We played Soul Raiders again last night. If you’re interested, I strongly advise you to look at my write-up of our previous game. That essay has a much better presentation of the game than what I have here.
This is the first time we’ve played the game in which we could not complete the chapter in a single evening. We had to call it a night at some point. We took pictures of the game state. Those are the source of the non-cat pictures in this post.
The pictures with Shuba were taken in the middle of the game. He did something I’ve never seen him do before: He fell so deeply asleep that we saw his “inner eyelids” or whatever-it-is that causes cat’s eyes to look this way. He twitched the way animals do when they’re dreaming.
Those pictures, along with just covering the components mid-game using my game table, will allow us to pick up the rest of the chapter on some future night.
There’s great artwork in Soul Raiders. The iconography helps in playing the game and guiding the story. On the lower left you can see “Event cards” (scrolls with the numbers on them) which we read when the game directs us to. The deck with the numbered monsters has custom encounters, as opposed to the more generic monsters we fought later in the game; you can see generic monsters towards the bottom of the following photo.Shuba decided that he wanted to play the side of the monsters, and attacked M’s miniature figure.
In the earlier part of the game, A remarked that the game seemed much too easy. It seemed even easier when I discovered that I’d made a mistake in the rules, and the monsters were doing far less damage to us than we thought. He wondered if we were playing the game wrong.
The game has lots of locations, far more than we could lay out on the available table space. You can see that we started stacking Location cards, covering those that we were less likely to return to. Even with all that you see here, roughly half the Locations in the chapter have not yet been revealed. We have also not yet unlocked the meaning of every icon you can see in the picture.
Then there was a shift in the game. The threat increased, the number of monsters went up and became more challenging. It’s become more likely that we’re going to lose this playthrough.
This is the central game board from a previous photo. In Soul Raiders, the team shares a health pool, represented by the Vitae (hearts) on the outer edge of the board. We’re actually doing OK on health at the moment… but only because both M and A have just invoked single-use healing skills.
The problem for us now is the Threat, represented by the track with exclamation points in the middle of the board. It’s now rapidly moving upwards. If it reaches the top of the track before we’ve accomplished the chapter goals (and we’ve earned none of them yet), the game ends in failure.
Both M and I turned to A and asked, “Are you happy now?” M acknowledged that he’ll never complain about how easy the game is again.
In case it’s not clear: We enjoyed ourselves. We look forward to returning to Soul Raiders to complete Chapter 2.
Shuba also looks forward our next session. If you’ve been keeping track of my cats, Jiku was around but preferred to watch from a distance.
If we succeed, on to Chapter 3! If we fail, we’ll either repeat Chapter 2 until we get through it, or we’ll repeat Chapter 1 to earn experience to improve our characters’ decks.
