Wonder woman, the Board Game

Whoa...post, right?  This last weekend, Poot and I played Wonder Woman: Challenge of the Amazons, a cooperative board game by Ravensburger.  If you peruse my July reading list you'll see Boardgamegeek videos related to how to play and a full playthrough.  Although that second one has a bit of an error in that every time Ares moves, they're not dropping two orange cubes with him (Servants of War) if there are no Amazonians in his location to corrupt.  That makes a huge difference in the game as it leaves a few points of escalating damage all over the board and more options to get 5+ cubes in a location (which is a 3 point hit against your 20 "life").  The result:  so far against Ares, we've lost, and handily.  I do get the impression we might have an easier time of it with three players instead of two as it would bump up the card interaction, although also the draws for baddies.

There's a great step each round where you all plan together but, and they said this at the end of the video as well, it avoids the Pandemic-style solo game leader/dictator situation by then throwing the planned cards into your hand with some previously hidden cards that might be better than what you were planning.  And when that happens, you're free to simply try to play a better hand based on what you knew your teammates were up to.

There's that, and it's fast.  We finished up our first game in under an hour, even with being new to the game.  Took me longer to watch the playthrough.  And it feels even faster with the discussion portion being pretty spirited and interactive.  

It might have limited replay with three different villains and a couple of ways to escalate the difficulty, but I suspect they'll expand it at some point in the future.  If not, it's still a super easy game to teach a visitor.  You get to coop instead of playing against each other.  And it's a pleasant alternative to a  parallel game like Pandemic.