Board Game Reviews by Josh

Nemo's War Review

2012-05-29T04:14:00.000-07:00

A little while ago, I got an email from Victory Point Games suggesting that I was absolutely sick of reviewing games, but that their games could restore my joy in reviewing! I thought that this email was hilarious, but I decided to take them up on their offer. Since I didn't know much about their games, I went on Board Game Geek and looked for what seemed to be popular. And so, I wound up with my very own copy of Nemo's War to try out.

Nemo's War is a solo game based on Jules Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and you play the role of Nemo captaining the Nautilus. Throughout the game, you can search for treasure, fight ships, and fight imperialism. On each turn, you start by rolling two dice. Based on the dice rolled, you place a new ship in two different oceans (or if you roll doubles, you replace a treasure). Also, if you roll high enough, you draw an adventure card - which is either a test for your ship, or a bonus that you can use later. After this setup, you select an action for the Nautilus - it can Move, Incite rebellion, Search for Treasure, Stalk or Attack an enemy ship, or Rest/Repair/Refit the Nautilus. After this action, the year marker is advanced, and the next turn begins. This cycle continues until you have completed a year (each turn represents one week), you have encountered the Maelstrom, or you have encountered one of the other end of game conditions. At this point, you calculate your score to see how well you performed.

Exerted crew resource

The first thing that I liked about Nemo's War was the concept of "exerting" resources. Essentially, what you can do is bet a resource before you roll dice for various actions (like attacking a ship). Betting this resource gives you a bonus to your die roll. If you then succeed on the die roll, you don't lose anything; but if you fail, you lose the resource that is exerted. Not only can you do this before the die roll, but there are also three once per game resources (passengers) that can be sacrificed for a bonus after the die roll - but, if you use these, you lose several victory points at the end of the game. This exerting mechanism was very interesting to me, as I don't recall seeing anything like it in other games.

The next thing that I enjoyed about Nemo's War was that Nemo had four different possible motivations in the game. You start the game by picking a motivation, but it can change once later during the game (after you've done several turns and you can see what you actually want to score bonuses for). Based on this motivation, you score points differently at the end of the game. If his motivation is war, you get extra points for sinking warships, but nothing for science or wonders. If you are exploring, then you get less points for sinking ships, but you get a lot of points for wonders. These different motivations force you to implement different strategies, and this allows the game to stay fresh longer.

With those pros, I also had a few cons with Nemo's War. First, I would say that there was waaaay too much dice rolling. In the same way that people say Monopoly is all luck-based because of the dice rolling (which I disagree with), I think that Nemo's War has the same kind of "plan but hope" element (a term that I just made up). If you roll well, you will do well; if you roll poorly, you will fail miserably. Here's an example of how much dice rolling you may have on a turn. You roll two dice to determine if you have an adventure (and where ships appear). You roll high enough that you have an adventure. Your adventure is a test - so you roll two dice to see if you succeed or fail. Since you fail, you choose to sacrifice your Conseil once per game resource to roll again. Next, as Nemo's Action, you choose to Rest. You roll one die (and cut the number in half) to see how many weeks you spend resting. Next, you roll a die to see if you were successful at Resting. Now, your next turn begins. Now, admittedly, this is an extreme example (though you can roll even more dice on your turn if you are attacking repeatedly - especially if you encounter warships that attack you before you shoot back!), but since every one of Nemo's Actions except for moving the Nautilus requires you to roll dice, you are basically always rolling dice for one thing or another.

The game comes with the world's smallest dice

The next con that I had for Nemo's War was that the game felt very fiddly. Though, I think that there were two main aspects that annoyed me with their fiddliness - the year tracker and the resource exertion. I was always doing something with one of them. Every turn the year tracker advances. That's fine - it's a turn order tracker. However, each turn, after you roll to determine if there is an adventure, you will quite possibly have to flip the tracker. If you are exerting resources, you are supposed to move the resource down slightly to indicate that it's exerted - and if you succeed, you move it up, if you fail you move it down. I generally forgot to do this, and left it moved slightly down until I failed, and then moved it the rest of the way down. After all, I normally wanted to continue exerting the same resource until I lost it. Overall, though, you are constantly tweaking pieces around on the board, and this is compounded by the fact that it is single player, and so you are the only one taking care of all of this upkeep.

The final con that I had for Nemo's War was that it felt unnecessarily complicated. And, I think that one of the things that would really help this would be to have a turn order cheat sheet that quickly told you what you needed to do (and what you were trying to roll on the dice at any given time). Most of this is present on the board itself, but it serves to clutter the board more than give you an easy reference of what you need to know. Since you don't have a clear cheat sheet, you have to refer to the instruction book that is essentially a 6 page wall of text. What's more, there are actions that you won't use in some games (or will use rarely), and yet to understand the game and get going, you still have to read through all of these. Specifically, the Incite action is completely worthless if your motivation is Science - Liberation (the track that you affect with the Incite action) is not worth any points with this motivation. There are also three different tracks that can affect the game at any given point. This adds to the confusion when initially learning the game, as you have to figure out how much you care about each of these tracks.

Finally, here's something that you should be aware of about Victory Point Games' games. They all have inexpensive components. Their company motto says something about the fact that they focus on gameplay instead of components. I can appreciate this, and I knew it going in, so I wasn't disappointed when I got the game. I don't consider this a con - I'm simply mentioning it here so that you will realize what you're getting if you buy one of their games.

Overall, I give Nemo's War a 7.0/10. The game worked, but I didn't find it exciting enough to keep drawing me in to play it repeatedly. And, with it being solo, there won't be other people asking me to play it.

If you like literary based games, you might also check out Beowulf: The Legend and Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (which can also be played solo).

I would like to thank Victory Point Games for providing me with a review copy of Nemo's War.

duck! duck! GO! Review

2012-05-25T05:59:00.000-07:00

One of the games that was generously sent to me after the tornado was Duck! Duck! GO!.

In Duck! Duck! Go! each player takes on the roll of a rubber duckie that is racing around the bathtub. His goal - hit all three buoys and then cross the finish line (go down the drain). But you must be careful, because the blasted bird dog is hunting you down, and if he catches you, you will be sent to a life preserver! What this actually means is that each turn all of the players pick a card from the three in their hand and reveal it at the same time. The players then move in order from lowest to highest on the card (thus allowing the lower numbered cards to get in the way of the players with higher numbered cards). If you cross a buoy, then you get the marker to represent that, and you also get a special bonus power that can be used once per game. If you run into another player or a wall, your ducky turns completely around and faces the other direction. After everyone has moved, the player in last place gets to move for the bird dog (trying to catch his opponents and send them back to life preservers). Play continues like this until one person has collected all of the buoys and crossed the finish line.

The first thing that I like about Duck! Duck! Go! is the rubber duckies that are included in the game. My understanding is that there are over 100 different duckies that you may get and that each set is (probably) different. I think that this is a brilliant marketing strategy, and is also just a really cool feature of the game. Most of the people I played with (granted, they were women) loved the rubber duckies, and they didn't even necessarily care if there was a game associated with it. And I must admit, I thought that the duckies that were in our game were pretty cool!

The next thing that I thought was neat was that the life preservers served both as starting locations and as "teleporters." This could really help if you found yourself horribly out of position and facing the wrong direction, as it was a much faster way to re-orient yourself than the other alternatives (continuously running into walls).

The next thing to mention is that I think that the designers of Duck! Duck! Go! did a wonderful job of depicting what it would be like to have a rubber duckie race. Imagine filling a bathtub with water and then racing rubber duckies by using a squirt gun to move them around (which, the more I think about it, sounds very fun). Now, imagine that you're not allowed to move around the bathtub but must always shoot the duckie from the same angle - and how frustrating it will be when you hit a wall (and get stuck on the wall and spend five minutes trying to get off of the wall). They have captured both the difficulty of movement and the frustration that you would experience very well. Which leads to my biggest con for the game.

I never have the cards I need! As I just stated - they capture the frustration of trying to move your duckie very well. Each time that we played I found myself running into walls because of the cards that I had (and because I was very bad at the game), and getting more and more frustrated by my complete lack of ability to move. I would chase down a buoy and have everything set up to where I would successfully be able to capture it. Then, one of two things would happen - I would have read my card wrong (that happened a lot; I thought I was better at spatial reasoning than this) or another duckie would get in my way and throw the whole plan off! Whereas I think that this is what a lot of people will love about the game, it was incredibly frustrating to me!

Another thing that I thought was odd, though I'm not entirely sure that it should be a "con" was that running into another ducky only affected your ducky - not both. If you ran into another ducky (or the wall) then you were completely spun around and facing the opposite direction - and their ducky remained intact. I really felt like both ducks should be affected - but that would drastically change the strategy of the game (as you wouldn't want someone to run into you most of the time).

Overall, I give duck! duck! GO! a 6.5/10. I think that a lot of people will like it better than I do, and I am glad that I had the opportunity to play it - but rest assured, I will pass this game along to someone else to try to help after the tornado. I think that it will find a better home in someone else's hands.

If you like duck, duck, Go! then you might also be interested in Gubs, Micro Mutants: Evolution, and Carcassonne.

Catacombs Review

2012-05-22T06:50:00.003-07:00

After hearing nothing but good things, I decided that it was time to hunt down a copy of Catacombs.

Do you like flicking games, like PitchCar and Crokinole? Then I think you'll be in for a treat with Catacombs - if not, then you can probably stop reading, because you'll hate the game! Catacombs is a fairly standard dungeon crawler - you're a hero running through various rooms killing monsters, acquiring money, buying items, and trying to kill the final boss. The twist, though, is that both you and the monsters attack by flicking your disks! If you successfully hit the monster, then they take damage. If they hit you, then you take damage. Some of your monsters will only be able to flick their own disk (do melee attacks), whereas others will be able to do ranged attacks, or even cast spells (thus adding more disks to the board, or affecting the disks in some other way). If you are able to flick your way all the way to the final room and defeat the evil overlord, then you have won! (Oh, and you've also beaten your friend who actually gets to flick the disks belonging to the bad guys.)

So, let me confess - I love dexterity games. I really enjoy PitchCar, Crokinole, Clout, and many, many others. And, as much as I love PitchCar, I don't really need to buy another game that does the exact same thing (though I have bought two sets of the base game). Fortunately, Catacombs really has a different feel than any other dexterity game that I have ever played. Between having different characters with different abilities, monsters that deal you damage, items that you can purchase, and even having the ability to be incapacitated, Catacombs truly gives you the feel of a dungeon crawler, but one that appeals to dexterity fans.

The Barbarian is surrounded!

My next pro for Catacombs is that I like how they set up "obstacles" in the different rooms. The game would be fairly boring if each turn the heroes and monsters setup on opposite sides of the board from each other and just shot directly at one another. Fortunately, in Catacombs, each room has 5-6 "obstacles" (large grey disks) that represent various formations (whether pillars, or stones, or something else) in the room that monsters and heroes can hide behind. These obstacles aren't in the same place in every room, either - there are 3 different boards, each with the obstacles in different places; and each board is double sided (which flip the start zones) so that there are 6 total obstacle configurations. I thought that the entire concept of having obstacles in the room was brilliant, and it really adds to the enjoyment of Catacombs.

The final pro that I will mention for Catacombs is that it is very replayable. There are a lot of different rooms, monsters, evil overlords, and even items in the game - enough that you will not use all of them in any given game. This helps give you the feeling that you're not playing the same game over and over. Honestly, I enjoyed the game (and the dexterity element of it) enough that I could probably play the same game over and over. However, there is no need - each time I play, I will get a (mostly) fresh experience. (By the way, did I mention that I love dexterity games, and that Catacombs does dexterity well? That's another 3-4 pros right there! Dexterity is fun.)

The Wizard with his summons

With all that I love about Catacombs (and, really, I do love the game), there is one major nuisance in it. Disks go flying off the board all of the time. I really think that this game would be ideally played in some kind of enclosed board, where all of your excess disks would be caught - possibly on a pool table (but where the pockets are filled in). Plus, when a disk goes flying off the board, you are supposed to place it back where it left. Right - this actually turns into where your best guess is that it might have left the board because, ultimately, you might have no idea. But, that's ok - as long as everyone is playing the game for fun, I think that this con will not hinder your enjoyment.

Ok, maybe there are actually two major nuisances. The second one is that it is really, really hard to tell what each disk hit after a shot. When three or four disks are clumped together, and you shoot a piece into the group (hoping to hit several of them) and they all go flying, it's very difficult to determine which ones were hit directly (thus damaged) and which ones were hit indirectly (which does not deal damage). If you're playing with someone ultra-competitive who isn't willing to realize that this is a game and should be played for fun, this can be incredibly frustrating.

The last thing I will mention is this - when flicking, it might be a good idea to have someone else hold the gameboard down. I have actually watched people flick the board while playing. Their disk was towards the edge of the board, and they missed their disk entirely and moved the whole board about 6 inches (and essentially caused a giant earthquake in the game). I laughed at them for doing this, but then a few minutes later a different player did it again!! I have not done this, so I am going to continue pointing fingers at them and laughing (not really) when they do this.... at least until I do it myself. Either way, it's something that you probably want to be aware of, so that you can avoid this problem.

Overall, I give Catacombs a 9.0/10. I love dexterity games, and this one gives me a fresh new feel on a genre that I love. Well done.

If you like dexterity games, you should check out PitchCar, Caveman Curling, and Fastrack.

I would like to thank Sands of Time Games for providing me with a review copy of Catacombs.

Nightfall: The Coldest War Review

2012-05-18T04:22:00.000-07:00

Hello, friends, and welcome to Nightfall review #4. This one is of.... well.... the 4th set - Nightfall: The Coldest War.

As with most of my expansion reviews, I will assume that you are already familiar with the base game. If you're not, I highly recommend checking out my review of Nightfall, so that you'll have a context to frame this discussion, as I only plan on writing about the changes that Coldest War has introduced.

One of the phases of the moon

The first, and most widely advertised, thing that Coldest War introduces is the "Moon Phase." Essentially, there is a new deck of about 6-8 cards that represent different phases of the moon. Based on which phase of the moon is currently active, a different global effect will occur. Some of these will make lycanthropes stronger, others will help vampires, one causes all kickers to resolve. But, for the most part, these phases target a specific race of monsters and make that race stronger in some way. And, if that isn't a race that you have a lot of in your deck, then at the end of your turn you have the option of changing the phase to be something else. Honestly, I found this element of the game to be fiddly and unnecessary. Since most of the phases only worked based on the class of your monster, it generally seemed to be an afterthought to get the bonus. You definitely couldn't plan a strategy around the moon, because it changes too often, and it's possible for the phase that you want to never come back up. More than anything, this element felt like something they tacked on just to have something "new" in the game. Fortunately, it is optional, and I will probably opt out of using it 98% of the time.

The next new addition in Coldest War are Combat effects. Combat effects are cards that you can play during any combat phase, and they give you a bonus. This is nice, since inevitably you will not be able to chain every card in your hand every turn. Most of these bonuses aren't large enough to be overpowering (give a minion +1 strength, heal a minion, etc), but it is nice to have an alternative way of playing cards. My favorite Combat effect is the minion that is able to be put into play from your hand, but with only one health. He then becomes a nice surprise attack to your opponents. Whereas I was a bit torn, because it almost felt like cheating to be able to gain effects from your cards without successfully chaining them (chaining is the crux of the game!), I do like the new Combat effects, and they help the Coldest War expansion to have a different feel than the previous sets. This is a nice addition.

The third thing that I will mention isn't really a new addition, but is really awesome. I love the new wound cards. It's worth mentioning - Coldest War is a standalone set. Yet, instead of giving you all "new" wounds, Coldest War gives you wounds of each of the existing types. This can be a bit confusing when you first look through the set and see "Martial Law" written on some of your wounds, but it really makes sense when you think about it. Anyway (drumroll....) the new wound effect is: "This card chains to and from any card. This does not count toward your 1 wound effect per turn limit." That is amazing! Suddenly, I want to get hit a few times, because I'll be able to chain on any card on any turn (assuming that other players start a chain). However, because of the final part (not counting towards your 1 wound effect limit) it makes sense to include the other kinds of wounds - otherwise the Coldest War set woundn't make sense without being mixed with the other sets (and, after all, it is supposed to be a standalone expansion). So, yes, I love the new wound effect. I like it more than any of the actual archive cards I've seen in the set!

Bone Cruncher!

The final thing that Coldest War mixed up on us was the starting decks. Nightfall and Martial Law each had the same starting decks. Because of those starting decks, the first few turns always felt a bit too prescribed (you start off by playing Yuri, because he gets you extra influence). This is no longer true, and the starting turns feel a bit more fluid - though, that might simply because I'm not as familiar with these new minions, so I haven't found a "go to" strategy. Honestly, in some colors I like the original starting cards, whereas in other colors I like the new ones. The most interesting one is "Snowstorm", whose strength is dependent on how many minions the defending player has (if you play this early when nobody else has any minions, you completely wasted your card). Though none of these new starting cards are incredibly unique or special, I like that they were included, as it provides more flexibility with the starting game. Now, you can use the old set, the new set, let each person pick which set to use, or even let each person mix and match from the different sets. I hope that they continue providing different starting decks in the future!

Now, just because it's fun, here's my (current) favorite card from this set: "Bone Cruncher." He is a Lycanthrope (this actually matters now, but still not much) with 4 hitpoints, and he deals 5 damage! Plus, he has a Combat effect that lets you make a target minion's damage unblockable. Awesome! Can you just imagine having a handful of these in your deck? You play one on the table, then discard another copy from your hand to make the first one unblockable - all 5 damage!

Overall, I give Nightfall: The Coldest War an 8.5/10. Whereas I still like the base game significantly more than this one, because of the new wounds and starting cards I think that The Coldest War is at the top of my list of Nightfall expansions.

If you like expansions, you might also check out (of course) Nightfall: Blood Country, but also Bang! Dodge City, and Thunderstone: Dragonspire.

I would like to thank AEG for providing me with a review copy of Nightfall: The Coldest War.

Kingdom of Solomon Review

2012-05-15T04:12:00.000-07:00

So, let's be honest for a minute (before I resume lying to you (not really (ok, I'm lost now (too many parenthesis!))))... I didn't ask for Kingdom of Solomon - I asked for the Manhattan Project. Minion Games offered my Kingdom of Solomon instead (they were out of Manhattan Project), and I figured I would give it a shot. After reading the rules, I really didn't expect much, but sometimes a game is a quite pleasant surprise, and this was one of those games for me!

In Kingdom of Solomon, the players are each trying to help provide resources to build the temple of Solomon - well, and other buildings in the Ancient Near East (some players might ignore building the temple). Each turn, players will alternate placing their workers onto various spaces on the board. After this, they will each collect all of their resources (or any other bonuses) in turn order. Third, (in reverse turn order) they will alternate turns buying and selling goods from the market, using victory points as currency. Finally, they will each have the opportunity to build one building per turn (in addition to as many sections of the temple as they choose). After one player has built five buildings, the temple is completed, or once all 11 building locations on the map are filled, the game is over, and the person with the highest victory point total wins. Sound like every worker placement game that you've ever played? Yeah, I thought so - but keep reading, and you'll see where this game stands out among the crowd.

A very powerful road

The first thing that I really enjoy about Kingdom of Solomon is how roads work. Each time you buy a building (except buildings with a "no build" icon), you get two bonuses. First, the building card is an action space that only you can place a worker on. Neat. Second, you get to place a building on the map. The region where you place your building can now only be claimed by you (or by the high priest (you get this title by building the temple a lot (lots of parenthesis today!))). What's more, you can connect regions by building roads - when connecting, you can only connect regions where you have a building or that do not have a building foundation (an empty place where a building could go). It's also important to note that you cannot use your opponents' roads!! If you miss this, it can terribly skew the game. Once you have these roads in place, any time you collect resources on any of the regions that are connected, you collect resources for every resource connected to it. Roads are powerful!! Instead of collecting 1-2 resources with a worker, if you gain a large enough "super" region, you can collect 8-10 resources or more! And, if you place a worker on each region in this "super" region, you can collect that repeatedly! Thus, preventing your opponents from having resources available. Reading through the rules, I did not realize how powerful roads would be - but they wound up being my favorite aspect of Kingdom of Solomon.

The next element that I thought was unique and innovative about Kingdom of Solomon was the "super action" spaces. There are three of these action spaces on the board, and in order to claim that space, you have to play all of the workers you have left for the round. This is a really neat push-your-luck against your opponents element. And, the payoff makes the spots definitely worth acquiring. My concern, though, was that this would make the game really fun with four players, but not as good with two (you only use one of the spots with two players). However, the action that is available in two players allows you to become the first player. Because of the roads and the sheer number of resources that you can gather on a single turn (and this becomes even more prevalent with two players), being the first player can be vital; so this space is definitely crucial.

Altar is the only two-player "super action" space

The final pro that I will mention is that Kingdom of Solomon plays very differently based on the number of players, but I enjoyed it with each number I played. With four players, all of the "super" action spaces are available, and so more fortune cards will be in play. Plus, with more players building buildings, it is more difficult to grow your "super region." However, with two players, there is only the one "super" action space available, and it very well may be ignored for half of the game. Yet, when people start growing gargantuan "super regions", players will be fighting over going first, simply to guarantee that they get resources! And, though at first glance the market seems to be useless in two player (you're allowing your opponent to get resources), once you have hordes of extra resources, it will only make sense to sell them in bulk at the market and get dozens of extra points (and your opponent will have to lose points in order to buy them).

Ok, the very brief, last final pro, is that I'm glad that Kingdom of Solomon was built with a Jewish and/or Christian theme, and yet wasn't lousy. All of the previous "Christian" games I have played are horrible (here's looking at you, Redemption), or were just spin-offs of Trivial Pursuit with Bible questions. I'm glad that Kingdom of Solomon is neither of those.

With all that is right with Kingdom of Solomon, I would say that the biggest con is that the rulebook is not very clear about several things. Every game I have played, and every person that I know of who has read the rules, has had questions that we had to guess about. Here are some of mine: When are roads built? How many are you allowed to build per turn? Do building cards that do not place buildings on the board count towards the 5 building end of game trigger? Is the number in the top center of the building card victory points (there is no diagram)? Is your "super region" able to connect through regions, or does it only use the immediately adjacent regions (the example only connects to adjacent regions)? The rules are very concise, which allows you to start playing the game very quickly - but, unfortunately, they are concise at the cost of clarity.

Overall, I give Kingdom of Solomon an 8.5/10. It was one of my more pleasant gaming surprises of the last year or so, and I would recommend that you give it a try!

If you like worker placement games like Kingdom of Solomon, you might also check out Alien Frontiers, Le Havre, and Stone Age.

I would like to thank Minion Games for providing me with a review copy of Kingdom of Solomon.

Quinto Review

2012-05-11T04:06:00.000-07:00

If it's a board game and can be played in less than a few hours, I'll probably be willing to try it. Today's case in point: Quinto (the vintage 3M version).

Quinto is basically number-Scrabble. Each player takes five tiles (which each depict a number from 0-9). The number five starts in the middle of the board. Players take turns placing numbers in a row or column, but must use a previously placed number in their new string of numbers. When placing a new row, the numbers in that row must all add up to a multiple of 5 (hence "Quinto"). There are a couple of minor extra rules. First, no row can consist of more than five numbers. Second, if you place all five of your tiles in a single turn, it must be able to score in at least two directions (such as when you add an "S" to a word in Scrabble and then create a new word going the other direction). Players get points equal to the sum of the numbers in each of the scoring rows and columns. Play continues in this fashion until no more tiles can be played - at which point players lose points for any unused tiles and whoever has the most points is the winner!

The first thing that I like about Quinto is the rule that you cannot have more than five tiles in a single scoring group (row or column). Whereas this seemed like a completely arbitrary rule that played off of the title when I first read the instructions, it really is crucial to the game. If it weren't for this rule, players would simply continue playing off of the same row repeatedly until the row stretched the length of the board. Therefore, if you scored 75 on your turn, I would easily be able to add 10 to what you had placed and score 85. This rule prevents these kinds of situations, and causes the players to actually play the pieces in more of a crossword fashion.

The second thing that I like about Quinto is that it is math based instead of number based. Whereas I do not have a poor vocabulary, word games help me to realize that my vocabulary is not exhaustive. In Quinto, however, all of the players are on an (approximately) even playing field. Assuming that everyone can add in multiples of 5, anyone can play the game and there is no advantage going into the game based on previously acquired knowledge. I wish that there were a way of leveling the playing field like this in Scrabble.

There are some cons to Quinto, however. Though I really enjoy math (I have a degree in it), I still find the game to be fairly boring. There simply isn't anything engaging in it. If I were working with young children on how to count by fives (or how to add in general), the game would be an incredibly useful teaching tool. However, as a game to play for fun, there are a lot of other games that I think are much more engaging. Here's really the best gauge I can come up with for you to determine whether this game is for you: ask yourself, "How many times can I look at an 8 and a 7 and go 'oh! I can make 15!'?" If the answer is not "I could do that all day!" but is closer to "twice," then this probably isn't the game for you, either.

Secondly, the game isn't even really very creative. Whereas Quinto is a really old game by modern standards (it was first published in 1964 from what I can tell), it really is just a derivative of Scrabble, which came out in the 1940's. Worse yet, I'm not really a major fan of Scrabble - which leads back to the first con, which is that Quinto is boring.

Overall, I give Quinto a 6.0/10. This game's mechanics work; they're just not fun. I am able to have fun joking around and laughing in games, and I'm able to have fun deeply strategizing in games - Quinto doesn't fall into either of these categories. If you're looking for a game to help teach children how to add, Quinto would be a good fit. For anything else, I'd recommend looking elsewhere.

If you like math intensive games like Quinto, you might also want to check out Power Grid, Lost Cities, and Atlanteon.

China Review

2012-05-08T04:07:00.000-07:00

So, recently on BoardGameGeek, I was asking people to recommend to me 30-60 minute long games. I discovered that these are the easiest games for me to find time to play, and one of the ones that came pretty highly recommended was China. As an amazing coincidence, shortly afterwards I was asked if I was interested in receiving a review copy of the game - sometimes life is just brilliant like that!

China is all about the victory points. I think that, thematically, you are trying to gain the Emperor's favor, be the Emperor, or something like that - it obviously doesn't really affect the gameplay or I might remember a bit better. China is driven by a 3-2-1 rule. You can play up to 3 cards per turn (if you spend two of them as wilds). You can play up to 2 pieces per turn, and those pieces have to be placed in 1 region. In order to play pieces, you must play cards that correspond in color to the region where you want to play (or use two matching cards as a wild). The two kinds of pieces are houses and emissaries. Houses score in a couple of ways - by having a lot of them connected in a road, and by having several of them in a region (more on this later). Emissaries score by having the majority of them in a region as well as in an adjacent region. The game continues until either the draw pile has been exhausted twice or no more legal placements are allowed. Then, it's back to being all about the victory points - tally them up, and the player with the most is the new Emperor... or made him happy... or something. But, they win!

My favorite part about the game of China is the scoring. House scoring is unique, to say the least. Once a region is filled (or at the end of the game if the region is never filled), all of the houses in the region are scored. The person with the most houses gets points based on the number of total houses in the region. The player with the second most houses, scores points based on how many houses the person with the most controlled. Third gets points based on second place's houses, and on down the line. This is by far the strangest (this is the less polite word for "unique") scoring system that I have ever seen - and yet, I really think it is fabulous. It works very well, and it forces players to balance their play. Yes, it's still the valuable to have the majority in a region, but not by placing large numbers of your own houses in a region - you do the best when a lot of different players place houses, and you are able to get the majority with 2-3 houses. However, if you decide to overload a region with your houses, such as by placing 5 houses in a region that can hold 6, then when the region is filled, you will get 6 points. But, whoever is able to fill in that last spot get 5 points - for placing one house! It definitely forces a player to rethink obvious strategies if they want to succeed.

Emissaries being friendly

The next thing that I enjoy about China is the emissary placement and scoring. When placing emissaries, a region can never have more emissaries than the total number of houses in the house majority. But, you do not have to have that majority to place emissaries. Therefore, if the player before you places two houses in a region, you can swoop in and place two emissaries without ever needing to place a house. Yet, you have to have the majority of emissaries in connected regions in order to score points. And, you have a limited number of emissaries to place (I generally run out of them). Therefore, you actually score the most points when other people place emissaries in a region where you have the majority. This can happen for two reasons - you are tied for the majority (you both are able to count this region as your majority in this case), or you were able to provide them with false hope that they would have the majority. This all works quite well, and I think that as you play the game more, you will get better at having your houses and emissaries work together well - expanding the majority of houses in a region so that you can expand the number of emissaries. (I'm not that good yet, but I think that it's plausible.)

The third thing I will mention (that I'm somewhat undecided about still) is that there is an interesting rule in China - if there are no pieces in a region, then you can only place one piece in that region. This means that you cannot start off by placing a house and an emissary in a region. It also means that if you place a house in a region, the person after you can place two houses in that region. It is an interesting rule that really discourages a player from being the first one to play in a region - yet, I think that without it, the game would not be as balanced (and it would be boring if people started placing a house and an emissary in each new region). So, it winds up being classified as a pro.

Chinese roads look similar to roads in other games

The final two pros that I have about China aren't necessarily about gameplay directly. I like that it is very fast to play, and that it (at least seems to) scale well with different numbers of players. The box claims that the play time is around 45 minutes, and in my experience this is fairly accurate, even in learning games (assuming someone has read the rules). This makes China pretty easy to fit in at a game night, or even during lunch. Yet, the gameplay is very solid, and so you will feel satisfied at the end of it. Plus, the game can be played with 3-5 players, and I think that it will play well with any number of them. The board is two sided, providing a map on one side for 3 players, and on the other a map for 5 players (with 4 players, you can use either side).

The biggest con that I encountered with China was that one of the rules is ambiguous, and yet can be crucial. In one game I played, most people were playing houses, and I started placing emissaries instead. I quickly got the emissary majority in a few connected regions, because I was the only person bothering to place them. Yet, as I started running out of emissaries (preparing to place houses again), I realized - "oh no, all of the housing spots are about to be filled." Sure enough, all of the house spots became filled, and I was out of emissaries - I could not play. Ok, now what happens? We looked it up - "The game also ends when no pieces can be played any more." Ummm... ok? It was my turn, and I could place "no pieces any more." Does that mean it's over? Other people still have pieces they can play, so it's not true that "no" pieces could be played - just none of mine. I looked for an FAQ online, and we did not find one. So, we decided that it was the end of the game. And I won (since nobody else had really started placing emissaries), but we didn't really feel happy with the conclusion, since we have no idea if we interpreted that correctly, or if I really had a bad strategy all along and should have accounted for the lack of possibilities that I was about to encounter. The rules were provided in several languages, so perhaps if we spoke any of them, it would have been less ambiguous. But, alas, I only speak English (one of the ladies I played with speaks Spanish fluently, but Spanish was surprisingly not included).

Overall, I give China an 8.5/10. I was very, very tempted to give it a 9.0, because it truly is a very good game. But, for whatever reason I don't love it quite that much - and my numbers are fairly ambiguous and feeling-centric anyway, so we'll go with an 8.5 for the purposes of this writing.

If you like games like China, you might also want to check out Chicago Express, Furstenfeld, and Princes of Florence.

I would like to thank Eagle/Gryphon Games for providing me with a review copy of China. Yes, I know that the box says AbacusSpiele - this is apparently one of life's mysteries.

Existenz: On the Ruins of Chaos Review

2012-05-04T05:11:00.002-07:00

A game that came to me highly recommended by some of my fellow bloggers is Existenz: On the Ruins of Chaos (not currently available on Amazon).

I was told that because I liked the Game of Thrones: Living Card Game, I should try out Existenz. However, I found Existenz to be much more like Magic: The Gathering. If you're familiar with Magic, most of this will sound familiar, but I'll go ahead and give an overview for anyone else. On your turn, first you re-activate (untap) all of your cards, you draw a card, and then you can play cards from your hand. You may play one Crystal (Land) per turn - these give you Energy (Mana) which you can then use to play other cards. You can play Summons (Creatures) from your hand, and there are about six different types. You may only have one summon of each type in play at a time, and it must be summoned onto either a warp dot or a start dot. There are also Catalysts (Enchantments) that can be played that affect gameplay, and Flux (Instants) cards that can be played at essentially any time, but are discarded after use. On your turn, you may move and attack with your Summons, as each has a speed and range - all damage they inflict goes onto the targeted summons, and once a summons takes more damage than it has defense, it is destroyed (think of defense as hit points instead of damage they can prevent). The game is played until one player's Life Base (a summons type that starts in play) is destroyed, reaches an end dot, or one player runs out of cards in their deck.

You have to be in position to attack

The first thing that I like about Existenz is that, through the board, it adds a spatial element to Magic. Instead of everything being in some ethereal realm where everything is conveniently adjacent, summons actually have to get near each other in order to fight. This makes sense. However, one of the rules is that you cannot move over "sharp turns" (acute angles). This is a really neat mechanic, and allows for the board to not require tons of icons representing when you can and when you cannot move (though the board is still pretty busy). However, it also makes most creatures' movement speeds not matter very much, and it also makes the combat much less frequent - especially considering that you're only allowed to have a few summons in play at any given time.

The biggest pro to Existenz is probably that the publishers of the game are listening to their fans. Specifically, the game was initially launched as a Collectible Card Game (where you have to buy packs of random cards). In fact, the back of the instruction manual encourages you to buy extra packs in order to expand your gameplay. Their fans apparently hated this (I can't blame them, I hate the CCG model, too), and so they have changed it to the "Living Card Game" model, where you still buy packs, but the packs are not random. I appreciate any time that a company listens to their fans like this, so kudos to X610Z for doing so.

Now, there are a couple of things that I need to mention before moving on to the cons - these are just points of note. First, my copy was mis-packaged. I had four decks, but two of them were the same (though the boxes for each were different). I have contacted the publishers, and they are fixing the problem - but this is something to be aware of, as I don't know how prevalent this problem was. Secondly, as I said before, this game is very similar to Magic. I don't know why this is - I don't know if the designer was trying to "fix" Magic, if they were trying to appeal to Magic fans, or if this really is a giant coincidence (this is my least likely scenario), but I don't think that anyone who has played Magic more than twice will see this game without immediately making the comparison (and, in fact, when I teach the game to Magic players, I teach what is different, instead of the full rules). Honestly, though, my biggest frustration with Magic is the mana system (I inevitably draw too much Land or not enough), and so I don't understand why Existenz kept this flawed mechanic!

This is a Crystal - yet no colored background on "H1"

Now for the cons - first, the game is hard to visualize. There are several elements that go into this. First, the iconography is both bad and inconsistent. Instead of having an icon to represent what type of mana you need (again, like in Magic - maybe I'll stop this reference soon), energy is represented with a letter and a number, and sometimes this has a colored background, but sometimes it doesn't. The inconsistency of the coloring makes the coloring essentially useless. So, you have to remember what Crystals gain H, B, R, and M. There is also a "C", which stands for Colorless - this is not intuitive, though, as it has a white background, and the cards don't all show the background color for Energy. In our first game, one of the players kept hoping to draw a Crystal that would give him "C" Energy. Also, the cards in general just seem very busy so that it is hard for me to quickly see what I need to know at any given moment - I don't know if this is because of the layout of the card itself or because I have not played it enough to be accustomed to it. I would guess that it is both.

The next thing that adds to the difficulty in visualization is that all of your summons are represented on the board with a marker that shows their summons type. However, when looking at the board, because of the "sharp turn" rule, it takes a few moments to see what can attack and where. Next, you have to figure out where each card is on the board - and then what your opponents pieces represent. Nothing intuitively associates any given card with something on the board. Part of this might be more iconography problems - instead of my card saying "dragon", and then having a picture of a dragon on the playing piece, maybe both the card and the piece should have a picture of a dragon. Ultimately, I'm not really sure how to easily fix this problem, but it definitely caused us to have confusion when we were playing.

Who is who??

One of the biggest cons that I found is that there is a strategy that makes the game horrible. I haven't played it out enough to know the full ramifications, however. Surrounding all of the "start dots", there are "no attack dots." A summon (including your life base) cannot attack or be attacked while on these dots. So, here's a basic strategy - don't move your life base off of the no-attack dots. Sure, you're not going to win by having your life base reach an end dot, but if you kill your opponent's life base, you win just the same. And he can't kill yours! However, envision what happens if both players use this strategy - nobody can attack their opponent's base. So, you are basically playing the game until someone runs out of cards! I will confess that this isn't entirely true, as there are some cards that allow you to attack a summons that is on a no attack dot, but I think that these cards are infrequent enough to cause this game to be wretchedly boring if two players decide to use this incredibly basic strategy.

The last couple of things are that the basic decks aren't very basic, and some of the rules seemed a bit artificial. In Magic terms, each of the starting decks was a "three color" deck - this means that in order to play all of the cards in your deck, you had to have three of the four different kinds of crystals in play. This really makes the decks slow - though fortunately, there are several Crystals in the deck that can give you two types of energy. When it comes to artificial rules, the "sharp turn" rule, though neat, doesn't really seem to make much sense to me thematically. Also, the fact that you can only have one summons of each type seems to be because otherwise you couldn't tell which piece on the board represented which summons, instead of having a thematic reason. This rule also means that you can't always play the cards in your hand - even if you can afford their energy cost. And, once you finally can play something (because you lost a summons), you have to play them on a warp dot or a starting dot, so they are horribly out of position for the fight that you need to reinforce (and because of the sharp turn rule, it will be several turns before they can get in position).

Overall, I give Existenz: On the Ruins of Chaos a 6.0/10. There are definitely people that like it (that's why I tried it), but I'm not really one of them. But, don't just read my review and discard the game completely - check out what other people have to say and decide for yourself. If you like Magic, this game is worth trying, just to see the spatial element of the game, but for most people I would recommend trying Existenz before buying it.

If you like games like Existenz, you might also want to check out Warhammer Invasion, Summoner Wars, and Game of Thrones: The Card Game.

I would like to thank X610Z for providing me with a review copy of Existenz: On the Ruins of Chaos.

Brandubh Review

2012-05-01T03:57:00.000-07:00

A classic game that has lasted for centuries is Brandubh. Brandubh is one of twelve games of Bibelot Games' "Reliquary Collection." This collection has taken many ancient board games and is re-printing them with very high quality components and packaging that provide you with a very easily portable, nice, yet ancient feel. Brandubh specifically, is from Ireland around 600 AD. If you're interested in learning more about the Reliquary Collection, check out their Kickstarter project - I think that they're worth backing. Also, as a final note, the pictures that I have provided in this review are of a prototype of the game, so the final product may look slightly different - but Bibelot has told me that they are not intending to change the look or feel.

As I said, Brandbudh is a classic game like Chess or Go. It is from Ireland around 600, and Bibelot Games didn't have to change or adjust any of the rules. Brandubh is the game of the Kings and the Ravens. All of the pieces are setup in a cross, with the High King in the center. The Kings have a total of five pieces, whereas the Ravens have eight. The Ravens are attempting to capture the High King by surrounding him on all four sides, whereas the Kings win if the High King successfully moves to one of the corners of the board. Each turn, the active player moves a single piece as far as he wants in a straight line. If, by doing this, he flanks one of his opponent's pieces (other than the High King) on opposite sides, then that piece is captured. Also, the High King is the only piece that is allowed to move into the corners or through the center. Players alternate turns back and forth until the High King has either escaped or been captured.

I love the suede pouch

The biggest pro that I have for Brandubh (specifically the Bibelot edition of it) is that the packaging is amazing. It is packaged in a suede pouch that also lays flat to serve as the board. In addition, the pieces (they claim that they are marble, but I have no idea) fit very well with the age of the game and the ancient feel presented by the suede pouch. Overall, when playing the game, you really feel like this could have been how it felt to play this game hundreds of years ago, and it is just amazing that the game has survived for so long. I really hope that one of the things that Bibelot does with their project is to provide the history of each of the games, but I don't know how far along they are in the publishing, and so I don't know if this is feasible for the first printing.

The next thing that I like about Brandubh is that it is actually a solid game. It is balanced, but not symmetric. The Kings have a much easier victory condition, since all they have to do is escape. However, the Ravens have a significantly larger force. I have seen both sides win, and whenever I have played it, I felt like the side I wasn't using always had the advantage - which I think means that the game is balanced well (and that I'm not very good at it).

The game itself is fairly simple, so instead of more pros and cons, now I will just cover the basic strategy for both sides. With the Kings, the goal is to escape at all costs. It doesn't matter if any of your Kings other than your High King survives. You should use your Kings as blockers, setting up a section of the board for your High King to quickly be able to move through. Basically, just get your Kings in the way of the Ravens. In addition, since the High King is the only piece able to move through the center, don't be afraid to quickly switch directions. If the Ravens are blocking you on one side, it might be good to switch to the other side of the board, and try to get some of your opponents blocked by the center piece.

The components fit the vintage (ancient) feel of the game

With the Ravens, you have to capture the High King. Unfortunately, he has a lot of lackeys. Well, he has a whole lot less of them if you start capturing them. You probably won't win with the Ravens if the Kings still have all of their pieces - so capture them as often as possible. But, when doing this, make sure that the High King doesn't slip through your fingers. You have to strike a careful balance between capitalizing on every opportunity to capture a piece, but also being attentive to what the High King might be setting up as an escape route.

Overall, I give Brandubh an 8.5/10. When talking to the people at Bibelot, they told me something along the lines of "we think the world is better with these games in it," and I would have to say that I agree. Not only the world, but my game collection is better with these games in it. It may not come as a surprise to many of you that I have "a few" games (I think it was around 300 last time I looked), and so many of the games that I play for this site wind up being traded after I review them. Brandubh I think will stay in my collection for quite a while, and I'm very eager to try the other games from the Reliquary Collection, so I wish Bibelot all the success in the world with their Kickstarter project. And, as a reminder, you can check them out here if you are interested in backing them in order to get a copy of Brandubh or any of the other 11 games in the Reliquary Collection.

If you like Brandubh, you might also like Atlanteon, Hive, and Abalone.

I would like to thank Bibelot Games for providing me with a prototype review copy of Brandubh.

Revolver Review

2012-04-27T04:15:00.000-07:00

One game that I've been really excited to try out (and finally received a copy of!) is Revolver. (Sorry, no Amazon link yet - I may go back and add it later.) I love Bang!, and so the theme of Revolver really appealed to me.

In Revolver, one player takes on the role of the Colty gang - who, led by Jack "The Crow" Colty, has just robbed a bank. Along with his 15 other gang members, Jack is now trying to catch the 3:15 train to escape. The other player takes on the role of Colonel McReady, who is trying to help bring the gang to justice - Wild West Justice (so, you're trying to kill them all). The game progresses through a series of battlefields, and to start each turn, the Colty player will advance the turn marker to indicate how close he is to escaping to the next battlefield (and ultimately to escape on the train). Next, on either player's turn, the active player draws two cards and then plays as many cards as they want from their hand. Some of these cards will go to a battlefield, where the McReady player is trying to shoot the members of the gang, and the Colty player is trying to shoot back and take cover in order to stay alive. At the end of the McReady player's turn, the Colonel will attack the Colty gang. Players will compare their fighting total, and if the Colonel wins, he kills one of the gang members. And, if the Colonel does not successfully kill any gang members on his turn, then they get a bit closer to escaping to Mexico (you remove a token from the "Mexico Border") card. Play continues like this until either Jack "The Crow" Colty has been killed, he has escaped on the 3:15 train (he survives until the end of the train battlefield), or his gang has escaped to Mexico (all of the tokens were removed from the Mexico Border card).

The "bad" guy

So, the first pro for Revolver has to be the theme. The Wild West theme is incredibly fun, and is integrated well into every part of the game. Between having all of your gang members out, fighting through different battlefields, and occasionally having a Buffalo Stampede charge at you, I think that anybody looking for a Wild West game will really enjoy the lore that this game creates - the back two pages of the rulebook even go into details about all of the members of the gang, and give you a back story about them all. A nice little touch that I really enjoyed (because I've done a minor amount of coin collecting) is that the Colty player's cards show a pile of Morgan Dollars on the back of them (silver dollars that were in use at the end of the 1800's).

The next pro, and truly the main strategic choice in the game, lies in balancing when to play various cards. Because the pursuit changes locations, setting up an ambush for the Colty gang cannot happen all at once. If you put all of your deputies in a single location, then you'll definitely kill some Colty gang members there - but once they escape that location, you won't be able to continue your pursuit! Essentially, each battleground has a certain number of turns that you will be there (which can go up or down based on cards). Especially around the last turn of each battleground, both players have to weigh the value of playing a lot of extra cards at a location - it will help them win the next fight, but then those cards will be stranded at that location and unable to move!

With those pros listed, there were also a few cons with Revolver. The first one is simply that certain things aren't especially clear. For example, the cards have small icons in the bottom left corner that say things like "Action," "Character," and "Firepower". Yet, some Action cards appear to work the same as the Character and Firepower cards - by being played and staying at the location. Yet, one of the rules is that "The Colty Gang has a three card limit. This means he can only play a maximum of three firepower cards at each battlefield. Once three cards have been placed by the Colty Gang player, he may not place any more cards at that battlefield..." (I added the italics.) So, how do Action cards fit into this? One specific action card is the "Gatling Gun." This Action is very powerful. Does it being an Action imply that it goes away after a time? This doesn't fit well with the rest of the rules, however. I have looked through the rules repeatedly and also looked through the official FAQ, and I haven't found the answer to what these symbols mean.

If he's good, why's he killing 16 people?

The next con to Revolver is that the winner truly seems to be determined by the luck of the draw. Both players have some pretty useful cards, and whoever draws more of these powerful cards will probably win. The McReady player has several cards that let him instantly kill bandits - if he draws several of these early in the game, then there is very little that the Colty player can do. Yet, the Colty player has three cards that let him move through a battlefield more quickly. If he is able to get all of these (along with some of his other more valuable cards), he might be able to rush through the game and get the victory. But, though there is some strategy in determining what to play, and where to play it, there is a lot of luck involved in who can draw better cards.

The next couple of things I will mention aren't pros or cons, but are things to be aware of. First, I am not sure if the game is balanced. Now, I have played it a few times, but not nearly enough to say with any certainty whether it is balanced or not. In addition, I have seen both sides win, so I know that it is possible. Yet, it still seems like the game is skewed in favor of the Colonel McReady player. He has so many cards that let him instantly kill bandits, that it is very hard to stop him from killing the gang. In addition, he also has significantly more cards that let him draw an extra card (which is really a bonus in itself), and also has a couple that let him keep the Colty player at a battlefield longer. Again, I don't know this for certain, but it at least gives me the feel that the McReady player has an advantage - if you've played the game a few times, I'd love to hear in the comments whether you have the same thoughts on the balance of the game.

Finally, the cards have black borders, and they show wear incredibly quickly. I actually noticed that my copy was showing wear during the first game. If you are a person that likes to put sleeves on your games in order to keep them pristine, you will want to have your sleeves ready before you start playing. I don't think that any of the cards are showing wear to the point that either of my decks is marked, but I was still a bit disappointed that before I finished my first game, it looked like I had played the game dozens of times.

Overall, I give Revolver a 7.5/10. I enjoyed the theme, and I think that the game is fun to play, yet I think that the game is luck driven enough that I probably will not play it too often - just occasionally as a nice, light, change of pace.

If you like Revolver, you might also check out my reviews of Bang! (of course), Wyatt Earp, and Gubs (if you have kids).

I would like to thank Stronghold Games for providing me with a review copy of Revolver.

Frenzy Review

2012-04-25T04:29:00.001-07:00

Here's a game that I played almost ten years ago, and then ran into again recently: Frenzy.

In Frenzy, there are three different rounds, and in each round three different Battlefields. The goal of the game is to score the most points by winning Battlefields. Frenzy is real-time, which means that you don't have to wait for your turn. There are seven total piles of cards on each side of the table - one under each Battlefield (this is your Front Line - you and your opponent compare these to see who wins that Battlefield), and one under each of your Front Line cards (these are your Supply Line, and the top card of each pile goes to whoever wins the Front Line). Finally, each player has a Headquarters where he can only place Heroes. Each round ends when one player has placed three Heroes in his Headquarters, or when one player has run out of cards. At that point, each player scores the top Supply Line card for each Battlefield he has won. Repeat two more times and whoever has the most points wins.

The best thing that I see about Frenzy are the Heroes. They usurp the normal order of power in the game. Each player has Warriors with strength from 1-4 and some Heroes in their deck. If there were no Heroes, then almost every game would end in a tie with both players playing a strength 4 Warrior at the front of their Battlefield. Fortunately, there is an Assassin (Hero) that defeats strength 4 Warriors but loses to every other unit. Without these Heroes, this game would not function.

In addition, Frenzy came with four different "Factions" that could be purchased. These included the Undead, Orcs, Humans, and Dwarves. Each of these have the same basic deck, but include a different additional Hero (such as the Lich for the Undead). This adds slightly more variety to the game, but each of these Factions had to be bought separately, and it they did not really add enough extra variety to justify the extra $10 or so that it cost to purchase them.

Now for the biggest con with Frenzy - the game is too trivial. Unfortunately, even with the Heroes, I don't think that Frenzy managed to strike that elusive balance between having enough things to concentrate on to make the game challenging while having little enough that players can play it quickly. Striking that balance is the crux of a good real time game. Specifically, I think that Frenzy does not have enough that a player must pay attention to. Basically, if you only pay attention to the front lines and ensure that you are winning them, you will wind up winning the game. Yes, there are cards that could actually cost you points by winning a Battlefield (specifically, if you wind up scoring a Wizard, they remove themselves and one of your other Score cards from your Score pile), but it doesn't hurt enough to force you to actually watch for them. Whereas Jab: Real-Time Boxing forces players to pay attention to everything that is going on to prevent themselves from losing in whatever way they are neglecting (knockout versus judge decision), Frenzy only has the one path to victory, and thus becomes too simple.

Overall, I give Frenzy a 5.5/10. It is honestly better than I remember it being the first time I played it, but it is still not good enough to warrant me recommending that you try it out, unless you really just love real-time games.

If you like little card games, then you might also want to check out Lunch Money, Poo: The Card Game, and Skallywaggs.

Nightfall: Blood Country Mini Review

2012-04-23T04:13:00.000-07:00

Since I love Nightfall, I am glad that I was able to try out Nightfall: Blood Country. In this review, I will assume that you are familiar with Nightfall - if not, I recommend checking out my review of it.

Here is the extent of the changes in Blood Country - when drafting, all of the extra cards that will be shared by the players are revealed before players select the cards for their private archives. That's it. This is a nice change, as you can actually draft knowing whether or not your cards will work with some of the center cards. However, it's obviously not a huge change.

The first thing that I will talk about with Blood Country is that the packaging is very small. Because of this, some people might balk at the MSRP being $35. However, the box comes with 24 new archive cards. Considering that the "promo" archives that they offer wind up being $5 per archive, $35 for 24 archives really isn't very expensive. Secondly, if you decide to combine all of your cards into a single box (for ease of carrying), then why would you want a large empty box? All of the cards from Nightfall, Martial Law, and Blood Country easily fit into the original or Martial Law box. Plus, if you want to carry around just Blood Country (or a different subset of cards), the box is large enough to hold all of the new cards as well as the starter decks and wounds from the other sets (as well as a few favorite archives), and takes up much less space. So, overall, I think that the packaging (though initially causing the expansion to look way overpriced) is ideal for what you receive, and the product itself seems priced appropriately.

Those are really the only additions and controversial issues with Blood Country. So, now I'll just mention a few of my favorite cards.

The first one is called "Pipe Bomb." Pipe Bomb lets you shuffle the bottom two wounds from the wound stack (the extra wounds), and shuffles them into one of the archive piles. This card really seems very unique, and can also be very powerful at slowing down (or at least punishing) a player that is buying lots of cards from single archives - especially if they are coming from his private archive.

Another one of my favorite cards is "Harley Doberman." Harley forces all players to discard a card from their hand each time they put a minion in play - and if they can't discard a card (or choose not to), then they receive a wound. I love playing a couple copies of this card at the end of a really long chain. Because of how the chain resolves, Harley will be in play before the other minions, and so your opponents will either have to discard all of their cards, or (more likely) will wind up receiving a lot of wounds for the minions that they have in the chain.

Overall, I give Nightfall: Blood Country an 8.0/10. If you are a Nightfall fan, I think that this is a great option for adding a lot of extra minions in a fairly inexpensive way. Plus, several of the minions add new strategies to the game aside from just gaining minions and dealing direct damage.

If you like the darker theme of the Nightfall games, you might also check out Mob Ties, Gloom, and Betrayal at House on the Hill.

I would like to thank AEG for providing me with a review copy of Nightfall: Blood Country.

Lord of the Rings: The Card Game - Khazad Dum Expansion

2012-04-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

So, because of my obsession with Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, I was very excited when I was able to purchase the Khazad Dum Expansion. In this review, I'm going to focus on what the Khazad Dum expansion adds, and so I will assume that you are already familiar with Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. If you're not, then I would recommend reading my review of it.

Player Cards

The sweet new Axe

The Khazad Dum expansion is, essentially, the dwarf set. Both Heroes are Dwarves, and there is only one player card that is not a dwarf or directly related to dwarves. Along with all of the cards that were previously available, I think that this allows for a player to make a solid dwarf deck. However, there aren't any cards strong enough that I feel they should go in any deck, even of a certain color (cards like Gandalf or Steward of Gondor) - but, if too many of those cards are made, then the game would become unbalanced. Since I have a deck that I find incredibly powerful, I have not actually used any of the cards from this set (my deck is not built around dwarves). Yet, some of the cards added are definitely good enough to motivate me to consider building a dwarf deck next time I rebuild. (My favorite new card is the Dwarrowdelf Axe - it can only be put on a dwarf, but it adds +1 to Attack, and it instantly deals one point of damage to whatever it attacks.)

Into the Pit

The first adventure included in Khazad Dum is entitled "Into the Pit." This adventure is a three-step quest that focuses on exploring locations. To start the game, you pull out three locations. After exploring each location, the next one becomes available, and you cannot proceed beyond the first stage of the quest until you have explored all three of those locations. This can cause the first quest step to be the longest one in the game, but what I like about this adventure is that it gives you time to expand your group of allies before you are attacked. The first location goes into play as the active location, and it prevents enemies from (even optionally) engaging you. This allows you to quest without worrying too much about enemies attacking you (one goblin can actually immediately engage an enemy when it's revealed), but also causes the enemies to pile up in the staging area until you have completed this step. Thematically, this really works well, especially since the second questing step causes more enemies (including a Patrol Leader) to be added to the staging area - and if you manage to kill them all, you automatically advance beyond that step. Overall, I really enjoyed this scenario - it was tense, but didn't feel too overwhelming.

The Seventh Level

Do NOT let this attack you

The next adventure is a very basic two-stage questing scenario. The only real twist in this scenario is that you are provided with a Book to start the scenario (it goes away in stage two), and this Book allows you to quest a hero without having to exhaust them. The consequence of this is that you are not allowed to attack with this Hero (so, I used my Hero that allows me to exhaust it to draw two cards). If you are able to generate a lot of quest points, then you can defeat this scenario pretty quickly. However, if you have an unfortunate draw, there is a Cave Troll that is specific to this scenario that I believe is the main challenge in the entire scenario (he has 4 Threat, 6 Attack, 4 Defense, and 7 Health - and his excess combat damage attacks another character). There are two Cave Trolls in the scenario. I recommend trying to defeat the scenario before the Troll comes out. Overall, I enjoyed this scenario, though not as much as the first one.

Flight from Moria

The most unique adventure of the three is the third adventure (the hard adventure). Essentially, this scenario is representing the Heroes attempting to escape, but getting lost in the process. There are only two stages to the quest, but there are seven different cards representing the second stage. Whenever you are going to the second quest, you flip over the top card, and two of the cards can lead you to an exit. However, one of the cards can only lead you to an exit if you have gained the "Abandoned Tools" objective card (fortunately, a different stage two quest card can let you search for this objective). The other possible escape card forces each player to discard the top card from the encounter deck, and if it is a Treachery card, then that player is eliminated. Unfortunately, I often play this game solo, so basically I get to decide if I want to risk instantly losing the game. I think that this adventure is really unique and innovative, but unfortunately, I find it to be very frustrating, as too much of the difficulty of the scenario is based on random elements, and I can lose regardless of how well I play. Though this is a neat, unique adventure, I probably won't play it very often.

Randomly decide if you lose

Summary

So, the one other thing that you need to know about the Khazad Dum expansion is that you will have to own it if you intend to play the adventures in the Dwarrowdelf set of expansions. In the same way that you use encounter cards from the base set in the Shadows of Mirkwood sets, you will use the encounter cards from Khazad Dum in the Dwarrowdelf series.

Overall, I give Khazad Dum an 8.5/10. I enjoyed two of the three adventures, and I think that the player cards add new deck building options, so overall I was pleased with the set.

If you love the Lord of the Rings card game as much as me, you might also want to check out the Game of Thrones Living Card Game, Yggdrasil, and Knizia's Lord of the Rings

Epigo Review

2012-04-17T04:19:00.000-07:00

A game that I've been wanting to review for quite a while is Epigo.

Epigo truly strikes me as the love child of Robo Rally, Abalone, and Yomi. The basic game is fairly simple. You have pieces numbered 1-7, and they are setup in a line (along with an X) in whatever order you would like. Your opponent does the same thing, and at the same time, you reveal your pieces. Now, on each turn, you and your opponent select three pieces to move (and a direction) and you reveal them the same time (Robo Rally). The higher numbered piece goes first, and you execute all of the moves. If both players show the same number in the same move (for example, if you both are trying to move the 5 as your second move) the orders cancel and do not occur (Yomi). If when trying to move your piece, but there are more of your opponent's pieces in front of you than your own pieces (at any point on the line), then you cannot make your move (Abalone). The goal of the game is to push three of your opponents tiles off of the board (More Abalone).

Whereas I mentioned that Epigo has elements of other games that I have played, it really melds them together into a fresh and unique gaming experience. Each turn you are trying to figure out how to move your pieces to successfully push your opponent off the board - or set it up so that you can do it later. At the same time, you have to balance preventing your opponent from pushing yours off - and sometimes the only way to do that is by successfully canceling their order! Sometimes, however, if you can out-think your opponent, you might be able to even move out of the way just in time and get him to push his own piece off the board! I like that the game is very simple, and yet can really make you think (and overthink) your moves. It truly strikes me as an elegant design and gameplay that works remarkably well.

21 variants!

The next pro for Epigo is the replayability. Even in the base game, because of the element of out-thinking your opponent, there is significant replayability. However, in case you are one of those people that likes to play something new every time (I'm like that), Epigo has 21 two-player variants included with the base game. 21! And, that's not including the four-player variants!! I have definitely not played all of these, but I played around with some of them, and I enjoyed what they added. Some of them seem a bit confusing, but some of the others do interesting things. One of the ones that I really enjoyed has you setup the board a bit differently, but also has you leave your "X" marker on the board after setup - and this piece acts like a black hole and any pieces that are pushed into it are lost, just as if they were pushed off of the board. I would say that more than anything else, the greatly varied options of Epigo are it's greatest strength.

There's really not that much to Epigo, so I will go ahead and move to the cons now. Really, I only had one con. For whatever reason, Epigo didn't grab me and leave me wanting to play it more. I enjoyed the game every time that I played it, but I still didn't find myself wanting to pull it off the shelf. I think that this might simply be because I'm not very good at pre-planned movement games (like Robo Rally and duck, duck, Go!). I'm willing to admit that I'm not good at these games - and I'd bet that if I were better at them, then I would enjoy them all quite a bit more. Either way, though, I can only base my opinions of a game on my experiences - and Epigo isn't one that I run to the closet to grab.

Overall, I give Epigo an 8.0/10. If you like Robo Rally, then you will really enjoy Epigo. If you like Abalone, you will probably enjoy Epigo. If you like the out-thinking your opponent aspect of Yomi, then you might like Epigo. If you like planning movement in advance, or really like games with variants, then you will love Epigo!

If you like Epigo, you might also check out Yinsh, Stratum, and Quoridor.

I would like to thank Masquerade Games for providing me with a review copy of Epigo.

Dungeon Lords Review

2012-04-13T04:19:00.000-07:00

A game that I traded for a while back on BoardGameGeek since it looked quirky (and I didn't want the other game) was Dungeon Lords.

In Dungeon Lords, you, evil genius ("evil"? slanderers!) are trying to protect your home, which some stupid townspeople are calling a "dungeon." In fact, those townspeople are really annoying and you'd like to eat them, but for the most part, you're leaving them alone. Though you're hungry. Anyway... you are simply focusing on building your glorious underground mansion - and then you hear that the obnoxious townspeople have hired people to come attack you! So, as any good home protector would do, you also hire monsters and set traps to keep people from breaking in. After all, you would protect your home if people tried to break in, right? How this plays out is that the game is played in 2 "years" each consisting of 4 rounds. In each round, you get to send your minions out to do tasks for you. These tasks include collecting food, convincing the townspeople that you're nice (which I find highly amusing), mining gold, digging tunnels, recruiting imps, building traps, hiring monsters, and building rooms. After the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th rounds, adventurers will come towards your dungeon, and at the end of the 4th round they will attack it (how rude!). Hopefully you have collected traps and monsters! When they attack, you are able to use your traps and monsters to defend against them, and fighting is fought over a series of up to four rounds. Each round, if there are surviving adventurers, they will conquer one part of your dungeon (fortunately they will suffer fatigue first, which will injure and possibly even kill them). At the end of the four rounds, if there are any adventurers left, they give up and go home (claiming total victory over the "Wimpy Overlord" - I told you that they are slanderers!). After two years, you count up your victory points based on things like "Most Evil" and "Most Unconquered Rooms" along with negatives for having had tiles conquered and other bonuses for things like number of adventurers captured.

Which ones are the good guys?

The first amazing pro for Dungeon Lords is the theme. The theme is utterly brilliant, as I have never played a reverse dungeon crawler. In fact, after the first year, you deal with harder adventurers - because of some magic called "Leveling Up." I find the theme to be incredibly enjoyable, and whereas you might be able to take these mechanics and make a different game out of them, I don't think that it would have the sheer amount of fun as Dungeon Lords. (So, another pro - Dungeon Lords is fun!)

Second, I really like how the minion placement works. This is really the crux of the game, as it is how you build your dungeon (thus this is a "worker placement game" or, more specifically, a "minion placement game"). Any given round you have two actions which you cannot perform (based on what you performed in the previous round). From the remaining actions, you select three and place them in order on your board. All players reveal, and then in turn order all players place a minion on their first choice, then all place on their second, and finally on your third choice. After this, all of the actions are performed in order, and normally the last person to place a minion on that action has the biggest benefit. However, there are only three slots on each action - so in a four player game it is possible to not get to place your minion if you wait too long. So, you need to balance waiting with making sure that you will get to perform an action. You also have to balance when you want to place various actions - after all, you can't have the best position on all of the different actions. And while you're trying to position yourself to be able to buy the best monster, your opponents are probably doing the same thing! This flows very well but adds a lot of depth to the strategy of the game.

The third pro that I will mention about Dungeon Lords is that fighting the adventurers (once you understand the rules) is straightforward yet engaging. Essentially, every round they attempt to take over one section of your dungeon. You can place a trap and a monster to try to kill them. After your trap and monster damage them, they might heal or cast magic (if they have a priest or wizard) and then they experience fatigue. If they're still alive, they conquer a room. There's no dice rolling or complicated comparisons. Each monster does a certain amount of damage; each trap does a certain amount of damage (though this can be reduced by an adventuring Rogue). Yet, with the system put in place, there are still different types of adventurers, each adding an important and different element to the game.

Worker imps look awesome!

The final pro that I will mention is that the design of the gameboards is amazing. Having not played Dungeon Lords in a few months, I was able to pull out the game and remember 97% of the rules from the boards themselves - it's all there! I think many other games would benefit from looking at how Dungeon Lords laid out it's components in a compact yet helpful way.

With all that said, my biggest con for Dungeon Lords is that there are a lot of rules that you can easily forget. If you're like me, then you will often have a few months between two plays of any given game (because I have "a few" others to choose from). Whereas the gameboards really help to jog your memory in Dungeon Lords, chances are that you will forget some of the smaller rules - like moving one step towards the "nice" side of the evil-o-meter after having a dungeon tile conquered. That one, specifically, is clearly marked on the gameboard, but there are enough small rules that unless you play it on a regular basis, some will probably be missed.

Overall, I give Dungeon Lords a 9.0/10. I almost slipped this score down a bit, but eventually decided not to. I really like Dungeon Lords - I think that it has a solid theme and mechanics that flow very well. And, even as a Dark Overlord, the game doesn't have a dark or creepy feel, so it's theme is really open to everyone.

If you like Dungeon Lords, you should also check out Age of Empires III, Cookie Fu (if you like quirky themes), and Through the Ages (which is by the same designer as Dungeon Lords).

Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin Review

2012-04-10T04:16:00.000-07:00

The latest and greatest (literally) version of Thunderstone has broken onto the gaming scene - Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin.

In case you're new to my site - hi! I hope that you keep coming back (and note, that you can follow me with RSS, Twitter, or Facebook). But, you should also know that Thunderstone Advance is definitely not my first Thunderstone review. So far I've reviewed Thunderstone, Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements, and Thunderstone: Dragonspire. So, I'm going to assume that you're familiar with Thunderstone, and I'm only going to cover the new elements introduced in Advance. If you aren't familiar with the game, you should definitely check out the basic Thunderstone Review - and maybe the Dragonspire one, too (though Wrath of the Elements introduced some new concepts, too).

The first new addition that Advance introduces is that Monster groups now have "Levels". This is small, but is by far my favorite new feature! Yet, not when I play the game by the "official" rules. I think that one of the biggest problems with Thunderstone is that the dungeon often fills up with gigantic monsters, and so nobody will ever go fight them - thus the game gets really boring. (One of the expansions, I believe Wrath of the Elements, introduced a variant of "advancing monsters" that also helped address this problem.) So, in Advance, the official rule is that you select a random monster group from each of the three levels. And, that is the extent of their role - you shuffle them together and play the game. However, it is easy to come up with a slight variant that helps keep the game flowing - either stack all the Level 1 monsters on top, followed by Level 2 then Level 3. You could also shuffle the Level 1 monsters with half of the Level 2 monsters, and the Level 3 monsters with the other half of Level 2. Or, any other combination that you like. No matter what, you actually have the freedom to setup the dungeon hall to prevent this stalling!

One of the more awesome Familiars

The next new feature introduced in Thunderstone Advance may seem a bit "familiar" to you (hehe - I love puns). You can now gain a Familiar. The first time that you defeat a monster in the dungeon, you gain a Familiar. This card goes in front of you and gives you extra abilities that you can perform. Some of the abilities require you to own Experience Points (though you don't spend it). The Familiar stays in front of you every turn until you use it - at which point it goes in your discard pile. But, once you play him again, he will again stay in front of you. This is a neat concept, but I dislike that your Familiar is random and that you have no ability to change it. They all seem to be fairly balanced, but I still think that in a game where one of the main objectives is to tune the cards you play with, it doesn't make sense that you get a card at random with no ability to decide which one to get - though you can prevent yourself from having to draw it by never using it (thus never discarding it). But, if you do this, then the other players with Familiars that are helping them have a slight advantage. Overall, Familiars are a nice addition, but they won't change gameplay very much.

The third major change (do you like how I've now upgraded that first change to "major"?) is that you now have a fourth option on your turn - you can "Prepare". When Preparing, you simply discard what you want from your hand and keep the rest. Then you draw back up to six cards. This is a very small action, and yet it can be incredibly helpful. When you draw all weapons and no heroes, you can keep a few and hope to draw heroes. When you draw three amazing heroes and three cards that only help in the village, you can keep what you need for next turn. When you get a bunch of useless trophies, you can keep the useful cards. This action will really be used much more than you would originally think, and it mitigates some of the inherent luck involved in trying to draw the "perfect" hand.

There are a ton of other changes that Thunderstone Advance makes to the brand, but I won't cover them all. I will say that I think they all improve the game. Here are a few more (without discussion about how useful they are):

One of the new Guardians

The game end condition is based on a Guardian instead of a Thunderstone (thus, no free points to whoever ends the game unless they kill a huge monster)
"Militia" have been turned into "Regulars" and have been improved slightly
"Iron Rations" has been replaced with "Thunderstone Shards" which are worth actually using
The game comes with a board that helps you in setup by preventing you from overloading a single card type (Weapon, Spell, Villager, Item)
You can play in a Dungeon (light penalty of 2) or a Forest (light penalty of 1)
The packaging is better than the original Thunderstone but not as good as in Wrath of the Elements (yet the cards stayed in place when I carried it vertically in a backpack - kudos!)
Diseases are replaced with Curses, and each one has an Ability that lets you destroy it (by suffering a temporary penalty)
There are more cards that encourage you to go to the Dungeon even when you don't have a guaranteed victory

Overall, I give Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin an 8.5/10. If you disliked the previous Thunderstone offerings, there's not enough in Advance to pull you back in. However, if you liked the previous games, or you were interested in trying out the game, I think that this is a good set to buy. I think that Advance improves on the game in a large number of small areas, which add together to make a better game.

If you like games like Thunderstone, you might also check out Nightfall, Warhammer: Invasion, and Runebound.

I would like to thank AEG for providing me with a review copy of Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin.

Castle Panic: The Wizard's Tower Expansion Review

2012-04-06T04:19:00.001-07:00

People complained that Castle Panic was too easy.... the designers listened - and they came up with Castle Panic: The Wizard's Tower. (In this review, I will assume you are already familiar with Castle Panic. If you are not, I recommend reading about it first (the link was to my review of it), as I will be focusing more on the new elements that the Wizard's Tower introduces, and not rehashing the basic game.)

Going from Castle Panic to the Wizard's Tower is (in video game terms) like going from the "Normal" difficulty setting to the "So Insanely Difficult That You Won't Win Unless You Never Do Anything But Play This Game" difficulty (I think Halo had these difficulty settings - though they called the second one something else.. "Legendary" maybe?). Basically, you take the basic game of Castle Panic and you add a lot of nasty monsters. Plus, you remove some of the standard, "easier", tokens and replace them with more monsters. Oh, and on top of all of that, you have "mega" monsters (which are insane - like the Hydra that for each point of damage you deal to him causes two Imps to show up in the Forest). Fortunately, you have been smart enough to employ a wizard (do not let him die!), and so he is helping you in your fight. Basically, the big differences to the gameplay are that 1) there are a ton of big, nasty monsters, 2) there is a wizard deck that you can draw from when performing a discard and draw action, 3) things can catch on fire. Since I've covered the first two, I'll briefly mention fire. If a monster is caught on fire, then he takes a point of damage at the end of each movement phase. If your structures catch on fire three times, they are destroyed. Also, when on fire, structures do not damage monsters that attack them - though they do catch those monsters on fire.

The first new element of the Wizard's Tower are the new monsters. I like the new monsters - I think that they add quite a bit of variety to the game (though it can be annoying to have to look up what they do on your cheat sheet every time one comes out in your first few games). There are monsters that are immune to damage in certain rings, but can be killed by one hit in other rings. Other monsters can climb your walls, move two spaces at a time, bring out imps, have four damage, and several other things. Also, the Wizard's Tower introduces the "mega" monsters. These monsters are the Superman of monsters - and the game would be harder, even if they weren't included! Each game that you play, you randomly pick 3 of the 6 mega monster tokens (using their "harbinger" tokens, which have the standard triangular shape so that you will still pull tokens randomly from the new monster bag). All of these "mega" monsters have more than three hit points, but they also have some extra abilities - some of which are especially powerful, like the Hydra (mentioned earlier) and the Basilisk, which prevents you from being able to perform the "discard and draw" phase of your turn.

The wizard's tower and mega monsters

The second new element of the Wizard's Tower is... the wizard's tower. One of your standard towers is replaced with your fancy new wizard's tower, and as long as it is not destroyed, you can draw cards from the wizard deck when you perform the "discard and draw" action. These cards are crucial, and without them, you would have no chance in the game. These can allow you to rebuild towers, hit every monster in a single space for one damage (very useful if you just killed a Hydra and it spawned 8 Imps), prevent monsters from moving for a turn, and many other things. I think that this is a neat element, and the wizard fits thematically. However, I'm not sure if I prefer the separate deck, or if I would have preferred the new cards to simply be added to the standard castle deck. (As a note, there are also a few cards that are added to the castle deck - mine were just barely larger than the original castle cards so that they didn't shuffle especially well. This was probably my biggest complaint with the entire expansion.) Overall, I don't think that it takes anything away by having separate decks - and it forces you to protect your wizard's tower more than the other towers, so it probably is better to be a separate deck.

My only victory - it was close!

Finally, there is fire. I have played several games, and I have only ever seen one structure be destroyed by fire. However, I have seen several monsters be heavily damaged by it. I guess it wouldn't make much sense to have the monsters affected but not the castle itself (unless it was "poison" instead of fire). However, in my experience it feels like adding the fire to the castle seems a bit like busy work, since you probably won't lose your structures to flames. Fire is a helpful thing for slowly killing large monsters, though. Also, fire is a way of allowing the dragon to make more sense - he doesn't directly attack your castle, but he breathes fire on it. In summary, I like that you can slowly deal damage to monsters, but I think that fire is fiddly on the castle structures.

Overall, I give the Wizard's Tower expansion an 8.5/10. (Oh, yeah, I really have no idea how to score expansions.) I gave Castle Panic an 8.0, but now that I've played with the Wizard's Tower, I don't think that I'd ever want to go back and play the basic game without it - which I guess is really the trademark of a great expansion!

While we're talking about expansions, some other expansions that you might want to read about are Thunderstone's Wrath of the Elements Expansion, Nightfall's Martial Law Expansion, and Lord of the Rings: The Card Game's Shadows of Mirkwood Expansions.

Finally, I would like to brag... I have defeated the Wizard's Tower expansion... once. And, more finally (and for my amusement), here are some other ways you could describe the difficulty of the Wizard's Tower expansion:

"Like Trying to See Through a Blindfold While Being in the Forehead with a Taser"
"Like Trying to Defeat Superman in an Arm Wrestling Contest while using a Prosthetic Arm"
"Watch me Die!" (this was an actual difficulty setting in Doom 64)
"Like Trying to Make an NFL Team as a Freshman in High School"
"Playing Call of Duty on XBox Live"
"Beating Tiger Woods in Golf Using Nothing but a Putter"
"Hitting Off of Nolan Ryan While Standing ON Home Plate"

I would like to thank Fireside Games for providing me with a review copy of Castle Panic: The Wizard's Tower expansion.

Defenders of the Realm Review

2012-04-03T03:52:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, a sweet looking new game showed up on the shelves of my game store in Joplin. It was called Defenders of The Realm. And, once I found out it was cooperative, I decided that I really must try it!

"Defenders of the Realm is just Pandemic with monsters and dice." Well, there are definite similarities - but, no. Defenders truly does stand on it's own as a different game. In Defenders of the Realm, players will alternate taking turns - each turn consisting of performing actions, drawing Hero Cards, and then drawing "Darkness Spreads" cards (which bring out minions and move Generals). If the heroes are able to kill all four evil Generals before any of the loss conditions occurs, the they win. If a General (or five minions) enters Monarch City, the land becomes entirely tainted, or if you run out of minions, then you lose. When performing actions, you can move, attack minions, heal the land of taint (not available in Pandemic), build magic gates, listen for rumors at an inn (not in Pandemic), and a few other things - the number you can perform is based on the number of hit points your hero has remaining (also different from Pandemic).

Generals also look awesome

The first thing that I like about Defenders is that the Heroes, Generals, and Minions all have different characteristics. This (to me) is the main thing that sets it apart from Pandemic - many of the mechanics feel similar, but whereas Pandemic has a very generic feel to it (every disease is the same and every city is the same), Defenders is much more engaging thematically. Minions change in difficulty - an orc is much easier to kill than a dragonkin. Because of this, when attacking orcs, you must roll a 3+ on a die to kill it; against a dragonkin you need a 5+! Likewise, each General has special abilities that make it unique - along with a different life total and die number needed for hits. Some Generals are able to block attacks (if you roll 1's along with your other attacks), some prevent re-rolls, and some are just hard to hit! Fortunately, different characters have different abilities to help them prepare for the fight. I think that (in the game) the most useful of these is the rogue - the rogue is able to listen for rumors at the inn incredibly well, which can help him draw a lot of cards of a certain color quickly; thus preparing him to fight a General. I could continue talking about how well I think the different characteristics of each part of the game are executed, but I believe you get the point.

The next thing that I like about Defenders of the Realm is that the game gets more difficult as you do well - not just as you keep playing it (like both Pandemic and Forbidden Island). There is a "War Status" track in Defenders - and each time that you defeat a General, the War Status is increased. As the War Status increases, more Darkness Spreads are drawn. However, not all of these cards bring out more minions. Each Darkness Spreads card has both minions that are brought out and a picture of where a certain General will attack (if he is in position). As the War Status increases, more cards will be drawn, but some of these cards will only be used to help Generals move forward - after all, as you defeat Generals, less of the "Generals move" icons will be applicable. So, this War Status keeps the game from getting much easier as you keep playing.

I hope you roll well.

The next thing that I must mention is the die rolling. I like and absolutely hate the die rolling. Each time that you attack anything - whether a general or minions, you roll dice to see how successful you are. This is really sweet, because when you attack a group of three minions, you get to roll a die for each one of them using a single action! However, if you hit all but one of them, you could spend the rest of your actions that round attempting to hit the final minion, and never hit him! This causes a player to decide if it's truly worth attacking single minions (often the answer is no). However, when attacking Generals, this like/hate relationship grows. In my opinion, if you don't kill a General in a single attack, you're probably not going to kill him. They heal very quickly. Therefore, your goal is to attack him when you have enough dice that you should be able to defeat him. Yet, there is never a guarantee. One game that I played, I attacked a General that required 5 hits, and a roll of 4+ to hit him. I attacked with 11 dice (if you are good at statistics, you know that I "should" get 5 hits, 5 misses, and one that is either a hit or miss). I hit with 4 dice - not quite enough. Since I lost, I had to roll a die to see how much damage my character took. I rolled a 5, which was all of the life I had left - instantly killing myself! So, again - I think it's neat... but since I don't roll dice well, it can be very frustrating.

Now, for my first true con - I felt like the game should scale your hand limit based on the number of players. Specifically, in a solo game. Each player has a hand limit of 10 cards. This works fine in most games, as all of the players are collecting cards to attack a General together. However, in a single player game (assuming you're not pretending that it is multiplayer and using several characters), you can only have 10 cards in your hand at the end of any given turn (during the turn it can be higher by listening for rumors at the inn). This makes it impossible to attack a General with more than about 12 dice. And, as I just mentioned about die rolling, this is far from a sure victory!

Where are Windy Pass and Raven Forest??

The next con that I will mention is not about gameplay as much as about graphic design. When you flip over Darkness Spreads cards, you have to place minions in certain locations on the board. Yet, there is no way of knowing where on the board those locations exist (without playing the game repeatedly). I have had several turns where I spent far more time looking for where I should place minions than I did performing my actual actions.

The final con that I will mention is that my copy of Defenders seemed to be a production anomaly. My "Special Action" Hero cards were a smidge bigger than my other Hero cards - this made them hard to shuffle, and also hurt your thumbs when you tried it. I also received an extra copy of the Wizard and the Undead General character cards (fortunately nothing was missing). I haven't heard anyone else say they had any issues with this game, so I'm assuming that I somehow just received a rare bad copy. I'd also guess that if I asked, the people at Eagle Games would replace my Hero deck for me so that the cards were all the same size, but I got my copy for free from them, so I decided not to press my luck! Oh, and I also thought it would have been cool if the different minions had different molds - instead, they all look the same, but with different colors. Since the game is $85 MSRP, I thought this could be a nice touch, but it doesn't affect gameplay.

Overall, I give Defenders of the Realm a 7.5/10. This score is only this low because the game costs $85 MSRP, and I felt like (though I like the game) I may have been disappointed if I had paid that much. (And, this is making me reconsider whether I should even factor in the price of games when I do my reviews.) If you enjoy cooperative games and fantasy themes (and don't hate dice), then you will love Defenders. If you like cooperative games (and don't hate dice), then you will like Defenders. If you hate dice rolling, then stay away.

If you like cooperative games, you might also check out Knizia's Lord of the Rings, Castle Panic, and Sentinels of the Multiverse.

I would like to thank Eagle Games for providing me with a copy of Defenders of the Realm to help rebuild my game collection after the tornado.

Pantheon Review

2012-03-30T04:17:00.000-07:00

One of Rio Grande Games' newest titles is Pantheon. Since I like so many of their other titles, I decided to try this one.

In Pantheon, the player represents a race of people that continues dying off and coming back to life. Or something like this - I'm unclear on what exactly. Either way, the players are attempting to build monuments and win the favor of the gods, because ultimately, their dying and resurrecting people group wants one thing - victory points. Pantheon is played over 6 "epochs". In each epoch, a certain civilization (not one of the players) is in power - this determines where the "temple" (starting point for the epoch) is placed, and each civilization also has a special effect that immediately occurs. After this setup, player take turns selecting actions. One action is movement - the player can play any number of movement cards from his hand, and gets one bonus movement for selecting the action. All of the movement has to start from the temple, and while placing, the player can attempt to claim "booty" tokens or can place monuments. After the first player performs his movement, all other players can choose to move as well (or draw one card). The next action that a player can select is a buy action - this lets you unlock more feet and columns (for movement), place feet and columns, or buy and upgrade sacrifice tiles (which help with gaining the favor of a god). The final two actions are gaining the favor of a god, or drawing three cards. The epoch continues until all of the booty tokens or god tokens have been collected. Then, you select a new civilization and start over. Except for after the third and sixth epoch - on those, you score for monuments and minor gods. (And after the sixth epoch you also put the game away.)

The first thing that I will note about Pantheon isn't really a pro or con, just an observation. From what I have seen, there are really two main strategies in Pantheon - you can attempt to build a lot of columns (the more you have, the more points they are worth, and ideally you want to place all of them if you want to win), or you can attempt to buy sacrifice tiles in order to gain the favor of the gods. When you gain the favor of the gods, you do this with a combination of sacrifice cards in your hand and sacrifice tiles you have purchased. But, sacrifice tiles don't go away after you use them (whereas you discard the used sacrifice cards). So, later in the game, if a player has purchased higher level sacrifice tiles, he will be able to gain the favor of many of the gods without even needing to draw extra cards. This is an incredibly strong strategy, and initially I thought it was overpowered. However (finally getting to my observation), I think that a player really needs to choose one of these two strategies if he wants to win. There is no middle ground. If a player attempts to both build monuments and gain the favor of the gods, he will probably lose. The monument strategy is viable, because monuments become more valuable as you place more of them, so the difference between placing all of your monuments and placing all but one of your monuments changes the score from 48 points down to 33 points! (You will also want to place as many monuments as you can early so that you can score as much as possible in the scoring phase after the third epoch.) Also, the better your sacrifice tiles are, the more easily you will be able to claim god tiles. So, having mediocre sacrifice tiles will force you to continue drawing cards while the other player is completing his empire. Choose one strategy and stick with it!

Some feet and gods

Now, with that said, it's time for pros and cons. The first thing that I really enjoyed about Pantheon encompassed everything about movement. Specifically, each player starts with a few monuments and feet (yes, feet) available to be placed. This selection is incredibly limited. But, in your buy action, you can purchase more feet and columns, which then can be played on a future turn. I thought this worked well. Also, I like that the monuments remain on the board, whereas the feet are removed after each epoch. This means that once you have enough feet unlocked, you only have to worry about unlocking monuments so that you can place them (again, because you want to place them all). I also like the bonuses you can get to movement, the fact that some "booty" tokens unlock more feet and monuments for you, and that you can place feet with movement or a buy action (depending on if you want other people to place feet as well - and what cards are in your hand).

The next pro really helps make the monument placing strategy feasible. I like that the temple moves to a different location each round, and that there are far more monument sites on the board than monuments each player has available. When I first started playing, I was assuming that if I didn't place a monument in every spot available to me on any given round, then I wouldn't be able to place them all. However, as I kept playing, I realized something - there are 18 locations where you can build a monument, and each player only has 12 monuments. Plus, since each epoch causes the temple to be in a different part of the board (and since you pick up your feet after each epoch), you don't have to have a major infrastructure in order to place these columns. Each temple has at least three suitable monument locations that are fairly close to it (though you might have built on them on previous turns). So, if you successfully build monuments on the available spaces near you each round, then you are going to be able to score very well! (Though, you will have to find something else to do in the final rounds if you somehow manage to place three monuments every epoch for the first four epochs.)

However, though I thought that there were a lot of unique and fun things about Pantheon (I wasn't exhaustive on my pros), there were several drawbacks as well. First, I was a bit disappointed with the actual production quality of the game. Without trying, I can think of three different typos in the game instructions/components, and also one place where the wrong image was inserted. Things happen, and I understand that. However, the typos would have been easily caught by any spell checker ("popints"). Whereas, I play games enough that I understand that the hobby board game industry is very small and can't afford a lot of proofreaders and editors (and, for that matter, I periodically find typos and grammatical errors in published books as well), these kinds of things would prevent me from showing Pantheon to my non-gaming friends, as I wouldn't want them to think that the board games I play aren't high quality.

My next con (actually game related!) is that the end of the game feels very anti-climactic. At the beginning, players are doing a lot of work building up their empire, and each epoch will probably last a decent amount of time. However, towards the end of the game, the epoch might only last a few turns. If players have purchased high level sacrifice tiles, they will be able to gain god tiles without having to play any cards, and player using the monument strategy will either have a lot of feet unlocked (so that they are ready to place many of them on their turn), or might even be out of monuments to place by the last epoch (this happened to me once). I felt like the game should have been scaled more to have more activity in each epoch, instead of the last couple of epochs being glorified scoring rounds for the player collecting god tiles.

Overall, I give Pantheon an 8.0/10. It was a fun game, and I enjoyed my plays with it - honestly, I'd be up for playing it more. However, I don't know that it has the staying power of a lot of Rio Grande's other titles.

If you like Pantheon, you might also want to check out Babel, Caylus, and The Heavens of Olympus.

I would like to thank Rio Grande Games for providing me with a review copy of Pantheon.

1955: The War of Espionage Review

2012-03-27T04:10:00.001-07:00

Today's review is of a Kickstarted game called 1955: The War of Espionage.

In 1955, each player is taking on the role of a spy, and the goal is to successfully seduce ("secure control") of three of the six countries in the game. Alternatively, you can also win if you can seduce your opponent's home country. To start the game, each player gets five cards in hand and gets to pick a home country (though, obviously, they can't both be of the same affiliation - the Cold War was not fought between two different Communist countries; or by two Capitalist countries). Now, each turn, a player can "play a card" (which might consist of several cards) twice, then redraws, and (optionally) moves his spy. You can only "play a card" (for influence) in three places - your home base, your spy's location, and the country pictured on the card. Your opponent can also defend if his spy is present, or if you attack his home base. When playing a card that pictures the country you are influencing and your spy is there, you get bonuses (which include playing extra cards and it still only counting as one). Most cards can also be played for a "Special Action" - these can increase your hand size, move your spy outside of his normal movement action, draw extra cards, etc. Players continue alternating turns until one player successfully seduces three countries or his opponent's home country. (Sure, the box shows a picture of two male spies, and I'm using the term "seduce", which implies female spies - but, those pictures are just trying to mislead you!)

The first thing that I like about 1955 is the critical role of your spy. "He" is your main conduit for influencing the board - in fact, he's the thing that changes this game from a boring game where you simply play whatever you draw (and have no decisions to make) to actually playing with strategy. You can place him in order to stack several cards in an influence action that you are planning for your next turn, or you can place him in an effort to thwart your opponent's influence. However, if you defend with too many cards, then on your own turn you will be limited in your actions (which is a nice balance). If you are close to securing a country, it might be important to place your spy there so that you have more options of what you can play. Conversely, if you have a lot of cards that match a certain country, you might place your spy in that country in order to combine those cards for maximum effect.

Deporting can be important

The next thing that I like about 1955 is that you can defend - and yet the defense isn't overpowering. If defending were too appealing, or too powerful, then the game would be very dull. ("I will influence the USA." "I'll block." "Ok, I'll influence Poland." "No, I'll counter." etc.) However, the fact that you can defend means that you're not completely at your opponent's mercy about whether a country moves. However, defending is limited - you can only defend in your home country and where your spy is. And, there are some special cards that allow your opponent to move your spy to your home country. So, the only place that you are guaranteed to have an opportunity to defend is your home country - but if you don't have the right cards to defend with, even this can fail. Yet, stopping your opponent from securing his third country can be the difference between winning and losing the game!

My third pro, which I mentioned briefly before, is that I like the balancing elements of this game. For example, when you defend against a powerful influence action, you will probably have to spend a lot of cards from your hand. This causes your options to be very limited on your own turn (since you don't draw until the end of it). Another balancing element is that some of the special actions can help setup a powerful attack (like moving your opponent's spy out of your way) - but these are balanced by costing one of your two "card plays" for the turn. And, then you can't use the card for influence.

Good strategy - draw Mercs

With all that I've said about 1955, there are still a couple of parts of the game that I'm not a huge fan of. First, the game can be heavily influenced by draw. In the games that I've played, this hasn't been a huge factor, but if one player is regularly drawing the 4-influence cards (which also have better special actions) and the other player is drawing mostly 2-influence cards, then the person with better cards will have a major advantage. What I've seen more in my games is that if one player draws a lot of Mercenaries (these can be added to any influence action, regardless of where your spy is), then they could have a serious advantage.

My other con for 1955 is that towards the end of the game, many of your cards can be essentially worthless influence-wise (and may not have useful Special Actions). This happens more if you are forced to defend. Here's what happens - towards the end of the game, you and your opponent will probably have some countries seduced (secured). You cannot play a card in these countries for influence. Fortunately, you can still play cards that show those countries on the country that your spy is in and on your home country. However, if you have a blue home country, and your spy was defending in a different blue country, then all of the cards that you would have played to defend would have been blue. Which means the cards left in your hand are red. Playing a card of the opposite color of the country you're influencing (because your spy is there or it's your home country) makes your card have one less influence. So, playing a 2-influence card is only worth one influence. And, the special action may not be helpful. So, essentially, you wind up wasting your turn. This is part of the balance I talked about earlier, but is still a bit of a nuisance when it happens.

The last thing that I will mention before I conclude the review is something that I was a bit surprised by, but wasn't really a pro or a con. I was surprised by how little we used Special Actions in this game. This may have been influenced by our style of play more than the game itself (I'm not convinced of that), but it seemed like we only played a Special Action every few turns. Now, this isn't to say that Special Actions aren't important - the ones that we played were often very powerful, but I think I was just expecting to play them more often. One of the games we played, I even said "Ok, I'm going to try to use Special Actions as often as I think they're appropriate, so that I get a good feel for them." Sure enough, even that game we spent most of the time playing cards for influence rather than Special Actions.

Overall, I give 1955 an 8.5/10. As I said before, it is a Kickstarter game. However, the game has a high enough production value and a good enough design that I didn't even realize this until I saw something online about it (after I had played it). This is what I hope for from Kickstarter games - that they are games first, and how they get funded is an afterthought. (To be fair, 1955 isn't the only game like this - Alien Frontiers, and Eminent Domain I think also easily fit this criteria.)

If you are looking for quality 2-player games, you might also like Summoner Wars, Mr. Jack and (the admittedly much bigger) BattleLore.

I would like to thank Ape Games for providing me with a review copy of 1955: The War of Espionage.

Ranking Review

2012-03-23T04:16:00.000-07:00

A game that was sent to me before I had even heard of it was Ranking!

In Ranking, you and your opponents will... rank various items. Each round there will be a question posed - something like, "Which is found more often in the forest?" From here, each player selects one of the tiles they have in their hand that they believe most accurately answers the question. You add in a few random tiles, mix them up, and reveal them. Now, players take turns ranking items. The active player will select two items on the same row and explain why one fits the question better than the other - moving one up and the other down. After any ranking, the other players may guess what the active player's tile was by placing a "guess marker" on the guessed tile. Play continues until at least one tile is in the top (6) spot, and at least one tile is in the bottom (0) spot. At this point, each player gets a number of points equal to their tile's current place on the tower (from 0-6), but loses a point for each person that correctly guessed their tile (to a minimum of 0 points for the round). Play continues like this until one person scores 15 points.

The first pro about Ranking has to be the replayability. People that enjoy this game will be able to play it forever without ever playing the same game twice. Between the 46 two-sided questions, and the 120 pictures, you are given significantly more components than you will ever need in any single game. Even if you did eventually play the exact same game where you used the same questions and had the same tiles appear (I'd estimate this to be approximately a 1 in a million chance), the reasoning that the players use for moving tiles would still be different, so the game would truly change.

Ranking has hordes of components

Before the next pro, I must make a confession. After receiving Ranking, I did not expect much from it - I read through the rules, but missed the part where the game was supposed to be "good" or "fun." However, this is why I actually play the game before reviewing it. Ranking features a storytelling aspect similar to Dixit. Therefore, I think that this game would truly appeal to creative people that enjoy making up stories. After all, you could take any two pictures and justifiably move either one up or down. For example, we had a question of "What is more likely to be lost or left behind?" One of the tiles was a treasure chest. Two of us immediately thought, "The treasure chest is least likely to be lost, because it's huge!" One of the other players thought, "You bury a treasure chest, so of course you leave it behind!" Therefore, when played with the right people, this storytelling aspect of the game can be quite enjoyable.

The final pro that I will mention about Ranking is that it has a bluffing element to it. If you are very obvious about which piece you are moving each round, people will quickly realize that it is your tile - and if they guess your tile correctly, you can lose a lot of points (both from losing points on the guessing and from them moving your tile down). Therefore, you have to strike a careful balance between moving several pieces around, and still trying to make yours move to the top (which can be easy if other people happen to be moving your tile for you).

With the pros I mentioned, there are still some cons for Ranking. First, the last player to rank a piece normally has a pretty major disadvantage. Once they do the final ranking, there is no reason that all of the other players shouldn't guess which tile is theirs. And, most likely, they are going to guess one of the tiles at the top (especially if you just moved a tile into the 6 position). But, players will quickly realize this, and so the con starts to mitigate itself as a wise player will learn to bluff better about which piece is his - possibly including moving someone else's tile to the top rank and attempting to get his to the second highest. This also isn't a major issue if the players start guessing earlier in the round.

I would say that the biggest con with Ranking is that if it isn't played with the right people, or in the right mindset, it can be very dull. When we first started playing, we even caught ourselves falling into this trap. We explained why we were moving the first few pieces, but then we started just moving pieces without saying anything. We were cutting out the creative and interactive part of the game! I can see far too many groups of people (read "strategy gamers") looking at the game from a strictly strategic nature and trying to play (and judge) it accordingly. This means that a lot of people will not enjoy Ranking. Essentially, I see Ranking as a party game to play when you have a very small party. If you were wanting to just spend time socially with friends, and only 2-4 people showed up (the game is 3-5, but I counted you as already there), you could pull out Ranking. So, it seems to be a party game for a very small audience.

The final con that I will mention is related to one of my pros. I enjoy the storytelling aspect of Ranking, and I compared it to Dixit. However, Dixit does a very good job of giving you something incredibly ambiguous to tell stories about, whereas Ranking gives you pictures of fairly concrete objects. This makes the storytelling more constrained - especially since if you are very creative with your explanations, people will assume that you're just trying to make up reasons to move your own tile higher.

Overall, I give Ranking a 6.5/10. I rarely reference my scoring chart (mainly because it might change), but I currently have 6-7 as "Game can be played sometimes, probably has niche groups which may enjoy it." I think that perfectly summarizes my feelings on Ranking. There are some people that will get a copy of it and love it as a small party game. However, I see many people (who read this site) preferring something more strategic.

If you like party games, you might also want to check out Say Anything, Wits and Wagers, and Train of Thought.

I would like to thank Rio Grande Games for providing me with a review copy of Ranking.

Hive Review

2012-03-20T04:16:00.000-07:00

Ok, we need to start this review off with a confession: I've already reviewed Hive here. In fact, it was one of my first reviews. Unfortunately, in my early reviews I was very eager to write as many reviews as I could (and did so on most of the really popular games), but I wasn't very good at diving into what made a game good or bad (of course, this is good or bad in my opinion). Hopefully in the year or more that I've been writing this blog now, I've developed a better writing style. Because of this, I'm going to start occasionally "archiving" some of these older reviews; starting with Hive. This essentially means that I'm going to rename the old post to have "Archive" in the title instead of Review, and will remove it from the alphabetical review list. I will also make a note on the original post linking it to the newer review. With all that said, let me start telling you about how great of a game Hive is!

In Hive, each player takes on the role of an insect swarm attempting to capture their opponent's queen (who, obviously, must be a usurper to their queen's throne). To do this, you alternate taking turns - which consist of placing new insects (you cannot touch your opponent's pieces with the newly placed insect) or moving an existing piece. And, so that you don't hide your queen forever, she must be placed in one of your first three turns. Now to the insects. Your insect horde consists of grasshoppers, spiders (yes, yes, they're not "officially" insects, but you'll have to ignore that), beetles, ants, and (of course) the queen bee. Grasshoppers jump directly across a line, spiders move exactly three spaces, beetles move one space (but can move on top of other pieces), ants can move to any space along the outside of the game, and the queen can move exactly one space. Play continues back and forth until one queen is surrounded.

The first thing that I like about Hive is the way that you can trap your opponent's pieces. Specifically, one of the movement rules restricts anyone from splitting the hive into two disconnected sections. This allows a shrewd player to move a piece (such as an ant) to where it is only touching one single piece - the piece he doesn't want his opponent to move. Once you have moved your piece into position, your opponent will no longer be able to move that piece because he would split the hive; he at least cannot move it until he brings other pieces along to reshape the hive.

The next thing that I like about Hive is the fact that the queen can move. She is often hindered by one of the other movement rules - you cannot move any pieces except the beetle and the grasshopper into a place that they cannot slide into. Hive is played with hexagonal shaped tiles, and thus you can create "choke points" where a piece is not able to slide in (by surrounding most of the sides of the position you want to block). This rule will often prevent the queen (who is normally at least partially surrounded... after all, that is the point of the game) from moving. However, when she is able to move, you can often completely throw your opponent's strategy into disarray. They will be stuck desperately trying to reposition their units while you capitalize by (hopefully) surrounding their queen!

The next thing I like about Hive is related to the actual components of the game itself. The game is incredibly portable and also a great tactile experience - and all with no setup time. The game (at least the edition I purchased) comes with a travel bag, which allows for the game to be thrown into a backpack and carried with you. If you also factor in the fact that there is no board, the game can be easily setup anywhere ("coffee shop") and play can begin as soon as the pieces are separated. Finally, the high quality tiles themselves make the game feel classy.

The final pro that I will mention about Hive is that I like the differences in the insects. Each piece is useful, but in very different ways. The person who wins the game will be the person who is best able to capitalize on the strengths of each piece. The easiest strategy to grasp is the ants, as it's fairly apparent that their speed allows them to move quickly to trap enemy pieces or to fill some of the spaces around an opposing queen. However, once you master some of the more subtle strategies such as moving a beetle on top of an opponent's piece so that you can start placing next to it, your play of Hive will advance to another level. I cannot say that I am incredibly skilled at Hive, but I do enjoy getting to challenge myself by finding new strategies and watching my opponents counter me at every move.

Now one thing that you need to be aware of with Hive is that there is no random element to the game. There is no dice rolling, nor is there any shuffling and random draw. Similar to chess (and many abstract strategy games like Yinsh and Pentago), every facet of the game is completely visible to both players and so Hive is a challenge to see which player can out-think the other - not which player can out-roll the other. I personally like some element of random chance in games, but I can also appreciate games like Hive which are completely strategy based; as long as they are fast paced, which Hive is.

Overall, I give Hive an 8.5/10. I think that it is a masterful game that you should look to try out (if you haven't already).

If you like Hive, you might also be interested in checking out Atlanteon, Abalone, and Rise!

Going Cardboard: A Board Game Documentary DVD Review

2012-03-16T04:19:00.001-07:00

So, for my second board game related DVD review, we have Going Cardboard: A Board Game Documentary (the first one was Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story).

The Feature

In Going Cardboard, you are taken into the world of designer board games. You are introduced to Essen, the largest board game convention in the world, and you get to hear information about many different facets of the industry. One of the interesting features is the explanation of the "Spiel des Jahres" award (German Game of the Year), and how it has helped shape this industry by creating an award worth winning (monetarily). Because the award was worth winning, designers and publishers will put more effort into trying to win the award - thus improving the overall quality of games.

(DVD's get pros and cons like board games right? Well, I'm going to give them to you, either way.) The first pro for Going Cardboard was the people interviewed. Some of the people contributing to the film include the founder of Rio Grande Games, the founder of Z-Man Games, and the designers of Dominion, Battlestar Galactica, Settlers of Catan, and Power Grid. They also included one of the co-founders of Days of Wonder, and the top people at both Funagain games and Game Salute. Oh, and Reiner Knizia. (Who is important enough to get his own sentence. In case you don't know who Reiner Knizia is, he seems to have designed about a quarter of the games that exist today. Some of the ones I've reviewed that he designed include Ra, Tigris and Euphrates, Through the Desert, and Lord of the Rings.) There are very few people that I can think of who I would have liked to seen interviewed that were not included. The only one that comes to mind is Christian T. Peterson, founder of Fantasy Flight Games.

Because of this list of guests, the next element of Going Cardboard that I liked is that I truly learned more about the industry. Honestly, I have been interested in the inner workings of the board game industry for long enough that I knew a decent amount of what was included. However, it was still fascinating to get to learn simple things like how Rio Grande Games acquired it's name, how many people attend Essen as compared to GenCon and Origins, and how Dominion was able to get signed by a publisher.

However, with all of the aspects of Going Cardboard that I found interesting, I think that the biggest con to me was that I found it hard to follow what the overall story of the documentary was (or if there even was one). At the beginning of the movie, they talk about the Spiel des Jahres, and then this transitions into various well known games such as Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride (along with people's feelings on Monopoly). Next, they discuss how various people started game clubs and smaller conventions. Among this they splice in the size of the game collections of some of the interviewees. Transition briefly into local game stores. Also mixed in is the story of Frost Forge Games and it's rough road to becoming a game publisher through Kickstarter (instead of having their debut title published by an established publisher). You eventually get to Essen and how fun and exciting that can be. These were all very interesting segments, but they didn't seem to flow well from one to the next.

The next con that I had for Going Cardboard was that the sound and video quality wasn't always top notch. Notably, in all of the segments when Tom Vasel (host of the Dice Tower, and probably the most well known game reviewer actively reviewing games) was interviewed, the sound always had an echoing quality. Some of the other interviews that were filmed at conventions also (not surprisingly) suffered from a large amount of background noise that made it more difficult to hear. Finally, many of the segments that were filmed in conventions had some challenging video quality. (The documentary actually starts off with footage of the opening of Essen when thousands of people are pouring into the convention hall. Unfortunately, this many people causes the ground to shake, and thus the camera (that I assume was on a tripod) was shaking along with it.) Small things like this, inconsistency about whether segments would have background music, and the fact that the DVD menu doesn't even have a chapters option for you to jump to a certain part of the film (and that one interviewee checks his phone during the interview!!) unfortunately allowed you to realize that the film was a small budget (Kickstarter) production.

As a final note that is my preference but isn't really a pro or con about the movie itself is that I would have preferred extended interview segments from the different participants. I realize that the producers were using artistic license as they transitioned from one interview to the next, thus keeping the segment more focused on a topic. However, with the people being interviewed, I would have loved to see an extended interview with many of these people. Not just a snipet of how Rio Grande Games was formed, but for Jay Tummelson to tell me the whole story of how the company came to exist. The same for Zev Shlasinger of Z-Man Games, and from many of the designers.

Extras

The DVD comes with a game! (Not surprisingly by Reiner Knizia.) Aside from this, the only special features are interviews and segments that didn't make it into the feature of the film for some reason. I found many of these to be interesting. There is one about how Battlestar Galactica was developed by Fantasy Flight; another was about the history of Funagain Games. One was about the founding of Days of Wonder, another was about self-publishing. There are around 20 of these segments, and I found many of them to be very interesting, and I'm glad that they were included.

Summary

So, I still don't have a decent scale to grade DVDs. I give Going Cardboard an 8.0/10. With it's problems, I still think it was an interesting DVD that I'm glad that I had the opportunity to watch. If you love board games and are curious to know more about the industry, I don't know how you can not want to watch this, especially since it is the only movie of it's kind. (And it had to get Kickstarted for it to even exist!)

If you are interested in Going Cardboard, then you probably play a lot of games - but have you played some of the fun but fairly unknown games like Jin Li, Mob Ties, and Wok Star?

I would like to thank T-Cat Productions for providing me with a review DVD of Going Cardboard via Game Salute

Game of Thrones Living Card Game Review

2012-03-13T04:10:00.000-07:00

A game that I wished that I had discovered a long time ago is the Game of Thrones: Living Card Game.

In A Game of Thrones, each player takes a deck representing one of the four main houses (expansions add more houses) in the Game of Thrones book series (by George R.R. Martin). From here, the game is played in a series of turns until one player has collected 15 power. First, each player selects a plot card and reveals it at the same time - the plot cards have an immediate effect, but they also determine how much gold each player receives, what each player's initiative is (who goes first), and what each person's claim value is (how much damage their house does in combat). Next, players draw two cards and have the option of playing any cards from their hands - characters, attachments, etc. Next come challenges. In initiative order, players have the option of challenging their opponents in three different areas - military, intrigue, and power. Both attackers and defenders have to "kneel" (turn the card to the side) in order to participate in the challenge. If an attacker successfully wins a military challenge, the defender must lose characters equal to the attacker's "claim" value. Intrigue challenges force the defender to lose cards from his hand, and power challenges force the defender to give power from his victory pile to the attacker. Plus, any undefended challenges gain a power for the attacker. After each player gets to take his turn initiating challenges, players compare how much gold and "standing" (non-kneeling) characters they have; whoever has the most gains an additional power. Finally, all kneeling characters are returned to standing, and any leftover gold is discarded. Play continues in this manner until one of the players has gained 15 power - that player is immediately the winner!

I love plot cards

There are several things that I love about the Game of Thrones card game, but the first is the plot cards. I have not seen anything like plot cards in any other game that I have played. The plot cards have a lot of strategy in several different ways. First, they determine how much gold a player has to spend; but the more gold you have, the lower your initiative value probably is. You also have to decide when to play your plot cards with higher claim values - they can be incredibly powerful in stretching an advantage, but if your opponent is able to keep you from winning any challenges, then it doesn't matter how high your claim value is! Finally, the plot cards can be great equalizers if one player is gaining too much of an advantage - one plot card (that comes with the House Stark deck) states "When revealed, kill all characters in play." This card can be phenomenal when your opponent has a distinct advantage; yet putting it in your deck means that you will have to play it at some point, even if you are the one with the advantage.

The next thing that I love about the Game of Thrones card game is how the challenges work. This works well with the initiative, because if you are able to get a higher initiative, then you can be the one forcing your opponent to react to your moves (after all, if you attack first, then you might be able to kill some of his characters before they have the chance to do anything - or at the very least convince him to kneel some of his characters to defend). Each of the different challenges are very strong, but in entirely different ways. Military is phenomenal and straightforward - if you kill your opponent, then they cannot attack or defend. Yet, with intrigue, you can prevent your opponent from bringing in reinforcements; or from hitting you with a nasty Event. Power, finally, wins the game. Regularly defeating your opponent in power will keep him from ever being able to gather enough power to defeat you - while helping you grow ever-closer to victory. These different strategic elements give an abundance of different strategies when building decks, but they also are critical during gameplay. Each turn you must decide how many characters you want to commit to which challenge - sometimes attacking simply to force your opponent into defending, and sometimes pressing all of your attack into a single challenge that you know your opponent cannot prevent. Once you have mastered the challenges in Game of Thrones, you will be a very skilled player!

The next thing that I like about Game of Thrones is that you truly are playing a game in which your cards represent characters - they are unique. Game of Thrones takes this uniqueness a step further than any other game that I have played. In Game of Thrones, if a unique character dies - he is dead. He cannot be played again, and he is placed in a separate discard pile. This makes deck building more interesting, as you must decide whether a single character is valuable enough to put multiple copies of in your deck - and if it is that important, you need to make sure that you protect that character, or else you will have extra cards that you cannot use later in the game!

Finally, I believe that the decks that come with the core set of Game of Thrones are well balanced and provide enough strategy that the game is enjoyable, even with a single core set of cards. If you are not intending to play in tournaments (I'm not), then you could play the game with just the core set, and you would really have a very solid game.

This is one of the duplicated cards

With all that is right with Game of Thrones (I basically love every part of the gameplay), there are a few things that I wish were different. These things are all related to what is included in the core set. For example, though each card can be included in a deck up to three times, you do not have three copies of each of the cards - in order to get these, you have to buy the game three times. Yet, some of the cards are included multiple times (such as Robert Baratheon), so if you did buy three copies of the core set, your extra cards would be worthless (this isn't nearly as bad as in the Lord of the Rings LCG in which you have a lot of cards with two or three copies; in Game of Thrones, most of your cards only have a single copy). Also, though a tournament legal deck consists of 60 cards, the core set provides you with four decks of 45 cards. I wish that you had decks that were legal to play in a tournament, even if the decks weren't tournament-quality. Finally, the game is setup out of the core set to be mutliplayer, and several of the cards are only useful in that kind of game. Yet, the game is incredibly fun two-player (this is how I play it and how I believe it is played in tournaments), so you immediately need to modify the decks for two player, or just play with certain cards not having much value.

Overall, I give the Game of Thrones: Living Card Game a 9.5/10. The gameplay easily deserves a 9.5, and the small nuisances of the core set are trivial enough to not drop the total score. Plus, the great news is that Fantasy Flight (I believe) is releasing all of their new expansions with the three copies of each card that you need, and are even re-releasing some of the older expansions to have this same three-copies of each card format! I truly look forward to continuing to play this game, and I really hope that I have several friends that fall in love with it so that I can have people to play against.

If you enjoy the Game of Thrones: Living Card Game, you might also check out the Game of Thrones Board Game, the Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game, and possibly Summoner Wars.

Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story DVD Review

2012-03-09T06:05:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I have to start this review with a confession. I love Monopoly. I realize that this confession will not necessarily be popular among many of my readers who wish to disassociate themselves as much as possible from the game. However, after growing up playing it, I still enjoy the game as an adult. I have many, many other games now, so it doesn't hit my table often - but when it does, I still enjoy this classic. So, when I heard about the Monopoly DVD documentary Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story, I was very intrigued.

Ok, here's the next confession - I review board games; not DVDs. In fact, this will be my first DVD review, but as long as DVDs continue to be made about board games (which I think my readers will find interesting), I'll continue to review them.

The Feature

Whereas this is called "The Monopoly Story", I think it would be better titled, "Chronicles of the 2009 Monopoly World Championship." The film features several hopeful competitors who are attempting to win first the U.S. National Monopoly Championship (for which you win approximately $20,000 - the amount of money found in a game of Monopoly), and then the 2009 World Monopoly Championship. And, along the way, they also give you more information about the game itself.

When it comes to interviewing authority figures within the Monopoly world, Under the Boardwalk is unmatched. Some of the people interviewed include the Monopoly world tournament judge for the last few decades, Charles Darrow's (the inventor of Monopoly) grandson, two U.S. Monopoly champions, the original Monopoly World Champion, Hasbro's Monopoly brand manager, and many others. Moreover, the film does a very good job of highlighting something about these people - they are normal people that happen to have a passion for the game of Monopoly. Regularly, when interviewing them, the film will tell you their names and professions. The down side of this is that, until later in the film, you don't realize how much of an authority figure they are! (Plus, knowing the authorities that are involved in the movie helps reassure you that the information you are receiving is truly factual.)

Because the competitors are presented as normal people, Under the Boardwalk does a very good job of bringing out the personalities (and even rivalries!) within the world of tournament Monopoly. You have characters that truly train, study, and practice for the tournaments. Then, you have people that enjoy Monopoly, but primarily play it with family. You get to follow a 6th grade teacher that uses Monopoly to help his students learn math - and you get to learn why one of the other highly regarded Monopoly competitors considers him to be a cheater. The people element of all of this really brings you into the story of this tournament. (And, fortunately, most of the people truly appear to enjoy their time playing - they don't appear to be quite as cutthroat as I expected them to be... but then again, if they were, who would trade with them?)

Among chronicling the 2009 World Championship, Under the Boardwalk throws in some fascinating information and history of the game of Monopoly. For history, the documentary starts with it's origins as the "Landlord's Game", and continues through it's gradual reshaping until it because the game that Charles Darrow invented - which, FYI, was played on a round board! For random facts, do you know where the largest Monopoly board in the world is - or how large it is? I do - and if you watch the film, you will too (well, at least until you forget). I found all of these factual tidbits to be very engaging. I wish that they had focused more on this aspect, but isn't one of the trademarks of a good documentary the fact that it leaves you wanting to know more?

Finally, I must say that I was impressed with the overall quality of the film. I had no idea what to expect going in. I knew it was about Monopoly, and that was enough for me. I had no idea if this was a small-budget or large-budget movie. (To be fair, I still have no idea.) However, with footage included from the national championships of New Zealand, Singapore, Mexico, Canada, and the United States (among others), the film truly feels exhaustive. There are a couple places where I noticed the sound being a bit less than perfect, but I believe that was because of the volume of what was recorded (I believe they were recording the announcer at one of the tournaments who was on a microphone).

Extras

In case the feature film wasn't enough, the DVD also features some extras that are pretty nice. First, you can take the full 20 question quiz that all National Champion hopefuls must attempt in order to gain entry into the National Tournament (I got approximately 14 out of 20 correct). Next, they also feature the full (42-minute) 2009 World Championship final game! I realize that many people will not understand this (unless, of course, you enjoy Monopoly enough to buy a DVD about it), but I can see myself watching this at some point!

Summary

Overall, I give Under the Boardwalk a 9.5/10. I have no idea how to score DVDs, so take that how you will. However, I really enjoyed the DVD and consider it to be something that any Monopoly fan should definitely try to watch!

I would like to thank the filmmakers of Under the Boardwalk for providing me with a review copy of their film.