Over the 30 years that we have been married, my husband and I have often had different activities. The only things we have ever done together for any length of time was being in a pipe band while we lived in Trenton and being a part of a strategy game group here that meets once a week. Even at home, we tend to do our own thing.
When I returned from my parents at the end of January, Chris brought out this board game we had not yet tried called Pathfinder. Not a new game but new to us. It looks very much like Dungeons and Dragons in that there are dice rolls which determine the outcome of encounters but also a deck building aspect.. I was skeptical as I had tried Descent which is more like D&D and I expected this to feel the same.
Each person starts with 15 cards. The cards may be weapons, armor, spells, allies, items or blessings and how many of each type depends on your character. We played with two characters each; a wizard, sorcerer, fighter and cleric.
For each scenario there were six location decks. In those decks were monsters, henchman, villains, barriers, items, weapons, spells, armor, allies or blessings. Basically some cards were good things and some were bad.
On a character’s turn they would turn over the top of one of these shuffled decks and encounter the card. The card says what skill you need to acquire or fight the card and you roll a certain die depending on what your skill level is. For example, my fighter started with a 8 sided die for a dexterity roll while the cleric only got a 4 sided die.
To beat a scenario, we had to fight and beat the henchmen to close the locations and then lastly beat the villain. Sounds easy right?
Each scenario took 1.5-2hrs. We only had 30 character turns to beat the villain or we had to start over. Every time we started over we had to create location decks again with the required number of each type of card. Another challenge was that if a character ran out of cards in their personal deck, they would die.
We had a couple scenarios that we ended up having to go through three times before we beat it. There were six adventures with five scenarios each. Even doing each scenario only once would take about 60 hours of just playing time to finish.
You may ask where the excitement was in it for us. At the end of each successful scenario, we would get some sort of prize. We could increase a skill, gain some loot, add to the number of cards we could have in our hand or add another card to our decks. Any cards that we encountered and acquired during each scenario would be shared at the end of the scenario with everyone. This allowed you to trade up weapons or spells as you could still only have a set number of each type of card in your hand. With each adventure level, more cards were added of each type with higher required dice rolls to keep it challenging.
I am not sure if it was the fact that we won by the skin of our teeth many times or lost a scenario (or three) by a dice roll but we kept wanting to play and keep going. We finished the entire game of Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords just last week. We found other character sheets for the game online and just started all over using six characters that are different types: Monk, Sorcerer, Ranger, Oracle, Fighter and a different Cleric.
We had to play using the longer direction of the table because of the extra characters and two added location decks. This made reaching the dice tower more difficult.
Chris decided he needed to build some individual dice trays for us.
We also created these character tokens on plywood to show which location each character is at during the game.
Chris told me yesterday that he found another version of adventures 1-6 online with different challenges and villains. That means we will play through the game at least one more time after this. Not bad for a $40 used game purchase.
Aside from spending much more time together, we are also having less screen time. Chris is getting less headaches which were caused by too much time on the computer and I am watching less Netflix just to kill time. Sometimes becoming obsessed with a game can be a good thing.
Sounds like you found a game connection!