Unrequested

Oh, dear. TenNapel's started up a webcomic.

2011-01-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

Doug TenNapel of Earthworm Jim and Sockbaby fame, has a new webcomic out, called Ratfist. It only just started, so there isn't much to say about it yet. So far, it's reminding me of nothing so much as the love child of Axe Cop and Sam & Max. It remains to be seen whether that's a good thing or not.

Boardgame review: The Target

2010-12-07T22:42:00.000-08:00

Every Tuesday, the local gaming store has boardgame night. Usually, this means a bunch of three and four player games happening at the same time, but sometimes it's fun to get everyone together into one big game. So, we're always on the lookout for good games that accommodate large numbers of players. The Target by Closet Nerd Games looks like it would fill that niche. Anywhere from 4 to 12 take the roles of spies secretly working for either the CIA or the KGB (Or maybe even working for themselves as double agents). Each turn, one player is the "Target", and every player plays a card that targets them. The ultimate goal for each team is for enough intel cards to be played on their HQ to win.

I really wanted to like this game. The theme is perfect for this sort of secret agenda game. A first glance of the rules and contents made me imagine the players trying to work out each others loyalties, tracking the path of intel so they can either help it to its destination or steal it for their own side. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work out that way. I'll be blunt: this not a good game. There's some good ideas in there, but nothing is implemented very well. It all comes out as a jumbled, confusing, awkward mess.

Components: There are a few things to be salvaged from this trainwreck. For example, each deck of cards comes with its own divided box. This is (mostly) a great idea; during play it keeps the decks organized, and when the game is over they store super easily. The agenda cards are also an interesting idea: They have a color bar across the top and bottom of the card, blue for CIA or red for KGB. You hide your card in a little half-envelope, so that if you have to show your loyalty to another player, they only see the exposed bar. The double agents, however, can turn their card so that EITHER a red or blue bar is showing, disguising themselves as one team or the other.

On the other hand, even these good ideas are marred by poor execution. One element of the game is you can only draw from one deck at the start of the game, until you unlock access to the other decks. When you unlock a deck, you get a little cardboard token with a letter on it. Unfortunately, the information that you need to know which deck you're drawing from and which deck you can unlock is really only printed on the sides of the boxes, and not in very large print. In practice, no matter where you are sitting there will some piece of basic game information that you want to know, but won't be able to see from where you are.

As for the neat secrecy envelope idea? It would be a lot more effective if the paper envelope was actually thick enough that the boldly colored card didn't show through. With even reasonably good light, you can easily spot a double agent through the paper.

The Rules: I'm afraid I don't have much nice to say here. The beauty of a game like, say, Werewolf/Mafia or Are You the Traitor, or even Bang! or Shadow Hunters, is that you can easily explain the rules to a large group of players and jump into the game. With The Target, though, even though the rules are only 6 pages long, they're so haphazard and full of special cases that it took a long time to get everything explained. And even then, people still weren't sure clear on a lot of rules well into the game.

The cards themselves are missing basic information. For instance, you can play three blue rookie cards to draw from any decks for one turn. Where does it say this? Not on the card, that's for sure. There are four different kinds of attacks. They all do the same thing, except that bombs work on an HQ and the other 3 don't. Again, the card itself doesn't say anything about this.

Also, there are just obvious holes in the rules. For example, the rule is that everyone plays a card on the target. That's fine, but there are also a lot of game effects that will require some players to show the card they are about to play to other players. Unfortunately, there's no rule for what order things happen in this case. The rulebook has all the hallmarks of a lack of blind testing. Seriously, game designers; take a draft of your rules, have a total stranger read it, and then watch them play a game. If they don't play the way you expect them to, FIX YOUR RULEBOOK. Ahem.

Gameplay: There's not much going for the game here, either, I'm afraid. A small hand of cards means you don't have a lot of choices of what to do. The locked decks mean you don't even have a lot of control over what abilities you have. At the start of the game, you have no information at all about who is on your team, and you'll probably have to play several rounds before you can even start to try to find things out, let alone act on that info. And it's pretty much random which decks you'll get access to. So you can easily end up with access to the attack/defense deck, but with no idea of who you should be attacking or protecting. The only players that had any feeling they were progressing toward their goals were the lucky ones to get access to the intel deck; they just threw as many intel as they could at their HQ when the opportunity came up and hoped for the best. That was a more coherent strategy than anyone else could manage. In the end, no one could really say they had fun.

Final verdict: I can't really recommend this game for anyone. It's far too slow, clumsy, and poorly written to be an enjoyable game. Everything this game tries to be, some other game does better.

Boardgame review- Ascension:Chronicle of the Godslayer

2010-09-09T01:30:00.000-07:00

Ever since Dominion has come out, there have been a number of entries in the deck-building game arena trying to dethrone it. I already reviewed Thunderstone, which didn't quite manage the task. Can the new entrant, Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer by Gary Games step up and do the job?

Like all deck-building games, the first step when you open up the box is to unwrap all the cards, sort them out, and find some plastic sleeves for them. If you're going to play any of these games, Dominion, Thunderstone, or Ascension, you really want to include room for card sleeves in your budget. You can play without them, but this is a game about shuffling and reshuffling cards over and over. An ounce of prevention will keep this game going a lot longer.

Anyway. Unlike its older brothers, Ascension includes a board. You don't need it. Really, it's just a player aid. But it's a reasonably well laid out and helpful player aid, so we'll give it credit there.

Gameplay is very simple. It's basically the Dominion formula, except even less structured. You start the game with a deck of 10 cards. 8 cards are apprentices that provide runes (money) and 2 cards are militia that provide strength (also money, but murder money). Each turn you start with a 5 card hand. You can play all of your cards each turn and buy any number of cards you can afford, unlike the strict limits of Dominion. Some of the cards you play provide runes; the cards that you buy with runes go into your discard pile and are now permanent parts of your deck. Some of the cards provide strength; the cards that you defeat (read: buy) with strength give you an immediate effect and then go to the trash pile and never enter your deck. Some cards give you honor (victory point) tokens when they are played or defeated. Like Puerto Rico or Race For the Galaxy there is a pool of points that ends the game when it's empty. Many cards have special abilities when played. Most cards that you purchase into your deck have honor values on the card, and give up their points at the end of the game. The winner is whoever has the most points, from earned tokens and purchased cards combined, at the end of the game.

Mechanically, everything works fine. There are no huge combos to slow the game down like Dominion, which may make the game more appealing to casual players. The special abilities on the cards are very clear and straightforward; the influence of the M:tG players on the design team really shows in that regard. The costs and values of the cards seem to be balanced well. So far, nothing has come up that I can point to and say "this is broken."

While the rules are fine, the rulebook is not. After the fiasco of Thunderstone and its four (well, I stopped keeping track at 4. Maybe there have been more revisions) rulebooks, you'd think that game designers and publishers would be very careful to double check the rulebook. It's not like there's even much to proofread: The actual rules only amount to about a page or two, the rest of the book is devoted to labeled pictures of the cards and a glossary.
But sadly, the rulebook is clearly several edits away from a final product. Several rules are simply missing: For example, in the section about spending strength to defeat a monster, it says that after you defeat the monster, you discard the monster and immediately replace it with a new card from the draw pile. Then it refers you to the previous section of the rules, the section about buying cards with runes, for more information. But that section doesn't mention replacing purchased cards at all! Also, one of the cards, the cultist, is a special monster that is never discarded no matter how many times you defeat it. But the rules don't actually say that, so it appears to just be a bonus for the first person to scrounge up 2 spare strength to kill it.
I suspect the rulebook was due another revision before printing, but never got it. In the setup description it calls the draw pile the "center deck", but the board calls it the "portal deck." This sounds to me like a few changes got made that never made it into the rulebook. Or maybe it just wasn't proofread enough. Always a possibility. Still, once you've got those missing rules, everything runs smoothly.

One major difference between Ascension and Dominion (or Thunderstone) is during setup. In Ascension, rather than coming up with a selection of cards to be available each game, you basically just shuffle everything together and turn 6 cards face up. This means that from turn to turn you have different choices, but from game to game it's always the same cards that could show up. In practice, this makes it hard to plan out a long term strategy; on your turn you just buy what's available. If you're lucky it pairs up with stuff you already bought. Being allowed to purchase as many cards as you can afford each turn means your decks grow much more quickly, which reduces how often you cycle, so you may not even see the cards you're buying for quite some time. There are cards that trigger off of each other, such as construct cards (cards that remain in play) affecting other construct cards, but in practice you're lucky to see these combos actually happen. On the other hand, the costs of the cards seem to be balanced with that in mind; you don't really pay extra for abilities that may never happen.

Some random thoughts: I really like how the Cultist card works in this context. It's the card I mentioned earlier that's always available to be defeated. So even if there's nothing else out there to fight, you can always spend 2 strength to get 1 honor token. You can do this as many times a turn as you can afford. It helps prevent the feeling of not being able to play because your entire hand is strength cards and all the available cards require runes. It also means there is a constant drain on the honor point pool, moving things along toward endgame.

Random thought the second: Like Thunderstone, Ascension tries to be Dominion With Theme. In Ascension's case, they go for M:tG style blurbs on each card. The simplified battle mechanics in Ascension (pay strength, defeat monster, get reward) actually feels a lot more thematic than Thunderstone's somewhat counterintuitive system. On the other hand, Ascension doesn't have much of a feeling of progression. You don't upgrade your heroes and items, you just get more of them. You don't really take on tougher and tougher monsters, you just fight whatever's available, and the tough monsters just sit there taking up space until someone gets a good draw. Most disappointing, despite the avowed goal of the game being to slay the evil god Samael (Chronicles of the Godslayer and all that), you never actually slay any gods.

Who should get Ascension? If you thought Dominion looked interesting but too daunting, Ascension is probably an excellent gateway game. It's certainly simpler that Dominion, and the honor token pool puts a time limit on the game that keeps things from dragging out. On the other hand, it probably won't satisfy the itch of more hardcore gamers. There just isn't that much depth to the game.

The List: 16-18

2010-07-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

16: Girls with Slingshots Another of those slice of life comics I love so much. Actually, the evolution of the art for this comic is interesting. Corsetto's gone from a more elaborate style, with softer curved lines, to a simpler, more angular style over the course of the comic. I kind of miss the old style, but I bet the new method's easier to get out on time. And this comic is definitely worth keeping up with, so anything that keeps the strips coming is fine by me!

17: Lackadaisy 1920's mobster kitty cats. It's exactly as adorable and wonderful as it sounds. Don't really have anything else to say, other than that it's a must read.

18: Punch an' Pie
More slice of life stuff! This one follows a tiny tiny woman trying to sort out life and love and all that. Written by Aeire, who previously did Queen of Wands(where Angela first appeared), and drawn by Chris Daily, who also does Striptease, which I already mentioned. It's pretty good, all in all, but right now it's stuck in one of those holding patterns that SoL comics tend to get caught in, where the plot just sort of idles a bit until everyone's lined up for the next big event.

The List: 13-15

2010-06-20T23:23:00.000-07:00

13: VG Cats Not much to say about this, it's a one-shot gaming humor comic. Chances are, you've already got your own opinion. If you don't, go take a look and form one. Sometimes he runs a side comic; the current one is Super Effective, which is kind of a parody telling of first-gen Pokemon. It's amusing, but at the rate it's updating it'll never get past the first game.

14: Shortpacked! This is David Willis's newest entry in the Walkyverse and... it's nothing like the original comics, really. Except when it is. Originally, this comic was just a gag comic about toys, with no story at all, just the author talking to the audience. When It's Walky! ended, Willis ended up turning Shortpacked! into a story comic, but he still seemed to want it to just be a joke comic with no drama ever. He lasted all of 12 minutes before giving up on THAT. I might have to give the Walkyverse comics their own post at some point, there's way more than a paragraph worth of stuff to say about them.

15: San: Three Kingdoms Comic A parody of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It's about a story that Americans typically aren't familiar with, written by a non-native English speaker, and makes no effort at making the jokes and references actually accessible. And I love it. I couldn't even tell you why.

The List: 10-12

2010-06-13T00:26:00.000-07:00

10: Sore Thumbs One of the giant heap of Crosby comics. It originally claimed to be a political-slash-gaming comic, but pretty soon degenerated into insanity. Unfortunately, the insanity of Superosity is more interesting, but at least Sore Thumbs has good fanservice.

11: Superosity Considering its historical importance to the world of webcomics, it seems like this would be a little more dignified, wouldn't it? Just as crudely drawn as when it started, and the humor hasn't matured much, either. And it's still just so offbeat and random that I still look forward to reading it every day. This was the flagship that helmed the Keenspot comic collective, back in the days when no one thought you could make any money off webcomics. And they were pretty much right, but Keenspot's still around, sort of, and that counts for something.

12: Striptease Good artwork, but the spotty updating schedule and occasionally facedesk-worthy writing makes this hard to recommend. It's on hiatus right now, anyway. Maybe I'll have something nicer to say when it comes back.

The List: 7-9

2010-06-09T13:01:00.000-07:00

7: Joyce and Walky! The denouement of It's Walky! I've been reading David Willis's stuff since the Roomies! days (geez, the man loves exclamation points even more than I do). J&W is actually a subscription comic with the occasional free sample that doesn't seem to have much to do with the storyline. I haven't been assed to buy a subscription yet. If I ever do, I'll have more to say about it, I'm sure. Meanwhile, it's mostly just on my list out of inertia.

8: MoonDog This would be a great comic if it would just update once in a while! Yeah, yeah, sense of entitlement and all that, but still. Well, it's a good read, anyway, and I keep it on my list hoping against hope that it will update again in the vague and distant future.

9: Sabrina Online Honestly, not sure why I keep this on my list. The art is great, but it's a comic that's paced for a daily schedule, but released on a monthly schedule. Never mind that the overflow of fandom references and nerdier-than-thou jokes. It's more work to delete it from my list than to check it once a month, I guess, but it's not on my must-read list.

The List: 4-6

2010-06-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

4: Dresden Codak I swing back and forth on this one. The artwork is nice, and when he's on the writing is quite clever. Problem is, most of the time the writing seems to a thick coating of overeducation pasted across... nothing in particular. Lots of namedrops of writers and philosophers that don't actually provide anything to the strip. The comic is strongest when doing one-shots and poster-style strips, where the lack of any actual depth doesn't hurt it.

5: Flaky Pastry Pretty much just as much of a junkfood comic as it sounds. No depth, no coherent themes, and no apologies for it. Goblins, elves, catgirls, mad scientists, pretty much just running around and goofing off, and trying and failing to make out with each other. Occasionally a plot tries to sneak in, but hardly anyone pays it any serious attention. There's not a lot to talk about with this comic, but it's still a lot of fun. Also, nice fanservice.

6: Freefall Sort of a lightweight, comedic counterpart to Schlock Mercenary, in that it's not exactly hard scifi, but it takes its physics seriously. A story about an engineer who happens to be a wolf, an entrepreneur space captain who happens to be a horrifying squidlike monstrosity, and robots that think they're puppies. The plot is slow moving, but it's really just a gag comic anyway.

The List: Intro, 1-3

2010-06-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

OK, there's just way too many comics in my reading list for me to write a whole big entry about each one. So in the interest of fast, cheap content, I'm just going to go through my bookmarks from top to bottom and say a few words about each one.

1: Bob the Angry Flower A gag comic about an angry flower, a stump, and a floating fetus. Quite a bit less logical than it sounds. The humor comes from random and often insane situations. Often falls flat, but when he hits it's golden. Almost every strip is a one-off, making this great for random linkage.

2: College Roomies From Hell!!! One of the old guard, it's been around since 1999. I used to follow this strip eagerly, but in the past few years... I'm not sure, it just feels like it's collapsing under the weight of its continuity, getting more and more incomprehensible without actually getting anywhere. The characters behave in ways that I just can't figure out anymore. Still on my reading list for now, but not one I recommend to new readers right now.

3: Crimson Dark A sci-fi story somewhat in the vein of Firefly. (The creator is probably tired of that comparison, but hey. It's a motley band of misfits in a spaceship. The shoe fits.) The character art is done by drawing over 3D models of the characters, which gives the comic a distinct look. It fits the setting and feel of the comic, but does edge right up against the dangerous valley. The story and writing are strong, if nothing extraordinary. A solid read.

Boardgame review: Fire and Axe

2010-05-27T21:25:00.000-07:00

Fire and Axe: A Viking Saga by Asmodée is pretty much exactly what it says on the box, a chance to pretend to be Vikings, marauding across Europe and beyond. Each player gets to be a band of vikings, sailing their longboat to trade with, raid, and settle the rest of the world.

First glance: The components are quite nice. No complaints about the artwork, good sturdy cardboard for the map and tokens, and the plastic playing pieces are bright and easy to distinguish from each other. The plastic city pieces with hidden cardboard numbers underneath work very well; they stand out well against the rest of the board.

So, a quick and incomplete look at the rules: the basic mechanic of a game turn is that you get 7 days worth of actions. If you're at home, days are spent loading vikings and trade goods onto your ship. Once you set out, you can move one space per day, but sailing too many spaces during a single turn will force you to lose either goods or crew. If you are at a foreign port, you can trade a good to the port, raid a city, or settle the land. These actions don't cost any time, but you can only do one thing at a port each turn.

Trading simply means unloading a good from your ship onto the port space, and immediately gaining points depending on how valuable that port space is.

Raiding is an attempt to capture one of the plastic city pieces at that port. The attacker rolls a die; if he rolls higher than the value of the port he captures the city, if he fails a crewman dies. He can keep trying until he runs out of vikings, uses all three dice, or gives up. When capturing a city, the player claims the piece as his own. Each piece has a random, hidden point value underneath it, and the player reveals it and gains that many points.

Settling is like raiding, except that the player has to decide how many dice he is rolling, and rolls them all at once. Each die that fails means one crewman is lost, and then if any dice were high enough he can move one viking from his ship to that port. Settling doesn't earn points right away, but will provide points at the end of the game.

While raiding and settling are usually worth more points than trading, if a viking attacks a port that has received a trade good in a previous turn, he gets a +1 bonus to his die rolls, so selling goods on one turn and then attacking the next turn is a common tactic.

At any given time, there will be three saga cards in play. These are like missions that the home countries are sending you on, and these cards serve as the driving force that directs the game and keeps it moving. Each card has an objective listed, like 'raid Constantinople' or 'trade at York, Lincoln, and Norwich'. Whoever completes the last step of a saga card claims it for itself. Some saga cards, the ones that require you to sail well out of your way, are worth bonus points. Then a new card is turned up. When all of the cards have been claimed, the game ends.

At the end of the game, players score bonus points for the settlers they have placed, plus bonus points for the player that captured the most cities, and the players that got the most of each of the three categories of saga card. Whoever scored the most points wins.

Overall, the rules are pretty clean and simple. There's a few confusing parts during setup, where it tells you to place trade goods on a part of the map that doesn't exist, but it turns out that doesn't actually affect the game at all. The most confusing rule is the dangerous sailing rule, but carefully reading the examples should straighten things out OK.

Fire and Axe makes a good gateway game, a bridge between experienced gamers and newbies. By and large, the game is structured that if you think like a viking, you'll probably do pretty well. Go out and rampage and pillage. The more you do, the more points you get. While the dice can ruin even the most well-laid plan, there's still room for more skilled players to strategize. In particular, you want to try to figure out how to accomplish as much on a single trip as you can before you have to go home and resupply. There isn't a lot of direct conflict between players, making this more of a scavenger hunt game rather than a wargame, but you can park your boat in a port to block other players out, and there are runecards you can play to mess with each other's plans.

Fire and Axe is probably weakest as a two player game, because of one mechanic in particular. Because it's the person that completes the last step of the saga card that claims it, you need to be careful not to do half the work, then leave the last step wide open for your opponent to jump in and steal. With only two players, this can lead to very short, conservative turns that end up dragging the game, as neither player is willing to risk a partial card until they can do it all at once. It won't stall out completely, because sooner or later someone WILL be able to do a card all at once, but it can still affect the pace. A third player breaks up the symmetry. If two players enter a standoff, the third can just go somewhere else and not worry about slowing down. In any case, the game has a sort of free-for-all feel that's better suited to more players anyway.

Fire and Axe is a game that's probably worth adding to any collection. The bad news is you might not be able to. Unfortunately, the game is out of print, and there are no plans for a reprint. Ragnar Brothers, who made the original game as Viking Fury, are offering the original version again. Unfortunately, this doesn't include the improvements that Asmodée added to the game, like the higher quality components and extra rune cards. If you can find a copy of Fire and Axe, maybe a used or forgotten copy at your local game store, it's well worth snagging.

Why I Read This: A Girl and Her Fed

2010-05-25T00:10:00.000-07:00

I had a bit of an uncertain start with A Girl and Her Fed. The art was a very strange mix of crude line drawings and, well, gray blobs. But over time the art style grew on me. The very simply drawn faces, just three lines for the eyes and mouth, take on the expressiveness of emoticons, if I can wax nerdy for a moment. But it worried me that the art style never seemed to evolve or grow.

Art quality isn't necessarily a deal-breaker for me when I'm deciding if I like a webcomic. It's pretty common for an artist to start publishing their comic as soon as they have the idea, and maybe a few character sketches and storyboards ready. And that's fine. It's the nature of the internet to let anyone publish, even if they don't have the artistic skills that would get them published in the physical industry. There are comics that remain stagnant and ugly, where the artist doesn't even try to improve their skills over time. But it's the comics where the artist DOES put in the effort that I watch for. I love being able to wade through a comic's archive and watch the art quality improve over time.

So, I was a little worried that the art wasn't improving. But happily, it was all a trick. Instead of a gradual improvement of art quality, there would be sudden bursts of higher quality art. Backgrounds, facial features, and everything would suddenly appear when Sparky, the Fed, would activate the chip in his head. Good art became a visual indicator of the world of the chip. Sure, it's the Wizard of Oz trick, but I still like it.

Eventually, the comic shifted to the new art style, although with a simpler color scheme than the painted quality of the chip scenes. It looks a lot better, there's no getting around it.

The thing is, though, is that now Otter is redoing all of the art. As I understand it, it's largely because the strips have to be redrawn to be print suitable anyway, so they're getting a facelift during the process. And it's neat to see the old strips in the new style, and to see the little changes to details as the story gets tweaked to match the new art.

Sooner or later, Otter's going to get back to the part of the story where Sparky learns how to use the chip. What's going to be the visual cue then? I'm torn. See, I really like the new art style. Having a consistent look for the whole series is a good thing when it comes time to make the dead tree version. But I really liked the impact that the contrasting art styles had.

The story recently ended its first major art, and the current updates are a mix of an interim story and remakes of the old strips. And honestly, I'm more interested in the remakes. Even though I know what's going to happen, I don't know what's going to happen. That's a pretty neat trick to pull off.

Boardgame review: Thunderstone

2010-01-31T18:58:00.000-08:00

Thunderstone, by Mike Elliott of AEG, is basically the hack and slash version of Dominion. Both Dominion and Thunderstone revolve around starting with a small deck of weak cards, using those cards to add better cards to your deck, and gradually improving your deck until you can start collecting victory points. While Dominion took this idea and made a game with very tight mechanics and a very loose theme, Thunderstone... well, they went a different direction. It would be easy to go down the line and compare every aspect of Thunderstone to Dominion, but that wouldn't be entirely fair. More importantly, it would be kind of boring, so I'll try to resist.

The basic turn of Thunderstone is simple enough. At the start of your game, you draw 6 cards of your starting deck of 12. Each turn, you play your cards, then discard everything, draw a new hand of 6, and wait for your next turn. During your turn, you can do either go shopping in the village, go fighting in the dungeon, or rest.

Resting just lets you remove a single card from your deck at the cost of your turn. Done.

If you go shopping, you lay out your cards, play any village effects that those cards might have, then you total up the cash value of all the cards you've played and buy one card that costs up to that much. Then, if you have any heroes in your hand, you can spend XP you earned in the dungeon to level them up. Then you're done. The cards you can buy are things like heroes, weapons, spells, and the occasional card that helps when shopping. The selection of cards is random each game, and never changes over the course of the game.

In addition to its normal function, each card can have a gold value from 0 to 3 that you use when purchasing. This means that you have to balance your purchases. Too many cards that don't have a gold value in your deck, and you can't purchase good stuff. However, there's not really a relationship between cards that are good for fighting being bad for purchasing. Some of the best weapons provide good income, while the only attack spell provides no income. Heroes, the most important cards for entering the dungeon, are almost never worth income, except for thieves. The overall effect is that the deck-building portion of the game feels muddied. There are two stages to building your deck, sort of; building the economic strength to buy the good cards, and buying the good cards to be able to take on the dungeon. But the unclear distinction between economic cards and combat cards just makes that all seem a little clumsy.

During the dungeon step, you lay out your hand of cards, assign any weapon cards to hero cards, use any dungeon powers to prepare yourself, then choose one of the three monsters to fight. The 3 monsters are in a line, representing how deep in the dungeon they are. The deeper they are, the darker the room is, which provides a penalty to the combat that can be offset by bringing light. The light mechanic is actually pretty nifty, and I wish they'd done more with it. It adds an extra variable to the combat that you have to consider, since light is an easy bonus to obtain, but any extra light beyond what you need to counter the penalty gives no bonus. [*]

Like the village cards, not all the monsters are available in every game. The monsters are divided by type into 8 decks, humanoids, dragons, oozes, etc. Only three decks are shuffled together in each game to make the dungeon deck, so you know ahead of time what monsters will be showing up. This mostly works well; it lets you know what situations you'll have to prepare for, which I like.

Once you've chosen a target, the monster performs its battle ability, and then you either win or lose. There's no randomness here, so in 99% of the situations in the game, you'll only choose a combat that's a forgone conclusion and there will be no surprise. There's also no way for other players to interfere with your combat, for better or worse. If you win, the monster is added to your discard pile where it is worth victory points, and you also claim the XP value of the card. If you lose, the monster simply goes to the bottom of the deck. Either way, the dungeon gets a new monster, so there's always three to choose from. The lack of randomness makes combat a little unsatisfying to me. There's no element of risk, no way to go for the long odds against a tough foe if you're behind, no way for a weak foe to have a surprise upset against a complacent player. Basically, it just comes down to meet-the-requirement-collect-the-reward.

The game ends when the Thunderstone leaves the dungeon. One of the cards in the bottom 1/3 of the dungeon deck is the Thunderstone. It can't be captured directly; to claim it you have to defeat the monster in the depth 1 slot when the Thunderstone is in the depth 2 slot. If the Thunderstone moves to the depth 1 slot for any other reason, the game simply ends with no one claiming it. Either way, whoever has the most victory points printed on cards in their deck wins.

So, how good is the game? Well, it's fun but it's also very, very flawed. Maybe even fundamentally so. My overall impression is that the game designers have played a lot of games (Dominion in particular) but have never actually studied game design, or even just looked at games from the perspective of what is and is not good design. It comes across as a very amateurish game with professional production quality.

For instance, the rules are just full of inconsistencies and confusions. The rulebook has been rewritten twice and still isn't quite right. Not even obscure things, either. It's all stuff that should have come up in playtesting. In some cases, the new rules actually contradict the cards. A simple note that the change is an errata would suffice, but the reading leaves the strange impression that the rules writer thinks the card says something different than it actually says.

Also, the endgame condition is, well, terrible. The Thunderstone itself only provides a small score boost, but it quickly becomes obvious that it's just random who will benefit from it. The random nature of the dungeon deck means that there's no buildup of weak monsters to strong monsters, so there's no last big challenge to claim the MacGuffin. The game ends with a whimper.

Thunderstone's attempts to do what Dominion did right backfire in the village. Simply put, there aren't enough different kinds of cards, and the distribution that does exist is strange in some ways. There's only one attack spell, and it's the most expensive non-hero card in the game. There are three different kinds of light source, one of which is guaranteed in every game. There are two different archery-themed heroes, but no bows. Worst, the cards that are available to purchase at the start of the game are all that will ever be available. Going into the dungeon and killing the dragon will never net you an awesome unique sword or magic bauble. It's an RPG with no loot mechanic.

(Actually, sometimes you get spoils from defeating a monster, but that just lets you buy an item. Your cards still have to have a high enough gold value. This is less like collecting exciting loot, and more like making it back to town before the store closes.)

There are things that I do really like. The hero levelling mechanic is fun, and provides a much needed way to interfere with other players by getting to the heroes they need before they can. The darkness mechanic is interesting, as I mentioned, and it does let them pull off a few neat interactions. Even the flaws I mentioned aren't really deal breakers. They're not the sort of thing that makes me stuff a game back in the box and leave it on the shelf to collect dust. However, I can't quite recommend it as a purchase. In my case, my FLGS owner opened it up as a store copy, and from my point of view 'free' is the perfect entry fee to this game.

As a final note, I think that there is a really good game hiding here somewhere. I know that AEG intends to release an expansion, and if they take that chance to really shore up the deficiencies of the game instead of just aimlessly adding more of the same, then I might change my recommendation. But for now: get someone else to buy the game and play their copy.

[*]: Apparently, in Thunderstone Land, light is just the absence of darkness. Your penalty due to darkness can be arbitrarily high; there's no rule limiting how dark it can get. However, you can only add light until the darkness level is at 0, after that there's no more darkness to take away.

Boardgame review: Dungeon Lords

2010-01-23T19:09:00.001-08:00

I've got some more webcomics to point out soon, but I haven't worked out exactly what I want to say about them yet. So meanwhile, here's something completely different.

Dungeon Lords is the newest game by Czech game designer Vlaada Chvátil. I'm already a fan of his earlier games, especially Galaxy Truckers and Space Alert, so when I saw that he had a new game coming out about making a dungeon and staffing it with imps to work it and monsters to fight off invading heroes, the part of me that so fondly remembers Dungeon Keeper got very excited.

So, of course, the actual publication of the game got delayed.

But I did finally get ahold of it, and tricked a couple of friends into learning it with me, and we had a go of it.

First off, this game is adorable. The artwork calls back to the creatures of Dungeon Keeper, but made humorous and adorable. Just check out that imp over there. The little plastic imp figures are just as adorable. All of the game boards (and there are quite a few, but each one serves a purpose and space is saved wherever they can manage) have little details on them, like a baby imp hugging his slime BFF. Heartwarming. Vlaada Chvátil tends to write rulebooks that range from humorous to hilarious, and Dungeon Lord's book tends toward the latter, especially the flavor commentary provided by a minion and a demon. My one complaint is that the wooden minion figures have an unfortunate silhouette. I think they kind of look like the E.T. sprite from the terrible Atari 2600 game. My roommate thinks they look like dinosaurs with priapism. We can't decide which is worse. Some stickers with the minion picture on them would fix that problem right up.

Second off, the game has a definite learning process. You can't really just jump into a game and learn as you go. I'll get to that in more detail in a second, but it's something to keep in mind. It's not really a complicated game, mind you. There are far fewer rules to remember than in, say, a Fantasy Flight Games game. But you also can't just pick it up and play. Don't worry, though, the pregame lessons don't take very long.

To borrow the summary from the rules, the game goes as follows: Build, fight, build, fight, score. That's it. In the build phase, you send out your minions to do your bidding, gathering resources and spending them on tunnels, dungeon rooms, and monsters. In the fight phase, heroes try to wreck your dungeon and you try to hold them back. After two game-years of building and fighting, you total up scores and see who won.

This is why you can't just jump straight in, by the way. Even though building is the first phase of the game, you need to understand how the fighting phase works, otherwise you'll just be playing blind.

Anyway, on to the mechanics. Dungeon Lords borrows from a lot of other games, but it neatly avoids being a ripoff. The build phase is divided into four production seasons, a little like Kingsburg, with some maintanence steps mixed it. During production, players can send their minions to do three different jobs. The available jobs are gaining food, spreading propaganda, digging tunnels, mining gold, hiring new imps, buying traps, hiring a monster, or building a room.

Dungeon Lords takes a rather nasty twist on the standard worker placement mechanic that you see in games like Caylus or Kingsburg. Each player decides where and in what order to send his three minions secretly and simultaneously, then everyone's orders are revealed and the minions are placed going around the table. The first minion to arrive at a space gets the least benefit, so you might try to send a minion to an important task late. On the other hand, only three minions can go to a particular job space, and there are four players. (If there are fewer than four players, a dummy fourth is included just to block random spaces.) So if that space is in high demand and you send your minion too late, he might end up blocked out of the space entirely!

The other twist in the build phase is that you are blocked from taking two of the actions during each season. Each season, two of the three action cards you played are taken out of your hand for a round, and can't be chosen next season. You can see what the other players are blocked from, as well, so you have some clues as to what your opponents will be able to do.

Between the production seasons, you'll be able to see what adventurers will be attacking at the end of the year. The evillest dungeon lord gets the strongest adventurers. But the adventurers come in four types: meat-shield warriors, trap preventing rogues, damage healing priests, and spellcasting wizards. If you have a plan for the battle phase, you might want to arrange to be more or less evil when the heroes are handed out, so that you get one your defenses can handle. If a dungeon lord gets too evil, he attracts the attention of the paladin, who is a huge pain to defeat, but is worth a bunch of points if you can manage it.

The fight rounds play out like a kind of puzzle minigame. In each of four combat rounds, the adventurers attempt to conquer a tunnel or room in your dungeon. You can send a trap and/or a monster to attack them. If you do enough damage to an adventurer, he goes into your prison and is worth points. If any adventurers survive, they conquer the tile, which makes you lose the use of that tile and is also negative points. Usually, traps and monsters can only be used once, so the puzzle is working out how to most efficiently use your defences so that you protect as many tiles as possible. The special abilities of your traps, monsters, and of the heroes can interact in strange and hard to predict ways.

After two game years of building and fighting, the game is done, and you count up the score. There's lots of different ways to get points, so it's hard to point at any particular thing and say "this is what you're trying to do." Compare to, say, Galaxy Truckers, where the winner is whoever earns the most money. In Dungeon Lords, the dungeon that's worth the most points is the best dungeon. What makes it the best? The fact that it's worth the most points, of course! It's not completely satisfying, but really it works out fine. I certainly can't think of a better alternative off the top of my head.

In your first game, you'll probably just care about keeping your dungeon intact. After a few games, you'll be watching for the moves that will earn you bonus points. I've got two full games under my belt now, which isn't enough for me to have a firm grasp on a winning strategy, but at this point when I lose it's entirely my own fault.

Some final thoughts: At first glance, having only two game years seems like it's too short. One of my gaming group thought that the game could easily go a third year, maybe with an expansion. You certainly don't have enough time to feel like you've "finished" your dungeon. Thinking back on it, though, I think that two years is just about right. Because the time is short, you never get to a point where you feel like you have nothing left to do and are just wasting time. Ending the game where it is leaves you wanting more, which is greatly preferable to wishing you had those last 30 minutes of your life back.

Final verdict? Well, I'd been drooling over the game for months and I, personally, am not disappointed by it in the least. This isn't a gateway game, sure, but if you've got a group of three or four experienced gamers, this is a welcome addition to your gaming repertoire.

Why I Read This: Kevin and Kell/Sinfest

2009-12-30T01:31:00.000-08:00

Most webcomics are amateur affairs, and it shows. I'm not even talking about quality issues; some amateur works can be amazing and the pro stuff can be terrible. I'm just talking about things like sporadic updates, working without a buffer, and inconsistent art quality.

Kevin & Kell and Sinfest are proof that professionalism can have a place on the web, too.

Kevin & Kell is damn near the oldest webcomic that's still going, so you'd expect a certain professional quality just from practice. But more than that, Bill Holbrook already had strips running in syndicated newspapers, and he's always run K&K with that same level of craft. A new strip is released every day like clockwork. The style has been consistent since the strip began. The strip wouldn't be out of place in a print newspaper, if it didn't border on furry vore fantasy.

When the strip began, at least, the whole species mix, predator/prey relationship stuff made for some interesting social commentary. Nothing groundbreaking, sure, but effective enough. The trouble is, you can only keep the commentary up for so long. The satirical strips still show up, but they're spaced out by vast expanses of formulaic gag strips. And it really is a formula, you could die of alcohol poisoning if you take a drink every time you read a variation of 'As an [animal] I always [thing that animal does].

Actually, once upon a time K&K was primarily a tech humor comic, although you'd never be able to tell now. You can sort of track the change in the strip's jokes and plot them against Holbrook discovering the furry fandom and attending conventions...

Basically, K&K makes my list by sheer inertia. I started reading it when it was only a year or two old, and it's pushing 15 now. It has its ups and downs, but even at its most banal, like the recent Rudy's Christmas Story storyline, it's still pleasant enough, and once in a while he gets interested in the strip again and cranks out some satisfying character development.

Sinfest is another strip that would absolutely fit in the newspaper comics page, except that no newspaper would carry it. Seriously, he tried, none of them would publish him. But if you delve into the archive, the parade of pimps, hos, blunts, and general irreverence going back to 2000 has had a consistent craftsmanship day after day without fail. The only real change in quality seems to be when he gets a new scanner. The characters stay the same, and the same basic setups and jokes get used over and over. Just like the pros do!

Sinfest manages to pull it off better than even K&K does, in fact. Where Holbrook tends to use formula gags as cruise control, just filling the days until a storyline that engages his muse rolls around, the mysterious Tatsuya Ishida uses formula as a framework. Even if there's nothing in current events he feels like satirizing, he'll just poke fun at his own comic.

I can't think of the last time I laughed out loud at Sinfest, but I don't really expect to, either. It's a gag strip. It takes 15 seconds of my time and consistently amuses me, and that's better than most real newspaper comics can claim. Plus, I think only the most... did I already use "irreverent" to describe this comic? Well, whatever. Only the the most irreverent comics can manage the street cred to pull off a good heartwarming strip once in a while.

Why I Read This: Gunnerkrigg Court

2009-12-28T23:20:00.000-08:00

OK, Technical difficulties are sorted out, so let's get started.

Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell is a pretty big part of why I started this blog. When I try to get my friends to read a webcomic other than Sluggy Freelance or Penny Arcade, this is the one I point them at.

Superficially, Gunnerkrigg Court seems like a Harry Potter style story, about a young girl named Antimony Carver who is enrolled in a mysterious boarding school. In fact, the basic premise really does have a lot of similarities with Harry Potter, except inverted. Where Harry is a basically normal boy enrolled in a school that's a bastion of magic surrounded by a mundane world, Antimony is a strange girl enrolled in a school that's a bastion of science (sort of) surrounded by a magical world.

Notice I don't use the word "normal" when describing Gunnerkrigg Court. There's nothing that you could call normal in the school, or in the comic. Even the school camping trip is chaperoned by laser cows. Antimony's true strength throughout the comic is that she is unfazed by weirdness. She's not normal or mundane by any reckoning, but she's relentlessly sensible, like a ginger little Susan Sto Helit.

Just to keep contrasting with that other Weird School story, where Harry Potter is structured like a shonen manga, with the hero encountering greater and greater obstacles as he grows and matures, Gunnerkrigg Court is laid out more like a Dickens novel. It's a story told in episodes, slices of Antimony's life that don't have anything to do with each other on the surface, but over time they start to link together into a complex web. To be honest, I hate Dickens, but Siddell pulls it off well. Characters that seem to be quirky little extras when they first appear will come back a few chapters later and play a significant part in the growing story.

Whenever you're trying to recommend a new comic to someone, the first thing you have to worry about is the comic's art quality. That's just the nature of a visual medium. If the comic has excellent art, that's a selling point, if the art sucks, well, you'd better talk up its other strengths. Gunnerkrigg Court is one of those comics that starts out a little shaky, but begins cranking out some truly beautiful art before you even realize the style changed. In the first comics, the character design is cartoony but functional, certainly not unpleasant. As the series progresses, the characters are drawn with more realistic proportions, a style I much prefer.

Gunnerkrigg Court has about 3 books worth of content posted so far, and the story is just beginning to unfold. It's an excellent time to jump in, while the archive is still pretty manageable.

An auspicious beginning

2009-12-25T00:10:00.000-08:00

Just as I'm getting ready to get things started, my laptop undergoes a catastrophic failure. Dead, dead, dead. With any luck, I'll be able to extract my bookmarks and get back on track soon. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas, internet.

Why I Read This #0: Introduction

2009-12-21T23:42:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of comics on my daily reading list. A lot. And to be honest, there's more than a few on that list that I have no idea why I keep reading every day. Sometimes it's just because the few seconds I waste looking at it in Google Reader are less important to me than the effort it takes to take it off my reading list. Also, I'm really just a huge geek and a voracious reader, so just because something is mediocre isn't a dealbreaker for me.

On the other hand, for some of the comics on my list I could tell you in a few short words exactly why I read it and keep reading it. The internet may be the purest incarnation of Sturgeon's Law, but oh that 10%.

In any case, there are plenty of places out there where you can read why webcomics suck and you shouldn't read them. I thought I'd try something a little different, and work through my list, justifying why things are on my daily read.

Of course, this is all just an excuse for me to dive into the archives and reread things from the beginning, so this isn't exactly going to go quickly.

Welcome

2009-12-17T17:05:00.000-08:00

Everyone needs a place to put their opinions on the internet, and this place is mine. While I mostly intend this blog to be a showcase of sorts of the webcomics that I read on a regular basis, I'm chock full of opinions on all sorts of things. In particular, boardgames will probably sneak onto her more than a few times. We'll see how that goes.