Tales from the Boarder

Episode 4 - Mysterium

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Sun, 18 Aug 2019 01:59:00 -0700

Archive.org or iTunes

Back once again from another dimension! This time, the dimension is the other side, the spirit realm or perhaps something much more sinister. Today we talk about Mysterium, a co-operative mystery solving game from Libellud.

Either follow the link or use the embedded player on the website.

Music from https://filmmusic.io:
"Pyro Flow" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Fiasco - The Post-Pod Review

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 15:35:00 -0700

Fiasco is a collaborative storytelling game for three to five people by Jason Morningstar and published by Bully Pulpit Games. According to the rulebook you play 'ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control.' The game is heavily inspired by the films of The Coen Brothers, Guy Ritchie, Quentin Tarantino and individual movies like Office Space, In Bruges and The Way of the Gun.

Longbaugh: What do you think?
Parker: I think a plan is just a list of things that don't happen.

- The Way of the Gun.

Fiasco does not begin with a plan. There is no gamesmaster to dictate what the story is or is not. Everything is conceived and played through in one three-to-four hour session of play. It's a fast, frenetic form of democratic storytelling that delivers high drama, low comedy and great opportunities for role-playing. Because the games are so quick, and your characters are not part of an ongoing serial narrative, you can take risks in the game that you would probably not consider for long term role-playing campaigns. If your character would be better off dead, for the purposes of the story, then it's no problem, as you can still participate or even explore your character further using flashbacks or some other narrative device. But, I'm getting a little ahead of myself...

All of the players start by agreeing on a playset. A playset consists of a brief outline of the setting for the game and lists of relationships, objects, locations and needs that help the players develop an interesting scenario to explore. Because you are defining relationships between characters during setup, rather than individual characters, you are developing the bones of a plot and intrigue and avoiding the common roadblock you get when you start playing traditional RPGs - how do the players know each other and why do they interact with each other? This core mechanic is so great that I'm shocked it hasn't been stolen or adapted by mainstream roleplaying systems.

Once you've got the relationships and plot elements sorted you play through a series of scenes. Each player takes it in turns to either establish or resolve a scene. If they establish a scene, the player describes a situation involving their character. Once the scene has been established and it's clear there's a decision or important element to the scene, the other players decide if it goes well or badly for the character by selecting a good or bad die and giving it to the player.

Rob: So, I'm in the bowels of the mafia Don's estate, looking for his prize stallion so I can steal a vial of horse semen.
Chris: This is definitely going badly for you.
Rich: I agree, there's no way your character can pull this off.
Darren: Bad die it is. What about if some guards turn up and chase you off?
Rob: Sounds good, but I'm going to grab something on the way out. Perhaps the Don is storing his own sperm, just in case. Taking that will up the ante and won't be valuable to anyone else.

The above example is really condensed, you could roleplay out the guard encounter fully, with the other players taking control of the guards before switching it up and letting the first player narrate the chase and aftermath. As long as the group agrees that what comes up meets the good/bad result, you're free to do what you like.

This brings us to the divisive part of this game. If you don't feel comfortable coming up with the story as you're playing, either because you prefer reacting to someone else's prompts or you don't feel like you have the creative muscles to contribute, you're going to hate this game. I firmly believe that playing Fiasco, or other collaborative storytelling games, often will develop those muscles and lessen the feeling that you can't tell your own story, but that will take take time and trust in your fellow players.

Marge Gunderson: OK, so we got a trooper pulls someone over, we got a shooting, these folks drive by, there's a high-speed pursuit, ends here and then this execution-type deal.

- Fargo

One of the interesting points raised in the podcast was the pretty clear understanding, justified or not, that it was the gamesmasters responsibility to craft the story of any given campaign. Obviously, in games that require a setting and rules arbiter, the gamesmaster has a responsibility to understand the setting and rules enough to be able to react to the player's actions. But, should that mean that the gamesmaster is the only, or even main, source of story or plot in your games? I don't believe so.

I'm not suggesting that players get to determine what the story is AND how it plays out. The beauty of Fiasco is that it understands that there is a balance that needs to be maintained between establishing and resolving the plot of any game. If your interaction with the story is purely reactionary and/or mechanical (choosing a limited response and rolling dice to see if it works) then it isn't a role-playing experience, it's just an encounter simulator.

I'll leave you with the immortal words of The Dude:

Walter, I love you, but sooner or later, you're going to have to face the fact you're a goddamn moron.

- The Big Lebowski

Episode 3 - Fiasco

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Sat, 20 Jul 2019 08:55:00 -0700

Archive.org or iTunes

This time the group discusses Fiasco, which turns out to be a lot more divisive than we initially thought. Now with added dog barking (sorry about that, its only for a minute or two in the middle!)

Either follow the link or use the embedded player on the website.

Music from https://filmmusic.io:

"Pyro Flow" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Episode 2 - Mansions of Madness

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Sun, 14 Jul 2019 09:38:00 -0700

Archive.org or iTunes

This time, we brave the Mansions of Madness (2nd Edition) from Fantasy Flight Games in pursuit of eldritch knowledge and alien horror.

Either follow the link or use the embedded player on the website.

Music from https://filmmusic.io:

"Pyro Flow" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Episode 1 - Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Sat, 29 Jun 2019 10:22:00 -0700

Archive.org or iTunes

Welcome to our first episode! We brave the grim and perilous world of adventure from Games Workshop and Cubicle 7 Games - Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play (4th Edition).

Either follow the link or use the embedded player on the right.

Music from https://filmmusic.io:

"Pyro Flow" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Warhammer Underworlds- Thundrik's Profiteers vs Ylthari's Guardians

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Sat, 29 Jun 2019 00:42:00 -0700

A faction card clash between Ylthari's Guardians versus Thundrik's Profiteers. All cards are taken from the Nightvault and expansions card set and 50% of cards in each deck are faction specific.

Thundrik's Deck

Ylthari's Deck

In the heat of battle, we made a few mistakes, Ylthari should have inspired with her first attack, I spent a glory point twice and Ghallaghan didn't have LOS for his last attack. There may be more we didn't notice, so feel free to pick us up in the comments!

Deep Madness

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Sat, 11 May 2019 16:08:00 -0700

Deep Madness is a co-operative game from Diemension Games for one to six players set in an underwater research station beset by Lovecraftian and other pop culture science fiction horrors.

The most obvious thing to say about this game is that the models looks gorgeous. Or horrific, depending on your point of view. They are evocative of the Cthulhu Mythos and the other horror source material that the game liberally borrows from; less politely, the aesthetic is pretty shamelessly ripped off from every popular movie and video game horror franchise in recent memory. The models are sometimes poorly defined; there were moments when we confused Husks for Ravenouses and Blinds for Deliriums, a quick peek at the model close up sorted it out, but it did add to the frustration of play. The card artwork is also of a variable quality, the effect icons and monster pictures were sometimes indistinct.

The game is made from sturdy, quality materials; even the most delicate looking models feel like they could take a fair bit of handling without fear of damaging them.

The Madness Within (The Gameplay)

Players and groups of monsters alternate actions. Players can search for equipment, move, attack monsters and perform special actions, either based on the character chosen or the mission. Monsters have defined actions they perform in order. For example, they may move, then perform a special action, then move again. It tends to be the case that if a monster moves into attack range they perform an attack, but not always. Monster specials can also be attacks but they can also make the monster more powerful. Attacks are made using six-sided dice or a special monster dice.

The play area is made up of individual room sections that are either 'devoured' or 'safe'. Devoured rooms have slightly different artwork, random negative effects on them, and monsters can spawn in them. Each turn a random safe room becomes devoured, increasing the number of possible spawn points, and a random amount of monsters are added to the board, starting in the newly devoured room. We normally added between 4-10 monsters a turn. Monsters are randomly drawn from an array of six monsters, randomly determined from a much larger group during setup. As you can see, there is a lot of randomness in this game.

This randomness mitigates against strategic or forward thinking. You end up analysing the board as it stands, as it changes radically from turn to turn. Plans rarely survive first contact, so they become fairly pointless as the game progresses. As the board fills up with monsters, the choices the players can reasonably make radically decrease so this only gets more pronounced.

The best spin on this is that no game will ever play out the same way, even using the same mission. However, this variability does mean that the game can be horrifically unbalanced or broken and essentially unwinnable from the start. We relied heavily on one character's special ability to move monsters around using a sonar decoy. Without that, it would have been extremely difficult to complete the mission objectives.

Time Out Of (Board) Space

If each game took less time to play, this wouldn't be an issue, but there are three or four actions a player can make on their turn, and each monster has two or three actions to determine as well. With six players and anywhere from 5-30 monsters on the board, that's a lot of actions to process. If we assume one minute thinking time per player action, that equates to 18-24 minutes per turn. Even after playing several scenarios, we were still taking many hours to play through each mission. It's a hefty time investment if you have an unlucky set up.

In the Madness Within scenario each character achieves their objectives by killing a different monster type each turn. Some players were able to quickly score, as they were lucky in the monster spawning phase; they were in the right position on the monster track to score and they had found some effective weaponry early on. Other players were not so lucky and spent more than half the game without scoring because they were out of position or because the one monster they were able to kill that turn wasn't worth any points to them. We got through eight turns (out of a possible twelve) in four hours, with the host setting up for an hour beforehand, before giving up at midnight.

The Niggling Horror Under The Sea

Deep Madness is co-operative, so monster actions are decided by the players. This leads to a certain amount of fudging when the monsters could move one way or another; players can choose which player character a monster moves towards (if the characters are equidistant from the monster) and who they attack (if there are two characters in range). It feels very much like you're playing damage limitation when you're controlling the monsters. This is by design, but what you end up with is monsters that don't behave as threateningly as they could or should be, so it diminishes the tension in the game and spoils the narrative aspect too. This is my biggest gripe with games of this ilk: players have to, or feel obliged to, minimise the threat from the encounter to win, which creates a certain amount of dissonance. Dark Souls has the Rule of Death to counteract this effect, but there is no such command in Deep Madness.

The monsters known as Grudges embody this problem. Their card states they only attack if a player moves into their range. A number of times Grudges spawned on top of players or into adjacent squares, so they effectively moved into range of the player. Should the Grudge attack or not? I argued that the rules stated they only attack when players move, so they shouldn't attack initially and shouldn't attack when players move within or out of range. I'm fairly confident that the first part of this interpretation is right, but the second feels narratively wrong, even if it is technically correct. I'm not sure it is technically correct, but the ambiguous language on the monster card doesn't help.

The Haunting Conclusion of The Dice God Dodecahedron and his Foul Ilk, the Hexophranic Banishers

Moment to moment, Deep Madness has bags of tension and feels thrilling. But it is draining for the wrong reasons and a small amount of reflection destroys the artifice the game is built on. The difficulty comes from waves of creatures and huge amounts of busy work instead of a compelling gameplay element. The arcane win conditions and large number of loss conditions should be a clue; players lose when one of them dies, or they run out of monsters to put on the board, or the turn tracker runs out. I didn't find any of these particularly narratively compelling. Why would losing one player signal failure? Horror stories are generally littered with bodies of everyone except a main character or two. What narrative function does running out of enemy models serve? Adding a ticking clock is a particularly easy way to engineer tension, but is it necessary or effective in every scenario?

So, on reflection, I didn't like it much. How about you?

Warhammer Underworlds Basic Boards

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 08:00:00 -0700

If you’re like me, then you might like to see the Warhammer Underworlds boards with no artwork, as it gives you a much clearer view of where the various hexes are without distractions. The images after the cut show all currently available boards with zero artwork.

Let me be clear; I’ve done this for personal purposes and these images are in no way designed to replace boards or to be used as proxies, they are purely a quick and easy reference guide to board layouts, based on publicly available images of the boards on various websites across the internet. I’ve deliberately left off a key to identify which colours relate to which hex type, so you’ll need to own or at least be familiar with WU to get much out of them.

Warhammer Underworlds Advantage

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Sat, 13 Apr 2019 08:00:00 -0700

While it may seem clear that achieving glory is the way to win Warhammer Underworlds, it is less clear as to the best way to do so. Because Underworlds is a deck-building game as well as a miniature skirmish game, there is a constant interplay between board and model position, the cards in your hand and your deck, and the activation sequence itself. This means that your strategy will require flexibility as there are many complications that could change the character of your game. So, instead of trying to come up with a hard and fast set of killer combos (although Charge – Shardgale – My Turn – Upgrade – Ready For Action is pretty damn cool) it is probably more useful to understand key concepts that have been floating around in other games that may inform your deck-building process and decision-making in game.

I think there are two key resources in your armoury – one obvious and one less so. The obvious resource is your cards, and I include your fighters in this. The less obvious resource is activations.

Card Advantage

There is a concept in Magic: The Gathering and similar deck-building games of Card Advantage. This is the idea that, all other things being equal, if you have more cards in play or in your deck and hand than your opponent, you have an advantage, based on the fact that you’ve got more resources to deploy. If you can remove cards from your opponents hand, deck or play area without losing any of your own, you gain card advantage from that action. If you have to use two spells to remove one creature, your card advantage is decreased.

Warhammer Underworlds is not exactly analogous to Magic: The Gathering, but the principle is the same and can be applied to the game to your benefit. If you can outdraw your opponent, you’ll have more ploys and upgrades to play. If you can kill, or otherwise neutralise, fighters with upgrades without losing your own fighters, or at least losing fewer resources, you’ve gained an advantage which will allow you to more easily score your objectives in later activations.

Without any models you can score very few objectives. You could play Warhammer Underworlds without playing a single card and have a fine time, but the game has been designed around the explicit principle that your warband is your fighters AND your cards. While your fighters exist in a three-dimensional space (and can act in two-dimensions), they are clearly defined by the abilities on their cards and the power cards you play on them. Reframing your fighters as part of your card resource can help you focus on the concept of card advantage.

Grawl may not be Riptooth, but it is wrong-headed to simply regard him as cannon-fodder (or canine-fodder, if you will). Sacrificing Grawl, if that is your plan, must not simply feed the other player glory; make your opponent work for every card they take and every glory they score. Plus, Grawl with Enchanted Collar has amazing defence – three dodge is as good as an inspired Snirk Sourtongue or Batsquig.

Activation Advantage

And now for a concept unique to Warhammer Underworlds – Activation Advantage. Activations are rare – you only get twelve all game, so if you use activations in ways that don’t lead to a net gain of glory (by scoring glory yourself or denying your opponent glory) you are effectively wasting those activations. Like card advantage, if you can get an opponent to use an activation frivolously, use a single activation to score multiple objectives or if you gain more activations, or activation like actions/reactions, using ploys then you are in a stronger position to win the game.

Imagine the following scenario: You guess that an opponent has Supremacy in their hand, as they’ve arranged three fighters on objectives in their last activations of the round. One of these fighters is in range of a friendly weak fighter, and a fourth enemy fighter, who is not on an objective, is within charge range of your best fighter. If you are correct, and the player does have Supremacy, then making an attack against the fourth enemy fighter, and taking them out of action, would result in a net loss of two glory. It would be better, by far, to use a weaker attack on a fighter standing on an objective to knock them off it for a neutral glory outcome.

Change of Tactics is a trap card, in this respect. You think it’s a solid card because it is reliable and doesn’t require too much interaction with your opponent. But, it takes two activations, or one ploy and an activation, to score one glory. If you can combo it with another objective, like Keep Them Guessing, then it becomes a bit more valuable, but it is then situational to you having both objectives in your hand at the same time. You also have to play suboptimally for one phase, unless you have the fortune to be in a good position to begin with, so you’re diminishing the chance you’ll score objectives in subsequent rounds. It is really easy to score, but its rewards are pretty poor for the effort you have to expend.

Running Change of Tactics and Keep Them Guessing together, you can expect to score three glory for four activations. Compare this to Skritch is the Greatest, Yes-Yes… which you can score in one activation. You’ll gain two glory, and the chance of success is 59% against a weak fighter. The expected average glory from this manoeuvre is then 1.18 per activation, whereas Change of Tactics is a measly 0.5 per activation and Keep Them Guessing and Change of Tactics nets 0.75 per activation.

So, what do you think? Change of Tactics was in the deck of the latest Grand Clash winner, so I could be talking rubbish, but it would be interesting to see how effective the deck could have been with a different objective.

The Eyes of the Nine

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 08:00:00 -0700

The Eyes of the Nine are a Tzeentch warband for Warhammer Underworlds. Led by the wizard Vortemis, this five man band (with one or two horrors depending on how you want to count them) serve the Lord of Change in their nefarious plot to connect the Realms of Chaos to Shadespire.

I've been having mixed success in my gaming group playing a hybrid spellcasting/Acolyte of the Katophranes Objective deck. I've found that buffing Vortemis a little makes him a pretty potent and reliable spellcaster, allowing me to easily score Agents of Change and Masters of Magic with a heavy dose of Gambit spells in my Power deck. I've stacked my upgrades with innate lightning bolts or the ability to change rolls to lightning bolts. This allows any spellcaster to be able to play spells as if they're playing ploy cards. If anything, I've probably over egged this element of the deck, so could do with replacing some of the upgrades that do essentially the same thing to buff the rest of the warband.

Sorcerous Retort was tried and quickly binned and Magical Mastery is for the chop next; getting enough cards and/or enough models around Vortemis to cast six spells or a spell reaction just hasn't worked out for me. I spent one game spending four activations to cast Vortemis's Bolt of Change attack. When it didn't pop until the third or fourth activation of the second round, it was too late to get glory to power the warband up.

Therein lies the major problem with this warband/deck combo - it relies too much on a single model. Vortemis is pretty solid, especially when inspired, but with only four wounds and a single dodge dice for defence until then, he's really vulnerable to quick charging damage dealers like the Skritch, Riptooth or Mollog. K'charik is easy to inspire, however, and you'd be foolish to leave him alive if he's close to Vortemis and you've gone all in on the leader. The ability to re-roll any dice when attacking is really great, making him a very reliable heavy counter. Narvia and Turosh can be useful distractions and, because of their range and speed, are at less risk of being squished than other melee based filler models and are pretty good at making charges into enemy territory for Eyes of the Master. The additional range upgrade, unique, I think, to the Eyes warband, means one of either Narvia or Turosh can fire off ranged attacks with no fear of reprisal unless charged.

When the deck works, it's a thing of beauty. After the initial speed bump, you're not reliant on rolling dice or grabbing objectives to score. Once you've powered up Vorty, he's a very scary ranged damage dealer with an insane number of gambit spells that just go off with no risk of failure or double critical damage. Abasoth's Unmaking counteracts a deck weighted towards holding objectives, and is a really simple way to score Scorched Earth. The Katophrane Tomes are great buffs and can be given to your Blue Horror which greatly reduces the chance they'll be taken off the board permanently if/when the horrors are taken out of action. If you're comfortably winning in the first round of match play, it may even be worth keeping the tomes in your hand to surprise the other player who would certainly counteract your spell-casting strategy by going after Vortemis in the second or third match up.

Any Warhammer Underworlds players out there with thoughts, let me know in the comments!

Warhammer Underworlds

ravenshawprime@gmail.com (Rob Sharp) — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 08:00:00 -0700

I’ve recently fallen love with a tabletop miniatures game. Forgive me, for I know not what I do.

Warhammer Underworlds is a competitive tactical miniatures game with a substantial deck-building element. First released in 2017, with the snazzy subtitle Shadespire, it has had a steady flow of new models and cards since launch and a new edition, Nightvault, released late last year. It’s fast, fun and feels incredibly well balanced. Games typically take 30-45 minutes so you can always move on to the next game, if you get totally thrashed, pretty quickly.

As you might expect with Games Workshop, the models are spectacular to look at, especially if you’re into the Age of Sigmar aesthetic. The Briar Queen and her warband are particularly lovely. The major downside is, because the models are push fit, there is very limited scope for modification or personalisation beyond how you paint the warband. There is a good amount of choice, with fourteen warbands out already and four more confirmed for later this year.

When you choose a warband, you don’t pick starting gear or customise your fighters, which has put off my gaming group a little. Instead you build two decks, one of objectives and one of Gambits and Upgrades. Gambits are cards that typically affect one action and are then discarded, whereas Upgrades provide permanent benefits. You might be asking why you’d pick Gambits at all, if they’re so ephemeral, but there are two main reasons. Firstly, Upgrades cost resources to play, whereas Gambits are free. Secondly, Gambits allow you to play actions outside of the normal turn sequence, giving you more choice in how you approach the game.

Objectives are one way of scoring Glory, the way you determine the winner of a particular game. Objectives can be as simple as standing on an objective marker on the board at the end of a turn or as complicated as performing four different actions in one turn or casting a set number of spells. The other way to gain Glory is to simply kill off the other player’s warband. Each model taken off the board scores one Glory point. Glory points also double as the resource required to apply Upgrades. You don’t lose a Glory point when you apply an upgrade, so you’re not penalised for upgrading, but you do have to turn the Glory point over to indicate that it has been used.

After three turns, each consisting of four activations for each player, the game is over. The small number of opportunities to act really does give each activation real weight. You can’t waste time manoeuvring aimlessly waiting for an opening, you have to seize the initiative and play bold (or sneaky, or clever) moves to win.

I thought about putting some links to useful pages, but there’s already a great page on the Wigglehammer blog here, so I won’t waste my time repeating it!

I’ve only been able to play a handful of games, so I’m not hugely confident in my abilities yet, but it’s got under my skin. The variety of differing play styles, coupled with the quick playthrough time, means you can really rapidly develop and adapt your warband to suit. Now, I just need to figure out a way to roll more crits…