Friday was face-to-face board games night at a friend’s place. I took Scully with me and there were six of us altogether for games. We played No Thanks, then Heat: Pedal to the Metal, and then a new game for me, Dungeon Academy.
In this game there is a dungeon map made of sixteen dice which are dumped at random into a 4×4 square tray, like in Boggle. Each player has a character card with different amounts of health (red) and mana (blue). Each player needs to plot a path through the dungeon grid on their own sheet of paper, at the same time, entering from any side, traversing adjoining squares (maximum once each), and then exiting from any side. Each die in the grid shows either a monster (red or blue, small or large) or a potion (red or blue). A small monster drain one health/mana (matching the colour), large ones drain two. As long as your health/mana don’t go negative you kill the monster and gain 1 gold. Potions add to the corresponding health/mana. Your character also has a special ability (mine was gain 1 extra gold per large blue monster slain).
It’s a race to see who can plot their course fastest, without messing up. If you mess up and drop below 0 health or mana you score zero gold for that round, but heal back to full in both for the next round. When finished, you grab a numbered card from a pile in the middle, first player finished gets 1, last gets the largest number (6 for our six-player game). Then you draw a treasure card for each player and choose in order, from 1 to the last player, excluding anyone who died in that round. So being faster gets you a better choice of treasure. Treasures can do things like give you extra gold, or give you abilities such as a helmet which can be discarded to avoid a monster hitting you, or invisibility cloak which means you can ignore a monster. Some are curses, which are negative, so you don’t want to be picking last!
You play over 4 rounds. In round 2 and 4 one of the regular dice is swapped out for a special die that has different faces that do other things. The last die is the “boss die” which has, for example, a dragon that drains 3 health and 3 mana, but is worth 3 gold.
I scored a final total of 30 gold, which was equalled by one other player, but we lost to someone who managed 31.
During the day I had 4 ethics classes. One of the parents contacted me early on and said that her daughter had been sent home from school with a fever, and might not join the class. But she really liked it and might want to join anyway even though she was feeling sick. It turned out she did indeed show up. Such dedication!
Friday was also warmish, reaching 23.7°C, in fact the warmest day of May so far. But Saturday dawned cold and didn’t heat up much at all. We only reached a maximum of 14.6°C at 10am, and then it just got colder again. A strong cold southerly wind has been blowing drifting showers across the city and it really feels like winter now. But I dragged myself out for a 5k run, and actually did a decent time. Probably because I was cold and wanting to get back inside as quickly as possible!
Today I finally got back into the construction of the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set. Stage 11 adds details to the exterior part of the castle/dungeon. There are spiders and plants and trees. If you look closely you can see a third spider lurking in the shadows behind the top of the left tree:
The door has also been covered with a removable rock face, making it a secret door!
And there’s a secret cache of gold and a key:
And part of the dungeon wall is removable too!
Inside this part, seen from the other side, has been added a skeletal torso guardian and a spellbook (behind the shield):
New content yesterday:
New content today:
