Shabbat Gaming: Sanctuary

Shabbat lunch I went to Elijah and family, and after lunch we played Sanctuary.

Elijah and his father were old-style gamers before meeting me, and now they have a mixture of old and new style games in their house. The Settlers of Catan sits on the shelf on top of Illuminati, The Princes of Florence on top of Divine Right, and Die Macher next to various war games.

Sanctuary is a roll-and-move game from 1982 based on the Thieves' World series from Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey. As far as roll and move games go, it's ok. You get to roll three dice - 2d6 and a d10 - and then take two of the dice of your choice to move your piece and the other one to move one of the five bad guys closer to one of your opponents (or away from you).

That pretty much wraps up the neat factor of the game. The rest is cards with locations to which you have to go to collect money, bad guys who may move on you and send you to jail, and cards which cause random effects or can be saved to do random actions. Lots of dice rolling, lots of luck, a number of "take that" mechanics, and no strategy. There's a noticeable theme, but it's pretty thin. I won.

We had a political discussion during lunch which I kind of regretted. The vast majority of people around fanatically favor McCain, citing fears and apocalyptic scenarios should Obama win, and that kind of drives me a little crazy, and my denial of this apocalyptic vision seemed to drive my host a little crazy, too.

Yehuda