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Stephen Tassie
Canada
Toronto
Ontario
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Earlier this week I had the opportunity to play some Titan. Years ago I acquired the old Avalon Hill version at an auction and have had very few opportunities to play it. I used to play a friend's copy a fair bit when I was in high school and the running joke in my group was "Who wants a quick game of Titan?" We didn't think that such a thing existed. We were wrong.
This weekend, I was running the open gaming lounge at a Toronto sci-fi convention (Ad Astra) and a fellow there was dting to play Titan, so we broke it out an began a five player game. Due to lack of attention spans and hypoglycemic issues, the game did not last longer than it took for th efirst palyer to be eliminated. So the game was abandoned, but it filled me with the urge to play again.
The next day I met my friend, Scott, at Snakes & Lattés and we decided to have a go at Titan. Something magical occured that day. We began setting up to play at 5pm (give or take a few minutes), and including rules review (Scott had played before, but not in years) and tear down time, we had finished not one, not two, but THREE games by 6:11pm. Not only did we play one "quick game of Titan," but we managed to play three.
All three matches were ended in a single combat. We rolled for starting towers, and all three times we occupied neighbouring towers (which increased the odds of early combat). Each of our three first battles had Titan legions in them - our first game, the battle was Titan vs. Titan - and in each one, the Titan died.
The first match was a foregone conclusion that one of us would lose the game, but in the subsequent games, angel legions fought Titans and won in both cases.
Scott thoroughly trounced my Titan in the first game, with a Titan legion that managed to have recruited a Warlock and a Guardian. In the second game his Titan fell to my Angel. In the final, tie breaking match, his Titan killed my angel, but not before taking a few hits of damage itself and then it fell to an incredibly successful roll from a simple Gargoyle. A Gargoyle who immediately received a field promotion!
In the third match, I had not intended to attack his Titan legion. My angel legion was parked on a tower and he had a 7 unit legion adjacent to it. On his turn, he split legions and moved one of the legions off the square, but moving the other (smaller) legion would have forced him into combat, so he left it stationed in the brush outside my tower. On my turn, the roll did not lead to any good recruiting options for my Angel legion, so I decided that I could take on a newly split, small legion and score some quick points. Little did I realise that he had left his Titan in the smaller of the two legions.
So through a combination of neighbouring start towers, a bit of poor planning and some lucky die rolls, I managed to play three games of Titan in just over an hour. Somebody call Guinness!
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