat). Our combined powers created this little sub-game that we got to play in manipulating the card supply, which was a lot of fun for us, but tedious and annoying to her.
The chuckling and gloating probably didn't help.
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