Jon Grantham
United States
University Park
Maryland
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After reading a lot of interesting things about this game and failing to procure it in a math trade, I managed to pick this up pretty cheaply on eBay.
Ben, Paul and I broke it out for the first time yesterday. I went through the rules with them, which took a while, but didn't result in too much confusion. There were a few points that need to be cleared up as we went along -- do you get one point per labyrinth or one point for every space you are ahead of the other team? Do you have to match both the strength and wits on an equipment card, or just one? I don't feel like we got confused about anything major, though, or stayed confused about anything for very long.
Based on advice I had read on BGG, we played 6 characters per team. We determined at random that Ben would be Team White and Paul and I would be Team Black. I was a little worried about this imbalance in the number of characters, but it didn't matter too much...even after I had decided what to do with my 3 (later 2) characters, I could amuse myself kibitzing about what Paul should do.
I drew Siennya, Sgt. Gritt and Pyraxian. Paul had Pat Garrett (who I insisted on calling "Mrs. Garrett"), Marcus Aurus and Dirk Slade. Ben featured Spartacus, Sir Gawain, Frostdancer (quickly dubbed "Snowflake"), Boris Andronov, Pvt. Sanchez and Tex.
The game got off to a quick start (thanks to the 6 characters per side), with Paul and I concentrating on the labyrinths while Ben sent three of his characters to gang up on Sgt. Gritt. Sgt. Gritt took a little damage, but dealt some back to Spartacus. I was able to send Pyraxian almost straight into a labyrinth, and Paul got another one, to help us post an early 2-0 lead.
Unfortunately, we didn't end up with great offensive cards. I had the Satchel Charge, which I accidentally gave to Siennya without realizing she couldn't use it. It would have been great to take down Ben's marauding characters, but it was not to be. Ben finally knocked off Sgt. Gritt to close the gap to 2-1. As he succeeded in challenges, he moved ahead 3-2 and got some fairly nasty ranged weapons to boot. He even tied up one of our labyrinths to push things to 3-1. Only bad luck kept him from going to 4-1.
At this point, we declared a time limit of half an hour. In the remaining time, Ben sent four of his characters to finish off Dirk Slade (who he'd been afraid of the entire game). He killed Dirk, but not before Dirk killed one of his characters (I forget which). He was also finally able to take a pot shot at the Pyraxian -- with 2 health, it seems like he's living on borrowed time -- but only do 1 damage. We completed a challenge to break a tie and move things back to 3-2. On the last turn of the game, Siennya was facing the dreaded minivan, which had vanquished the Pyraxian previously (can you blame him?). She SQUEAKED, which would have been cool, except for the fact that we need to tie up the labyrinth to send things into overtime.
All in all, Ben had a well-deserved victory. Everyone involved enjoyed the game very much. On that basis, I'm planning to pick up DoA 2: Intensity. Contrary to some other people on BGG, I don't think we were too thrilled by the wacky situations of the game. It was more like an opportunity to have a crazy, chaotic battle without devolving too much into a slugfest. There seemed to be the right tension between trying to beat up the other team's characters and trying to face the challenges yourself.
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Gregory Wong
United States
San Jose
California
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Please check out my Duel of Ages Quick Reference sheets.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/file/info/17816
It covers all of the expansions and the Masters Addendum. (I think it's missing info on Jump Pad. I'll have to add that in one day.)
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Ben Stern
United States
Baltimore
Maryland
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Couple of comments from my perspective.
As Jon stated, I really enjoyed the game. I was actually checking with him last night to find when we can get together again for the next game.
There is a nice balance of trying to get points by winning the challenge in a labyrinth and just staying out in the open and fighting it out. The random characters I started out with were very strong at melee fighting so started the game with trying to kill some of the other characters. I did learn pretty quickly that this can be difficult and dangerous and allowed Jon and Paul to jump out to a 2-0 lead as they were using the labyrinth strategy.
The one imbalance I see is the randomness in the characters received in the beginning of the game. I think overall, I had the better characters for combat and controlled the other teams movement by placing my characters where they could easily begin melee or distance attacks. Jon and Paul's team, however had the most powerful character in our game, Dirk Slade. When I finally decided to attack him (and, yes I was afraid to attack him all game and you will hear why in a moment), it was during Dirk's movement and he moved in such a way that I had 4 characters that could use attacks of opportunity fire on him. Where Dirk stopped, I noticed that Tex could fire and then move into melee (one of Tex's special powers that we may not have used correctly...) AND 3 other characters could move into melee. With 9 attacks on Dirk before he could attack once, I figured I would never get a better chance to attack him. Too make a long story short, I barely killed Dirk with my ninth and last attack and, in his dying action, Dirk easily killed one of my better characters. Maybe it is better just to stay afraid and ignore Dirk if he is one of the characters in the game...
All in all, a very fun game that I would always be willing to play.
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Posted Sun Apr 27, 2008 6:05 pm
