Philosophers, dragons and harems

It was a slow month for my D&D group. The current DM was probably still recovering from the reel of Chinese New Year or something. I can’t blame him; I’m still reeling from my Plants vs Zombies D&D game too. And no one else wanted to be the DM.

So a friend suggested that we meet up to play something else. In particular, he wanted to introduce me to the game of Three Dragon Ante for a long time, so this was good timing. It was a day full of card games. There were 3: Opus Dei, Three Dragon Ante, and Dominion.

Opus Dei

“Opus Dei” when (roughly) translated, means the “work of God”. Each player is a Zeitgeist. Each player has a world. There are human cards laid out. Most are Philosophers. A few are Scientists. Most dreaded are the Fools.

Each round, 12 human cards are laid out. When the human cards run out, a new “sun” (or year) starts, and another 12 human cards are laid out. There are 3 rounds.

Each human card is worth a certain number of points. The goal of each player is to amass the most number of points at the end of 3 rounds. The Philosophers are worth anywhere between 1 to 5 points.

The Greek Philosophers are usually worth a lot of points. You know, since philosophy practically sprung from Greece. Next are the German Philosophers. My friend told me something about Germany being the more aggressive in philosophy in modern times. Or some such.

Scientists have a different scoring mechanism. The number of points for each Scientist is worth the number of Scientists in your world. So if you have 1 Scientist, you have 1 point. If you have 3 Scientists, each Scientist is worth 3 points, so in total, you have 9 points.

The Fools are worth a negative number of points. The card game creator obviously have strong opinions. The Fools are generally individuals whom the creator deemed to have a negative impact upon the world.

Play goes on in a circle. On your turn, you pick 1 playing card from the deck, and decide to play up to 2 playing cards.

There are 3 types of play cards: Sun cards, Earth cards, and Miraculum cards. Sun cards affect all players (or worlds), for example, the self-referential “No other Sun card may be played while this Sun card is in play”. The current Sun card goes off when the new year (or “sun”) starts.

An Earth card affects only your world. For example, all Greeks in your world are worth 1 more point. There are negative ones too, for example, all Germans in your world are worth 1 less point. Which I got from a sabotaging friend…

A Miraculum card usually affects the human cards laid out. For example, move one human exactly 4 steps forward. Why would you want to do this? Because at the end of your turn, you create the front-line human into your world. If the front-line human is a Fool, you scored negative. So you want to move a Greek Philosopher up front.

I like this game.

Three Dragon Ante

The cards describe dragons and their powers. There is a money scoring mechanism, hence the “Ante” part. But it’s not real money.

After the hype that my friends created for me, I thought it’s a good game. I mean it has “dragon” in the name. My friends seem to like it. But I didn’t like it. It played too much like gambling. The flavour for the dragons aren’t strong enough to overpower the ante part. The goal is to possess the largest amount of gold. I think game ends when one player goes bankrupt.

I’m not going to talk much on this. You are encouraged to do research, or play the game to get a better idea. It didn’t really pique my interest.

Dominion

We only got to play 1 round of Dominion. It’s a resource-based game, where each player try to make the best use of his resources based on the available decks. There are 25 different decks of resource cards, and only 10 are in play. So the strategy for each game is different.

This was played at the end of the day, so I was drained. I didn’t have a strategy. Ok, maybe there is. I was telling my friends that the new players are the most fun, because they are the ones most likely to try weird strategies and in this case, cards. 2 of my friends who were relatively new to the game just bought resource cards for the heck of it.

It’s more fun than Three Dragon Ante though.

The goal is to score the most number of victory points. You can do research on the game play rules. There are probably better explanations on other websites.

There is this card that my friends seem to think breaks the game. It’s called the Harem. It’s worth 2 copper and 2 victory points. That means you get to use the card to buy resource cards, and it also counts as 2 victory points at the end of the game. A Harem card costs 6 pieces of copper.

“If you have 3 Harem cards on your hand, you can buy another Harem!”

Don’t think too much on that… it might mess up your life philosophy and beliefs…

Final thoughts

This was the first time I played any of the 3 card games. I like Opus Dei the most. The game mechanic can be separated from the flavour, which makes complete sense to my programming mind. The game mechanic appeals to me. The flavour of bringing philosophy to a game is also interesting. Each human card comes with a paragraph of what that human did. You can probably read the flavour text, not play the game, and it’s still worth your money.

I wouldn’t say Three Dragon Ante sucks, but it didn’t live up to what I thought it would be. I thought it would have more of an RPG flavour to it.

Dominion was fun. I will like to play with the other resource decks and see what strategies and plans I have to come up with.

This had been a nice non-D&D game day.