Happy accidental discovery – The Testimony of Jacob Hollow
Nov 19th, 2008 by shuttler
Tuesdays and Thursday nights are a wonderfully predictable time of the week for me. I usually sit down at home setup a gaming table and play some Heroclix, Warmachine, Hordes, Warhammer Fantasy Tabletop or my new passion Monsterpocalypse…RAWR!
If I am not at my house doing this I will visit one of the many other gamers habitats in our nerdy circle for games, banter and snacks. We admire each other’s new purchases, scenery and painting and talk about the comics we’ve been reading, horror novels, movies and indulge ourselves with deep conversations about plot lines and continuity.
Usually we become creatures of habit with both the games and the comics. I have a friend who will only read Marvel. Scoffing at my recent purchases of the New Krypton Superman arc. The same goes for the games we play our regular games and grow our armies or collections and get wrapped up in the fluff. I for one like to try different things that’s why when monsterpocalypse came out I was keen to try it and it won me over. It’s the surprise games that always crop up though that I love to collect. I had one of these surprises last night.
My good friend came over for a quiet game of Monsterpocalypse, just the two of us as the game is a longish one and it seems only him and me share the passion for giant monsters smashing up buildings and the innocent humans residing inside of them. He normally brings his ‘pub bag’ called this as it contains a few dice and card games and such for the pub, but nothing I have really tried before. It usually stores his monsters for MonPoc. However he arrives at my house this week and realises he has had a ‘Fail’ moment. He left his MonPoc army at home so we had to resort to something from the ‘pub bag’.
I’ve never really paid any attention to the card games available I think I pigeon holed them in the same category as trading card games something I really cant afford to get in to. I didn’t realise that for around £5-£20 you can pick up some great sets for 2 or more players.
So out of the bag came ‘The Testimony of Jacob Hollow’. This card game comes with some beautiful cards that you use for locations, combat, monsters, skills and items.
Essentially you draw 5 cards each turn and use them to combat monster, or outwit your opponent. Some cards let you heal yourself or give you other bonus’ there is also a location deck and a character deck. You choose a character at the beginning to play the whole round with and draw location each turn. The idea is you investigate these locations and fight monsters and such.
It really is a lot of fun and a game takes 20 – 60 minutes. First one to die loses or the first one to get 10 investigation points from the locations wins. Each card as a horror value used for resolving combats. The cards show a creature and it’s type and how many combat cards it gets to draw in a fight and how many rewards you get for defeating it.
I really was impressed by the details on the cards, some of the little quotes made me chuckle and the game play is very fluid. It requires a little imagination and could be seen as light role-playing without the weak lemon drink.
So I have a newfound love for these card games and found a ton of them out there. I am already thinking about checking out ‘gloom’ another interesting one with plastic cards that overlay each other. I see these as a place somewhere between dungeons and dragons or similar pen and paper tabletop and top trumps.
They take up very little space hence the ‘pub bag’ and can be a great way to alleviate boredom.
Needless to say I am trying to track down a Super Hero themed one now, although the Zombie ones look cool!
