2017 Board Game Review

I made it back to the Lone Star Gaming Fest again this past New Year’s weekend.  For fiscal reasons my wife and I were only able to attend three of the four days, but we still had a great time.  Next year we should have enough saved up to stay at the hotel at least three nights and attend all four days of the convention.  I am very much looking forward to that.

Now, on to the game reviews.

Twilight Imperium, 4th Edition (2-8 players)
Released in November 2017, the fourth edition of Twilight Imperium is exactly what I wanted from a long form strategic game: clear play without crunchy-rule inspired game delays.  I last played TI using 2nd Edition and it was a slogfest that lasted all day.  They’ve made tweaks to the rules and presentation of tech so that the game with 3 new-ish players (none of us had played 4th edition) and one teaching player only took six hours from box opening until we had a winner.  Actual game play (as opposed to board setup and rules explanation) was about 4.5 hours.  The player mats had all the ships and their stats laid out and tech upgrade cards to ships fit right on top of the old ship stats.  This allowed players to easily see what each other’s ships could do without having to continually ask what was upgraded and what wasn’t.  The public objectives are now do-able for modest payouts and none of the secret objectives were stupid hard, speeding up scoring during the game and shortening overall game length.

I liked this enough that I want to join the local TI player’s group so I can play it more.  The $150 price tag is a bit steep for me to buy a copy myself, but if I get more plays in this year, it might become reasonable to do.

Unfair (2-5 players)
The goal of Unfair is to build the best theme park using Rides, Upgrades, and occasionally throwing dirty tricks at your competitors.  The game lasts 8 turns (with players getting 3-4 actions in rounds each turn) and whoever has the most points in rides at the end wins.  Rides score points based on the number of upgrades added and I should note the scoring chart goes up to 36 upgrades with the value per upgrade increasing the further up you go.  Points are also scored for money in hand and a few other methods based on cards played in game.  The artwork is great and the color text on the cards is a hoot.

Like Smash-up, there are different themed sub-decks that are selected and added together to create the common decks the players will draw from.  The themes are fun and add flavor, but don’t dominate gameplay.  The game I played included Robots, Jungle, Gangsters, and B-Movies (a theme being play-tested and not currently published).

This was very fun and is now on my Must Acquire list.  Gameplay was about 2 hours, but it was getting late and we started losing track of whose turn it was.  I think with repeat play the playtime will drop down noticeably.  This game is easily teachable to non-gamers.

London Underground (prototype) (2-6 players)
There were several prototype games being played at the convention and this was one of them.  It was Saturday morning, I was looking for a game, and allowed myself to be roped into playing this one.  I was surprised by how engaging it turned out to be.  It uses an actual map of the London subway system, which was attractive.  You moved your token along the rails making deliveries (it is, in its essence, a train game).  At the end, the person who won did so just before I was going to and another two players were within stabbing distance of a win as well, so the balance was good.

I can’t go into more detail, but when this comes out I think I want a copy.

Liar’s Dice (tournament) (2-8 players)
This was fun, but the rules version where a failed challenge cost you the difference in dice washed me out early.  The version of the rules I’m familiar with costs you only one die and losing four in one go was a surprise.  Still had fun and stayed to watch my table play out.

The sets used in the tournament were home-built using components from a teacher supply store with printed rules and a board to show the current “bet”.  My wife scored a set for home use after the tournament.

Sol: Last Days of a Star (1 to 4 players)
Confession: I love this game.  Friends own a copy of Sol and I ask to play it every time they bring it over.  It is on my Must Acquire list, right at the top, and where part of my tax refund is going this year.  I taught the game to three other players, including the owners of this particular set who owned it but had never played it.  There is also a solo version of the game, but I've never tried those rules out.

In the far future, the sun is dying.  The far descendants of humanity need to power colony ships to escape before the sun goes nova.  To get the power they need, they must harvest it from the sun.  This is further destabilizing the sun, making the nova more immanent.  Game on!

The colony ships orbit the sun (also providing a mechanism to track whose turn it is) while smaller sundiver ships dive into the sun to build the structures necessary to harvest energy, transmit energy to the colony ships, and build more sundivers.  The deeper into the sun the stations are built, the more effective they are but the faster they destabilize the sun.  Destabilization is handled by drawing cards from a deck, the deeper the layer, the more cards drawn (from one to three cards).  In the deck are 13 Flare cards.  When the 13th one is drawn, the sun goes nova and only the colony ship with the most momentum (victory points) escapes.  Everyone else dies in the nova.  This makes the game a balance of getting things done versus blowing up the sun before you are ready.  When the deck starts getting low, things get tense.

This game is worth the cost.  The components are beautiful and the theme meshes well with the game play.  Gameplay is about 2 hours, depends on how much analysis paralysis your players are susceptible to.  The only downside to this game is that the silver colony ship looks like a pair of kids scissors (which has no bearing on play, but really guys?).  I don’t know what the manufacturers were thinking, but there it is.  (I always play blue.)  Other than that one minor thing, this is really a perfect game.

Divinity Derby (3-6 players)
Divinity Derby was just released in December and is beautiful.  The fully painted mythological monsters are beautiful, the board is beautiful, the cards are beautiful.  There was some argument over whether or not the players have enough information at the beginning of the game to place their bets on the racing monsters.  I think there is from 3 to 5 players, but for 6 players maybe not.  As a result of this argument, two of the five players left after the first of three races and the game ended, which was unfortunate.

The players sit around the table and between each player seat is a card holder with six cards.  You can look at the cards adjacent to you and use that information to place face-down 2 bet cards on two different monsters.  Part way through the race you will be able to place a third bet.  The bet cards have one to three race positions on them.  The more positions listed, the less the bet is worth.

Once bets are placed, players take turns playing one card each from the two racks next to them.  The Race cards show a monster and two values (ranging 0-3 plus a 5), one greater than the other.  Of the two cards, the player plays one at the high value and one at the low value.  The values are how many spaces the monster on the card will move, then the cards are discarded.  The race ends when all the Race cards are played.  Some of the cards can be played as dirty tricks, which risks the monster being disqualified by Zeus at the end of the race, depends on whether he was paying attention or not (random draw).

There are also two special power cards for each deity that are unique to the deity and either modify race positions or bets or whether or which dirty tricks might get noticed.

I liked this game and want to play it again.  I’d also like to read the rules instead of having them explained to me.  There was a point that came up that I would have liked verified.  At $40 this is a good deal.

Camel Up Card Game (2-6 players)
Racing camels and betting on them each round and for the over all race – that’s Camel Up Card Game.  This is the Camel Up (originally Camel Cup) board game in cards.  Each round the players choose 3 of 6 cards to be included in the race, some being shown and some being kept as a hole card.  This provides great replayability as you never know exactly which camels will move or how far each round.  Each turn a player performs a race action (which moves the camels along the races track) and optionally performs a betting action (which is where you get points).  Our race lasted three rounds because I pushed the lead camel across the line, so 3-4 rounds seems likely for each game, meaning a 30 minute play time is possible.  I think 45-60 minutes will be more likely, depending on how chatty the players are and, again, on analysis paralysis.

If you like Camel Up, you will like this game.  If you want a short racing game, you’ll probably like this game.  For $19.99, you can’t go too far wrong.  I’ll be buying this game this year, now that I’ve played it.

Azul (2-4 players)
Another beautiful game that is tactilely pleasing, Azul is literally a tile placement game where the players are selecting sets of tiles from the common play area to slowly fill a tile floor pattern on their play card.  Options for tiles are to draw a set from factories, discarding the remaining tiles to the center, or drawing a set from the center.  Like Yahtzee, you can only score sets of fixed numbers, ranging from one-of-a-kind to five-of-a-kind.  Extras fall to your workfloor row and count as negative points at the end of the round.  Points are scored at the end of each round for adjacent tiles and at the end of the game for complete sets and rows or columns of tiles.

This game can play quickly, but analysis paralysis will kill it, dragging out what should be a relatively quick game.  Non-gamers will be able to understand this game and it makes a good family game (for, you know, gamer families).

The bad news is that this game is currently out of stock.  If you can get it for the MSRP of $40 or near that, do it.  Otherwise, wait until the restock in March 2018.  It’s worth it.

Mystic Vale (2-4 players)
Mystic Vale is a deck building game where the sleeved cards can be upgraded with inserts.  The game comes with more than enough sleeves for the player decks.  The inserts stick a bit when the game is first opened, so you need to separate them before attempting a shuffle.  They did not re-adhere to each other during play, so that seems to be a one-time issue.  The rules are laid out well for learning the game.

The number of cards you have to work with each turn varies from 2 to “a lot”.  How many cards you get is limited by the blight icon that appear on cursed lands and some of the upgrades (you stop at 3 and bust on 4).  There are two economies: mana for card upgrades and spirit symbols for vale cards that provide constant benefits each turn.  The card upgrades are on transparent cards that with images that occupy the top middle or bottom of the card.  You may not overlap images and some of your starting cards have images on them, so this will limit you.  Plan ahead with your upgrades.

The MSRP is $44.99 and this seems to be a fair price for everything that comes with the game.  There are already three released expansions and likely more on the way.  If you like deck building games, this is a good game.  If you are so-so on deck building games, you might still look at this.  The number of cards in your deck never changes, but the cards keep getting better as you play.  This avoids the long wait for a particular card that can happen in games like Dominion.  My wife, who hates deck-building games, loves this game.

BONUS REVIEW

One Deck Dungeon (1-2 players, 4 with two sets of the game)
I didn’t play this at the convention, but it ended up among my games when I got home and unpacked.  It had ID in it, so I know who to return it to, but in the meantime, we played a couple games of it and loved it.

One Deck Dungeon allows one or two players (four if you combine two sets) to explore a small dungeon, represented by a deck of cards.  The deck of cards are a timing mechanism for each of three dungeon levels (you flip two cards to the discard pile each turn) and represent the rooms with monsters you can explore for experience, loot, or skills.  Each turn you either explore (and draw face down cards so there are 4 rooms to explore) or kick down a door and face either a monster or trap.  If what you find behind the door is too scary to face right now, you can flee and end your turn.  Otherwise, you roll dice to resolve the trap or kill the monster.

You will always kill the monster of get past the trap.  What you are really doing is rolling dice and placing them on the card's threat spots to minimize the consequences the room.  If you don’t roll well enough with the right dice (yellow for fighting skill, pink for agility, blue for magic, and black wild dice) to cover all the challenge squares on the card, you take the effects of the uncovered squares.  This can be damage, time lost, or both.

At the bottom of the deck is a stairs card.  When this comes up you either descend to the next level of the dungeon or linger on this level to finish kicking down doors.  The danger of lingering is that there are no more cards to discard for time, so instead you put damage tokens on the deck.  Every time there are three tokens, the players must allocate a point of damage to a character.  Linger too long and a character can die and the dungeon wins.

After the third level, you must face the dungeon boss.  This fight will take multiple rounds as the boss only takes damage from certain threat spots on its card and can take more damage than can be dealt in one round.  If you have not improved your characters enough, this fight can be very, very tough.  Again, if either player dies, the dungeon wins.

I plan to buy a set of this and a set of the expansion when the expansion comes out at the end of March.  Depending on how well they play together or separate, I may buy a second set of both for 4-player mode.  At $20 for One Deck Dungeon and $25 for the expansion/second game, it’s a good deal.


That's it for this year.  Session 3 of Under the Mountain will appear next week.

Food Truck Thursday – Offbeat Eatz

This week’s food truck was on time and already taking orders when Coworker R and I arrived, so no disappointments like last week.  The truck was as purple as her hair, which I and the guys in the food truck commented on.  Game on!

Food Truck: Offbeat Eatz

Price Points: $10-$16 per person (chicken sandwiches on the lower end, burgers on the higher end)

Cuisine: grilled chicken sandwiches and burgers, fries optional (but recommended)

The Review:

My original plan was to get a burger and Coworker R was “just going to look”.  Both of those plans failed once we were in front of the truck.  The chalkboard beside the order window announced today’s special: cheese steak sandwich with fries.  Immediately my order was the cheese steak – burgers can wait.  (I’m a sucker for a good cheese steak sandwich.)  Coworker R looked at the pictures of the chicken sandwiches and suddenly she was in line right behind me.

The cheese steak sandwich was both tasty and of good size.  The meat had caramelized onions in it, along with some jalapenos, and sweet pink onions on top.  I removed the onions from on top as onions and I disagreed, but the onions inside were necessary to the proper flavoring of the meat, so they stayed.

This was a good cheese steak sandwich.  The jalapenos gave a good pop of heat when I got to them.  I would have liked more jalapenos as I didn’t notice them until I was half way through the sandwich.  Your mileage may vary.  The fries were good, with an even coating of just the right amount of salt – enough so you notice but not so much it dominates.  My only complaint was that I wanted more fries when I was done.  Coworker R had the same complaint.

Some of the specialty chicken sandwiches looked like they may have had too many toppings, so Coworker R got the standard chicken sandwich.  She liked it but has gotten the same grilled chicken sandwich, at the same price, elsewhere and been equally happy.  Also, the pickles were sweet pickles, which she does not care for.  Your mileage may vary.  We speculated that the specialty grilled chicken sandwiches may have been more wow than the basic one.

Summary:

Definitely do again and worth the money for the beef options – the basic chicken option was more neutral.  Next time I’ll get one of the burgers for a more consistent baseline of comparison with the other food trucks I’ve eaten at, but man, I’m a sucker for a good cheese steak sandwich.

Food Truck Thursday – Cuban Spot

This week’s food truck was supposed to show up at 11:00 AM, so I and several co-workers went down at 11:00 to beat the lines. 

There was no food truck.

We waited 15 minutes and then Coworker R and I decided to bail as we were hungry.  I picked up the vindaloo at the local sandwich shop (they have an Indian restaurant deliver meals for re-sale each day) and ate my lunch.  It was filling and just the right amount of spicy.  Once back to my desk, I saw an email that the food truck was not going to show until Noon, with no explanation.  Too late to do me any good.

Food Truck: Cuban Spot (their menu)

Price Points: $10-$12 per person

Cuisine: sandwiches and burgers with Cuban spices and toppings

The Review:

Co-worker C got the Cuban Burger and went on and on about how good it was, rubbing it in.  Folks from other departments who share the area with us also got ½ burgers and said they were very tasty and way filling.  The burgers all smelled incredible.  I regretted spending my budget on the vindaloo.

Summary:

Assuming they show up on time, I am still willing to eat at this truck based purely on how good the food smelled.

Food Truck Thursday – D’Lish Curbside

[My new employers (more on that in a later post) just initiated Food Truck Thursdays here at the office.  They’ve arranged for a different food truck to be here at the office each Thursday for at least the month of September.  I’m going to review them as a way to get back into regular posting here on the blog.]

Food trucks are still growing as a thing here in Houston, which has the largest non-judgemental food market in the country.  We don’t care whether or not your last restaurant succeeded or failed, we just want to know if what you’re doing right now is any good.  Today’s food truck does very well.

Food Truck: D’Lish Curbside

Price Point: $10+ per person, $3.00 more if you want fries with that

Cuisine (from their website):

"We're the Creators of the TEX-ified Southern Comfort & Gulf Coast Seafood Poutine Style Fries. We also Specialize in Specialty Burgers & Sandwiches, D'Lishified Bowls & Tacos with a Special Twist."

The Review:

I had the Fried Chicken and Bacon Sandwich (burger) with a side order of fries.  The sandwich (burger) had a dollop of white gravy on it, meaning once you start eating on it, you cannot set it back down.  This is not a problem as once I started eating on it, I didn’t want to stop.  The sandwich (burger) had just the right amount of crunch, from both the chicken and the bacon.  The chicken had a low batter-to-chicken ratio, meaning there was plenty of chicken to eat.  The bacon was crispy without going overboard and there was a noticeable amount of it.  This was a very tasty sandwich (burger).

[I keep calling this a sandwich (burger) because, while called a sandwich, it was served on a burger roll.]

Coworker R had the Krazy Korean Ribeye Steak Sandwich.  She was actually craving Banh mih, but she found this to be a good alternate.  (She’s still craving Banh mih, so it wasn’t a complete substitute for that.)  She found the thinly sliced steak was marinated in a very tasty Korean sauce of some sort which the sriracha aioli complemented very well.

We both had the fries, which were thick cut and tossed with a spice mix of some sort.  It had a taste of heat to it, but we both agreed the fries needed more seasoning.  That said, they were good fries, freshly cooked – they were still hot after walking back to my desk and after eating my sandwich (burger).

We went just as the food truck was opening and the line was only 5-6 people.  Other co-workers went after we returned and reported the line was 20+ people deep.  They went back 30 minutes later and the line was still 20+ people deep (a different 20 people of course).  They aren’t back after a third try and my lunch hour is over, so no report from them.  Maybe I’ll do a supplemental later.

Summary:

Very satisfying and filling with a reasonable price (for food trucks).

I will eat at this truck again.

2015 Board Game Review

I was not able to make it to Lone Star Gaming Fest (again!), but I have played several new boardgames recently, so I’m reviewing them as my semi-regular boardgaming review.

Aye, Dark Overlord (4-6 players)

I played this at Jon Con 1, a memorial convention/wake for a friend of mine who died very unexpectedly this year.

Aye, Dark Overlord is a game where the players take turns being the Dark Overlord while the rest of the table are the Dark Overlord’s goblin minions.  The Dark Overlord’s latest Evil Plan has failed and the minions have to explain why it wasn’t their fault, deflecting blame to the other minions until one of them is finally executed.

This game is all about spontaneous storytelling and blame deflection.  The Dark Overlord gives a sentence about what the Evil Plan was and then starts accusing the minions of making it fail.  The Minions have to come up with plausible (and entertaining) explanations of how it wasn’t their fault, it was the fault of one of the other minions.  There are cards that assist in shifting the blame, but the real fun is in the spontaneous stories of why you can’t be the reason the Evil Plan failed.

Also, it is NEVER the Dark Overlord’s fault, even when it is his fault.  Pointing out it was the boss’s fault to the boss is a fast ticket to being executed.

I enjoyed playing this a lot.  The first game was a bit stiff as the players learned the game.  In the follow-up games things loosened up and we all had great fun playing.  We played about 4-5 games in a row before I moved on to get snacks and a soda.

The Stars Are Right (2-4 players)

I played this for the first time at Jon Con 1 this year.  The Stars Are Right is a board manipulation game to make patterns of stars on the board to summon Cthulhu Mythos servitors.  First to 10 points of servitor creatures wins the game as the stars are now right to summon a Great Old One!

Each player has a hand of cards, each being a servitor of three levels of power.  The “board” is a grid of cards, each showing a number of stars, a phase of the moon, an eclipse, or a comet.  The servitors allow you to manipulate the board tiles in several ways.  If you get the stars on the board to match the configuration shown on a card, you “summon” that servitor into play, which grants you more abilities to manipulate the board each turn.  Servitors are also worth points each, which are necessary to win the game.

I liked the puzzle solving aspect of this game – how do I manipulate the board so I can summon one of the servitors in my hand, preferably one worth many points or providing a needed board manipulation capability.  As every player is manipulating the board on their turn, planning ahead is limited as the board can be completely different than when it was your turn last.  This means you need to think on your toes and be good at pattern recognition to spot possibilities on the board.

Splendor (2-4 players)

My wife hosts a tea on the second Sunday of each month, which tends towards board gaming with up to 7 different kinds of tea available to drink.  This game was brought by a couple who irregularly attends.

Splendor is a game of first to 15 points being the winner.  Points come from gem cards purchased by chips representing different gem colors or having enough gems to garner a patron(s).  On your turn you pick up additional chips, buy a gem card, or reserve a card and get a gold chip (which is wild, color-wise).  Gem cards also supply chip equivalents each turn, allowing you to buy more expensive cards with fewer chips.  There is a fixed number of chips in the game and the colors can run out if multiple players want a particular color.

This one is a lot of fun and, while it may sound complicated, can be taught to non-gamers quickly.  It is on my list to acquire myself now that Christmas has passed.

Cyclades (2-5 players)

I played Cyclades during my Christmas holiday and everyone at the table enjoyed it.  Control of islands on the board gives you gold pieces (I wished they had called them obols, but that’s my Classics degree speaking up), gold pieces are used to give offerings to the gods, the gods let you do things on the map.

There are 5 deities, four of which get shuffled each turn into a different turn order (Ares, Poseidon, Zeus, and Athena) and one that is always last and helps keep you in the game (Apollo).  Bidding is like bidding for genes in Evo – each player in turn order places a bid on the deity of their choice.  If a later player overbids them, the earlier player either bids on a different deity or ups their bid on this one until each player has an uncontested bid.

The deities let you do multiple things: Ares allows the builder to build armies, move armies across an previously existing bridge of ships to another island, and/or build a fortress to defend an island.  The overall goal is to control two metropolises by either building them or conquering them.  They are built by either having a set of buildings that the different deities grant access to or have 4 philosopher cards (from Athena).  There are also classic Greek monsters available as cards that can be purchased and that grant different one-shot abilities.

I very much look forward to playing this again

Mission: Red Planet (2^nd Ed.) (2-4 players)

I bought Mission: Red Planet after looking at it several times over several visits to my FLGS.  Sending Victorian astronauts to Mars and fighting for control over the resources?  Sounds good to me, but will it be fun?  Then some Christmas money found its way into my pocket and quietly burned a hole large enough for this game.

Each turn each player chooses one of nine roles in their starting hand.  Each role adds 1-2 astronauts to waiting rockets and does something else.  Once the role is used, it goes to a discard pile, but one of the roles recycles the discard pile back into your hand.  When to do this is a critical choice that has to be made – the game is 10 turns long and you have to play a role each turn.

The roles are also numbered from 1 to 9 and each turn after roles are secretly picked, a count-down starts and when it reaches the number of the picked role, that player takes their turn.  In case of tie, the player who is closest in line to the first player goes and then the next and so on.  First player moves each turn to the person who went last the previous turn.

Mixed into the turn clock are three production rounds.  In the first round, each mine pays out 1 token to the player with the most astronauts in that region.  The second and third production rounds generate 2 and 3 tokens per mine, respectively.  These tokens are the victory points of the game.  There are also secret missions that score points, but I’m not going into much more detail to keep this review short (-ish).

A good game with multiple levels of strategy and a beautiful set of components - well worth the price.

Tokaido (2-5 players)

Tokaido looks beautiful game and follows its theme very well.  Players are traveling the Tokaido Road following different goals.  There are multiple ways to gain points and each traveler had a different power, so there is no one perfect way to play.

Movement is based on who is furthest behind going next.  Each stop on the road allows the player to do a specific thing, from getting money to giving offerings at a temple, to stopping to paint (gaining a piece in one of three painting sets to be collected).  Villages allow you to collect sets of tchotchke souvenirs.

I’m not certain how I feel about this game.  I’ve played it twice and there are two things that seem to grant too much favor to lucky players.  The first is which two travelers you get to choose between and the second is starting position.  Initial turn order is random and some of the most desirable stops in the first stretch of the road are the first ones.  Those fill up by player 3, so players 4 and 5 have to go further down the road to less desirable locations and wait for the other players to pass them before going again.  Some of the travelers have abilities that will always happen during the game, others have to land on specific locations to use theirs and go the entire game without being able to land on one of those spots.

This is a game I’m willing to play again, but I’m not certain I’ll ever buy my own copy.

Zombicide: Black Plague (2-6 players)

Zombicide: Black Plague is Zombicide with a fantasy re-skin, so I won’t go over how it’s played – you either know already or you just need to know it emulates zombie movies very well and is worth the price tag.  I recommend Zombicide: Rue Morgue for your modern day zombie apocalypse needs.  What I’m going to cover are the differences between the modern and the fantasy versions.

Players play one of six peasant survivors after the zombie plague swept over the kingdom.  The player cards are smaller and fit onto a tray that makes it easier to display what is in your hand(s) and what is in your backpack.  Pegs show what powers are active and the experience track is integral to the tray with a built in slider.  This is all good stuff.  Players also can take three hits before going down under a pile of zombies and can carry up to 5 items in their backpack, both of which are improvements from the 2 hits and 3 items in the modern game.

There are no cars, so this version inserts vault rooms with two entrance/exits on the board and vault rooms each hold an advanced weapon: either the Orc’s Crossbow or the Inferno spell (I might be wrong on the spell name).  In most quests (read: scenarios) you will need to find the blue objective to get the key to the vault(s), but not in the Tutorial.

The addition of necromancers to the zombie mix adds an additional sense of urgency.  They appear at one spawn point (bringing an additional spawn point with them) and try to leave the board by the next nearest one.  If they escape, that new spawn point becomes permanent - kill him and you get to remove any spawn point on the board.  Get six permanent spawn points on the board and you lose.

I like that they kept the starting equipment rules from Zombicide: Rue Morgue.  Being able to select who gets what from the starting items avoids early frustration in the game.

I’m interested in seeing what expansion material comes out for this version of Zombicide.  The 6 starting characters are good, but I’m used to playing with a wide range of characters to choose from.  I’m also used to playing with sets of Zombicide that have multiple add-on packs of zombies.  The second game of Black Plague I played we died due to walkers getting extra actions three times in a row because we weren’t killing them fast enough and ran out.

Worth the cost (once the retail copies make it into the shops - only Kickstarter versions available right now).

Defiance: Shadowrun or d20 Modern?

Watched episode 1 of Defiance on The-Channel-Previously-Known-as-Sci-Fi.   I'm trying to decide if they were doing an alternate background for Shadowrun or d20 Modern.

It was pretty basic storytelling.  They really crammed too much into the 2 hours of the show.  I think they would have been better served making everything they put into the first episode into the first season.  This would have provided more depth to the town, the characters, and the personal relationships between the characters.  See the first season of Deadwood for a good example of how this is done.

By the way, it is fairly clear that Defiance borrows heavily from Deadwood.  (Plus some Shakespeare and some westerns/samurai stories: Yojimbo/A Fistful of Dollars/Last Man Standing - I'm looking at you.)  They need a better Al Swearengen as the one they have is kind of bland.  The riff on the drow and what a female led society that lets the men think they are in charge looks like is interesting, but I did not see enough to determine if it is a cultural trait or just that particular couple.

Also, I've driven through St. Louis, so I know what the terrain looks like.  It is a river plain adjacent to the Mississippi, not a valley surrounded by cliffs and hills.  They may try to hand wave this as part of the terraforming the aliens started (and might or might not have finished), but that seems unlikely.  Anything that would have raised those formations would have been enough to drop the arch entirely.  I'm striking this up to "filmed in Canada".

Those are my initial thoughts on the show.  I'm probably not going to watch any more episodes as it did not have that "must see what comes next" vibe.

To get back to my original question - I think the show models an alternate Shadowrun setting more than d20 Modern.  It looks like they are substituting high tech and psionics for magic, but it is hard to tell from the first episode (too much exposition, not enough doing).  The aliens are all here and have been for 33 years at the point the story picks up, which lines up with Shadowrun more than d20 Modern.  d20 Modern assumes more "fantasy races" are bleeding through from the shadow realm over time, whereas Shadowrun has the goblinization event and then it's done.

The technology is a post-apocalypse mix, so there is a mix of ultra-tech and low tech.  As with any post-apocalypse world, good alcohol is hard to find, but bullets are always available.  Most of the people in Defiance (the town) have pistols (if they are human) or energy blades and maybe energy rifles (for the non-humans).  The big horde o' bad guys at the end are all body armor and energy weapons like space orcs ought to be (no, they are not called orcs, but really, look at them).  This, to me, leans more towards Shadowrun's mixture of high tech and social regression rather than d20 Modern's more "world behind the world" vibe.

That's it for now.  I'm still recovering from a cold I came down with last Saturday, so my thoughts a bit more scattered.  Later!

The Microscope Experiment - Summary and Observations

So this week I played Microscope with my weekly gaming group again, finishing the round we started last week.  With five players (the maximum recommended number of players) we pretty much filled up the table with 3x5 notecards.  We did not do as many scenes this time, which seemed to drop the energy level at the table.  We also seemed to be reaching the point where players had definite ideas where they wanted the story to go and were starting to get a bit snarky when it didn't, which seemed to be a good sign it was time to stop working on this particular history.

 

Observations:

• We missed that Legacies could be used instead of the current Focus until after we were done playing.  I think this would have helped where players had no idea what to do with the current Focus but had things they wanted to add to the history.
• Writing an Event requires a bit more conciseness than we mustered early on.  We got better, but it is something to keep an eye out for.  Events are more concise than Period and have a definite start and end, even if they are only implied.  For example, my Event "Open warfare between the armies of The Circle and The Purple Crown" should have said "The Circle and The Purple Crown field their steampunk mecha prototypes against each other for the first time, utterly destroying Townsville and each other".  That's what I was seeing in my head, but I had not yet learned to put that exactly down on the card.
• Scenes are where the excitement is.  Do Scenes as often as you can get away with.  Really.
• A good question for the Scene helps lots, but the Scene description is vital to getting started.  I found myself restating the descriptions for scenes to make sure I understood what the active player was trying for and getting them to state the exact starting point of the Scene.
• I can see why 3-4 players is a better number - things go around faster and players have more influence on the history.
• Microscope is designed for large periods of time, so it would be difficult to use for periods of time smaller than multiple decades.  But for grand scale creation, it works very well.

Next week we are building characters for our Burning Wheel game and will be doing a quick round of Microscope to establish some world history.  I'm not certain how that will pan out exactly, but it will give the players a better grip of the world and more insight into it, so that should be good.  I think I'm going to recommend the GM set out the periods he wants and have the session be a single round adding to that.  The end period for the game will be the starting point of the actual campaign.

Summary:

I'm going to provide a (hopefully) concise summary of the outcome of our two sessions of Microscope.  I'll try to explain anything that seems unclear.  All cards played are defined as Dark or Light by the player, but this seems to be somewhat arbitrary.  I might need to read some more on this for the next game.

History Seed:

We started with by selecting a seed from a list of sample seeds in the back of the book.  The seed we selected was "Secret societies carefully steer the course of civilization".

The Palette:

This is a list of things players want or don't want to see.  The Yes options allow for the possibility of something, the No options specifically exclude things, making them forbidden to add.

Yes:

subtle magic [This should have been defined better.]

cybernetics

reanimation is possible

No:

timey-wimey stuff

joke conspiracies

non-humans (specifically sentient non-humans)

otherworld travel (allows other worlds to exist, but no travel to them)

(more, much more, below the cut)

The Microscope Experiment

The weekday group I’ve been gaming with (the semi-infamous “Super Rat”) is switching campaigns at the moment from a Mouse Guard game to a more general fantasy campaign using Burning Wheel. We are very pleased with the stripped down rules set in Mouse Guard and are very interested in trying out the full Burning Wheel rules.


But that’s not what I’m talking about today.

At the end of last week’s session, I suggested we try an experiment and give Microscope a spin to give the GM a bit more time to prep.  I read them the blurb on the back of the rules (same text in the link) and they were willing to give it a try.  Last night (Monday) we gave it a spin.

The start was a bit slow as I explained the rules and we went through setup. I followed the advice in the back of the rules for running a teaching game with me as the teacher (the only one who had a copy of the rules).  The teaching advice was good as it had several read aloud bits to emphasize points, notably that just because I'm teaching the game does not give me any extra authority.  By the time we had to stop for the night, everyone was into the game and really wanting to keep playing.  If it had not been a work night, we could have easily gone for several more hours.  My wife even took photos of the card lay out at the end so we had reference pictures when we play again.  (Even though the layout of the cards is done so that picking them up properly makes it easy to lay them back out later.)  If we have the same mix of players next week (we were down one player) we will play Microscope again, expanding more upon our history.

Learning to role play the scenes as opposed to narrating them was tricky to remember to do.  We didn’t do it very well the first time, but we got better about it as we went.  The other habit that is hard to break is offering advice once the game is started.  There is a natural tendency to want to help and supply suggestions, but that is really against what the game is trying to promote, which is giving equal creative time to each player.  This is one of my favorite aspects of the game.  I tend to have a strong gaming persona as a long time GM, so having a mechanism to rein me in a bit is good.

We played with five players, which is the upper recommended limit on players and I can see why. Having five actors in the scenes was sometimes a bit tricky when it came to getting everyone equal time in the spotlight.  I think we need to get a bit better at crafting the starting point of the scenes, but it was an experiment and we were learning the system.

I strongly recommend giving this game a try. It is worth the $10 for the PDF. Make sure to have a good 3-4 hours set aside for play with maybe an extra 30 minutes for rules explanation. Otherwise the game will end just as people are really getting into it, which can be frustrating. This game would clearly work well at a convention in a standard 4 hour slot, new players or not.   I'll do a sort of session note later this week to outline what we did, but that's for a separate post.   Later!

2013 Board Game Review - Part 3

OK, this will wrap up Saturday and Sunday of Lone Star Game Fest (and the new games I played there) and my board game review for this year.

Power Grid: Italy
This will be quick as I've covered Power Grid before (short re-cap there: buy it).  I had a chance to finally play on the Italy map.  This is an older map (published in 2005) and is part of the France/Italy set.  It is somewhat claustrophobic, but not as bad as the Japan map (which, by the way, is the train game definition of claustrophobia rails - very little clear land and expensive mountains to build over).

Summary: I like this map, better than the France map on the other side of the board.  It promotes thinking about what cities you want to connect without invoking the analysis paralysis that can happen in more confined maps.  The lack of convolution or special rules makes it a good follow up to the maps that come with the game.

The Castles of Burgundy
This might or might not be out of print at this point, so buy it if you see it and like territory building games.  Each player has a "map" of their territory, which is a hexagon-shaped map of hexagons (see here).  In the basic game, everyone has the same map.  In the expert, the maps are all different.  There is a central board where pieces (improvements to your domain) become available each round.  What you can select is handled by rolling two dice.  What ever individual numbers come up correspond to a small selection of pieces.  There is also a small silver piece economy based on how many mines you have built, plus some of the pieces provide silver immediately when placed in your domain.

Each round consists of five turns.  On your turn you roll the dice, use one number to pick a piece from the main board, use the other number to determine where you place the piece on your domain, and see if you scored points.  Fields score points for live stock, the number scored based on the number of animals on the tile, which ranges from 2-5 (IIRC), plus the number of the same animal type you already have.  So if you have four cows already and you add a piece with 3 cows on it, you score 7 points for that piece.  Mines give you silver between rounds, ships let you move up the turn order, buildings for city spaces provide a variety of benefits and your domain map has them all spelled out in some of the best iconography I've ever seen in a board game.

You also score extra points for completing an entire region on your map, based on the number of hexes in the region (1-5 on the basic maps).  There is also a bonus for completing all regions of the same type - so all your fields regions (you have 2) or town regions, etc.

The game takes a small bit to explain, but really, once you've had the icons on the boards explained once you never really need to reference the rules again. They did some superb icon work on this game.

Summary: I will buy a copy of this game shortly I liked it so much.  I suggest you do as well if you like territory building games.

~*~

And that's it for this year.  I played more than two games on Saturday and Sunday, but they were repeats of the games I reviewed this year (except Game of Thrones) or last year.  I got in a second game of Zombicide (Doug is unlucky for me), a game of King of Tokyo (a favorite from last year), taught Ticket to Ride to someone who "had had a bad experience", and then another game of Infinite City (a really attractive game I must track down).

Later!

2013 Board Game Review - Part 2

(Apologies for the delay - life became hectic and then I got ill.  Meh.)

Resuming my board game reviews from Lone Star Game Fest with the games I played Friday, December 28th.

Zombicide
Directly from Kickstarter and now available online in a few places, Zombicide is the Kickstarter I wished I'd backed.  I don't own a copy and so I cannot get enough of this game.  You are survivors in a zombie apocalypse, just like in the movies.  The game is cooperative and mission based, so you have a different goal depending upon what the mission is.  The game comes with 10 missions (in no particular order of hardness) and the Guillotine Games posts supplemental missions on their website for download.  The base characters you play are straight out of classic zombie movies.  If you were in on the Kickstarter, you get bonus characters based on other pop culture icons who fit right in.

Generally, your goal is to get from the starting point to the board exit without dying.  Usually you have to find some things (like food) before you can leave.  As you kill zombies, you get experience and level up, gaining up to three new abilities.  The zombies have 3-5 spawning points, at least one of which is directly in your way, more likely all of them at one point or another.  There is a deck of cards that show what spawns at each spawn point.  The cards have four levels of danger and the danger is set by the player with the MOST experience.  So if you have one person mowing down all the zombies, every time they top over into a new experience the board gets more dangerous for everyone.

Updated rules are available on the company website.  I recommend them as they clarify a few minor points that were unclear in the original rules, but the game is entirely playable out of the box and tons of fun.  Oh, the updated rules also lists the difficulty level of the missions, which do not go from easiest to hardest but vary along a rough story arc.  Mission 0 is the trainer, but Mission 1 is the hardest mission in the box and takes the longest to play.  I will defeat it one day, oh yes I will.

Summary:  Buy this and play it if you get the chance - I will soon.  It is not cheap, but comes with a ton of minis and a the art work on the boards is beautiful and detailed.

Ticket to Ride: India
I believe I reviewed Ticket to Ride before (play it as soon as you can), but the India expansion is the newest board expansion for the game.  It includes a reprint of the Switzerland map on the flipside, but I didn't have a chance to play that side.  The game play is the same as all the Ticket to Ride games (fun), but the twist with India is that you score bonus points if you are able to build duplicate routes to your tickets.  The bonus is significant, so it's worth keeping an eye out for, but I won the game on straight route completions and the longest route bonus, so it's not critical.

This is NOT a game board for beginners or those subject to analysis paralysis.  The over-thinking trying to score the dual route bonuses will kill the game.

Summary: Buy this if you like Ticket to Ride (and you do, right?).

Infinite City
I sat down to play this because I had nothing better to do.  Best spent hour of my life at the con.  Maybe second best, but it would be a close tie with The Castles of Burgundy.  We'll see.

Infinite City is a tile laying game where you build the board as you play, one of my favorite styles of game.  Turn order is simple: add a tile from your hand to the board, put one of your markers on the tile, do what the tile says, and draw back up to five tiles.  Sounds simple, doesn't it?  The tiles let you do things ranging from add additional tiles, draw above your hand limit, swap markers with someone else on the board (stealing their tile), and a lot more.  The game ends when someone puts their last marker on the board and the other players get a final play.

Points are scored three ways.  First is number of linked tile groups, minimum of three to for a group, no diagonals.  So isolated tiles of 1 or 2 do not score at all, but 3+ score equal to how many you have linked and you can score multiple groups.  Next is control of silver cards.  Some cards have silver rings on them - control the most at the end of the game and you get points equal to how many you control.  Finally, some cards have point values - you score all the point values on the cards you control.  Most points wins.

First time players will focus on board placement and maybe silver cards, but experienced players will focus on cards worth point in themselves and try to grab as many of those as possible.  You can easily double your score with those, so watch your opponents tile values, not just where they are on the board.

Summary: Good gateway game to introduce people to the hobby and fun to play for more advanced players.  Plus, the sci-fi city artwork is elegant and cool.  I want my cities of the future to look just like this.

That's it for now.  Part 3 will wrap up both Saturday and Sunday as I played several games I've played/reviewed before and not as many new games.  I should have that ready to post by Tuesday, January 15.

Later!

2013 Board Game Review - Part 1

Lone Star Game Fest ran from December 27th through December 30th at the same hotel as last year.  I had a great time, but four days of convention is starting to wear me out like it has not before.  The self-imposed sleep deprivation is wearing on me enough that I'm starting to feel and sound like an old man.  I'll have to do something about that next year.  Drink more liquids with caffeine in them should be a good start.

The A/C issues were resolved (mostly) by the convention purchasing steel utility shelves for attendees to stack their games on.  This worked really well and allowed better viewing of what games were available than the tables, plus more room was achieved with fewer shelving units due to the availability of four shelves over a table's single surface.  As to temperature control - I wore shorts and flip flops for most of the con and was comfortable most of the time.  The public areas of the hotel were much more comfortable than last year, so a positive all around.

The following reviews do not include the prototypes I played nor games I played last year (mostly).  I'll make note where I vary from this and why.

Game of Thrones (Boardgame)
I'm not a fan of the gimmick the author uses in the books, but I was willing to give this game a try anyways.  We played Game of Thrones with 5 players who had never played before (including myself) and 1 player who had played a few times before, but never taught before.  As it turned out, this was not a good mix, or at least it wasn't for me.  The game is an area control game where you are attempting to capture 7 castles before the end of the 10th turn.  There are more than 7 castles on the board, but with 6 players, we hovered between 2-4 for most of the game.  From the people who read the entire series of books, it seemed to emulate the conflicts in the books fairly well, even if the results were different.

Combat is a matter of moving troops into an attack and then playing a card from your hand.  Each house has its own hand of 7 cards with values of 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, and 4, but different powers for each house.  This provided some bluffing opportunity as cards played went into a discard pool and out of use until all 7 cards were used.  If you powered through a combat with your 4, it was unavailable for at least 6 more battles.  I liked this mechanism, but some of the powers were slowed down the game.

Sea power in this game seems to be broken.  Chains of ships provide unlimited movement and the ships can support land battles while simultaneously moving troops around.  We played the 2nd Edition, which has some corrections from 1st Edition to fix this, but I really think ships should be able to either ship or support, not both at the same time.  This would fix the issues with sea power I saw.

Initiative, tie-breaking order, and ability to play more than two of any command counter type is something voted on using power tokens - a limited resource irregularly garnered during the game.  This part is an issue, particularly initiative, as they changed only 2-3 times in our game, mostly at the start.  This left me down turn from the only experienced player, who I was constantly in conflict with.  His familiarity with the rules and the position he was playing (we learned late in the game it was the only position he had ever played) made the game frustrating to me.  This would have been manageable, but he also suffered from analysis paralysis and "take-back" fever, where he was constantly taking back moves he had agonized over, delaying the game a great deal.  This frustrated several of the players at the table who were just trying to learn the game.  I eventually reached my frustration threshold and walked away from the game late in the 9th turn, something I've never done before. 

Teaching a game and wanting to win a game are two different goals and are regularly in conflict with each other.  They guy "teaching" the game was more concerned with winning the game that he agonized over moves and added at least an hour to the game length.  In the end, he won the game, but it is very unlikely that the other 5 players will play the game ever again, defeating the reason for teaching the game.  I played for 6 hours before walking away and it lasted another hour after that for the final turn.  You may see how much I was willing to put up with to try and finish the game.


I might give this game another chance, just to get a better feel for it, but I don't plan on spending any money on it.

Legendary
 This is a deck building game using the Marvel superheroes IP.  It is a cooperative game, but only because the players are all working against the board and not each other.  The game I played had little in the way of planning and we were acting mostly independently of each other.  We were also resource starved at the beginning, which seemed to be bad luck in how the villain cards came out, but is crimped the ability of the less experienced players to effectively resource management.

Legendary starts with a master villain the players select, a villain deck whose setup is modified by the master villain, an initial set of power cards the players can purchase, and identical starting hands for the players.  At the start of each player's turn, a new villain card is turned over, pushing the line of villain cards along a 5 space path.  Each space represents a location (like the sewers or rooftops) and some powers are keyed to the locations (Storm's lightning bolt is more powerful on the rooftops).  If a villain gets pushed off the end of the track it "escapes" and bad things happen.  What exactly happens is stated on the villain card.  Players then use the cards in their hands to fight villains and/or buy better powers.  At the end they discard their hand and draw 5 new cards for next turn.  Some of the villain cards can force a loss of cards before your turn comes around again, so you need to be ready for that.  Instead of attacking a villain, if the player has enough attack strength in cards, they can go after the master villain.  The exact strength necessary is based on the master villain selected and the difficulty selected for that game.  The master villain has to be attacked a number of times (4 I think, but that may have been just the master villains we were facing) to win the game.  The master villain card sets out the way the players lose.

This is another game I need to play again to get a better feel for.  I have a better feel for how things work now, but the curve was...different from what I was expecting.  I've played Dominion and was expecting something more like that, but this isn't that game.  Your pool of cards will rarely get past 15 cards really and I expect that the optimal strategy keeps it below 10.  The goal is to beat up villains and eventually the master villain, not build a deck.  The pressure from the villain cards sliding off the track means you need to fight them often with whatever you have handy.  There may be too much randomocity in this game for me to really like it, but I really need to play it some more to work that out.

I might buy this game.


That's it for Day 1 of the convention.  I only got three games in because of Game of Thrones.  (The missing game was a prototype.)

Review: The Case of the Syphilitic Sister by James Hutchings

This is one of my infrequent book reviews.  In fact, the other one I did was for The New Death and other stories, also by James Hutchings.  James ask me to take a look at his newest project, a piece of serial fiction he is releasing through Jukepop Serials, a literary website providing serialized fiction in a variety of genres.  James described it as 1930's era pulp superhero action and then some other words, but, really, he had me at "1930's pulp superhero action".  Plus, I REALLY liked The New Death and other stories, so I wanted to read more of his work.  (I'd link to New Death, but I'm not certain which link he'd prefer.  I'll add it later when I get confirmation.) (See Update at the bottom of this post.)

The Case of the Syphilitic Sister
First, let me fess up: I want you to go read this and up-vote it so James will publish the next chapter sooner.  I WANT to know what happens next and I'm terribly impatient.

Chapter 1 starts with a trope and subverts it immediately.  The classy dame meets the detective in his office.  Except the office is neat and orderly and has clean and polite man at the desk fronting for the actual "detectives".  I put detectives in quotes as they are actually the superheros.  It being the 1930's, these are the people in costumes using their brains, brawn, and gadgets kind of heros.  To make their organization seem larger and more powerful, they take turns acting as each others followers, which is a pretty neat trick.

I won't get too deep into the plot as A) I want you to go and read it, and B) it's only one chapter long so far and just gets the ball rolling, not deep into plot.  Suffice to say, there is a mystery and the heros are on the case.

Heros shown so far are Green Dragon, who is the client contact, wearing a dark green suit with pistols that can act as flamethrowers.  He is also good with people, which is why he talks with the clients.  Next introduced is Princess Iron Fan.  I'm guessing she's a martial artist, but that's a guess as she her abilities are not discussed.  Once on the job, The Kabbalist is at work, with the other heros dressed as his sidekicks, The Golems.  I'd like to say I really like this method of force multiplication.

While on the job, the heros run across thugs after the same thing they are.  This interaction is very entertaining in how the thugs react.  One pees himself when the Kabalist and the Golems "appear", one throws a punch into some body armor (hurting his hand), and one decides to go for a switch-blade.  The one with the wounded hand quietly tells the third thug to put away the knife and then has a whispered negotiation with the Kabalist to avoid the fight.  Both agree and the Kabalist loudly orders the thugs to begone and, on cue, the thugs run away screaming and everyone saves face.

I really like this part.  Being a 1930's superhero is dangerous to both sides and the fact that both sides are willing to publicly play their parts while quietly negotiating what those parts are going to be is believable.  Neither side wants to push things too far, but neither side can afford to lose face and the cops give both a sideways look when they get involved.

The only downside I'm seeing is one of some anachronistic language.  The most noticeable (for me) is a reference to "suicide by cop", a term that was not coined until the 1990's.  I am a stickler for things like this, so it was jarring.

As I said at the top, I really want to see where this story goes and I'm eagerly awaiting the next chapter, which I hear will be released on the 22nd of this month.  He has material for several chapters, so perhaps you could go, give it a read, and up-vote to get him to publish a little more often that monthly.  It's worth the time to read and I think you too will want to find out what happens next.


UPDATE:The New Death and other stories can be found here: 
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
DriveThruFiction

UPDATE 2: Chapter 2 is now published.  Go read it! (You'll need to log in to read it.  It's worth it.)