More Boardgames, Four-Hero SDE

Last night, more boardgames were played!

We began with another game of Red November.  Matt drowned, as he passed out due to grog in a compartment that filled with water shortly thereafter.  We failed to stop the accidental launch of the ICBMs, thereby precipitating global gnomish thermonuclear warfare.  As a result, the ship which was supposed to come rescue us did not arrive, and we lost.

Then we played two games of space alert, both of which we lost.

After this we played two games of Super Dungeon Explore, with Drew as consul fielding a fire elemental spawner, a bramble knight spawner, and two spawners of kobolds.  We fielded the bearman berserker, the sniper, the thief, and the ember mage.  The first we lost in the first room due to over-aggressive tactics, while the second we lost in the first room mostly due to abominably poor rolls on our part and excellent rolls on Drew's.

We switched Matt to playing consul, and brought the paladin, the lancer, the ranger, and the ember mage.  Matt fielded a pair of turtleman spawners and a pair of plant spawners, and stacked all the troops of each type on only one of their spawners, leaving the other undefended.  We could not attack the undefended spawners, as we would then have to fight a miniboss with no loot, so we instead attacked the stacked plant spawner.  We drew a fortuitous environment card, which spawned some enemy squirrels who were quite annoying but also gave us temporary treasure items when we were in the plant spawner's tile.  These proved very useful, and let us destroy the plant spawner and hunt down the succubus miniboss that Matt subsequently spawned.  Ultimately, however, the game was too slow and we called it a Probable Hero Victory after that, because we all have to work today.  There was some discussion of how to speed up games, but the only definite conclusion drawn was the four hero-players is definitely too many.  We did reach the consensus that the early game and the late game are both interesting, because the heroes are in consistent danger, but that the middle-game is a slog where the heroes are under little threat except by minibosses.

But yeah, our track record for cooperative games this weekend was preeetty atrocious.