New to Me – November 2020

Another month and another COVID month where I actually have some new stuff to talk about!

Kind of.

Expansions aren’t necessarily the same as playing “new” games, but they are still cool, right?

You’re not one of those that hates on all expansions just because “this should have been in the base game” even though including all of that stuff would make the initial cost of the game astronomical.

Are you?

Hopefully not.

Expansions can be superfluous (Editor: “oh, big word there!”). But they can also add some great things to a game.

Maybe the game works well without the expansions, but maybe it works even better with?

I know some games have the expansion “fix” the problems with the base game, and those can also be awesome (but also sad that the base game didn’t have that kind of fix to begin with).

Others just add a bunch of cool stuff. They’re not necessary. But they’re fun. And even more fun than the base game!

And maybe I wouldn’t play the base game without the expansion anymore, but that’s not because the base game sucks.

It’s because the expansion adds so much cool new stuff!

The Cult of the New to Me has been pretty lenient in not getting mad at me for not playing new stuff recently.

It’s like they’re actually, I don’t know, practicing kindness or something.

Either that or they’re plotting something.

Give it a few months and we’ll see how it shakes out.

So without further adieu (all of my adieu was stolen by a boss monster’s minion anyway), let’s begin!

Roll Player: Monsters & Minions (2018 – Thunderworks Games) – 2 plays

Designer: Keith Matejka

Artists: JJ Ariosa, Luis Francisco, Lucas Ribeiro

Players: 1-5

Adds a 5th player

During this whole COVID thing, my wife and I have really enjoyed playing Roll Player, the dice-placement game where you are basically rolling up an RPG character and trying to score points for doing it well.

I’m sure a lot of people were thinking, after reaching the end of the game, why can’t I do anything with this character that I’ve created? Is this all there is?

The Monsters & Minions expansion adds that to the game.

During the game where you’re rolling up your character, you can also go on a hunt and try to defeat one of the end-game monster’s minions.

The idea behind these minions is that you can then try to better your fight against the final monster after the game has basically ended.

With this expansion, the players will be facing a final monster after all of the dice-rolling and placement is done.

Each monster has three aspects to it that will possibly allow players to add combat dice to their attempts to defeat it.

These three aspects are Location, Obstacle, and Attack.

When defeating minions, if you roll high enough to get a trophy icon, you will be able to look at one of these things so you will know what is coming.

What are the combat dice? Whether facing a minion or the final monster, you will be forming a dice pool of combat dice (little dice that are used just for combat).

These dice will be rolled and then you will compare the total amount to the card in question.

You will always start with one, but you can get more depending on whether you meet the conditions (for the minion) or how you meet the requirements from the monster’s adventure cards (for the final monster).

You can also buy “mercenaries” (i.e. extra dice) for 5 gold or 3 experience points. Experience points are what you can earn for defeating minions and possibly buying some stuff from the market.

Having loved the base game, the wife and I really love this expansion. It’s very cool to have an end-game goal and I can just imagine how well this game and expansion would go with more players than just the 2 of us.

We did find (at least in our 2 plays so far) that we didn’t pay as much attention to the market as we did in the first games with just the base.

The only time we did was in the second game where I had a character class that gave me an attribute action (I think it was Dexterity) when I bought a Skill. So I bought a bunch of skills to take advantage of that.

Speaking of the Market, the new Market cards are pretty cool. I especially love the Scrolls that give you a one-time bonus depending on what it says and what you have. The Scroll above let’s you gain or lose gold based on where your alignment marker is. So if you happen to be on the +3 space, you get 6 gold! That’s a good investment for one gold.

The Unholy Flail (also pictured above) gives you an advantage against the minions and monster that you will be facing.

I love the choices you get with some of these Market cards.

The Malicious trait above gives you one point for each “1” you have on your character sheet. Combine that with a trait that gives you a bonus if a certain one or two of your attributes is below 8 can be quite lucrative.

I also really like the new character classes available with the expansion.

I really like the addition of monsters and minions that you can fight. It makes this seem even a bit more like an RPG that you are rolling a character for. The minions maybe not quite as much but definitely the end-game monster.

For the minions, unless you have some other reason to go after multiple ones, it seems like we just wanted to go after three of them so we could look at all three of the Monster’s cards (Obstacle, Location, Attack) and make sure we were ready for the final monster.

In the first game, I did have a trait that gave me points for multiple minion cards, so I went after a couple more, but otherwise it seemed like a bit of an afterthought.

I guess it does give you something else to do if you would just be discarding a card from the Market to get 2 gold. If you don’t really need the 2 gold, a hunt is not a bad option if you have enough combat dice.

I did enjoy the new character class choices that you have with this one. The above pictured ones are pretty cool (not moving your alignment marker when you buy a Trait can be huge!), but I also enjoyed the class (not pictured) that let me buy mercenary combat dice for 2 gold instead of 5.

That came in very handy during the final fight!

Even though I still lost.

In fact, my wife beats me at this game way too often to be comfortable…

But I’m ok with that!

This expansion is really cool and I can’t wait to try the 2nd one (Fiends & Familiars, which I’ve been holding off on so I will have a “New to Me – December” post to do)

I won’t play Roll Player without this expansion (or perhaps the 2nd one) any more, as I love what it adds to the game.

Legendary Marvel: Champions (2018 – Upper Deck) – 2 plays

Designer: Devin Low

Artist: Jeremy Colwell

Players: 1-5

When I mentioned the news of the 2021 Legendary Marvel expansions, I also talked about how I’ve rejoined the Legendary community after a long hiatus.

Part of that resurgence was buying the Champions expansion for the game.

We played one game with only cards from this expansion (except for Henchmen, which unfortunately the expansion doesn’t come with so I had to make one up) and the characters are a lot of fun!

I already posted a picture of one of the heroes involved, but all five of them are pretty cool.

As with all of the other 100-card expansions, there are 5 heroes involved with this one, in this case most all involved with the Champions team.

There is the Totally Awesome Hulk, Ms. Marvel, Nova, Viz Vision, and Gwenpool (not a Champion but still included) in the hero selection.

The expansion also brings back the “Demolish” keyword, which means that you turn over the top card of the Hero deck and each player discards a card with the same cost as the revealed hero.

This can be pretty devastating depending on what you have ready to play in the next round. Or you might get lucky and you don’t have any cards of that cost.

The expansion has 2 Masterminds (Pagliacci and Fin Fang Foom) and they can be pretty tough.

The first time we played with just this expansion, we played the new keyword “Cheering Crowds” wrong. What it should do is let you KO a Bystander you have rescued and play a copy of the same card with that keyword. We were actually playing it that it let you play a copy of any card you had played that turn.

That made things super-easy!

Overall, I really liked what these Heroes added to the game. The villains are pretty cool too and I’m very happy to add these cards into my Legendary Marvel collection. With so many expansions, my card randomizer may not come up with any of these for a while, but if it does, I will enjoy them!

So there we go. A couple of new expansions played in November.

These expansions are really cool and I’m happy I played them.

One of these days, we’ll get an actual new game in here!

Hopefully prior to when we can actually go to a new game day.

It’s tough knowing that some of these games that I’m buying won’t see the light of day until COVID is over and we can actually have a normal game day.

But I’m still enjoying them!

Gaming with the wife is a lot of fun, and that’s been one good thing about COVID: playing stuff that I normally wouldn’t be.

I have more Legendary Marvel expansions on the way, so hopefully that means that I’ll have content for more of these posts in future months.

Have you played any of these? What are your thoughts?

Let me know in the comments.