Over the holidays I spent much of my time unplugged. There were visits with family, celebrations of the season, and of course games of Magic to be played. There were a couple of card games that I thought would be interesting that we picked up mainly to play with my girlfriend and her son, another of which I picked up quite some time ago with the same idea in mind. Two of the games were wrapped as Christmas gifts for him, but I secretly wanted to play them just as bad!

My girlfriend and I decided to try a couple of these games out on New Year’s Eve, mainly to learn how to play them and so that she could gauge what his level of interest might be. He’s about to turn 10 years old so there are some games that might be a bit above his level of understanding or beyond his attention span. The main theme of the games that we picked out were that they embraced video game themes or were straight up conversions of old video games into card game form.

We started the evening with The Oregon Trail.

This one was right up my alley. I remembered playing the shit out this back on Apple computers in the “Computer Lab” in elementary school. She remembers playing it too, so despite having differing memories of the game, we were both intrigued to see how this would turn out. The game consists of cards, a die and an erasable board w/ pen. You’ll write out the names of your party, and there’s even tombstones of the otherside for when they die, and they WILL die. What set this game apart from the others is that it is actually a co-op experience, all the members of your party are working together to survive the Oregon Trail, just like in the video game. You’ll draw some trail cards and supply cards, and the game starts. You’ll have to match up trail cards that butt up against the starting city, and if you don’t have a trail card that will match up, you have to draw from the pile and skip your turn. Some trail cards are blank and simply serve to extend the trail, while others force you to roll a die to ford a river or draw a calamity card which typically means bad things are about to happen. Once you get 5 trail cards extended from the starting city, you’ll stack them and start on a new stack of 5. You have to do this a total of 10 times to reach Oregon. The calamity cards bring on diseases, kill off your oxen or poison your water, most of which can be cured or resolved using the supply cards. You’ll also occasionally draw a Fort or Town card and can then restock on your supplies, but typically you’re running out of them or losing them left and right, and sometimes you’ll pull a snake bite card and have an instant death. It was fun but without multiple players you’re probably not making it to Oregon. We managed to be on our 6th stack of 5 before dying, and that was the furthest we made it.

The other game we tried out, is called Boss Monster.

This one reminds me of Munchkin, another game I had played in the past (and finally got my own copy of over Christmas!). It’s also something like Dungeon Keeper, but uses old school 8-bit flavored art. Even the cover of the box reminds me of old Nintendo boxes, and the nostalgia factor is probably why I picked this one out in the first place. Basically you start off by randomly picking a boss monster which represents you. Then you’ll draw some room cards and some spell cards. The room cards represent your dungeon, and there are a number of phases for each round. First, you’ll build. Everyone picks a room and places it face down next to their boss monster. Everyone then reveals their room at the same time, and heroes spawn in town (which is just the center of the table). The heroes are baited to players dungeons based on symbols on the card. Whoever has the most of that symbol represented on their room cards (that are in play) will bait the hero into their dungeon. Each hero has a set amount of life and each room does a certain amount of damage to the hero as they pass through it. If they die on the way to the boss monster, you collect their soul. If they make it to the boss monster, you take a wound. Various effects can change what happens, and these effects are printed on the room cards (i.e. if a hero dies in this room, heal a wound). You can also cast spells to affect the game, though they can only be played during certain phases. You’re trying to win the game by collecting 10 hero’s souls, and avoid taking 5 wounds. Later after the standard heroes are all played through, epic heroes start spawning, and they are worth two souls each but definitely harder to take down. Overall I think it was a fun experience but my lady-love wasn’t as fond of it.

There was another game called the Super Mario Power Up Card Game that we bought as well, and it seems interesting but required a minimum of 3 players so we haven’t checked it out just yet. Overall I think this was a nice diversion from typical gaming and I’d recommend trying these titles out if you’re looking for a similar diversion!