What Do I Know?

My friend picked up a copy of the Relic boardgame from Fantasy Flight and he wanted to know if I wanted to give it a whirl before the DCC game on Thursday.  There were three of us, and to summarize, I had a lot of fun with the game.

I had never played Talisman before, so I was not sure how the game was going to play.  One of us picked the Ratling Sniper, the other took a Sanctioned Psyker, and I took the Rogue Trader.  Before it was all over, the Sanctioned Psyker was out of the game due to corruption  (hm), and was replaced with an Inquisitor.

Essentially you are trying to work your way around the outer and middle ring to build yourself up so you can enter the final ring and deal with the “boss” threat in the center.  Your character has various attributes that level up when you turn in trophies, and you add those attributes to your die rolls when you resolve tests.  You also pick up influence markers, that you can use to buy various things based on where you land on the board.

Ultimately, you want to end up snagging a Relic or two, which give you some neat abilities, and then move into the final ring until you meet up with the boss and hopefully beat him.  If you die, you lose your stuff and start over in one of the corners of the outer ring, and if you gain too much corruption, you leave the game and start fresh, with no levels or anything, with a new character.

What is kind of nice about the game is that the rules seem to reinforce the fiction of the game.  When I played my Rogue Trader as going for as much influence as I could, that seemed to play into my strengths.  Unfortunately, our ratling sniper had some really bad luck and was actually further behind then the Inquisitor was, which was that player’s second character.

We also had some fun moments where the Inquisitor was continually recruiting my character to help him fight some massive threats, over and over again.  The Inquisitor’s player also seemed to keep getting some of the oddball mission, such as getting defeated.

Fairly early on we got some heavy hitter opponents on the board, such as Greater Daemons with an attribute of 12  (the top score that I noticed for anything).  On top of this, we determined that the new store location doesn’t like our dice, and forced us to roll horribly for most of the game  (except when one of us was rolling for the bad guys, when we got multiple sixes going).

I’d definitely play it again.  I made it to the “boss” twice, and “sort of” defeated him, because I made my first test against him just as we called the game to start DCC for the night.  I’m looking forward to getting a chance to play the game again, and seeing how the different characters might chance the play experience.

As always with Fantasy Flight, the game is gorgeous, but man does Fantasy Flight get their money’s worth from those two part black circular things that they put together their dials with.  Also, after the low die rolls that went on all night, we determined that we’re going to need to bring a stack of character sheets or something to sacrifice to the spirit of the new location of the game store before our dice are back to normal.