Eminent Domain and Quarriors

[avram]

Been a while since I talked about boardgames, hasn’t it? I’ve been getting my fix at the monthly NerdNYC boardgame nights. I’ve played a couple of new things:

Eminent Domain
I’ve played this a couple of times. It’s a space-themed deck-building role-taking game, like a cross between Race for the Galaxy and Dominion. The innovation is that each time you take a role, you gain a copy of the card for that role. Also there are neat little plastic spaceships.

Quarriors!
Another deck-building game, but with dice instead of cards! You get a bag of dice with various symbols on them, and at the start of each turn you pull out six and roll them, generating “quiddity” (magical power) that can be used to summon creatures or buy new dice. Your creatures go out and fight other players’ creatures, and if they survive to the start of your next turn, they score victory points for you, and let you cull unneeded dice from your collection. We played this twice today, and while the first game took about an hour and a half, the second (once we all knew how to play) took just 45 minutes (and I won).

Eminent Domain seemed pretty tight, by which I mean various strategies became apparent as I learned the game, and it seemed like there was a clear link between success and strong play. Quarriors! seemed less so. There was a high luck element, and the strategic connections among dice were less clear than those among, say, Dominion cards. One of the discussion threads on BoardGameGeek claimed that there were some optional “expert” rules in an upcoming expansion that tightened up play: Allow the purchase of two dice per turn, and require that the scoring creature be culled.