NightFall

[redemption99]

Anyone else here play this Deck Building Card Game?(Nightfall)

It's a lot of fun and I got it a few months back in the school semester. It's very fast paced and you can through a game in like 30-45 mins at the most.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/88408/nightfall

[The Schaef]

Content warning for those troubled by vampire stuff.

I've been curious about this game for a while, if only because I'm curious about how different games give different treatments to the deck-building genre.

Dominion's simplistic-but-elegant system has you buying points into your deck, which are required to win but also interrupt deck flow.  (mild content warning: there's a Witch card and a small expansion set of cards dedicated to alchemy, but you can include or exclude any cards you want; nothing but money and points are required.)

Thunderstone (content warning: some magicky stuff) has you buy cards into your deck but the purpose is to go fight monsters, which then go to your deck as points.  Probably the closest to Dominion in gameplay but turns it into a dungeon crawl.

Ascension (content... warning?  The thematic material is kind of obtuse) is what Dominion would be like if it were Fluxx.  Whereas the previous two titles have particular rules governing the number of cards you can play/buy/attack per turn, Ascension is a lot more free-form: you have money points and punching points, and you can basically buy or punch as many cards as you are able to afford that turn.  Also, punched enemies go into a common discard pile instead of your deck, so they convey a reward one time and are gone forever.  And the available cards are not stacks of cards but one giant random pile with only six cards showing at a time.  This means that gameplay is much more tactical than strategic; you don't know what cards are coming up from one turn to the next, and comboing cards is both more difficult and less prevalent.  Also, it makes the four colored themes semi-meaningless.

I'm not sure how to describe Heroes of Graxia; it's kinda halfway between Thunderstone and Ascension.  I just know I didn't like the gameplay.  One point of note: you can attack other players armies on the table and not just baddies.

Josh and I have also played the deck-building cash in on the popular zombie video game franchise.  The gameplay is not great but the theme actually made it more fun for us to play than Graxia.  Still not something I'd recommend, if not for the zombie content, then just because it doesn't play very well.

So this brings me to Nightfall.  We have demo decks at my gaming club but no rules were included and we haven't found anyone who has the game who can teach us.  One point I liked from what I've heard, is that instead of buying points into your deck, you're trying not to take damage cards into your deck, which aside from being negative also slow your deck down like victory points.  So it's my understanding that the goal is a low score kinda like golf.

Did I get this right?  What more can you tell us?

[redemption99]

That sounds about right, the point is to get the least amount of wounds and the best part of this deck building game is that your starting deck gets rid of itself after you play the starting cards so that helps make your deck fast and furious. Lots of different strategys to employ when building decks also helps make it fun even if you play a lot.

[The Schaef]

I like that, since most games make you work to get rid of your starting cards, which become an anchor almost immediately in gameplay.

The problem with Thunderstone is that it's often difficult to get rid of bulk once you start getting good cards, combined with the fact that various monsters can trash your good cards when you finally have something that can cut through the more difficult junk on the table.  But I also think going to the dungeon just to bury a difficult monster is an underrated tactic.

The problem with the zombie card game is that there are only a few cards that trash from your deck but I consider them critically important, because you have no idea if the next zombie is going to be a 10 or a 90, so the only way to make sure you don't end up dead or mostly dead is to slowly upgrade all your ammo to 30, get two or three copies of the best gun, and weed everything else out of your deck, so that you have a minimum of 45 damage every hand.  It drags the entire game to a halt.

So being able to trash your starting deck early only entices me more.

[redemption99]

Yea though in the first "zombie game", there was a great card that made you able to get your deck down fast that only cost 20 gold. In the expansion there wasn't that card and made the game slower but at least it wasn't broken as fast as it was for me in the first game.

I do like the aspects of Nightfall but I always find myself irritated when people choose to attack me over someone else, :p Of course I am usually exaggrating the amount of wounds I acctually have but  at the time I don't know that lol.

[The Schaef]

Quirk of Fate did the job rather nicely.