Had some fun tonight. My buddy and I gamed for about 5 1/2 hours, only getting in one game of Elder Sign and one of Castle Ravenloft. We didn't do too badly in either, given it was our first time playing both.
Elder Sign started off pretty well, with me quickly amassing 4 Elder Signs and him getting one to throw at Yig. Then he decided to take an Otherworld challenge, knowing that he only had a slim chance of avoiding getting devoured. He said "Sometimes you need to take risks" when I advised him to wait until the daily effect from the current Mythos card ended. He took the risk, failed, lost his Elder Sign after getting devoured, and caused me to lose one due to the ongoing effect on the mythos card. We had very few doom tokens on Yig and had 5 Elder Signs and next thing I knew we were down to 3 and we were spawning monsters and doom tokens like crazy. Yig awoke and I was promptly devoured, as I had no items at the time to sacrifice. My buddy had 4 clue tokens and max stamina/sanity, so he went round-and-round with Yig, slowly whittling the doom tokens down. After what seemed like 20 minutes, he removed the last one and won.
Castle Ravenloft went pretty smoothly as well. We played the second adventure, where you have to drive forward through the castle and locate an item in the chapel. Things took a bad turn when he drew an encounter turn that swapped him with the furthest monster away (which was on the complete other side of the map). We eventually made it to the chapel and he killed both monsters in one attack. He then claimed the item and though he had fulfilled the victory requirements, it didn't make sense to us thematically that a cleric sent us in the fetch the item and we didn't have to make it out with it. So we decided to keep going once I caught up to him and we drove our way back through the traps and enemies that were in-between us and the stairs. Once we made it to the squares at the top of the stairs (and defeated the spider that spawned there as a result of an encounter card, allowing me to level up with the natural 20 I rolled to defeat it and the 5 exp I already had), we declared it a victory. Very fun. I am very much looking forward to playing again next week and I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of Drizzt in a couple weeks. He said he will probably buy Ashardalon, so we will be able to roll through all three.
I am pretty pleased that I finally played Elder Sign, since I have owned it for two months almost. And knocking another unplayed game out was cool too. Hopefully my two X-Wing core sets get here this week (they only shipped out of Philly on Saturday though, so probably next Thursday at the earliest), because that is what I spend my time at work doing now, is reading about different 100-point squads and strategies and trying to decided which expansions to buy to go with the two cores. I am so excited about that game. I also need to get a good mat. I can't settle on which Hubble deep sky pic I want to use though, there are so many good ones out there.
