Kickstarter Interesting Projects #1 – SoB, Journey and Templar Intrigue

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I don’t really have a specific definition for what to include in a post like this, suffice to say it’ll be for projects that I think look quite interesting, and if I had money I knew was spare, would definitely back.

My inspiration for this is pretty much the first game I’m going to mention, as I think it looks particularly exciting and am rather sad that I can’t really afford to back it. It also put me in a mood to take over a list that ran for a while in boardgamegeek of the 10 top funded board game projects on kickstarter, which you can find at the following url.

http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/150923/2013-kickstarter-boardgame-projects
Shadows of Brimstone

Shadows of brimstone is a cooperative dungeon crawler game set in the Old West, with horrors and bandits abound. Players create characters in classic Western roles, then venture out into the wilderness and down into deep mines in search of adventure.

This project, which has been running since October 23rd, has racked up a huge $750,000 sum already, with 11 days left for it, and looks to overtake the hugely successful original Zombicide project in the next few days. With a value that high you can probably guess it’s a miniatures project already, which is has in spades.

Rather than go for a typical approach of a single box with expansions later, SoB has 2 core boxes right from the start with their own set of characters and adventures set in the same world. It’s possible to get just the one of these for $75, but the real starting level is at $150, where you get both boxes and stretch goal content making this a particularly valuable point to back at. There’s also a higher level, mine cart, which includes all the unlocked add-ons, for a crazy amount of content at a somewhat crazy price of $475.

As the project progresses there is some amazing new content being added, from different enemy types to whole new ‘otherworlds’ to travel to and explore. It’s a very exciting project to track as it evolves, although a lot of additions are optional add-ons that will increase your pledge ever closer to giving in to a mine cart level.

I don’t know what else I can say about the project really, except I really hope a friend that’s looking at it takes the plunge so I can try it out when he receives his copy! Go take a look, you may like what you see!

Journey: Wrath of Demons

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1588487845/journey-wrath-of-demons?ref=live

Another miniatures project of the moment, this project has it’s roots set in Chinese mythology. Through the game you play as pilgrims fending off bull demons as you search for the Sutras, with the ultimate goal of defeating the bull demon king in a showdown at the end.

The game provides a variety of quests to play through, and is open to various paths for your pilgrims to take, be it slaughtering waves of foes, or cleansing their souls in an effort to be better men. The art of the game looks great too, with a huge wealth of art, architecture and drama in the Chinese mythologies it’s based upon.

I’m not quite so enamored with this project as SoB, but I think it looks like something worth a longer glance to those who can afford it. The miniatures are bigger than other games I’m used to, and look like they’d be great fun to play the game with. Currently it’s at $237,000, but I wish them luck in reaching much dizzier heights as the campaign continues and they hit more stretch content.

Templar Intrigue

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaelmindes/templar-intrigue-a-werewolf-type-game-by-tastymins

To finish up, we have something a “little” bit on the cheaper side. This project has a minimum level of $2 ($3 international) for the game, on a pay what you want system where the recommended ask is $5.

The game itself is a werewolf/love-letter style game where you are trying to work out what roles the other players are in and use that to your advantage and win. In this particular game, you do know ‘some’ information about other players, but not necessarily their allegiance! No moderator is required in the game and play is fast, with the aim being to win a few rounds rather than just the one. Predicted play time is 30 minutes for 3 games.

That’s about all I know really, but I think Tasty Mintrel Games are an awesome company and I am more than happy to chip $5 in on this project. I can’t wait to get my hands on both this, and other projects by them as they come available in the future.

That’s all for now, hope everyone’s having a good week, farewell! =)

New Games: Gear & Piston, Byzantio/Nekken

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Yesterday morning I received a parcel. it turned out that parcel was the delivery of pair of kick-starter projects I backed earlier this year, both by LudiCreations. I was expecting them soon, but so earlier was absolutely brilliant service, and it’s awesome to know they were sent from Essen!

Gear & Piston

So far I’ve had the opportunity to play this one twice. In it, you are an engineer in the late 1800’s trying to design a prototype automobile to compete with the forthcoming motoring giants. You do this by developing new parts, scrounging for junk and ultimately in order to meet deadlines, using any old scrap that’ll get the thing working!

In the game you place tokens (workers) in a few places to try and gather the parts you need (or prevent others from doing so!) to build your wonder machine. These are:

  • The Black Market. Here you can do dodgy things at the cost of losing one of your actions next turn. These include looking through the next few new parts to take one, stealing a part from another players hand, and shifting your position on a location to get what you want first (or even go last to get the first player token next turn!)
  • The Patent Office. I find it a strange idea for the new parts to be here, but it does the job. Here you can take a single new part from a wide selection (6) or a random one from the stack. At the end of each round all the available parts are discarded and a new 6 are placed out. Also, when a part is taken it is immediately refreshed, so it can pay to take a piece later if nothing really appeals for your car that’s already out!
  • The Junk Yard. Here you can scrounge parts that have been dumped by the motoring giants or other people trying to develop their own automobiles. These aren’t quite so lovely and sometimes have volatility that represents how likely your car would be to just collapse during use. The advantage is that you can take 2 from here, although the selections a little smaller than the patent office too (3).
  • The Workshop. This location is where everyone heads back to their workshop and tinkers with their machine. You can build, upgrade and remove parts from your prototype and work it to perfection here. Going early in the order lets you get more done, but the last player gets the 1st player token next round.

Each game you have a few investors to compete over who provide some extra points based on what you’ve built. One investor for example likes a car with a long range and another just wants it to be comfy, other still might want a really long automobile to roll around in. These are what provide a bit of spice and variety to each game.

I really enjoy seeing what everyone comes up with as the games goes on, whether it’s a dirty petrol vehicle with dodgy components or a luxury hybrid. I’ve lost both the games I’ve played, although the 2nd I at least drew for 2nd place (4 of us). It may or may not help that the first game we just did a few things wrong, and the second we extended the game longer than I think we were supposed to because we just didn’t want to stop with half-vehicles that would be more scrap than not, i.e. not much fun ^^.

The game does up to 6 and is pretty easy to teach, so I can’t wait to get some more plays in and I just hope it doesn’t get stale as one of the players felt it might. I will not rest till I make a petroleum gas electric hybrid!

Byzantio

This is a very interesting game in that I backed it more because I was interested in the company, LudiCreations than because I wanted the game. I wasn’t sure at all if I’d like the game as there’s things involving writing and hidden data which aren’t really something I’m accustomed to and don’t like people doing in games where it’s not a deliberate mechanic ^^

In it, you are competing to control a variety of cities across various regions of the Byzantio world. At the start of the game you write down the cities that you are aiming to have control of and will get points based on whether you get those or not. The reason it’s hidden is that at the end of the game you get points if you can guess your opponents primary high scoring city correctly.

To achieve your goals, you have 30 available actions of a few different types – Campaign, Muster, Advance, Negotiate, Bribe and Expel. There are 30 rounds and a set number of each of these, so you must plan wisely to not limit yourself in later rounds and lose your empire. Advance is an interesting one as it’s the only way for big movements across the map, and you only have 4 of them. Use your last one before having half your cities taken from you and you’ll be in serious trouble.

As it turns out, I found our solitary game really fun to play, with my chosen cities happening to be not too overly competitive with my foes, who really seemed to bicker a lot over their disturbing similar set of places!

In the end I won by having control of 4/6 cities, with a 5th as a draw (Half points). One of the other players guessed my home city, which I had placed as an island which as it turns out, for at least the first game is a really obvious idea to go for (Everyone’s was an island!). I guessed one other persons. Of the other 2 players, one guessed both and the other guessed neither, but they had control of or drew on enough of their cities they couldn’t match my sprawling and beautiful empire!

Very interesting game, and I look forward to my future plays to see how our strategy develops over time. I can see the misdirection elements of the game coming heavier and heavier into play as the players go through it, with next game for example everyone’s main cities being likely to be a nonchalent town in the middle of the map to try and obscure it in among fights over the islands to try and draw people’s gaze away.

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I’d like to finish with a massive thanks to LudiCreations, for delivering their projects not just on time, but one a month earlier than the estimate and 1 2 months earlier (If only by a day into those brackets). Very great service and I look forward to backing future board games from them.

Hope everyone’s had a great Halloween and continuing to have amazing parties to do with it!

Bye! =)

Kickstarters, Life and Apologies for being lazy at Blogging

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Lets start on the last thing I mentioned in the subject, er, my bad for being terrible at keeping to a schedule! A few weeks ago I decided to try and post twice/week and haven’t stuck to that at all. Hopefully I’ll be better at keeping to the posting after the following news!

So the good news I mentioned. It seems I will be changing status from ‘looking for job’ to ’employed’ very soon, after an interview that went well on Friday and a followup meet today. This means I’ll be kept occupied in the days and more importantly, feel motivated to actually post things here when I get the opportunity. I have to drive to get there so this week I’ll be trying to get a hold of a car which will be interesting, as I spent all of Uni avoiding having one ^^.

Finally lets get to the first thing in the subject, kickstarters! In this case a quick summary of status of projects I’m following, most which I’m finding myself particularly happy with concerning communication from the project creators!

Zombicide

Ok so this has had not so perfect communication, but I’ve received the 2 base games through (Prison Outbreak and Toxic City mall) from the kickstarter which I’ve played a couple of times now. It’s a shame that the stretch goal content has been split out into a ‘wave 1.5’ which is what I’ll be waiting on next (With Wave 2 early next year), but I’ve gotten to try out and had great fun with what I’ve received. I’ve even got some foamboard and made a custom storage solution for the new boxes so the original game fits in neatly with the new stuff!

Among the Stars: The Ambassadors and Archon: Glory of Machination

I’m getting both of these through my backing of the AtS: Ambassadors pledge, with Archon as an addon. There was an update 5 days ago about the shipping and it looks to be about on track to arrive on time in November. Absolutely can’t wait as the base game is awesome and it’s expansion is looking even more so, with Archon being a nice bonus that I don’t yet know a lot about!

Shadows over the Empire

Another Artipia project! This is a rather interesting game where you try to influence important people in ‘the empire’ to somehow win the game (I don’t really get it, but it looks interesting ^^). This should be set to ship early November and seems on track to reach that goal. I might presume it’ll be included with AtS: The Ambassadors and Archon, but we’ll have to see ^^

Machine of Death

I’m quite happy that we got an update within the past couple of days for this, as it’s a little late (Expected August) and looks like it’s all finalized and in manufacture to ship very soon (November it would seem). Looking forward to finding unique and random ways to kill people off in this little card game!

Gear & Piston and Byzantio/Nekken

These 2 projects by Ludicreations are clearly being organized for shipping together, as updates about shipping are double posted. They apologise a lot for it for people that have backed both, but it’s not something that worries me and I’m happy to see them taking a lot of care to give everyone a chance to correct shipping details before going ahead with it. This looks to be shipped around Essen time and hopefully be delivered late November/early December. Really looking forward to Gear & Piston, with Byzantio being a bit of a wildcard which I’m unsure of, but am excited to try out.

Myth

Another big one, which I spent almost as much on as Zombicide! The wonderful guys at Mercs miniatures post fairly frequent updates on progress, with pictures of what they’ve been up to and plenty of information to keep us backers happy and confident that they’re working to schedule. I think this games going to be an absolute stunner and may even dethrone Zombicide as my monster game of awesome. Should be great, bring it on January!

Euphoria

Looks on track or if not, to be very close to it. This game has be so excited as it’s another game by Jamey Stegmaier, a very interesting person to follow who posts very insightful things about kickstarter projects and how to do well in them. His first game Viticulture is so more more fun that I’d have expected for a game about wine-making, and this time round it’s a theme I find exciting before even trying it out, so looks to be doubly-successful in being fun for me. Roll on December!

DrunkQuest: The 90 Proof Seas

Also looks set to be roughly on track and arrive around when it should. Great to be updated from these guys on what’s going on, and while it’s a shame some ass stole a load of bottle openers which were slated to be included in copies of the game, the creators have gone straight out and found a replacement solution which is even better than the original, absolutely brilliant support for their backers. Getting drunk and playing games is so not going to be a good combination though ^^

Xia

This project seems to be in good shape, with the art looking a lot sexier than during the campaign already. This project is delayed until march by stretch goals, so not much to say on it for the moment except it should be a very interesting project!

Teramyyd: Earthsphere

The beta arrived for this a while back, but I’ve not had much of a chance to try it out unfortunately, and I feel like I shouldn’t really have taken up one of the beta positions (I thought I’d have so much more opportunity to learn it and enjoy it in beta form!). We couldn’t quite work out how it’s supposed to work correctly and didn’t much enjoy the short game we tried, but I still have confidence that the changes that have already been made, and those to come, and the fact we clearly played it ridiculously wrong, mean it’ll be a great project in it’s finished state. It’ll be delayed by a fair bit, but I’m ok with that for the creators to get it right!

Paperback

I don’t really know what to say about this for the moment. There was an update back on the 9th saying it’s been sent to the printers, so guess that means it’s on track and will arrive to create wordy fun for me and my friends in a couple of months ^^

404: Law Not Found

Looks in good shape, with the creator posting regular (1/week) updates through kickstarter on how things are progressing, including a neat breakdown chart of what tasks are getting done. I wish more projects would provide this level of updating, but it’s not really required, just a little extra that I’m sure all the other backers appreciate too. I’ve played the game once in a pre-finished state and found it interesting, so look forward to getting it, or just trying it out sometime in ‘complete’ style (Being as the aforementioned creator lives a whole 10 minutes away ^^)

That turned into a very long post! I was thinking I’d only comment on a couple of projects, but most of them are slated to arrive in the next couple of months and as a result are all ones with a ‘recently posted update’ state! Can’t wait to have them all arrive as I can’t help thinking I’ll feel like it’s Christmas with every parcel.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day/week/month/year/decade! Cheers ^^

Random Musings #1

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Oops, so much for Friday/Monday posting, I’ve been a bit distracted with the whole looking for a job thing, and completely forgot about this! I’ll have to do a couple of random posts to make it up =)

I’m not really sure where to go from here, so I’ll just start with writing about the games I mentioned in my last post and see where things go!

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

I got the pathfinder adventure card game last week, and have played it rather a lot since! In fact me and my housemate Ken have completed the starter adventure ‘Perils of the Lost Coast’ and the start of the RoTR adventure path ‘Burnt Offerings’ already, leaving me wanting the rest of the adventure path as soon as possible!

In the game, you have a deck of cards representing your character, which contains spells, armour, weapons, items and more. The deck is quite small (at least at first) with 15 cards. For the main character I’m using – Ezren – that means 8 Spells, 1 Weapon, 3 Allies and 3 Items. Throughout the game, you travel to and explore various locations, bringing up opportunities to get new stuff (cards) and fight enemies, hoping to weed out and corner the ‘villain’ for a particular scenario. When you use cards, you sometimes get an opportunity to ‘recharge’ them to put them at the bottom of your deck to pick up later.

Did I mention that deck is also your health bar? Well, it is, and damage taken in the game will cut down your deck, reducing your capabilities and leaving you fatigued from fighting. I love this mechanic, as you have to really think about how to handle what comes up and when you can use cards (Place them in the discard pile), as that will limit your further options for the scenario!

At the end of each scenario, you receive a reward of some kind and move onto the next scenario in an adventure. Those rewards are often cards or ‘feats’ that affect your character for all future games. I absolutely love this aspect, and it has me feeling somewhat attached to my wizard and wanting to progress him to new heights as we continue with the adventures.

It’s an absolutely awesome game, and my ramblings about it don’t do it justice, despite it’s numerous..issues (There’s a lot of errata already due to unclear wording!). Absolutely looking forward to buying all the adventures as they come out and travelling through them, despite the fear of death that will accompany us throughout! (Characters dying is usually for good, no reviving them for the next game!). Just..brilliant.

Smash Up: Obligatory Cthulhu Set

I’ve not really played this much, but me and 2 housemates had a go on Monday night. I love the addition of madness, and manipulating it as you play is great fun, and the new factions are pretty damned cool and further making me interested in the lovecraftian universe. I played as the Miskatonic University Steampunks society and had a lot of fun adding and removing madness from my deck while spamming actions all over the place (Steampunks are possibly my favorite faction, covering bases everywhere in actions is awesome!).

I didn’t win, but I think the new factions will be adding a lot to the game, and it may well have to be a rule that each player gets 1 cthulhu faction and 1 other for the next few games, just so we get to have lots of madness shenanigans. Can’t wait to try out the elder things faction next time!

LoL Worlds

What, this doesn’t belong here. Well tough! The World Championships for League of Legends are happening at the moment, and the quarter finals have been on for the last couple of days. I don’t usually card much about this kind of thing, but I have a lot of friends who do and I’m trying to follow it to some extent.

We’re all going to meet up for the finals, which I am really looking forward to. I don’t get to see all my friends from Uni very often, and I can’t wait for this as a result. I guess I have to admit a bit more appreciation for sports than I usually do, because having it as something to bring people together is a valiant cause, even if normal sports are wholly uninteresting to me ^^

Go Fanatic! ;)

I’ll leave it at that for now. I have a few more things to bring up (Planned custom content for pathfinder for example, which is going to take a long while) but they can wait for another post. Thanks for reading!

PS: I think I’ll start applying numbers to posts as naming them all completely differently will get confusing!

Pathfinder, Smash Up and Job-Hunting.

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So I don’t know where to go with todays post, but to start with, I can say I just received a lovely delivery from Amazon. briefly mention job stuff, then talk about what’s in that delivery!

Come Thursday, I’ll be out of a job, as I’m in a fixed term contract while another member of the company is on maternity leave. As a result I don’t think I’ll have money for buying new…anything for a while, and will be spending a lot of time job-hunting. I’ve had the deliveries games pre-ordered for a while or I’d have not bought them, but at least they’ll be a comfort while I pull my hair out over job applications in the next few days/weeks!

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

I’ve not been in a lot of roleplaying games, but I did a few with my closest friends about a year ago, and even bought myself some books in the pathfinder system so I could run games in return for them. I bought a random adventure to start with, which is the one I’ve actually ran, and then bought the Rise of the Runelords anniversary edition, intending to run a full campaign sometime, which so far hasn’t happened after I stopped attending due to not being a fan of a particular game my friend was running (Hunter).

Anyway, as a result I’m really interested to see how the Rise of the Runelords path plays out, and I have this amazing opportunity to do so through a medium I much prefer – board games. The base set for the pathfinder adventure card game is this very path, and I can’t wait to rip open the absolutely massive box when I get home and try it out. The game is designed with a slow overarching deck-refining mechanic where you earn cards during each game, and get to keep some of them for future games, slowly increasing your power as you go.

I really love being able to keep a character and advance it over an extended period, and this opportunity to do so in a card game has huge appeal for me. The game has a couple of other interesting mechanisms, such as a deck that acts as your abilities and your health (So you must strike a balance to not fatigue yourself too much, or risk dying to anything left after your rampage).

The game apparently supports solo play which could be interesting, although I usually prefer multiplayer gaming, but I look forward to seeing how it goes. Can’t wait to try it out, and hopefully talk about it in a future post! (Maybe Friday!)

Smash Up: Obligatory Cthulhu Expansion

As it’s a requirement that all games get a Cthulhu expansion, AEG have taken some time out from doing normal expansions to fulfill their obligations. I wasn’t expecting this to get dispatched for another month, so I was happy to find the delivery containing the PACG also had this little box included.

The expansion adds 4 new factions from the universe, such as Innsmouthians and Miskatonic University, and a new type of card – madness. I’ve not played with it yet to see how it goes, but the just is that they are cards you might get into your deck during a game that have strong benefits, at the cost of giving negatives to your score at the end of the game. I’ve been rather skeptical due to the 4 similarly themed factions (It feels like it’s completely against the Smash Up style!) but I do think it’s a pretty cool mechanic, and one that required a dedicated expansion to not risk spiraling into non-use.

I’ve not played Smash Up in a while (Blame Legendary), and can’t wait to try it out with a breath of new life from this and it’s future expansions, Miskatonic Steam-punks shall rule the world ;)

Till next time!

Link

So I don’t know what to post about today, so I figure the first thing that comes to mind is a great idea. As it happens I just glanced at the kickstarter page for 404 to see how it was doing, so that’s becoming the target of this post!

Best of luck to 3DTotalGames!

Kicktraq Chart for 404: Law Not Found

As I’m posting this, the project is sitting at £7.818, a not-insignificant amount of money! That’s nearly 80% and the project was posted on Monday. After hitting £5,000 on day one, things are settling into a slow but steady rise in pledges.

I’ve gotten remarkably far without staying anything about the game, so lets get that sorted. In 404, players are controlling robots on a spaceship who have been fitted with some shiny new chips to upgrade them to be better at their jobs. Unexpectedly, after receiving these new chips the robots have found their 3 laws missing, with 3 scrambled directives in their place, robots like to obey their directives and will try their best to made do!

The objective in the game is to fulfill your 3 directives before the other robots, before the ship completes its mission. These can be a wide variety of things, from ‘Explore Breathing’ to ‘Improvise Science’. These are achieved in amusing ways, for example to explore breathing, you need a human to finish it’s turn in space alive, which will require a spacesuit, things may not go your way though, so you may end up killing the human and needing to explore further!

As I touched on earlier, the game takes place in a spaceship. On a turn, players receive a hand of cards, which are essentially programs they can run to perform tasks, such as move, activate item, pick something up, etc. You choose 3 of these and then everyone carries them out simultaneously, taking everyone closer to their objectives, or haphazardly wrecking everyone’s plans with your attempts.

Alien Artifact = Awesome

A part of the spaceship and cards for the rooms.

There are also some autonomous agents on the ship – Humans, and a monkey – who follow a simple flow chart to perform actions, such as loading missiles…or fellow humans, to fire at enemy ships which might attack during the game. The monkey of course won’t do anything so potentially useful, and will run around the ship in search of banana’s instead!

Lastly of importance, are items, which are in the form of tokens in stacks around the ship. These can be things like spacesuits, tools or an ever important banana, and include humans (dead or alive!) as far as carrying them around is concerned, although pesky living ones will try to escape, so you might want to fix that.

All in all, I think it sounds like a hilarious game and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. I did get the opportunity to play-test it a while ago, but having missed a lot of the rules and it being an early version, I didn’t really get much from the experience, other than to see how much potential it has.

On top of all of that awesomeness, is the extremely attractive pledge levels. It only costs £28 to pick up a copy of 404, with free shipping to the US and EU, and a within reason £15 ask for elsewhere. Not something I find it easy to say no to!

So to finish up, go take a look, pledge for 404, and have fun gaming!

404: Law Not Found

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Custom Board Game Stuff #2 – Legendary

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Lets take a look at another custom things project! One of the 3 games I mentioned that I’ve made some custom stuff for is for a contest, so I won’t be posting about that until the results to that go up, although I really want to, but there’s still one I can talk about!

Legendary

Recently, this has jumped far into the lead as my most frequently played game. It’s a deck-building game where the players control a group of super heroes fighting off an mastermind, who’s trying to complete some kind of evil scheme. The game is based off the Marvel universe, as as a result holds high appeal to myself and to pretty much all of my friends, which is partly why it gets played so much!

In the game, players recruit heroes from a set of 5 in each game, which each have unique skills and abilities, such as taking wounds to deal massive damage (Hulk), or getting rid of them to draw cards (Wolverine). The bad guys in the game are sorted into various groups, which are of two types – villains and henchmen. These all get shuffled into a deck, with some bystanders and general effect cards (Master Strikes, Scheme Twists), one of which is drawn at the start of each players turn.

The way that bits of this game are split up made it a really attractive pull for me in terms of customizing. The biggest groups of cards are heroes, and even those are 14 cards, in just 4 types. The things there are to play with in the game:

  • Heroes. Each hero has 14 cards, which is made up of 2 Commons (5 cards each), an Uncommon (3 cards) and a Rare (1 card). The cheaper cards tend to be something of ‘enablers’ to held activate or empower the uncommons and rares for a hero. This might mean for example that they help you rescue bystanders, with an uncommon that gains power for each bystander saved.
  • Masterminds. Each mastermind has 5 cards, 1 is the mastermind itself, and 4 are ‘tactics’. The mastermind card tells you certain information for set up, and has a ‘master strike’ effect, that occurs when one of 5 master strike cards in the villain deck are drawn. The tactics cards each have an effect which occurs when you fight the mastermind, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse.
  • Villains. Villain decks are 8 cards, which I ‘think’ have 4 different named cards in each. They can have an ambush (When drawn), fight (When fought) and escape (If they reach the end of the city track) effect, though not necessarily all or any of those.
  • Henchmen. Henchmen decks have 10 cards, all of which are identical, after all they are meant to be nameless minions. They are quite weak, and more often than not have a beneficial effect when defeated.
  • Scheme. Each game you choose a scheme for the mastermind. This has a major effect on each game, such as turning heroes into villains, destroying city spaces, doling out wounds, and more. Each scheme has a criteria under which evil is victorious, which you should probably beat the mastermind before that happens! They use the Scheme Twist cards, (usually 8, but can be less, or up to 11) which normally go into the villain deck to affect the game when drawn.

There”s a few other types – bystanders, officers and wounds, but they are less customizable (Well, maybe bystanders, but I’ll leave them for now!) due to having a more passive role in the game.

That’s a lot of things! At first it seems pretty daunting, but it’s very easy to focus on a small aspect of them. I’m tackling a few at once, because I want to make my custom addition to the game fit a particular storyline. In particular, those depicted in ‘Captain Britain and MI13’, which had a short run a few years ago, and is a semi-sequel to Excalibur, apparently, I’ve not read it to really know! I bought the comics after finding out that there’s a hero called ‘Captain Midlands’ in them from a magazine, something that I, being from the Midlands, just had to read…I can’t imagine someone from here being a hero at all ^^.

So I have a setting, now I just need to pick bits from it to work on. I wrote myself a list first of all the key things I wanted to do, although I don’t have any particular intention of a stopping point for all this, in fact I may read Excalibur when i run out of things to add just to keep it up! Lets have a look what I’m working on.

  • Heroes – My current list of heroes added from the series consists of the Black Knight, Captain Britain, Captain Midlands, Faiza Hussain, Pete Wisdom, Spitfire and Union Jack.
  • Mastermind – Just the one so far, Plokta, a duke of hell. His name just comes form ‘Press Lots of Keys to Abort’, although for what reason i can’t imagine, but I do find it amusing!
  • Scheme – 2 Schemes to start with, ‘Dream Corridor’ is from the same storyline as Plokta, and ‘Steal Britain’s Magic’ is another key one, which takes part during the Secret Invasion storyline in the Marvel universe, with the invading Skrulls attempting to steal our sources of magical power.
  • Henchmen – In the comic, plokta is trying to capture people in his dream corridor to drain their energies, which he uses to make Mindless Ones, they seemed pretty hilariously easy to beat though, despite attempts to make them sound like terrible enemies in the text, so I made them henchmen for now! I guess they are as strong as the source which makes them, which is in it’s early stages in the books.

I’m having an absolute ton of fun designing all of this lot, and now that I have my methods for getting the graphics done, I’m looking forward to testing it all out and making sure it’s balanced. Some of that can be done just from looking at the cards, and I posted up what I was doing early over on boardgamegeek to get feedback before I go about printing things off and taking it further. I’m not completely sure if that was the right thing to do, as some people don’t seem overly impressed as seeing unfinished ideas posted up, but that’s just how I prefer to do things ^^

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1029863/ss-customs-captain-britain-and-mi13-wip

If you’ve played Legendary, you’ll realise from the pictures that I haven’t kept the exact same style. It’s not that I don’t want to, but I simply couldn’t find anything high enough resolution to look good, and I didn’t want both the borders AND the background images to look terrible, so I went about coming up with my own. There’s nothing much to them, as I kept the same general style as the standard ones, but the pictures are fairly high resolution ones I found of the Captain Britain and MI13 comics, so they look pretty cool anyway (At least in my opinion!), plus it makes my work that bit more unique, which I quite like (I really loved that doing the Smash Up customs, all the styling was unique for each faction, so there was no feeling of being carbon-copies of the base game!).

Next step will be printing off on paper or card, and playing a game where my deck gets sleeved up as I play. Hopefully it’ll turn out to be fun as is, and if not, balancing time. When i can get them to something satisfactory (Not necessarily perfect) then I’ll be sending off an order to PrinterStudio to get some more sturdy cards to play with, and they’ll be added to the box with everything else, I can’t wait!

Thanks for reading! It’s ever so fun to write all this stuff, and seeing that I have a reader count higher than 0 is just awesome!

Custom Board Game Stuff #1 – Smash Up

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So I find myself wanting to write something about the various custom content I’ve made for the board games I own. There’s 3 of my games that have received this kind of attention – Smash Up, Legendary and Viticulture. I’ll go through the first of those now, and perhaps post about the others later.

Smash Up

One of the games that I’ve played the most in my collection is Smash Up. It’s a fairly simply card game, where each player takes 2 factions of a variety of themes which they shuffle together to make their play deck for a game. Each faction has a unique focus, for example zombies retrieve cards from their discard pile, wizards manipulate their deck and aliens beam things up! Players then take turns playing a minion and an action each turn, to try and capture a set of bases laid out on the table.

The nature of the game makes it extremely attractive towards having variants made for it. Each faction consists of 20 cards, in a roughly 10 minion/10 action split, and most cards have a few copies. As a result, when I came up with the idea of trying to make some kind of custom game/content for my girlfriend for her birthday, this took the lead in my attentions.

I had to start somewhere, and that somewhere was what factions I was going to add. I could have gone for something similar to the base game, somewhat open thematic ideas like pirates/ghosts/etc, but a far more fun idea was to base it on more specific things, TV Shows, Films and the Like.

  1. Batman – With my girlfriend being the target, this was an obvious choice. It’s a particularly awesome universe, and many of the characters are styled in a way that she loves, it just had to go on.
  2. Red Dwarf – I don’t even need to argue this, Red Dwarf is just an absolutely awesome example of British comedy at it’s best. I love the series and still hope for more, even if it’s impossible for them to live up to the stellar standard of the earlier series’.
  3. Doctor Who – While she’s less than enamored with Doctor Who, she does like the series somewhat and it’s so varied and exciting to me personally that I wanted it to make an appearance.
  4. Adventure Time – I never seem to want to watch Adventure Time on my own, but I do enjoy watching it with others, it’s a rather insane series vaguely targeted at children which was bought up a few times, and just felt right as an option that my girlfriend would love.

So I found some free time and set to work on thinking what the cards would do. Rather than stick to an overlying mechanic for each deck, I decided on which characters and props to include first, and worked from there. The Scutters for example, reduce a bases breakpoint, while Candy Kingdom people are low power, with a boost when they get surprised, or when Princess Bubblegum is around to motivate them.

To actually make the cards, rather than try to hack together some cut and paste of my own, I opted to make use of a proper service for printing cards. I did some research, and found both artscow and printer studio as options, with the latter working out cheaper if I did enough cards (236), I only needed 88 for this project, so I found a quarriors harry-potter card set and got those printed too (I haven’t used them though, sadly!). Here are the results!

Smash Up custom cards

Smash Up custom cards

If you’d like to see some more detail on the cards, I have them posted up on boardgamegeek where you can see them and print them yourself if you wish right here:
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1004996/4-custom-factions-for-smash-up-adventure-time-ba

Enjoy!

 

Back it for a Buck #1

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Back it For a Buck
This month, I’m taking part in a community challenge to back 10 games for $1 each. The goal of the challenge is to show support for the designers and publishers that are pumping time and effort into getting awesome new games to the gamers via kickstarter. Supporting the challenge is of course a $10 commitment, but one that I think is worth it, and may well try to keep up in the coming months.

Link: http://todayinboardgames.com/b4b-challenge/
BGG Thread: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1029757/the-back-it-for-a-buck-b4b-challenge/

So far I’ve backed half of my 10 games, and instead of waiting until I’ve found all 10, I’m going to post half now, and the other half later. Without further ado:

1. Incredible Expeditions: Quest for Atlantis.
A deck-building exploration game in a steampunk/lovecraftian setting, sounds like my kind of thing. Incredible Expeditions boasts a variety of play styles (Comptetitive, Cooperative and Single-Player) to explore and battle your way to victory.

2. Burning Suns
A tactical science fiction game where you vie for supremeacy over the universe through technology, diplomacy, exploitation and destruction. This is a pretty cool looking game with some nice miniatures which happens to be a UK project, something which funnily enough, tends to grab my attention, if only because you almost certainly know it’ll have reasonable shipping if I was to do a full pledge!

3. Battle Merchants
I wasn’t too sold on this project on it’s first launch, but since then I’ve traded for and played Manhattan Project, another game kickstarted and supported by minion games. That’s something which has given me a lot of confidence in them, and to be honest I wanted to help them get another game out there. It’s an economic game in a fantasy world where players are selling weapons to the warring races, not the most pleasant of themes, despite how fancied up it is, but that’s not why I backed it ^^

4. Cubist
A dice-building game, in a completely different sense to quarriors. In this, players literally use their dice to build towers, obeying matching rules as they go to try and make structures given on goal cards. This looks pretty cool and I think is worth my $2 (They should be ashamed of that minimum level) just for going outside the norm.

5. 404: Law Not Found
A game about robots who thanks to a glitch, have had their 3 laws overwritten with some rather ridiculous replacements. This is the game I’m most excited about this month. Partly because it’s a reasonably cool little game, and partly because I know the designer, and have been following his posts about it on boardgamegeek, his blog and facebook up till the launch. He’s passionate about the project and has put a lot of time and effort into making it a great game, and I really hope it succeeds. I’ll probably end up picking up a copy, not because it’s a friend, but because I think the game he’s created is worth what he’s asking for it, and that’s something I hope everyone who views the kickstarters agrees with.

That’s all for now! Hopefully I can find 5 equally awesome or better projects over the rest of the month! Kickstarter is awesome!

My Life and Gaming

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Edit: This is a soppy-ness warning. A friend let me know this is a pretty pitiful post, so feel free to ignore it and read the more interesting posts following it! ^^

I’m going to start this blog off, with a picture of my board games collection. The reason for this is that I don’t really know what to post on a blog, and the only thing that comes to mind is to write something about myself.

I’ve always played games, ever since I was small. Traditional Board Games when I was small, monopoly, scrabble, cluedo and the like, those games that everybody plays, but I never really enjoyed playing them (Well, maybe scrabble). My enjoyment of games came with video games, since my older brother got a PS1 I have always loved them, and since I got my first PC even more.

Crash Bandicoot numbered among the earlier games I’ve played, and it still reflects today, where platform games are among my favourite genre’s, despite being sadly neglected in modern consoles. Since then memorable games for me in the earlier years of my gaming have been Quake 3, Jak & Daxter, Counter Strike, Ratchet and Clank, Battlefield 2142, Hydro Thunder, XGIII and Burnout (Wow, I never considered how many racing games I used to like). FPS games held my desires for a long time, but a few years ago got replaced by World of Warcraft.

It’s funny, how I feel ashamed in many ways to say that WoW was a big part of my life, but it was something I needed, an escape from the world. I didn’t much enjoy my last few years of school, and timetables left me never seeing much of my friends at college, so I immersed myself in the game world. In the real world I went to college, ate, and come home, in WoW I was a user of the magic arts, I was something more. I don’t even think I care how pitiful that sounds, I needed it at that time in my life.

Come University, I gave it up. It wasn’t that I got bored of the game, or didn’t want to play, it was that I was going to a completely new place, and I had a perfect opportunity to start afresh, to make new friends instead of feeling like a misfit. It was a great choice, and I instead occupied my time with friends, with the game of choice being Team Fortress 2, where we could run around in a manic scenario having fun together. That lasted a long while, until a friend convinced us to try out League of Legends, a game which I still love today.

Our last year at University had LoL at the game of choice when meeting up with friends for games. I tended to organise LAN parties occasionally through all of University, as well as the Computer Science events, so it just a switch from TF2 to LoL at those times. We’re all fairly good at the game now, and playing 5-man teams in ranked games is amazing fun, even if we aren’t exactly top-level players (Besides, casually playing is more fun).

Also in that final year of University I joined my friends in doing some roleplaying games. It’s such an amazing thing to just sit around a room with friends and immerse yourselves in something else, while still being highly social. The fact that noone overly serious about it and takes things in a casual light was just perfect. I stopped attending much around when I started playing board games, as I just didn’t find time, but I hope to attend one again, particularly now I have one of my mates that does it living in a house with me!

Don’t worry, it’s on to board games now. Last year, Wil Wheatons tabletop series started airing on youtube. A friend showed me the first one, (Small World) and I kind of impulse bought it…and it’s sequel, and tried to convince everyone to play all the time. I had a lot of fun playing that, and wanted to try other games, so I went along to the UoB tabletop society with a couple of friends of mine to try other games. Since then I almost feel like doing so opened up a whole new chapter in my life, as I had enough fun that I booked off more Friday afternoons than not to attend the society and play board games with people. I even met Grace, now my wonderfully awesome girlfriend, at the society – I didn’t even notice I was attracted to her for a while, I just loved spending time with her and to be honest, probably stayed more to spend time with Grace than to play board games.

I took to buying a lot more board games now that I came across more, via both Wil Wheatons series and the societies games. I discovered boardgamegeek and signed up in January, although I didn’t post for a while after that, to find out about more games. My collection has increased substantially from just Small World, so I now have some 40 games, and more on their way from kickstarter this year. I love playing them all, it gives me opportunities to be social where before I’d have sat in my room, and while I still love playing league of legends with friends, that has nothing on sitting to a table with them and enjoying a physical medium.

So, below you have my collection of board games as it stands. Some of the RP books are mine but most of them are my housemate Kens. I’m so happy to have them, as they really are a bright spark in my life and have made me a much happier person in general, so I think they will be getting shown off frequently in this blog.

Long. Live. Tabletop Games!

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