GenCon 2011: Resident Evil deck building game

by: Russell - posted: 8/6/2011 7:36:00 PM

A lot of day three at GenCon for me was kind of just laid back, making a couple purchases (I'm big into CCGs), getting my butt kicked in a Super Street Fighter IV tournament (never bring a Vega to a fireball fight), so I didn't get much of a chance to check out any software, but I do have a plan set for tomorrow.  Today though, I did check out something gaming related: the Resident Evil deck building game by Bandai.

For those unfamiliar with deck building games, it's basically where you start out with a small hand and can eventually get cards to add to your hand, and those extra cards will help lead to your main goal.  In Resident Evil, you begin with a deck of ten cards.  In the center of the play area you have weapons and actions you can buy, as well as cards to give you more actions or ammunition for your weapons.  Each turn you can play actions (once unless otherwise stated), buy a weapon, action, or other item (again, once per turn), explore the mansion (basically, encounter a zombie...again, once per turn), or any of the three, or even all three.  Any card you buy and actions you use go straight to your discard pile, and at the end of your turn, any cards left go to your discard pile and you draw five more cards.  When your deck empties out, shuffle your discard pile and make it your new deck.  The objective in most DBGs (deck building games) is to gain a certain amount of points.  We didn't get to play a full game, but I'm assuming the same applies to this game.

Bandai did a pretty decent job on the game.  I happen to be a big CCG fan and this is only my second time playing a DBG (I checked out Bandai's Star Trek DBG back at Origins),  If you're a fan of Resident Evil and card games, I suggest you give this a shot.  It's different, but a fun type of different.  Tomorrow I plan to check out demos of a couple Dungeons and Dragons PC programs that can help create characters and run campaigns.  Granted they're only demos, but I'm going to see how they hold up against each other.  I also hope to check out a game I passed a couple times, but constantly had several people waiting to check it out.