Return of the Heroes

I just played a very frustrating game of Return of the Heroes. It was the first time that we played with the Under the Shadow of the Dragon expansion, which made the game much longer and more complicated.

The primary issue, however, was that Z decided she wasn't going to listen to anyones advice, and ended up in difficult situations that made her cranky and whiny. The first mistake she made was playing the hobbit, which is one of the new characters. The hobbit has only three hit points and only moves 2 spaces. Then she wouldn't listen to any advise about were to place her manor house, and placed it next to the White Village, where you can get healed. Therefore, she had fewer areas on the board where she could heal than the other players did. She also completely fixated on fighting the dragon to win the game. She focused on her dragon quest, and ignored doing other small quests.

Her character got killed one space away from her manor house, which resulted in major tears. We decided that since she didn't start the game with the bonus that we sometimes give her, that her bonus would be a one time "you don't lose your last life" potion. She got impatient with moving slowly, so she kept using the teleporter, which shot her everywhere on the board except where she needed to go, and ended up taking her longer to get anywhere than if she had just moved there normally. Finally she got impatient for her dragon quest chits to come out, so she spent all her gold at the mystic to pull the chits she wanted from the bag. She then didn't have the gold that she needed to actually complete one stage of her quest.

We finally ended up conceding the game to Al, which is the nice way of saying, we had to quit before we all ended up in a bad mood.

We separated out the expansion from the base game, and decided that we would just play the base game until Z gets a little older. Al also wants to try Shadow of the Dragon as a stand alone. He thinks that since it is only 9 tiles, it may play more quickly than Return of the Heroes, which would be a good thing. Although it says that it is only a two player game, Al says we should try it with three.