Order of the Stick: Comedy Gold

We played the Order of the Stick board game last night. It was a bit confusing at first, and the rules were sometimes hard to track down. I wonder if this was intentionally modeled after the D&D experience, as I wouldn't put it past the creators to do exactly that. Anyways, our first game was interesting, and we ended up calling the game after realizing the length of time it would take.

Today, the great W (who is being waited for, in the test chamber) came by and we played another game, this time with four players rather than the five in the previous game. It took approximately six hours to finish the game, but it was a blast! We ended up having a great roadblock, where the only room that was explored on the third level of the dungeon (explored by me, playing Roy), had a huge stack of monsters in it, with a pair of demon roaches at the bottom. Demon roaches are special in that they are henchmen: they support every monster, and have a range of 2, and they are always at the bottom of any stack of monsters (which means they can support all the types above, for example, if there's an ogre king, then a goblin king, then a kobold king, all of them will get supported by the roaches until you manage to get through all three to kill the darn things). This meant that no-one wanted to explore any adjacent rooms, because the demon roaches would support any monsters that dropped in those rooms too, and thus this led to a giant roadblock, where the whole party meandered on the second floor rather than getting closer to Xykon's lair. There was also some hijinks involving a shadowdancer, a pair of dragons, followed by a dark room (with a beholder in it) and a chasm. A fireball was added to the mix, but unfortunately it wasn't able to cure the situation. This was later eased by the dungeon collapsing and the monsters running for their lives.

Anyways, the game was highly entertaining to play, and it held my attention pretty well for the whole time, which says something about it: a lot of long games can cause me to lose attention, the only exceptions I can think of are this one and Arkham Horror. A notable one which does cause attention span loss is the world of warcraft board game, which is fun, but since each side is relatively disjoint from the other's moves, it's easy to go off and do something else during the other team's turn.

Finally, the title of this post reflects one of the pieces of loot that dropped as Xykon died: "Comedy Gold", which shows Roy (team leader) slipping on a banana. Since it was Roy who killed Xykon, this seemed especially appropriate to the situation at hand.

I recommend anyone who has played RPG's before to go read Order of the Stick. Anyone who hasn't, go read it anyways as a lot of the humor is probably still pretty accessible.