2012 Board Game Review – Part 2

This is a continuation of my game reviews of games played at Lone Star Gaming Fest 2011.  In Part 1 I reviewed Hamsterrolle (a.k.a. Hamster Wheel), Inca Empire, Defenders of the Realm, and Martian Dice (along with Zombie Dice).

Endeavor (3-5 players)

Endeavor is set in the Age of Sail and you are attempting to build your empire to score the most points when the game ends.  Your empire is a separate board from the main board where you keep track of buildings built and resource “tech” levels, plus resource cards from overseas colonies.

I was hoping for a more “conqueror the board”-style game and this isn’t it.  This is more of a “build up our ability to do things so you can do more things”-style game.  You start with the same “tech” as everyone in four categories: “buildings”, “people”, “recycle people”, “hand size”.  These are not their actual names, but what they do.  “Buildings” determines what level of building you can build, with higher level buildings being more flexible in granted abilities or just more of them.  “People” is how many tokens you get at the beginning of the turn to do things with.  “Recycle People” lets you pull people off of buildings (jobs) they were put on last turn, both giving you more people to do things with this turn and clearing the buildings to be used again.  “Hand size” is how many resource cards you can hold at the end of your turn, starting at one and going up to five.

Buildings are the primary way to get actions beyond “put a guy in an empty space in Europe”.  You need buildings to sail to the other parts of the world, buildings to attack places settled by other players, and buildings to draw resource cards.

I did everything wrong in this game.  I built a barracks to seize a site in Europe from another player to grab a resource when I should have either built a building to improve the resource or (more likely) built a building to so I could sail to other areas and get the resources without losing a guy to combat.  Because my ability to go overseas was limited to the use of one-shot tokens I captured during play, I was hindered in doing just about everything else.  Not surprisingly, I came in last.

I want to play this game again, knowing what I know now.  This seems to be that kind of game where the first time you play you get drubbed but learn how the game really works.  I’m not certain I’d buy this game right now, it depends on how my replay goes.  If you like a resource development game, this game should work for you.

Shogun (2-4 players, but really, you need 4 players)

Shogun is an old fashioned “conqueror feudal Japan” game, which I like.

The game is technically eight rounds long, with each round being a season (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter), but the winter season is mostly checking for revolts due to lack of rice and scoring points.  In each round (except winter), ten actions are taken in a random order determined by shuffling a deck and dealing out the actions.  The first five are dealt face up, the second five face down.  Players perform each action together in player order.  Actions are assigned at the beginning of each round by placing one of your territory cards face down on your action board (shows the ten actions and gives a place to play one card for each) in each space.  You also have five cards for bidding on turn order, which can also be put on regular actions to indicate you are not performing that action.  You have to place a card on each action and only one card, so you are going to do each action only once per round, including gather rice to feed your army and raise taxes to pay for things (like building castles, temples, and No theatres and raising more troops).  There are two attack actions, so you can attack twice, but from two different regions.

Oh, and remember that you only know the order of the first five actions when you are planning, the next five will be revealed one at a time as the round progresses.  Hope your raise taxes action happens before that territory is captured.

Armies are represented by cubes and combat is done by putting invading cubes and defending cubes into a dice tower and comparing what comes out.  Cubes will get stuck in the tower and reappear later, which adds randomness to the combats.  Territories produce different amounts of rice and taxes, so you want to place better territories on those actions, but each time you do those actions that territory gets a revolt marker.  Once you get above one marker, a revolt will be triggered and you have to fight peasant armies.  And peasants stay angry, even when a new player conquerors the territory.

The winter phase causes rice usage and spoilage based on a mechanism I won’t go into here, but is well done.  Run out of rice and you get revolt markers on random territories and, as above, if you get two or more on a territory, you have to fight the peasants.  Then you score points.  Points are scored for territories owned; castles, temples, and No theatres built; and having the most of each building in a region (group of about 8 territories).

I played a three-player game of this and remembered why three-player games like this are bad: they end up being two players versus one player games, not three player games.  I, of course, was the man in the middle.  Plus side, the game is relatively short, so the agony was finite.  Minus side, you REALLY need four players to play this.

I might buy this game eventually, but it is not a high priority unless I can get it cheap.

Age of Steam (3-6 players)

Age of Steam is a rail game where you place track tiles and move cargo from source cities to destination cities.  The resources are randomly placed at the beginning of the game (they are represented by colored cubes), so no game should be identical, providing a high re-playability.  Money for doing things is gained by issuing shares.  Money is used to lay track, costs dependent upon what you have to build over and how complex the track depicted is, and bidding on turn order.  However, at the end of the turn you have to pay your shareholders and upkeep on your train, so spend your money wisely.

That’s really about it.  There are expansion sets that add new maps and tweak the rules.  We played on the map of Ireland, which is in Expansion set 1.  I liked this game a lot.  I was leery about a rail game with shares (I’m not a fan of the 18xx series of games), but this is abstracted and no representations of shares are actually used, just a track to keep track how much you owe at the end of each turn.  It is about as complex a rail game as I care to play and kept my attention.  I could teach this to an average person and not lose them.  I will probably track down a copy of this game and buy it so I have access to it.  It will be the upper end of railroad games I teach at my wife's tea get-togethers.

Fortune and Glory (1-8 players)

Fortune and Glory is a game about pulp action heroes searching the world for ancient artifacts.  This game can be player either competitive (the basic game) or cooperative, which is something I look for in a game nowadays (the cooperative part, not the ability to do both, although that is cool as well).  In the cooperative mode, you race against Nazis or Mobsters, trying to gain enough fortune tokens before the opposing vile organization meets their (lower) quota.

Artifacts are comprised two cards, an artifact (like a crown or hammer or throne) and an adventure (of Poseidon, of the Monkey God, of Lost Souls).  Each deck is 30-40 cards (I haven’t counted them), so the odds of a repeat combination is very rare.  The players go to various locations across the world (drawn randomly when the artifact is drawn) to find the artifacts.  There they have to overcome 2 to 5 dangers before they can claim the artifact.  The dangers require the adventurer beat a test based on one of their four stats: Agility, Lore, Cunning, and Combat, with each character being ranked between 2 to 4 in each.  The stat tells you how many dice you get to roll, the test tells you the target number and how many successes.  Many danger cards give you an option between two dangers, but sometimes you just get one option.

Ok, bad news up front: this game is $100.  The good news: it’s worth it.  The production quality is high, there are a ton of components (something like 11 decks of cards to draw from, plenty of tokens to cover the board, pieces sculpted to look like all the characters and the major villains, pieces for Nazi goons and mobster thugs, dice, and even a soundtrack CD), and the game is a lot of fun.  There is a very high replayability factor game as the combination of artifacts, locations, and bad guy results varies from game to game.

I’ve only played cooperative mode, but others borrowed my copy to play competitively.  I’ve played a couple of games where we got close to losing to the vile organization and a couple of times when the bad guys weren’t much of a threat.  I think the difference is in the random placement of the artifact locations: if they are clumped together near the character starting points, the game is easier than if they are spread far away.

I would have bought this if I had not been warned I was getting it for Christmas.

Factory Fun (2-5 players)

Factory Fun is about quickly placing machines on your factory floor and connecting them to reservoirs (you start with one each of four colors) and output reservoirs (so they don’t spill on the floor).  Note, if you have trouble telling colors apart due to color blindness, this game may cause you some trouble.

Each player starts with a stack of 10 random machines and simultaneously flips the top one over with the other players.  You then grab one you think you can place (not necessarily your own), put it on your factory board, and then place the reservoirs and/or connector pipes.  Each machine is worth a certain number of points (I saw values from 4 to 13).  Adding pipes, source reservoirs, output reservoirs, or moving previous placed items cost points.  Subtract the cost to legally place the machine from the points the machine gives and adjust your score.  At the end of the game there are bonus points for connecting the output of one machine to the input of another.

This sounds simple, but you have a limited number of sources (one of each color) and only three output reservoirs, so about half way through you have to start getting creative to connect the machines in, using over/under pieces and T-shaped pieces to get things where you need them.

The game needs a rule that states you cannot pick up a machine until you are ready to add it to your factory.  There may be such a rule, but I did not get a chance to fully read the rules and learned from folks who were playing nice.  The second group was more competitive and had an annoying habit of picking up the most valuable machine and then seeing if there was any way to actually place it, holding on to it until they were certain they couldn’t actually use it and then tossing it back.  This behavior slows the game down as players wait to see if a better piece will get thrown back by someone who had no reason to pick it up in the first place.

This game was a lot of fun for me as I enjoyed puzzling out how to add pieces, but if you are not quick at this, this game can be very frustrating as the other players grab all the better stuff first, especially if they grab for points and not for usability.  I plan on buying this game, but instituting a house rule about players getting prematurely grabby.

Next:

Mondo, King of Tokyo, Cargo Noir, Olympos - some of my favorite games all convention

2012 Board Game Review – Part 1

I’m back from Lone Star Gaming Fest again, four days of nothing but boardgaming.  This year we were at a new hotel as the previous one was remodeling (something known about), but part of that remodeling was a reduction in conference space by half (something found out only at the end of summer).  The new facilities were good physically, but the hotel had air conditioning issues, especially during the middle of the day.  My room was OK, but the conference room got warm and the public men’s room was as warm and humid as an indoor pool, including the chlorine smell.

(Note: Yes, it was New Year’s weekend and we are in the northern hemisphere.  Air conditioning was none-the-less necessary and I spent the weekend in t-shirts and shorts, wearing flip flops.  Welcome to Houston “winters”.)

That aside, it was a great con and I had the chance to play several games I wanted to check out and several games I’d never hear of.  Here is my first set of reviews of the games I played at the convention, all for your edification.

Hamster Wheel (2-4 players)

This is a German game and is actually named Hamsterrolle.  Sadly, it is out of print at the moment, which will make it more difficult to track down a copy and I want one.  The game is a block balancing game where you are trying to be the first person out of blocks.  The trick is that you are balancing the blocks on short ledges INSIDE a wooden wheel about a foot in diameter.  Everyone has to put them on the same side, which causes the wheel to roll, moving along the table as each new piece is added.  As previously added pieces climb the “backside” of the wheel, they will eventually fall out.  If that happens after you place your piece, you get all the pieces that fell out of the wheel.  Now you have to place those as well before going out.

It sounds simple and at its core it is, but the strategy comes from placing your next piece in a way that forces the next player to have to play on the next “spoke” up, a spoke that might be angled so their piece will not actually stay or, even better, cause several other pieces to fall when the wheel rolls.

We played on a table with a table cloth, which I think slows the wheel from turning.  On a hard surface, the wheel should roll easier, making the game more challenging and jerk-moves even jerkier.

All the components are made of wood and consist of the wheel and four sets of seven pieces, each piece in a set a different color and shape (although 5 of the 7 are planks of varying lengths).

Inca Empire (3-4 players)

This was a Christmas gift from my in-laws.  I saw a picture of the board when doing a Google image search for something else and new I needed to own it, so I put it on my Christmas list.  The game did not disappoint, although we were doing scoring wrong the first time we were playing, which soured my wife on the game.  The second time I played it, we did the scoring correctly and it made a big difference.  Turn order changes at set point in the game and is set so the person losing goes first and the person winning goes last.  Early in the game, going last can suck.  Later in the game, there is some advantage to going last.

Inca Empire is mostly about placing sticks (one-inch long wooden pieces) on the board to claim paths from the starting area to city sites (where you can build cities and then temples on cities, all for points), outpost sites (where you can build outposts for points), and to territories to conqueror (which both score points and contain the city and outpost sites you want to build on).  You can also build terraces which grant a single victory point each, but also provide more workers.  Conquered territories provide one to three workers and zero to four victory points based on the markers randomly placed on them (face down) at the beginning of the game.

The game plays over four eras, each era having one to three rounds with scoring at the end of each round (except the first round, but that is an exception).  The rounds have a number of phases based on the era with four types of phases: Inca Phase (get workers), Sun Phase (place sun card, which help and hinder, on the Sun Board - more on this later), Worker Phase (where things get done), and the Supa Inca Phase (at the end of the each round and when scoring happens).  The whole thing is laid out on the board with a piece marking the current phase, so players can easily see what phase is coming up next and how long the game has.  The board has a three-player side and a four-player side, the only difference being the starting territory being split for three or four players.

This is essentially a rail building game with an Incan theme, but it has the right level of complexity that makes it fun to play without being overwhelming for new players.  Once cities, temples, and outposts are built and scored, any player can build a path to them and get points for them, but only one path per link on the board, so strategy involves playing paths to get you what you want, but make it difficult for others to access thing you built.  The points for building is better than the points for merely being connected during the Supa Inca phase, so building is very worthwhile.

The Sun Cards, as stated, do either something good or something bad and you have a hand of three of them to select from during the Sun Phase.  The tricky part is that you play them on the Sun Board in turn order and the Sun Board is divided up into sections equal to the number of players, each section bordered by two different player colors, and limited to on Sun card play per section each Sun Phase.  This means any card you play will always effect two players, for good or ill, and you might not be able to play that good card so it affects you if you are late in the turn order.

I’ve now played two games of this with three players and it plays well (especially when you do the scoring correctly).  I look forward to playing it again with four players.

Defenders of the Realm (1-4 players)

Defenders of the Realm is Pandemic with a fantasy theme and dice rolling for movement and fighting minions (what would be disease cubes in Pandemic).  Instead of curing each disease, you have to fight the general leading each villain faction, each of whom is slowly marching in to Monarch City, a space in the center of the board.  The amount of dice you roll to attack the generals is based on what cards you discard and you have to discard cards with the correct color.  Then you roll the dice and count how many dice beat a target number (based on which general).  Then you check to see if you rolled enough successes to actually kill the general, which requires about seven or eight successes.

As per a collaborative game, there are many ways to loose.  If one of the generals gets to Monarch City, the players lose.  If you run out of minions of any color, the players lose.  When you reach critical minion mass in a place (based on number of counters, not per color) you place a taint counter AND spread minion counters to adjacent areas.  If you run out of taint counters, the players lose.  The only way to win is to defeat all four enemy generals.

As you may be able to guess from my short summary, I am not a fan of this game.  The dice mechanism just makes the game take longer and can be frustrating, especially against the generals.  There is a ton of free material for this game online from the designer, but after playing it and getting a feel for it, I think I’ll pass.

Martian Dice (2-however many players you have)

Martian Dice is a dice rolling game where you are Martians gathering samples from “Earth”, trying to determine who is actually in charge there: the chickens, the cows, or the humans.  You roll all 13 dice at the start of your turn, each die having one tank, one human, one chicken, one cow , and two death rays.  You set aside tanks (which are bad for you) and then select all the dice showing one of the other four symbols (chickens, cows, humans, death rays).  Set aside the tanks and whichever set you chose and decide: stop here or roll again.  If you roll again, you re-roll the dice you did not set aside.  If you stop, you check to see if you score points.  To score points, you have to have death rays equal to or more than in number than tanks.  If you do, the other dice score one point each with a bonus of three point if you collected at least one each of the chickens, cows, and humans.

To complicate things slightly, after you roll and set aside any tanks you just rolled, you cannot keep dice matching dice you previously kept (except death rays, which you can always choose).  Stated another way, if you kept humans on the last roll, you cannot select humans for the rest of this turn.  If you every roll dice and the only things you rolled are things you already have (except tanks, which are bad, and death rays, which are an excepting), you stop rolling and score.

This is fun and quick and plays anywhere you have a rolling surface.  The one house rule I’m thinking about adding states that any death rays you keep over the number of tanks you have score one point each.  I’ve seen folks with 2-3 tanks and eight or more death rays because of how the dice rolled.

As an aside, I strongly recommend Zombie Dice from Steve Jackson Games.  A similar style game and the game Martian Dice wanted to be without getting sued.  You roll three dice at a time and the dice not in use stay in the cup.  Dice have brains, footprints, or shotgun blasts.  How many of each depends upon the color of the dice: red dice have 1 brain, 2 feet, and 3 shotgun blasts; yellow dice have two of each; and green dice have 3 brains, two feet, and 1 shotgun blast.  There are three red dice, four yellow dice, and six green dice and you blindly draw dice from the cup, so you are never certain what you are going to get.  When you roll, you set aside brains to one side and shotgun blast to the other, footprints are kept for re-rolling.  Then you can stop or draw dice (until you have three) and roll again.  If you accumulate three or more shotgun blasts you fail that turn, put the dice back in the cup, and pass the cup to the next player.  If you stop, you score the brains you have accumulated this turn, put the dice back in the cup, and pass the cup to the next player.  When one player gets to 13 or more points, everyone else has one last round to beat the leaders score or lose.

Next Up:

Endeavor, Shogun, Age of Steam, Fortune & Glory, and Factory Fun

Starting This Week: Board Game Reviews!

Starting this week I'm going to post a series of board game reviews.  These will all be games I played at the Lone Star Gaming Fest this past weekend.  I will also intersperse these with Aldelle Group adventure logs so I can catch up on those - I'm only five behind at this point!  :)

The Aldelle Group – Session 55 – Lucien, Meet Ra.

Session 55 happened Tuesday, November 29, 2011.

This campaign used the Dyson’s Delve dungeon pages on A Character for Every Game [http://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/maps/dysons-delve/] as a starting point, but has now moved on to new material from the DM.  I heartily recommend Dyson's Delve as a beginning adventure.

Adventuring Group:

Tre-ba Bel a sheer (female elf alchemist)

Elspeth (female half-elf rogue)

Frankie Hu, Master of the Distracting Fist (male dwarf monk)

Harkaitz of the Red Soul (male human cleric of Ra)

NPCs:

Aziz of the Light (male human paladin, cohort of Harkaitz)

Sarisvati the Sun-touched (female Ifrit oracle, cohort of Aziz)

Midnight (female half-elf witch, cohort of Frankie Hu)

Macha (female human fighter, cohort of Elspeth)

Estrela (female Aasimar druid, cohort of Tre-Ba)

Asmo (male halfling sorcerer)

Carnish (male gnoll spellcaster of some sort)

Professor Walsh (male human expert)

The Red Keffiyeh (human warriors, followers of Harkaitz)

Short John Copper (male halfling cook, hireling in the employ of Harkaitz)

Evening, August 7, Year of the Earth Rabbit

Praise Ra, who purifies the unclean.

After a short consultation about how to deal with the smoke and its likely source (an ever smoking bottle), Estrella led us forward, shifting into an air elemental form and blowing the smoke ahead of her.  When Estrela reached the door to the entry area, the female vampire stepped out of the smoke and struck Estrela twice, draining life force with each hit.  Estrella fell back and the rest of us advanced – the fight was on.

We quickly discovered we were not facing just the female vampire – Lucien and another of his spawn were also in the smoke.  The smoke limited visibility and the fight was a confusing jumble of close-in fighting.  Aziz strode into the thick of the battle, dealing heavy damage to the vampires with his sword and the channeling of positive energy over them (something I was also doing).  All three of the vampires struck Aziz, Lucien striking the killing blow.  Lucien taunted us, calling out, “Where is your god now?”  We renewed our assault on the unholy trio.

The female vampire was felled first, dissolving into mist to escape and reform.  Estrela stopped this in her air elemental form, shaping winds to contain the mist and then flying out of the pyramid and into the bright, bright afternoon sun.  The female vampire boiled away under the cleansing power of Ra.

The other spawn fell next, turning to mist and temporarily escaping us.  We then concentrated all our wrath on Lucien.  I was ready when he fell and turned to mist – I cast stone shape and englobed him in a perfectly sealed sphere.  We then found and sealed the ever smoking bottle and I healed those I could.  Midnight cast locate creature to track down the missing vampire spawn and Estrela again used her air elemental form to drag the mist out into the sun.  We rolled the sphere containing Lucien far out into the sun and cracked the sphere open.  My last words to the vampire were, “Here.  Here is my god.  Now burn!”

Aziz’s body has been cleaned and wrapped.  Tomorrow morning I will summon a divine intermediary and report our success at securing the gate.  Rather than teleporting us, I will ask for assistance in raising Aziz from the dead.  This is within my capabilities as a priest of Ra, but we are missing necessary material components.  After that, I will commune with Ra to determine if we have completed our mission.  We may have to secure the gate near Terranor, lands that now swarm with demons and devils.

I will say a prayer over Aziz’s body and then turn in.

Morning, August 8, Year of the Earth Rabbit

Praise Ra, who lifts his servants from the sand.

I reported our success and requested aid in bringing back Aziz.  I may have been a bit testy about the whole thing.  Eating breakfast next to a deceased friend seems to have that effect on me.  I have not received an answer on my request yet.  Am I in the proper frame of mind to commune with Ra?  I do not really think so, which is why I am writing this down.  I hope it will calm me somewhat…

…I noticed a gleam in my handy haversack, something that, due to the magics of the haversack, should not happen.  Investigating, I found a large diamond, flawlessly cut.  It is the missing component I needed to raise Aziz from the dead.  It seems I have my answer.

Noon, August 8, Year of the Earth Rabbit

Praise Ra, who reveals shadows.

I completed the ceremony to raise Aziz and he is back with us, ready for whatever comes next.  This is good as my commune with Ra (done after raising Aziz), indicates we still have much work ahead.

We have not completely saved the world yet.  We must seal the Terranor Gate within a month’s time.  This is complicated by the demons spread across the lands of Abeloft who will work to stop us.

We are going to need an army.

Today and tomorrow I will be making sendings to those we know and have met on our quest (I can only make five sendings a day).  My message is simple:

 “Greetings.

  The lich and his vampire are destroyed.  We raise an army to free Abeloft from demons and save the world.  Are you in?

~Harkaitz”

This message will go to Alathin, the brass dragon at Lagaskia; Lorastin, High Priest of Ra at Lagaskia; Doran, the High Priest of Ra in Uru; the leader of the storm giants we met in the Uskar; Feranhal in Ttaeladra; Nionel in the Drow City; and Ashias of the lizard men.  Beckett, High Priest of Ra in Terranor and still among the living, and Wednesday will get different messages.  Wednesday will be asked to go to Orzimar to recruit the dwarves and Beckett will be told relief comes this year.  We do not want to tip our hand, but Beckett needs to know help is coming.

After today’s sendings are made, I will start moving our group to Lagaskia via wind walk.

*End of Session*