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Andreas Propst
Austria
enzenkirchen
upper austria
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Today I was glad to have one of my best friends and neighbour Luki
over to finally play a first game of BDB. We never got around to it before since Luki is studying medicine in Vienna, which obviously takes a lot of time - he was either at his flat in Vienna or had to study at home in our small village of Goldberg. So I was really excited to try the game with him at last. Luki is one of my oldest Magic: the Gathering buddies, a frequent victim of my playtesting sessions and plays Dominion and Dominion: Intrigue regularly. So he brought along a good amount of general gaming experience and was quite familiar with the concept of deckbuilding games.
Teaching BDB to Luki was a piece of cake. It took about 10 minutes for me to explain the rules and for Luki to understand everything. The fact that his English is excellent helped a lot there. So unlike in my previous games with my sister and mother the language barrier wasn't an issue at all. So the game could begin...
Luki intutievely went for that "Double Tackle" strategy I talked about being a viable way to victory in some earlier blog posts. His first Dino was dodgy Velociraptor, with which he inflicted some wounds early on. To make the Double Tackle Strategy work, Luki swapped his Velociraptor for a Spinosaurus (Using Velo's "Dart" attack, which allows you to retreat him for free), bought some Megalomanias (+1 Attach, +1 Strategy, +1 Buy and +1 Draw) and Charges (+1 Draw, +1 Attach, +1 Combat) and started to "Megabite" away with his Spino, soon killing the Spino I had bought as my starting Dino.
I bought some Megalomanias and Charges as well, threw in two Pincers (+1 Draw, +2 Strategy) and, as always, purged my Wound cards and also two of my Evades with Sacrifice.
This way we exchanged hits until Luki had scored 2 KOs (I had scored only 1 at that point) and everyone was left with heavily damaged Dinos. As far as I can recall, this has been one of the closest games I had ever played. Luki played like a pro right in his first game (he is quite a smart guy I must admit  ) so I had to give my best to score the two KOs that stood between me and victory.
The thing that eventually won me the game was that I purchased two Flamethrowers, which first killed Luki's benched and wounded Velociraptor and then his active Styracosaurus. I won at the very last moment - if Luki would have had one additional turn I would have been done for (see picture of the "final showdown" below).
As you can see (or not, with that blurry photo  ) my two Dinos had both only 10 Hit Points left when I played my last, winning Flamethrower...
So that was my first game of BDB with Luki. It took us about 50 minutes or so.
Overall he liked it a lot, wants to play again to discover and explore the tremendous strategic possibilities and when asked for criticism, he couldn't think of any, except that he would have liked to see more Dinos, a broader variety of them (As of the current rules, you play with 6 different types of Dinosaurs in the Dino deck). I offered him to play with a "Random Setup" next time so he could play with other Dinos than in the first game, which was played with my suggested "Starter Setup".
As Luki plays Dominion every once in a while, one question was inevitable: How does BDB compare to Dominion?
Luki mentioned three major things:
1.) The goal of the game, scoring 3 KOs, seems a lot more interesting and intriguing as the rather boring VP collecting in Dominion.
2.) Dominion is easier to play (not rules-wise - as I said before I was able to explain everything in 10 minutes - but rather strategy-wise) and to "control". In Dominion, once you got a good deck running, you are already halfway there on the path to victory. Not so much in BDB, where you have to make hard decisions and adapt to your opponent until the very end.
3.) Although the newer expansions for Dominion introduced more interactivity, BDB is far more interactive and player-vs-player-oriented, as you fight each other directly on the battelfield.
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So that was my first game of BDB with my good gaming buddy Luki. I'd like to seize the opportunity and thank him a ton for taking the time for playing, despite being so busy with studying, and for the nice feedback.
I am looking forward to many more games with my neighbourino, as he proved a worthy and though opponent right on the first game!
As always, thanks for reading!
Cheers,
Andi
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