new game: Defenders of the Realm

[cellio]

Dani played Defenders of the Realm at Origins and found it promising despite its high similarity to another game we enjoy, so he ordered a copy. We've now played a few games.

This is a cooperative game where the players are trying to prevent the spread of four strains of monsters before they overwhelm the map. The map consists of a bunch of interconnected sites, each color-coded to one of the four types of monster. On each turn new monsters appear in designated locations (dictated by cards), and if you get more than three monsters in a particular location that spot becomes tainted. Each type of monster also has a general; the generals might move during the "darkness spreads" stage (also when new monsters come out), and if any of them reach the capital you lose. Other ways to lose are to run out of taint markers and to run out of monsters of any given color. You attack monsters by going to their locations and rolling combat dice; you attack generals by accumulating cards of the right colors, which you draw each turn. Each player has a unique role with associated special abilities. You win by killing all four generals.

But wait; this isn't at all like Pandemic. Why, this is non-deterministic! You have to roll dice to attack infections, er, monsters. And the infection, err, darkness-spreads, cards don't get reshuffled and put back on top. And taint is completely different from outbreaks. Um, yeah.

But all that said, it's an enjoyable game; while it blatantly rips off most of the Pandemic mechanics, it doesn't feel like a complete knock-off. This is its own game, though I do wonder how the publisher has stayed out of trouble.

Defenders of the Realm is more complicated, and after three playings of the game I don't feel that complexity serves it well. Each character role has three special abilities; in a large game I found it harder to keep track of which other players were best-suited for which tasks because I had to remember more factoids. (Contrast with Pandemic, where if someone is the scientist, for instance, all I have to remember is "needs four cards to cure instead of five". That's easy.) Further, the monster strains behave differently, both in how hard they are to kill and special abilities. The game did not need that. In addition to roles having more traits to remember, players also have active quests and, if they've completed others, benefits from that. So now I have to try to remember all that too, if we want to be able to plan cooperatively to best overall effect.

As in Pandemic, some of the cards are also special events (rather than monster/disease-killing cards). Pandemic has no more than ten of these in play; I saw more than ten different ones pass through my hand in Defenders of the Realm in a single game. I pretty much wrote off trying to track special cards that others had, though I was able to remember the existence of a few particularly-useful ones (someone has One Quiet Night, err whatever that's called in this game).

Defenders of the Realm works reasonably, with those reservations, for four or five players. (Officially it only supports four but we played a five-player game and saw no ill effects.) It does not seem to scale well for smaller numbers; Dani and I played a two-player game and the monsters and taint overwhelmed us, in large part because killing the generals requires the resources of several players at once. The generals don't get any easier to kill in a two-player game but you have half the ammo of a four-player game. If we play more smaller games we will probably experiment with house rules.

I need to comment on some of the physical artifacts. The "darkness spreads" cards govern both the appearance of new monsters and movement of the generals. The former is easy to read, but the latter was impossible for me to parse even with a magnifying glass. This is one of those games where they let art get in the way of legibility. Be warned. The quest cards also use a small font, and two of the generals were hard for me to distinguish from their minions (the other monsters). A third one kept falling over. None of this is insurmountable; we had someone with better vision manage the monster stuff and we played with the one general lying down. But it's an area where a little more thought would have resulted in better game components.

Pandemic is definitely the tighter game and, for me, more enjoyable so far. But for a change of pace and a longer game (a couple hours rather than 30-45 minutes), Defenders of the Realm is worth a look too.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

This is its own game, though I do wonder how the publisher has stayed out of trouble.

Well, you can't copyright an *idea*... (Though, who knows, you might be able to patent a game mechanic. I seem to recall WotC trying to copyright "tapping".)