“Thunder, Thunder, Thunderstone!†This week we played Thunderstone—a fantasy-deck building game so close to the Dominion game that there should be lawsuits. But we don’t care about that. We only care if the game is fun…and it is. My friend Bob loaned me Thunderstone about six months ago and we just now got around to playing it. (This is mostly because I have to give it back to Bob this weekend. We should have played it sooner!)
As I mentioned, the game mechanics are very similar to Dominion. The difference is that in Thunderstone you are building a deck of heroes to venture into a dark dungeon, destroy horrible monsters, and come out again with the fabulous prize—the thunderstone. The heroes can be equipped with various items such as weapons, spells, and food. Besides the thunderstone, the other prizes in the dungeon are the monsters themselves. Killing monsters is the main way to garner victory points. When you kill a monster You also get experience points (XP) and it gets added to your deck. You can use XPs to level up your heroes so they can become more powerful. Many monsters, once they are in your deck, add special abilities or gold that you can use later. When you’re not killing monsters in the dungeon, you are going to town to buy more cards to add to your deck. These cards represent the weapons, spells, and food I mentioned earlier, but can also be heroes and various town folk that have abilities to help your heroes.
Let there be light! Light is very important in Thunderstone. The entrance to the dungeon is filled with three visible monsters, ranked 1 through 3 by its position next to the monster/dungeon deck. The higher the rank, the deeper the monster is in the dungeon and heavier the light penalty is. This penalty translates into negate attack values for your heroes. To overcome this darkness, the heroes can possess various light sources ranging from torches to fireballs. (Yeah, fireballs!)
So what did we think of the game? We liked it…probably a little better than Dominion because you get to fight things! That is, we liked the overall theme of Thunderstone better than Dominion. Ben had played Thunderstone before, possibly hundreds of times. Still, he knew the rules just as well as those of us that had never played before. We like Ben. Still that didn’t keep Ben from winning the first game. He had 30 points. Mike was close with 28 points. (Note: Mike may have actually beaten Ben, but Mike didn’t realize there were victory points on some heroes as well as monsters. Mike only looked at his monsters.) Owen and I were pathetic with 11 and 12 points respectively.
With one game under our belts we re-randomized the village, heroes, and monsters and played again. This time things turned out quite different. (Ok, not really that different.) Mike won with 28 points. (Mike was a monster killing machine.) Ben was second with just 18 points. Owen had 14 points and I had 13 points. But this time, Owen and I were not pathetic.
Chaos Steve