my new favorite boardgame

I beat my brothers-in-law and nephews at 7 Wonders twice today.  These are all smart dudes and I usually struggle to not come in last.  So now I will insist we play this game at every family gathering. More seriously, this is a fun little card-laying game of civilization building that involves passing cards to the player next to you and not being able to use all the good ones, so you get the double frustration of giving good cards to one player and getting crap from another.  Good times.

Another game we played was Egizia, which has a cute little ancient Egyptian monument-building theme.  The two frustrations in this one are the player before you swiping your action, and not being able to pick the option you want without screwing yourself out of future actions.  The latter is represented by little landing boats along the Nile; you can only go downriver, so if you pass something you can't go back and get it.  Another fun one.

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer microreview

Today I played Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer with my sister Jenn.  She whupped me of course.  Anyway, if you dig the deckbuilding-without-collectibility aspect of Dominion, this is the same sort of thing with two key differences:

1) You don't have to thing as hard about what order you do things in when your turn comes up.  You can pretty much but not quite show all your cards and figure out what happens simultaneously.

2) The theme is fantasy heroes beating up weird monsters.

When I was a kid I was a sucker for anything involving monsters, but nowadays one can be picky/choosy and insist on good mechanics too.  Ascension delivers on both a good theme (with cool art) and some interesting mechanics.  One amusing detail is that if there are no monsters on the main field of play then your heroes can always go beat up crazy cultists for minimal points.  Death to all fanatics!

The only thing I don't like about it is that there's no real sense of urgency in fighting the monsters.  Victory is basically a race to win more glory by defeating more badguys.  If there was a provision in the rules whereby the monsters could win the game (and all the players lose) that would add some juice.  You know, like Arkham Horror ot Betrayal on the House on the Hill.  I think Republic of Rome had the same basic idea, with Hannibal standing in for the monsters.  The old GDW card game Red Empire also had a neat "everybody loses" mechanic: the game ends with no winner if you spent too much time skulldugging the other players and ignored governance.

some non-RPGs I played at Winter War

Betrayal at the House on the Hill - I've played this before and quite like it.  In many ways it better encapsulates and boardgame-ifies Call of Cthulhu better than Arkham Horror does.  At least the way I run Call of Cthulhu: first half of the game is a Scooby Doo episode, the second half involves things falling apart and centers failing to hold.  Don't get me wrong though, Arkham Horror is nifty, but it doesn't involve exploring randomly placed haunted house tiles and I will never get tired of that.

Dominion with Seaside expansion - Dominion has all the juice inherent in the structure of a collectible card game without the economic shackles of buying more boosters.  And unlike many, many games I occasionally win this one, so that's nice.  One time I even beat my sister, which I consider a braggable accomplishment because I'm pretty sure she basically lives her life looking for opportunities to whomp me at boardgames.  The Seaside expansion cards left me completely flummoxed and I got clobbered.  But I can't blame the game on that though, as lots of games confuse me.  Even something as relatively straightforward as Puerto Rico took me an embarassingly huge number of plays before I figured out what I was doing wrong.  ("Hey, maybe I should try shipping some goods and scoring some points!")

Incidentally, a reliable informant told me that Thunderstone is basically Dominion plus monster fighting.  You know I gotta get in on that action.

Dust Tactics - This is a simple minis game from the makers of AT-43 that dares ask the question: what if World War II had more lasers and robots?  I ended up playing the Nazis, running some laser troopers commanded by a busty Aryan dominatrix type and a couple panzer-mecha.  Bazooka Joe and his four-legged tanks chewed me to pieces, so yay for Uncle Sam I guess.  The figures were nicely done plastics and the dry-erase control sheets did an excellent job of encapsulating a lot of information.  The only thing that I didn't like was that one moved across a giant grid o' squares.  Hexes too fancy?

Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game - My opinion of fullblown 4e aside, I really gave this the old college try.  After all, if my major complaint is that 4e is too boardgamey, you'd think a boardgame version might be a hoot.  Good: if you want more figures and tiles for your D&D game, there's a lot of good loot in this one.  Including some sweetass monsters.  Bad: everything else.  Seriously.  If you want to play a boardgame about dungeoneering there are many better options.  I've never played Descent but several people at the table and kibitzing nearby said it was far superior.  Personally, I'd rather play Dungeon! or Mertwig's Maze than Castle Ravenloft.  Or even Munchkin Quest, which seems to have the same endgame flaw as the original cardgame.

Castle Ravenloft did have one interesting new mechanic that I can't quite figure out whether to put in the Good or Bad column: whenever you roll a natural 20 on any die throw your PC goes up a level.  That can only happen once a game since only first and second level are supported, but even several days later I'm pondering the possibilities of level advancement by random occurence...

Arkham Horror

I played the Cthulhu Mythos themed boardgame Arkham Horror for the first time last night. I ended up leaving before the game was over and here is where my guy was when I got up from the table:

That's just beautiful.

Winter War recap, part 2

For Saturday at Winter War I focused on two main things: playing boardgames and finishing my Empire of the Petal Throne dungeon. Yes, I really do wait 'til the day before to finish my con games. Unless I don't bother finishing at all. In these matters my motto has long been "If you've got pregens you've got a con game". And for a simple enough game I can skimp on that. I use to worry that my tardiness in preperations was a disservice to my players, until I realized that some of my best DMing happens when I am working with a shoddy dungeon map and a half-formed premise. But for EPT I really wanted at least three complete levels. In between finishing level 2 and creating level 3 whole cloth I managed to get in a lot of other fun stuff.

Legendary downstate Illinois gamestore Castle Perilous was open for business when I arrived Saturday morning. Armored Gopher Games is my home turf and store of choice. I'm happy to buy any and all game stuff I can from them. But Castle Perilous always has something neat in their used section. This time I found an issue of Pegasus (one of the old Judges Guild mags) and the Boot Hill module Range War. Spent five buck apiece for them. Nowadays Boot Hill is one of the few RPGs lacking both robots and witches that interests me and I'm always up for something from Judges Guild. Unfortunately, the Castle didn't have any Bella Sera cards. My daughter asked me to pick some up for her at the con and Castle Perilous was my last, best hope for little cards with ponies on them.

For the past several years lunchtime on Winter War Saturday has involved my sister and I getting together at the nearby Monical's Pizza with whoever else we can connive into joining us. I don't think I've mentioned ol' what's-her-face in a while on this blog, but my sister Jenn has really gotten into boardgames and Euro-games over the past five years or so. She now has her own Wednesday night game group in her home and she can pretty much whoop me at any game where I can't hide behind a screen and change the rules to suit my purposes. Her boyfriend Kirk was with her for the second year in a row and my wife Amy joined us at the restaraunt. The official fifth wheel of the group was Dane, a member of my Mutant Future group and hoot to hang out with. We had a nice meal but the guy sitting in the booth behind Jenn kept turning around and staring at us. I made eye contact with him more than once but he was undeterred. At first I thought he was one of the con-goers (the place was lousy with games, being right next to the hotel.) and was waiting for a moment to jump in on the conversation. But no, he was just the world's least subtle eavesdropper.

The lunch break on Saturday is also the time of the live game auction, which wasn't quite over when we got back. Dane ended up buying three different lawyer-themed games for the minimum bid. The only thing I bid on was a copy of Age of Mythology. Have you seen the plastic pieces in one of those? Perfect monsters for 1:72 scale, I tell's ya. But it went for well over the cheapskate level I bid at. I sold a bunch of stuff this year and made out like a bandit on that end. I felt a little silly when my sister bought one of the items in the auction. Especially since it was a birthday present from my brother-in-law, who was also in the room. When I first got it I was all "Puerto Rico for the PC! Huzzah!" But six months later it was still sitting on my computer desk, box still sealed. It might as well go to someone who will actually play it.

After the auction comes the event I consider the centerpiece of the convention: the Doctor Metcalf Memorial Blind Sniper Tournament. Some of you grognards might be familiar with Sniper!, an old SPI game about man-to-man fighting on the streets of Stalingrad. The Winter War variant is basically an every-man-for-himself hidden movement shoot-out, usually with 15 to 20 people scrambling around the map. The game can last up to twelve hours but most of the players are dead well before that. Since the referee (Bruce, one of the founding fathers of the local game scene) takes a lot of time processing written orders and writing responses, whole other boardgames are played during the tournament.

This year I played three other games before being killed on turn 11/hour 6 of the game. My sister and her fella crashed the Sniper room and played Alhambra Dice with Jim, Dane and I. I did absolutely terrible at this game but I got to roll a bunch of funny dice, so who cares? Jenn and Kirk headed off for their Settlers of Catan tournament, so the three of us remaining broke out one of Dane's newly-acquired lawyer games. We tried Judge for Yourself, which is a basic 'guess the actual verdict' sort of thing. What made the game fun was that on some turns you are part of a jury and must return a unaminous verdict, so when someone talks you into a wrong decision you can give them lots of crap about it.

The last game of the night for me was Endeavor, a Euro-type game of brutal colonial exploitation and power politics. Dane had to leave, but Jim and I were joined by his son Ian and a couple of other Sniper players. It must be an easy game to pick up, as I managed to finish third, ahead of the other newbie and someone already familiar with the game. If you like Puerto Rico but wish there was a map to fight over, you might want to give Endeavor a try.

Sunrise over Lake Damned-If-I-Can-Remember

The ol' Gameblog went on an unexpected hiatus for the last week or so because of a number of factors. The primary explanation is that I was super busy getting ready for the family trip to Wisconsin. I'm typing this post from the condo we rented at a very lovely resort near the the small town of Cable. Any Gameblog readers in the area? Shoot me an email: jrients @ gmail.com. Though to be honest, I haven't checked my gmail account in about a week and it might take a day or two for me to get caught up in that department.

So my good buddy Pat is in town for a visit last weekend and he, my daughter and I headed over to the Armored Gopher Games for a used game auction. Armored Gopher's last used game auction was of the silent type, where you simply write down you best bid on an attached slip of paper and then the next day you get an email informing you that you spent way too much money on a big pile of game crap. This time it was a live event, modeled closely on Winter War's excellent format.

I know you all are surprised to hear that I spent too much money on a big pile of game crap. Well, it was only twenty bucks, but I didn't spend more than $3 on an single item, so I ended with a lot of stuff. For some unknown reason I was in a mood to bid on a old board games, winning the bidding on the Parker Brothers D&D cash-in Shadowlords!, the Avalon Hill bookcase game UFO, Alien Contact (which I knew nothing about and bid on solely based upon nifty font used on the box's logo design), The Legend of the Lone Ranger (bought at my daughter's urging) and the licensed board game for the old TV show S.W.A.T.

On the RPG front I ended up buying one of the later, black-covered 2nd edition Player's Handbooks and the infamous Skills & Powers book. I didn't play any AD&D during the period when Skills & Powers and the other "2.5" books were out and I've been meaning to get them for a while. True story: I got heckled when I bid on the 2nd ed PHB. Josh, one of the regulars that make my Encounter Critical and D&D con games so fun, shouted from a couple rows back "isn't that a bit too new for your tastes?" I shot back "The first printing was in '89. That totally counts!" A cheap copy of Palladium's Monsters & Animals also made its way into my win pile. Is it possible to have too many monster nooks? I doubt it. I also nabbed two third edition Gamma World modules and the Buck Rogers adventure War Against the Han. The latter is for the Buck Rogers rpg that TSR did that more closely resembled the original post-apocalyptic pulp novel. I figured now that I'm running Mutant Future as an ongoing venture a few cheap post-apoc resources could come in handy.

Which brings me around to Wednesday and Mutant Future session #2. I had the same three players (Carl, Dane & Wheelz) running the same three characters (Silver Bob, Ted "Creepy Deer" Fletcher & Stern the Pure) with the addition of Stern's new henchman, Dumbo the Elephant Dude. I decided to use WalkerP's One Page Dungeon, MineCo 3000 Uranium Ore Extraction Complex. Continuing the previously established theme of "Oh noes! Our hometown is running out of waters!" I fed the party a totally bullshit rumor about a settlement further down the Poison River. Their mission: find out how the locals are able to purify river water, or at least arrange to buy water from them. [Spoilers!] The Ore Extraction Complex doesn't purify any water. Its run by androids and hypno-zombies that the androids don't mind slowly killing with poisonous water. So a totally false lead, but given reports of activity down river a plausible one. What can I say? Years of watching Gilligan's Island as a youth probably gave me a twisted idea of what constitutes a fair scenario.

Anyway, the party all died. They got through the majority of the adventure and burned through most of the allotted session time, but then things went awry. The One Page Dungeon format leaves a lot of lacunae for the enterprising GM to fill in and with this particular one-pager an unanswered question was "what are the androids armed with?" So I rolled some dice and consulted the artifact charts. I got mostly stuff like laser rifles and six-shooters, with one android armed with an electric stun baton. But one of the two androids guarding the Great Computer God ended with a grenade launcher and some lethal photonic grenades. The sick thing is that photonic grenades only damage living beings, so the androids have absolutely no reason to be dainty about their placement on the battlefield. Only one PC made his save vs. instant grenade death and he was gunned down one round later.

To their credit, the gang immediately started rolling up new PCs. Too bad these new guys are a bands of rejects. Two thirds of the team is blind! We'll see how well that works out next session.

The other thing, besides prepping for vacation, that's been eating up my time lately has been a book. I've been obsessively reading Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I read it cover-to-cover over the last week and brought it along to immediately re-read. I can't remember the last time I did that. From the first read I can't quite make up my mind whether this Jaynes guy is Sigmund Freud crazy-but-important-to-his-field crazy, Nikola Tesla brilliant-but-doomed-to-be-misunderstood, or Immanuel Velikovsky/Ignatius Donnelly trying-too-hard-to-explain-everything-with-one-theory crazy.

Guest Post: Boardgame Reviews by Wulfgar

Gameblog reader Wulfgar contacted me with an offer to do a guest post. Thanks, Wulfgar! Check out his boardgame mini-reviews below.

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Howdy all. I’ve been reading Jeff’s blog for about a year now, and decided it was time for me to give something back in return for all the enjoyment I’ve gotten. Along with being an rpg fan, I’m also big time into board games. In fact, over the past few years, my collection of rpg books has shrunk while my board games are breeding like tribbles- mainly because I have people around who are interested in playing the board games. So here’s a brief review of six games that I think might be appealing to the readers of this blog. There are so many good games out there that it was hard to narrow it down to even 6. I went with games that are all in print, lots of fun (at least in my humble opinion, and have cross over appeal to people who play rpg’s. I hope you enjoy.

1. Risk- Star War: Original Trilogy Edition by Hasbro

This game is one of the “holy grails” of board games that, I doubted would ever be made: an officially licensed, highly playable, strategic level wargame about the Original Trilogy Star Wars movies. If you like Risk and like Star Wars getting this game is a no-brainer. If you like Star Wars but don’t enjoy Risk, this game probably addresses your beef with the original. Think Risk is too long? Well Original Trilogy only takes about an hour and a half. There’s not enough strategy? This game uses the same basic dice rolling combat system but adds all sorts of cool stuff: 3 classes of space ships, a Death Star that can go around blowing up systems, the Force, 3 factions (Empire, Rebellion, Hutts) all with different victory conditions and capabilities. The rules are online at: http://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/Risk_SW_Original_Trilogy_Edition.pdf

2. Wings of War by Fantasy Flight Games

This is an incredibly simple, quick to play, and very fun game of World War I dog fighting. There’s no board and no dice- just a bunch of beautiful cards and a couple rulers. You can play on any flat surface- a table top, floor, whatever. The game in short: You have a plane that is represented by a card. You have a deck of cards full of different maneuvers you can perform (straight, right, left, immelman, etc). Each player secretly picks out 3 maneuvers. Everybody shows the first maneuver and moves their planes. People in range can shoot. Show the 2^nd maneuver, move, and shot. Show the 3^rd maneuver, move, and shoot. Repeat. Damage is resolved by drawing from a damage deck. Along with just plain old getting your plane shot up, you can catch on fire, get your guns or rudder jammed, etc. This game takes less than 5 minutes to explain and set up. Wings of War is actually available in a number of different sets that all include the “core rules” to use some rpg lingo. These are “Famous Aces”, “Watch Your Back”, and “Burning Drachens” which are all compatible with each other as well as a few WWI booster packs available. There is also “Dawn of War” which is the first set for WWII and uses slightly modified rules- it is NOT compatible with the WWI sets. I went a bit crazy and bought all of the WWI stuff at once, but now I have a quick and easy to explain game that can accommodate from 2 to 14 players! The rules are available here:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/PDF/wingsofwarbdrules.pdf

3. Colossal Arena by Fantasy Flight Games

Colossal Arena is a game about fantasy creatures (Ettin, Wyrm, Cyclops to name a few) battling it out in a gladiatorial arena. In a very neat twist, the players take on the roles of gamblers betting on which monsters will survive. Like Wings of War, Colossal Arena is a “board game” without any actual board. In this case you sort of build the board with cards as the game progresses. During the game players place bets on the monsters and play cards indicating the strength the monsters are currently battling at. High numbers are good. Low numbers are bad. You start with 8 monsters (out of 12 to pick from) and 3 will be left standing at the end of the game. Players collect on any bets placed on surviving monsters. So you’re trying to keep your guys alive and knock off the other players’. In addition the “backer” (the player with the most money bet on a monster) can use the monster’s special power when they play a card on them. There are a couple other neat things going on like undead referees and crazed spectators who jump into the arena. All in all, this is a game that I really enjoy a lot. With the caveat that they are not the best-written rules in the world (it’s much simpler than it sounds) you can find the rules to read at: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/PDF/colossalarenarules.pdf I personally like the alternate rules for the endgame which are also available to download at the Fantasy Flight site.

4. War of the Ring by Fantasy Flight Games

War of the Ring is a big, bold game of moving hordes of plastic armies around a map and chucking fistfuls of dice in the tradition of Axis and Allies. At the same time it is an incredibly good adaptation of Tolkien’s Trilogy. The Free People player is trying to hold off the forces of evil long enough for the Fellowship to destroy the ring, and the Shadow player is trying to either conquer Middle Earth or completely corrupt the ring bearer. The players face a lot of the same challenges as the characters in the book. The good guys must decide if they want to keep the fellowship together to better protect Frodo or send everyone off to rally the different nations to war. Gandalf can die- and come back. The Ents can rise against Sauroman. There’s a lot here to enjoy. This is another game with pretty poorly written rules. It’s much simpler to play than the rules are to read and is about the same level of complexity as Axis and Allies. You can read the rules at: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/PDF/warofthering.pdf

5. Fire & Axe by Asmodee Editions

Fire & Axe is the game that originally gave me the idea for this column. I found the game about the same time Jeff was writing about his Beyond Vinland campaign. Both involve Vikings roaming around looting, killing, and exploring. Players each take on the role of a Viking Jarl. You outfit your long ship with men and various trade goods and set sail from Scandinavia. You travel around Europe and beyond doing 3 main things- trading, raiding, and settling. You also get Saga cards, which let you, screw with your competition with nasty events like a rebellion in one of their settlements or a sea serpent attacking their ship. This is an easy to teach game that requires some good luck and sound planning to be successful in. The rules are not available online, but here’s a link to the publisher’s official page for the game: http://www.asmodee-us.com/games/fire-and-axe/fire-and-axe.php

6. Twilight Struggle by GMT Games

Twilight Struggle doesn’t have a sci-fi or fantasy theme, so it doesn’t translate directly over to the rpg world as well as the other’s listed. That being said, I had to mention this game because it is GREAT. In the past month this has quickly become my favorite game. It’s a tense and addictive game about the Cold War with one player as the United States and the other as the Soviet Union. You use cards to either implement various events (NATO formed, Castro takes over Cuba, Korean War, etc), build influence around the world, or stage coups. You’ve got to keep an eye on the DEFCON. You lose if you trigger a nuclear war, which builds a real sense of brinksmanship and makes for a better game than many others on the subject where a trailing player can just say, “Screw it. Nuke’em” and get himself a draw. To put how good this game is into some perspective, it takes about 2-3 hours to play and I’ve gotten in 7 games within the past couple weeks. 5 of them against my wife who is also addicted (and enjoys calling me a capitalist pig). While the game is very simple, learning what the different cards in the deck do will take a couple games- and give an experienced player a big advantage over a new one. The rulebook is very well done. There are 9 pages of actual rules. The rest includes a detailed walkthrough of several turns in a game, and historical commentary for every card in the game. You can read the book here: http://www.gmtgames.com/living_rules/TSRules2nd.pdf

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Thanks again, Wulfgar! I've some interest in both Wings of War and Star Wars Risk for some time, so it was great to see your opinions of them. I hadn't heard about Fire & Axe before now, but it sure sounds like a hoot!