Argent - the Consortium
- remember how I said Agricola is a knife fight for certain spaces? Argent is a knife fight where everyone brought a gun. And flamethrowers. And nukes. My elevator pitch is "Imagine Hogwarts if Voldemort was a rather unremarkable teacher. The headmaster just announced he's stepping down and one of you will replace him." There's 12 different voters (2 revealed, 10 hidden), and you have to win the majority over to your side in order to win the game. There's different rooms in the university, and you can send your mages to them, so standard worker placement stuff, but the catch is that your spells and even your own mages (workers) can do things. Do you want a space someone else took? Send a pyromancer there and burn your opponents mage (who has to go to the infirmary) and take it for yourself. But beware the nature mage, who can just use strength of earth and boot your guy to a different space and take it for herself. And that's just things you can do in round 1. By round 5 you'll be nuking entire rooms, playing your mages in a shadow dimension, and breaking the laws of time and space for fun and profit.
Oh and the Voldemort thing? Candidates include an 1100 year old Lich with a grudge against practically everyone, an eldritch abomination who is teaching classes for fun, and a red dragon.
Cutthroat Caverns
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Without cooperation you won't survive. Without treachery you won't win.
That's what's printed on the game box. A "cooperative" dungeon crawl where only the last person hitting a monster gets the glory. So you sit there. It's got 180 HP, and you do have a critical hit 100 and are going 4th, so you might kill it, but... what if the person going first just pokes it with a stick (0 damage)? I think of it as Munchkin done right, because it has similar levels of "Take That", but with two important changes. First you have HP, and when you die you're just dead. No glory for the dead. And second, the monsters are weird and can change the entire game. Like, the Wereboar. If he bites you you get an "are you a wereboar" card. 5 say "no", one says "yes". And at the end of the game you flip it, and if you're a wereboar the party gets to fight the Wereboar again (you win if you kill them all). Or the minecart racing, where you're just racing each other through mineshafts and screw the fighting monsters stuff. Or summoner, who is going to add a new monster to the deck every round he's alive, so suddenly screwing your neighbors comes with a caveat of "but will you actually survive the newer, longer dungeon?"
Less Euro than Argent, but a ton of fun.
Obviously Secret Hitler, Resistance, Mafia, etc. but I figure you know those.