The Masked Carnie

Someone on the Chaos forum asked what the game was like without a 4th player.  I figured that subject has enough depth that I can just go all over it in here.

As the deadline for release creeps up on us, we're getting a lot more images to check.  I hope to use this entry to compile all these together.  Obviously, they're all kept after the break.  They're rather large in their real forms, so click them to get the full images if you can't quite see.

I've investigated this expansion to Chaos in the Old World as far as I could.  The information is actually rather scattered around Fantasy Flight's pages, so here's a little compendium of all the various things I could find.  All information is compiled from Fantasy Flight's expansion site .

It's come to me that there's an article on FFG's site about how to win by dial, but there isn't one really anywhere about how to win by points for all characters.  It seems rather unfair, so before it's made totally useless by the new expansion, I thought I'd put my thoughts out there on the subject.

I just had a rather interesting game of Chaos in the Old World yesterday.  It was the second consecutive session with this group.  One was a regular player (Slaanesh), another very bad at it (Nurgle), and the other brand new (Khorne).  I had been leading for a while, but eventually the other players started going after me.  My dial was doing very well, but after one unfortunate round, it became rather clear that I was not going to win that way anymore.  I was also doing really poorly in points, so I basically resigned myself to losing.  A miracle occurred that really taught me something about the game, details after the break.

One of the tenets of Playing to Win is that not only do you do whatever is necessary to win, it can actually be advantageous to sometimes take bad strategies because your enemies won't see them coming. I had an opportunity to exercise this yesterday in Chaos in the Old World. Khorne generally wins by letting his advancement dial get run up, killing anything standing near him. He doesn't usually care about the score track except to consider who's ready to explode there. Well, I had that ridiculous opportunity to actually win by points, and I did so in a rather awesome way.

This one really took me by surprise and is now quickly becoming a regular game with us.  It really took some convincing to get me into this game (sounds familiar to my own struggles getting others into my games), but I'm glad I did.  In this game, heroes are more of an inconvenience than anything else.  Instead, you all are playing 4 dark gods all trying to corrupt the world in your own ways.  Each god tries to win by different means, so players can really get into character here.  Although the game takes up very few turns, those turns can take a very long time to set up (especially when I'm over-analyzing everything).  Players can win either by amassing lots of points from domination & corruption or just improving themselves to perfection.  It's rather pricey at $60, but considering I paid about that much for Pandemic with On the Brink, I don't feel so bad about it.