Across The Obelisk... Fast

Finding new ways of extending a much loved game.

My friend group has played Across The Obelisk ↗ a lot. We tend to gravitate towards it much more frequently over the last few years as apettites for more intense games has deminished. We’ve enjoyed the game a great deal and have by no means reached the limits of the game’s difficulty.

We had already been playing the game in a sort of ‘random draft’ mode. We’d each roll a random character and keep the choice whenever the right type of character appeared. For me this is any of the healers. Already this had proven a real challenge and getting mismatching compositions to work together often had some unexpected results.

The next element to add was a time limit on running through a whole draft run. Two hours. Now this really kicked things into a new gear. We’d often find we were semi-afk during a run and only paying minimal attention to what was going on. This changed things a lot. Now, each turn was a challenge of only playing the most vital cards. Time to kill is now more important than ever as the run may just time out if the team don’t have enough firepower. This built up to the point during the final boss fight, were two of us were skipping our turns alltogether, in a last ditch attempt to get over the line in time.

We finished the last run with an incredible four seconds to spare!

I can’t recommend this enough if you are keen to add a new sense of urgency to the game. Wonderful.