Board Games V: Pathfinder Adventures Card Game, Alchemists, Pandemic

And lo, there were games!

Pathfinder Adventures Card Game (hereafter PACG): Jared picked this up recently and was very excited to play it.  It was interesting and fairly fun if not what he expected (something closer to Sentinels).  Six locations, four PCs.  Each location and each character has a deck; a PC's deck represents their available HP, and their hand provides them resources for exploring locations.  Each location deck contains monsters, obstacles, loot, and either a henchman or the adventure's villain.  Defeating a henchman closes the location where it was found, which means that no further exploration there is possible and the villain cannot flee there if he is defeated.  If you defeat the villain without closing all the locations, he gets shuffled into a random one, along with divine blessings in the remaining locations.  It's possible to temporarily close a location when the villain is defeated if you have a party member there, which encourages the party to spread out; our D&D mentality and some of the mechanics (bard's support ability, ability to pass cards to other players at same location) encouraged us to bunch up, two players at each of two locations.  We fought the villain twice before we ran out of time (there's a turn limit), and because we were concentrated we were unable to close many locations to him.  As a result, we lost.

There is a campaign mode, where you alter your character's deck over iterated games (and also alter your character's limits on certain types of cards in your deck; ie, I had a ranger, and with sufficient experience I could gain access to spell cards).  I think there's some promise in the deckbuilding aspect of the game, but I'm not sure I'd want to play a proper campaign; there's a lot missing compared to the RPG experience.  Fun, but not the same sort of fun.

Alchemists: Took a benadryl before this and was pretty fuzzy; came in last by a fair margin.  Oh well.  It seems the meta has developed since last I played, with lots of turn-3 debunks where the debunker didn't actually know if they were correct, and used it to gain information.  There was some discussion of playing Master Mode next time, where this is not feasible.

Pandemic: An unforeseen chain outbreak in Asia got us.  So it goes.