It's going to be a short post this week...
Shemp and I started out by trying out Yomi. I purchased the Grave/ Jaina two pack, and I played Grave. Yomi is a card game that simulates Street Fighter type videogames, and has been getting great buzz so I was happy to try it out. I'd say I enjoyed it, but given our unfamiliarity with the rules I think it could definitely get better with practice. The mechanics do a good job of replicating what goes on in the games, allowing combos, feints, special powers, etc, while still being rather simple. I'll keep bringing it for a while and hopefully it will be easier to get a feel for it. For the record, Grave crushed Jaina, having landed his super mega move and dealing 45 points of damage... she never stood a chance.
We played Cyclades first (after an interesting email exchange about Kozure's fickle game moods). Everything was progressing normally, with maybe a little more combat than usual, and then Shemp won. No one saw it coming, and he made a huge bid on Athena so we should have been suspicious at least, but we weren't. Shemp took her unopposed, purchased his fourth philosopher and won. In Kozure's defense, he didn't have the funds to stop him. In my defense, I'm an idiot (I forgot to collect incom that round, so even if I had noticed he was about to win, I would have thought I couldn't stop him... even though I could have)
It was a bit anticlimactic, but bravo to Shemp for the stealth win!
We ended with 7 Wonders. As usual, I favoured science and completely ignored military, Shemp ignored science and Kozure was balanced. Shemp did a better job following through and beat Kozure by a hair. Me? Not close.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Sincere flattery (Defenders of the Realm x3)
At last week's session we played Kozure's newest acquisition, Defenders of the Realm.
I've read that this is very similar to Pandemic, and in many ways it is. There is a map of the game world, made up of many "locations" connected by paths. There are four types of minions spreading on the board trying to destroy the world, just like the diseases in Pandemic, and it's up to the players to stop them. If more than a certain number of minions is ever on a space and the game calls for more, there is an outbreak and new minions are added to all adjoining locations. If a minion of a certain type is ever meant to be added to the board, but none are left in the supply, the game is over and the players lose. The players win by defeating the minions in each colour.
Still, there are some significant differences. The obvious thing is that "curing" the invasion of a particular colour means defeating it's boss, a creature that has specific powers and win conditions. Players have quests that they can fulfill to gain advantages, each round adds a random effect to the board, and boss battles are resolved through die rolls.
For me, one of the defining mechanic of Pandemic (other than it's cooperative nature) is the the way the infection deck stacks. Cities that have been infected previously get added to the top of the deck, creating significant tension and putting huge pressure on the players as they strategize to prevent the diseases from creating an outbreak. This facet is missing completely from DotR, which is too bad. All of the "chrome" type mechanics which have been added successfully give the game a fantasy/ D&D feel, for better and worse. I enjoyed the retheming, the quests, the boss battles, etc, but the game definitely had a looser, more random and luck-driven feel.
We actually played three times. In the first, as the cleric (me), the Paladin (Shemp) and the Ranger (Kozure) an unfortunate series of card draws led to our demise before we all had our second turn (one card put a single orc on every empty green space, and the next put an additional orc in all locations with only a single orc. Guess what, no more orcs.
In our second game, we bumbled around the board with the same party and ultimately tried to defeat the demon lord. Although the odds were on our side, we failed and never managed to recover. The game ended with another loss before even defeating a single boss.
In our third game, we were firing on all cylinders. We switched the party to the sorcerer (me), the wizard (Shemp) and the Eagle Rider (Kozure) and got to work. Having recalled the mistake we made in our early games of pandemic, putting too much time and resources on removing disease cubes instead of attacking the source, we focussed much more on defeating bosses as early as possible. The demon boss was first on our hit list once again, though this time we defeated him. We then went for undead boss and orc, ending with the dragon. We successfully beat the game!
I found the game quite fun, though the game mechanics are not quite as tight as Pandemic. The comparison reminds me of Dominion and Thunderstone, actually. Dominion is clearly the better developed game, but the chrome of Thunderstone makes it enjoyable in it's own way, and maybe better for a different crowd.
I've read that this is very similar to Pandemic, and in many ways it is. There is a map of the game world, made up of many "locations" connected by paths. There are four types of minions spreading on the board trying to destroy the world, just like the diseases in Pandemic, and it's up to the players to stop them. If more than a certain number of minions is ever on a space and the game calls for more, there is an outbreak and new minions are added to all adjoining locations. If a minion of a certain type is ever meant to be added to the board, but none are left in the supply, the game is over and the players lose. The players win by defeating the minions in each colour.
Still, there are some significant differences. The obvious thing is that "curing" the invasion of a particular colour means defeating it's boss, a creature that has specific powers and win conditions. Players have quests that they can fulfill to gain advantages, each round adds a random effect to the board, and boss battles are resolved through die rolls.
For me, one of the defining mechanic of Pandemic (other than it's cooperative nature) is the the way the infection deck stacks. Cities that have been infected previously get added to the top of the deck, creating significant tension and putting huge pressure on the players as they strategize to prevent the diseases from creating an outbreak. This facet is missing completely from DotR, which is too bad. All of the "chrome" type mechanics which have been added successfully give the game a fantasy/ D&D feel, for better and worse. I enjoyed the retheming, the quests, the boss battles, etc, but the game definitely had a looser, more random and luck-driven feel.
We actually played three times. In the first, as the cleric (me), the Paladin (Shemp) and the Ranger (Kozure) an unfortunate series of card draws led to our demise before we all had our second turn (one card put a single orc on every empty green space, and the next put an additional orc in all locations with only a single orc. Guess what, no more orcs.
In our second game, we bumbled around the board with the same party and ultimately tried to defeat the demon lord. Although the odds were on our side, we failed and never managed to recover. The game ended with another loss before even defeating a single boss.
In our third game, we were firing on all cylinders. We switched the party to the sorcerer (me), the wizard (Shemp) and the Eagle Rider (Kozure) and got to work. Having recalled the mistake we made in our early games of pandemic, putting too much time and resources on removing disease cubes instead of attacking the source, we focussed much more on defeating bosses as early as possible. The demon boss was first on our hit list once again, though this time we defeated him. We then went for undead boss and orc, ending with the dragon. We successfully beat the game!
I found the game quite fun, though the game mechanics are not quite as tight as Pandemic. The comparison reminds me of Dominion and Thunderstone, actually. Dominion is clearly the better developed game, but the chrome of Thunderstone makes it enjoyable in it's own way, and maybe better for a different crowd.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Won't somebody think of the *zombie* children? (Earth Reborn)
I took a gamble on a game called Earth Reborn recently. I'm a big fan of Duel of Ages, and always appreciated the freedom of actions available, the multitude of character powers and equipment, etc. In many of our games, memorable stories would emerge as players would attempt unexpected or desperate strategies against one another (or failed spectacularly at what seemed like an easy success). The game does have issues (components, balance, playtime, etc), however, and rarely gets played anymore. When I was browsing the BGG essen videos, I stumbled across the one for Earth Reborn and was was quite attracted by the designer's stated goal to create a game that would foster these types of stories and memorable events. The fact that I really like Dungeon Twister, by the same author, certainly helped. It's a game about an apocalyptic future where two factions have emerged after hundreds of years hiding from nuclear radiation and are apparently not getting along. One faction is military, the other dabbles in the occult (zombies and such). In the weeks since I purchased it, I've been slowly working my way through the considerable rulebook and playing through a few scenarios solo to get acquainted with the system before inflicting it on anyone else. It's a very ambitious title that attempts to bring a lot to a single game, and from a production standpoint you get quite a toybox. Cool minis, tons of double-sided tetris like tiles for scenario building, a large assortment of equipment cards, tokens for decoys, passcards, mines, doors, etc, etc, etc. There is a lot of stuff here.
With some familiarity with the system, I became simultaneously very enthusiastic and discouraged. Setup time for the scenario based games are quite long. Although there isn't anything wrong with the theme itself, the implementation is pretty weak. Despite the huge effort to flesh out the backstory and the characters (there are pages of this stuff), it all comes off as *really* generic and cliché. Second, the scenario based learning system is great in theory, but we don't play games often enough to play 8-16 times just to understand all the rules. Luckily, I *really* like the game system. Despite it's incredible flexibility and depth, the rules are very logical and playable. The scenarios are much more than simply "kill everybody else", and once all the rules are known and the full game is being played the game setup seems like it will be reduced to something much more reasonable.
All that, and I wasn't really sure if anybody in the group would like this type of game.
Anyway, this week I picked it. We skipped to the scenario called "zombie family", which is a 3-4 player learning scenario which uses weapons, duelling for initiative and equipment.
In the scenario, the Salemites (the occultists) believe they've unlocked the secret to allowing zombies to procreate. A female zombie has been impregnated as a proof of concept. The Norad (military types) must invade the lab and destroy the female zombie before she escapes.
We played twice. The player controlling the Salemites starts with all his characters hidden mixed in with several decoy markers to make things harder for NORAD to figure out. We had a bit of a hard time with the hidden movement rules and got several things wrong, which was frequently leading to odd and unsatisfying results (ex: when characters were revealed, I thought it was necessary to wait until the next turn to activated them. In fact, it's just until the next round. Big difference. There was also perpetual confusion about the movement rules of hidden characters). Other than these scenario specific rules, everything was going quite smoothly rules-wise.
In the first session, Shemp was the Salemites. Kozure and I spread out our forces and stormed the building. It all boiled down to 3 individual skirmishes, but in the end the lady zombie was killed before she was very close to escape. Shemp suffered the brunt of the misunderstood hidden movement rules, and we realized that the male and female zombies are reversed between the miniatures and the cards which caused an error in deployment. Oh well, it was a good learning experience.
In the second session, Kozure was the Salemites. Shemp and I decided to storm fewer doors to prevent leaving too many open escape paths. We managed to uncover several decoys, but ultimately James Woo and Vasquez (NORAD characters) where caught in a showdown in a corridor while the zombie mommy got around them. There was a brief chance of stopping her as she struggled to bash down the door to get out, but zombies aren't easy to take down in a hurry.
At this point, it's still playing like a skirmish game. I'm looking forward to playing a more advanced scenario which opens up the possibilities a little bit (special powers, non-weapon equipment, destructible terrain, spying, searching, communication blocking, etc). Still, I think the game system is great... a combination of order tiles (that allow many different types of actions to happen while still limiting choice in a reasonable way) and action point allocation (which allows surprising flexibility to manage actions, special actions, opportunity actions, reloading weapons, etc, with very little unnecessary complexity.
Shemp and Kozure seemed to enjoy it, but not overly. Kozure mentioned that he preferred skirmish games that are more focussed on the skirmishing. Fair enough. I do think I'll be making this my pick for a while until we get to the full game so I can make a final assessment on the whole game. Right now, I am cautiously optimistic...
With some familiarity with the system, I became simultaneously very enthusiastic and discouraged. Setup time for the scenario based games are quite long. Although there isn't anything wrong with the theme itself, the implementation is pretty weak. Despite the huge effort to flesh out the backstory and the characters (there are pages of this stuff), it all comes off as *really* generic and cliché. Second, the scenario based learning system is great in theory, but we don't play games often enough to play 8-16 times just to understand all the rules. Luckily, I *really* like the game system. Despite it's incredible flexibility and depth, the rules are very logical and playable. The scenarios are much more than simply "kill everybody else", and once all the rules are known and the full game is being played the game setup seems like it will be reduced to something much more reasonable.
All that, and I wasn't really sure if anybody in the group would like this type of game.
Anyway, this week I picked it. We skipped to the scenario called "zombie family", which is a 3-4 player learning scenario which uses weapons, duelling for initiative and equipment.
In the scenario, the Salemites (the occultists) believe they've unlocked the secret to allowing zombies to procreate. A female zombie has been impregnated as a proof of concept. The Norad (military types) must invade the lab and destroy the female zombie before she escapes.
We played twice. The player controlling the Salemites starts with all his characters hidden mixed in with several decoy markers to make things harder for NORAD to figure out. We had a bit of a hard time with the hidden movement rules and got several things wrong, which was frequently leading to odd and unsatisfying results (ex: when characters were revealed, I thought it was necessary to wait until the next turn to activated them. In fact, it's just until the next round. Big difference. There was also perpetual confusion about the movement rules of hidden characters). Other than these scenario specific rules, everything was going quite smoothly rules-wise.
In the first session, Shemp was the Salemites. Kozure and I spread out our forces and stormed the building. It all boiled down to 3 individual skirmishes, but in the end the lady zombie was killed before she was very close to escape. Shemp suffered the brunt of the misunderstood hidden movement rules, and we realized that the male and female zombies are reversed between the miniatures and the cards which caused an error in deployment. Oh well, it was a good learning experience.
In the second session, Kozure was the Salemites. Shemp and I decided to storm fewer doors to prevent leaving too many open escape paths. We managed to uncover several decoys, but ultimately James Woo and Vasquez (NORAD characters) where caught in a showdown in a corridor while the zombie mommy got around them. There was a brief chance of stopping her as she struggled to bash down the door to get out, but zombies aren't easy to take down in a hurry.
At this point, it's still playing like a skirmish game. I'm looking forward to playing a more advanced scenario which opens up the possibilities a little bit (special powers, non-weapon equipment, destructible terrain, spying, searching, communication blocking, etc). Still, I think the game system is great... a combination of order tiles (that allow many different types of actions to happen while still limiting choice in a reasonable way) and action point allocation (which allows surprising flexibility to manage actions, special actions, opportunity actions, reloading weapons, etc, with very little unnecessary complexity.
Shemp and Kozure seemed to enjoy it, but not overly. Kozure mentioned that he preferred skirmish games that are more focussed on the skirmishing. Fair enough. I do think I'll be making this my pick for a while until we get to the full game so I can make a final assessment on the whole game. Right now, I am cautiously optimistic...
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Next time, you shuffle (Dominant Species, Lords of Vegas)
We had a longer than usual game night this week. Toronto braced itself for a huge snowstorm and everything was closed. All the schools, etc. Turns out that it wasn't much of a storm. Still, it led to me being off early, Kozure being off early and Shemp's wife not working hence Shemp being available early. Unfortunately, Bharmer couldn't join us due to illness and he'll be unavailable for quite some time so it's three player sessions for us!
Dominant Species
We decided to take advantage of the longer than usual session and play Dominant Species again. We still shortened the game by 10 cards, just to make sure it wouldn't go all night. I played the birds, Shemp played the arachnids and Kozure played the reptiles. We actually played 3/4 of the game with a major rules error (scoring points based on dominance instead of numbers of animals) but came to the conclusion that results wouldn't have differed greatly anyway. Kozure was looking for a win after a losing streak with this game (not all at WAGS) and early on it looked like his wish would come to be. I felt like I was making blunder after blunder (maybe everyone felt the same?), but luckily I was still holding my own. Let's face it, there are so many choices that it's probably inevitable that really good moves go unnoticed until it's too late. Kozure did crush us, and his last turn near complete domination of the island only distanced him further. His wish was granted!
Although I think the full game would be too long, removing 10 cards felt like too many. Probably next time we'll take out 5.
My feelings towards the game haven't changed. It's like a super charged El Grande. Fun, quite engrossing, but longer/ more complicated isn't in and of itself better. One advantage it has it that it plays quite well with 3 and 4 players. For 5 players, I think I would pick El Grande every time, however.
One other thing that I hadn't considered the first time: As the game progresses, the scoring increments for certain types of actions get larger, particularly the tundra scoring. In the games we've had the tundra scoring on the last turn has seemed really large but still probably balanced. I just realized that if we played to the end of the full game these swings would get that much larger! That might seem game breaking. We'll see.
Lords of Vegas
We played this session with a variant where the deck is split in thirds instead of fourths when seeding the game end card. This was meant to eliminate the problem we had last game where we ran out of dice. Unfortunately, I shuffled the property cards REALLY poorly and the colours stayed clumped. This led to a very weird game where the player who just happened to bet on the right horse did well and the others did not. I was the beneficiary of the luck, and won by a significant margin. One of the colours was entirely under the game end card, so it provided no points to Shemp and Kozure who had seen none were out and figured it was inevitable that they would come.
Shemp continues to display his negotiating skills. There is a lot of room for trading and deal-making in this game and Shemp came up with a few interesting angles again this game (convincing another player to build a section of casino for him so that he gets cash payouts but is no threat to being casino boss, for ex). I had a lucrative casino growing where Shemp owned half of the 6 dice. His constant threat to re-roll the dice defined much of the game for me. I ultimately agreed to a massively one-sided deal where he promised to not re-roll the dice in my casino if I gave him just about every unbuilt property I had. It was risky, but the endgame came before Shemp could capitalize on all the new money. I won.
I still think this is a great game, I just hope someone else shuffles the property deck next time!
Dominant Species
We decided to take advantage of the longer than usual session and play Dominant Species again. We still shortened the game by 10 cards, just to make sure it wouldn't go all night. I played the birds, Shemp played the arachnids and Kozure played the reptiles. We actually played 3/4 of the game with a major rules error (scoring points based on dominance instead of numbers of animals) but came to the conclusion that results wouldn't have differed greatly anyway. Kozure was looking for a win after a losing streak with this game (not all at WAGS) and early on it looked like his wish would come to be. I felt like I was making blunder after blunder (maybe everyone felt the same?), but luckily I was still holding my own. Let's face it, there are so many choices that it's probably inevitable that really good moves go unnoticed until it's too late. Kozure did crush us, and his last turn near complete domination of the island only distanced him further. His wish was granted!
Although I think the full game would be too long, removing 10 cards felt like too many. Probably next time we'll take out 5.
My feelings towards the game haven't changed. It's like a super charged El Grande. Fun, quite engrossing, but longer/ more complicated isn't in and of itself better. One advantage it has it that it plays quite well with 3 and 4 players. For 5 players, I think I would pick El Grande every time, however.
One other thing that I hadn't considered the first time: As the game progresses, the scoring increments for certain types of actions get larger, particularly the tundra scoring. In the games we've had the tundra scoring on the last turn has seemed really large but still probably balanced. I just realized that if we played to the end of the full game these swings would get that much larger! That might seem game breaking. We'll see.
Lords of Vegas
We played this session with a variant where the deck is split in thirds instead of fourths when seeding the game end card. This was meant to eliminate the problem we had last game where we ran out of dice. Unfortunately, I shuffled the property cards REALLY poorly and the colours stayed clumped. This led to a very weird game where the player who just happened to bet on the right horse did well and the others did not. I was the beneficiary of the luck, and won by a significant margin. One of the colours was entirely under the game end card, so it provided no points to Shemp and Kozure who had seen none were out and figured it was inevitable that they would come.
Shemp continues to display his negotiating skills. There is a lot of room for trading and deal-making in this game and Shemp came up with a few interesting angles again this game (convincing another player to build a section of casino for him so that he gets cash payouts but is no threat to being casino boss, for ex). I had a lucrative casino growing where Shemp owned half of the 6 dice. His constant threat to re-roll the dice defined much of the game for me. I ultimately agreed to a massively one-sided deal where he promised to not re-roll the dice in my casino if I gave him just about every unbuilt property I had. It was risky, but the endgame came before Shemp could capitalize on all the new money. I won.
I still think this is a great game, I just hope someone else shuffles the property deck next time!
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