Been a while since I made it to Halesowen! Had a nice holiday away and did a week at a Brighton group then went a little further to play in Cologne (Check the last post before this one if interested in that ^^).

Aaanyhow…

Dead of Winter

This week at Halesowen had myself, Mark & Steve in a 3-Player game of Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game. The setting of the game is after a zombie-apocalypse, but the focus is on Survival, not the post-apocalyptic pests. A game ends when either the main objective (Of 10 to be chosen from in the base-game) is completed, the round track hits 0, or the ever-present and threatening morale track hits 0. Players control groups of survivors, and have a secret-objective that they must complete to win the game alongside the main objective (There is also a 50% chance in each game of someone being a betrayer, who actually wants to make morale hit 0 alongside some other secret objectives).

The story for our game started that we were actually pretty comfortable in the confines of our colony, but the ever-present Zombie threat was interfering with life going on. To win, we had to successfully barricade each location in the town by 1, and get 10 barricades down in the main colony. We also, as with all games, had to keep our colonists fed, keep the zombies out, keep out the trash and constantly fight with the ‘crisis’ which occurs each round and has to be dealt with to avoid negative effects.

At the start of each round, all players roll their action dice (Which is number of survivors they possess + 1 Dice), which are used to perform the main actions that players can take. Next, players take turns where they perform all their actions for that round before play proceeds. Before a player does anything however, the player to their right draws a ‘crossroad’ card, which are sort of story-driving cards that can sometimes trigger if the player does specific things, and are only read out at that time.

On a players turn, they can do some things which require dice, and some which don’t. Those which don’t are generally risky, or are limited by other means (Such as the number of cards a player has). Attack/Search require specific dice results (But you know ahead of time if you can do these, because the roll happens before the turns), while Barricading, Attracting (Pulls Zombies from one location to another) and Cleaning waste just requires using up any die. Without a dice you can Play Cards, Move (Rolling the evil, horrible, nasty exposure die which I’ll mention in a sec), pass equipment, request cards and vote to exile others (I.e. if you think someones a betrayer you can kick them out the colony, although they still get to play).

Some things you do in Dead of Winter require you to roll a special die, the ‘exposure’ die. This 12-Sided die, forged in the depths of mount Mordor, has 6 safe sides, but then 5 sides with wounds (1 or 2 being frostbite, which causes you to then take a wound at the start of every turn – 3 on a survivor and it dies, losing 1 morale for the colony), and 1 side has a bite. A bite is instant death for that survivor, and worse, the bite then spreads to any other survivor at the target location, who can then either suicide to save anyone else, or roll the die again – On a blank the bite effect steps, but on any other result, they die and it spreads again. The result of this? If players push their luck too much, they could literally wipe out the colony and end the game in a single turn, scary stuff!

Aaaanyway, once all players have had a turn, the colony phase begins. This consists of:
1 – Pay Food (1 per 2 survivors in the main colony, or gain a starvation token and lose morale)
2 – Check Waste (Lose 1 morale per 10 cards in the waste pile)
3 – Check Crisis (If enough cards of the right type weren’t contributed…bad stuff happens)
4 – Add Zombies (1 per 2 survivors in the main colony, and 1 per survivor elsewhere)
5 – Check Main objective (Yep…you finally get to check, after the horrible things occur)
6 – Pass Turn Marker.
7 – Round track moves down 1 space.

— The Action Session Bit —

So where were we, yes, Barricades! This was a medium length objective, and we had 6 rounds to get it done in. The game started with 12 Zombies at the colony and 1 at all the other locations. Shouldn’t be too difficult – Kill a few Zombies, barricade up and we’re good.

Early on in the game, things looked like they’d go ok (Y’know…just the first turn or so =P). I went first and was able to drop a barricade into the colony & take out a couple of Zombies to clear the way a bit. After I finished my turn I realised I’d totally forgotten to contribute to the colony’s food or the crisis (Which was also for food), oops. I had moved one of my survivors to a non-colony location though reducing the food requirements. Between Steve/Mark they managed to sort out the crisis and food issue, and find some nice items.

By the next turn, things were looking dire for Steve already. (I think it was 2nd turn this happened anyway..), he got some nice items for both his survivors, then lost one of them, leaving a single survivor with night-vision goggles (So he would still have 3 action dice at least). He holed up at the police station for a while then, barricading it up more than we even needed and getting himself a nice weapon for his survivor. Mark got an extra survivor, and not long after so did I, which didn’t help as much as we might have hoped as I think the 2nd crisis was also for food! Having to feed a ton of colonists and still deal with the crisis was looking difficult (Though at least I remembered to use my food this time).

As we went on through the game we triggered a remarkable amount of crossroads cards, considering many are quite specific  – Quite surprising when ‘Active player has survivor x’ triggers when they didn’t start their turn with that survivor (i.e. a random draw from the 30 or so survivors gives them that exact one ^^). A crisis where we needed tools/fuel seemed easy enough, but I was last on the turn and used my fuel to move, then looked at I think 3 cards while searching and found 3 damn food cards! (The thing we were desperate for earlier, but at this particular point we had about double what we needed for the next colony phase). I should have just rolled the exposure dice and put the fuel in, could have avoided getting a morale loss and a starvation token added to the food supply from the crisis (When you can’t feed, you lose morale equal to the number of starvation tokens…)

Edit: I forget when it happened, but somewhere around here I think is when a bite effect occured as a character moved back to the colony (Might have been how Steve got down to 1 survivor actually), which also led to Mark killing one of his to stop it from spreading (A valiant effort…I’d have rolled the die and risked it ^^).

Over the next few turns I ended up with a very healthy amount of survivors (4), Steve remained on his impressive 1 survivor run (I think he got a 3rd piece of equipment too, not sure though) and Mark also got a lot of them. We kind of remembered then that we could have had him request the outsiders to increase his count, and as we’d pretty much surmised we had no traitor would have been a good idea (Mark even got to directly look at mine thanks to a crossroad card for the psychologist). Unfortunately we got to having about 2 rounds left with barely any barricades in the colony (2/10), although most of the non-colony locations were covered…We also had about 1-2 morale left and were struggling to feed, having not been able to add food and using up the double-quantity we had not long before.

Eventually Steve found another survivor, the ninja, but unfortunatey a bit late to help overly much (He did ninja a couple of Zombies though). I lost 1 of mine because I’m an idiot (I let a location overfill with Zombies which causes instant death) although I got it back soon enough. We spent much of the 2nd to last round clearing up spaces to hopefully barricade in the last turn. A stroke of luck with a crossroads card had Steve finding a Guitar and making us all so happy that we gained an action die each for the last round, (So me/mark had 6 and he had 5). The last round was tense, and we managed to get enough zombies down that we almost had time…but fell just short with me using my remaining actions to finish the barricades we needed…but couldn’t deal with the fatal morale-losing problems we had left such that we fell just short of the win.

Astoundingly close, it was a ton of fun and I can’t wait to play again, which I do believe is an opinion shared by Steve & Mark who played too. Next week we’ll hopefully be able to nab another couple of players for a full complement then kick the games proverbial arse…we can only hope.

Havana

First up was Havana, which had been bought along by Rachael & Lee, I believe because Steve wanted to try it out ahead of possibly picking it up in the works.

Havana is a fairly simple game, where the objective is to get 15 Victory Points based on tiles bought from the middle of the table, which all have a set of required resources and a VP value.

Each turn players play one of ~12 cards in hand, which have a number from 0-9 and a special ability (Well, the first turn you play two). This goes with another card, which will have been used in a previous round, with the numbers concatenated with the lowest first to get player order (i.e. if you use a 2 and a 5, you get 25). Lower numberered cards have weaker abilities, so there’s a tradeoff between whether you want a strong ability or earlier play.

Using these abilities players will gather up resources to pay for tiles bought from the ends of 2 rows on the table (Ends only!), which happens after the abilities phase (i.e. doesn’t require a card, just the right ‘stuff’). This lets you see ahead to certain tiles that will become available (They don’t run out, when 2 tiles remain in a row, 4 more are inserted between them taking it back to 6).

In our game of it I played in a very ‘Lets see how this goes’ manner, with Lee/Rachael seeming to know what they were doing from previous plays and Steve taking his time and planning carefully. All 3 of them got some points before me, and in fact, Steve managed to win so quickly that I barely have anything to write about for the play…I had 0 points at the end, although iirc I could have got ~11 points in my next turn, which demonstrates how swingy it can be.

It was pretty fun to play, and the card abilities tradeoff with play-order seemed quite unique among games I’ve played, but it was all over a bit too quick for the effort it seemed to take to work out what you’re doing. I’d probably play again, but well…I just struggle to be attracted to game where new players can score 0 when I frequently teach new players ^^.

Lost Legacy

Our next game was shorter still, and one I’d only just picked up – Lost Legacy. This is a tiny 16 card bluffing/deception game by Seiji Kanai (Same guy as Love Letter).

So far, it probably sounds about the same, but there’s a few differences here. Primarily is that you’re trying to explicitly find the Lost Legacy card, rather than end with a big number. In fact, you want a small number, because when the round ends, anyone who’s not eliminated gets to choose, in order of lowest number first, where they believe the Lost Legacy can be found – their own hand, an opponents hand, or in ‘the ruins’.

Similar to Love Letter, cards have abilities on them. Unlike Love Letter, they don’t all activate when played, with some having interactive effects such as ‘If another player looks at your hand, you are out of the game’ (Which seems awful, but thats’ on the ‘1’ card so it has an advantage at the end of a round). Some cards manipulate ‘the ruins’, which is an area of face-down cards (With 1 there from the start of the game), letting you potentially hide away the Lost Legacy where only you can find it.

We played as a campaign, which is to say multiple rounds to get a final winner, which is the first person to 3 wins. This was ridiculously tight, with us all getting to 2 wins before the end (One of mine being from the glory of spinning a pen to guess where the lost legacy was, too perfect ^^). Apologies again for poor description of the session, but well..short games (And I kinda left a week before writing this)

I really like the play of this game, and I think for 3/4 players this is far cooler than Love Letter (Although a smidgeon more complex, and the lack of guide-cards to tell players what things do will hurt for teaching non-gamers). Trying to work out when to keep certain cards defensively, or whether to slip the lost legacy from hand to ruins, or whether to shuffle the ruins when given the opportunity, are difficult decisions indeed! (It’s pretty poor with 2 though as I discovered playing with a colleague at work, as its’ near impossible to get to the investigation phase, which is the core of lost legacy’s fun).

Among the Stars

The final game of the evening was Among the Stars, a game I’ve talked about plenty on here because its’ a game I really enjoy. As a super-short summary, it’s a card-drafting tile-placement game where players vie for the most victory points over 4 years.

In our game, we were playing with mostly the base game, but had one additional module included that I’ve been wanting to try out for some time – Alliance Inspection. This is a very small module, consisting of just 6 cards. At the start of each year, these are shuffled and one is given to each player in secret. At the end of each year, players score 3 points if they have more of whats’ listed (One of the 5 location types, or ‘delayed locations’) than anyone else, -2 if they’re last, and no change if somewhere in the middle.

The game went by without too much issue. The first year I failed my alliance inspection, having failed to build any military, while Steve (I think) picked up 3 points for his. I dropped back on points considerably as my race, Wiss, can’t get additional power and I kept seeming to come on cards that would decimate my supply of 5 or just weren’t very effective (Leading me to discard for money a lot).

The 2nd/3rd years weren’t too bad, with the other players being fairly in line with points and alliance inspections being passed ok (I think…a week is too long I think before writing these), although I did catch up a little bit I stayed in last place, and still had a ton more money than I needed.

In the final year, I got an ideal inspection card, which was to have the most delayed locations (I had a lot, as I quite like going for them as they often play off the positioning aspects of the game), I also managed to spent a lot of my money, and built 3 factories (Cost is 5, but -1 for each other factory built, so they got cheaper on each one) which was a good chunk of points.

In adding the scores, I managed to leap ahead of everyone’s points…temporarily, as I did so before Steve added his end-game points, which let him jump back into a lead he’d held most of the game. Unfortunately my passed inspection was just not enough, and he sat a good 5-10 points ahead of me (With Rachael/Lee in fairly even spacing behind that, though I forget which order they were in).

—

Fantastic Evening, had a lot of fun with trying out the two new games and the module for AtS which I hadn’t tried before. At some point I’m going to have to try out the conflict modules for the game, which I’ve shied away from as they just don’t seem they’d be very new-player friendly. We’ll see what happens

As promised in my last post, here’s my typically badly written account of the rather intergalactic halesowen board gamers night on the 18th June ;)

Cosmic Encounter

I arrived a little late on Wednesday, although it didn’t appear anyone was sorted out for what to play yet. That wasn’t to last long, with some grouping for a game of…something (18xx but not as long as most I think was Mike’s one-liner description, no idea what that means though =P) and another group going for Tzolk’in, leaving myself, Ian, Kevin & Steve for sorting out what to play amongst ourselves.

Kevin suggested Cosmic Arguments, and after a brief not so cosmic argument where we didn’t actually have any other options that anyone particularly wanted to play, went with Cosmic Encounter, where we might find a better argument (After all, argument clinics are effective and this method was going for free!). I’ve not played before but have been wanting to for a while, as while ‘screw each other over’ tends to put me off, its’ popularity and apparent variety according to reviewers intrigued me ^^.

The principles of this game are simple. Each turn, the ‘main’/’active’ player draws a card from a randomized deck, which determines who they are ‘encountering’ this turn. Some provide choices, but mostly it’s something like ‘Encounter Blue’. The main player then places a number of ships (1-4 I believe) in towards the encounter, which is usually pretty minimal in actual effect, but goes some way to display intentions (4 Ships, attacking and confident, 2-3 ships, attacking but unsure – don’t want to lose too much, 1 Ship – Likely to negotiate). Both players may then invite others around the table to send ships to help out, who can either place them into the attack force or around the planet in defense.

With preparation done, the 2 players choose an encounter card from their hand, with both players then revealing them simultaneously. If both negotiate, they have 1 minute to decide on an exchange (Or none at all, if both agree that’s ok). If one negotiates & one attacks, the attack is an auto-success (Defenders ships are lost ‘to the warp’ and attacker(s) ships occupy the planet), but the loser takes as many cards from the attacker as ships lost. If both attack, then players work out their strengths and may play additional cards if they have any, with allies able to reinforce if they have the cards to do so – Success they occupy the planet and defenders ships go to the warp, fail and the attackers ships go to the warp with the defender keeping their planet.

If the first encounter on a players turn is successful, they get a second one immediately. When they have performed their encounter (or encounters) their turn ends and the next players turn begins. Play continues like this until a player (or players!) manage occupy a total of 5 enemy planets, at which point they win (Or not…maybe).

The big twist to the game, is that at the start, each player gets an alien race (Chosen from 3 they get dealt in secret, with the chosen one going face-up on the table). There are an absolutely huge amount of these to choose from, with wildly varying effects, from just increasing attack strength over the game (My power) to changing that players win condition to just having 20 cards in hand (One of my other possible options from the game start). These are what make the game interesting, as they push each player to think differently depending on who they fight and who they are, and with the huge amount available will eb different each game (Hence, I’d love to play again sometime ^^).

So anyway, enough about that (Particularly as the game is nearly 40 years old and many probably already know it). In our game, I played the warrior (If I win an encounter I gain a token, if I lose I gain 2, when I attack I get +power equal to the number of tokens I have). Kevin was a Sorceror (Swap encounter cards with opponent), James (Who turned up just after we’d decided to play, fortunately before beginning ^^) was opposite me and I was too lazy to try and read a long-distance upside-down card, Ian could swap the digits of attacks (So a 09 becomes a 90) with the caveat it effects both sides and Steve was a Ghoul, which probably had an effect but well..I don’t know if he ever used it.

The very first thing which happened, was that Kevin, being an evil wizard, attacked my beautiful summer-resort planet, aiming to claim its’ beauty as his own. Steve, being gruesome and presumely recently dead, being a ghoul and all, opted to join in on the relentless and cruel assault. Ian jumped in to help me out, but alas, we lost and a fantastic picnic location went to the bad guys.

Sorry but I’m not going to go that in-depth for the other encounters, but needless to say something I loved throughout was the ridiculous banter and the crossover of both wanting to win but also wanting to do odd things just for the hell of it ^^. After the first planet went to Steve/Kevin, myself, Ian & James teamed up for the next one bringing it to 1 planet for everyone. From there, all of us but Steve regularly increased our count in planets (Kevin was a step behind for a while too, as he, naturally, wasn’t part of the ‘Not Steve or Kevin’ alliance). By the end of the game everyone but Steve had 4 planets (He had 3) and ultimately victory went to James after an attack that he could not (And didn’t really try to, opting not to invite anyone to aid him) defend against.

It was a ton of fun and I don’t know how to convey that here. The random ‘who you’re encountering’ system works great, as it forces you to think about how you want to deal with different people – Do you attack the person that helped defend your planet just one turn back, or try to negotiate a deal, hoping they think the same. The ways that different powers worked was great (Although a shame that James/Steve didn’t seem to have much of an obvious impact with theirs) and I think will make replays a hugely interesting experience ^^

Among the Stars

Sticking with the Space theme, we next went with one of my games (From a number of suggestions ^^) – Among the Stars. I’ve talked about it before so I’ll try to keep it short! Over 4 years, players build space stations by drafting ‘location’ cards – each turn they pick one card, pay its’ cost and place it in their station, gaining points as per the value of the card and any text on it, then passing their hand to their left or right (Alternates each year), when the last card of a round is built, new hands are dealt and the next year begins. At the end of the game, objectives (Face-up from the start) are awarded and any final scoring happens (Some locations have ‘delayed’ abilities that’re counted now).

I don’t have a huge amount to say about how our game went, as when using just the base-game stuff there’s fairly little interaction (Asides from with your neighbours, although in this case there wasn’t much denial for me to do).

I can say though that for most of the game myself & Ian had lowish points, while the others shot ahead (I think they got to 20-30 points ahead at one point), although this was largely because we both went for more of a delayed-ability route (The location abilities that are counted at the games end rather than as you go) – It wasn’t deliberate, I was just using certain colours to go for the ‘Be the first to build 2 locations of each type’ objective ^^. I also tried to get ‘Be the first to build 4 different military locations’, but couldn’t get enough in hand that I could afford (The first ones I saw required 3 power, and my race, while I started with 5 power, couldn’t build additional power reactors, so it seemed too much of a risk), as a result James was able to nab that one away from me.

As we came into the last round, I noticed that interestingly, almost every players station was a fairly tight build (Often some will spread out, or be ‘spikey’ or have holes, etc to go for certain location bonuses, but the particularly ones we had this game led to the tight layout. Kevins power gave him extra money which I think he used well enough, James’ gave him an extra objective which he completed, but at the cost of missing out on one of the faceup ones (He had to build 12 different basic locations, which led to him missing on 12 different special locations ^^). Ian got to cancel one turn for each player over the game, which I think had varying effect, although successfully annoyed me as it cancelled a turret (Which are pretty good, but only if you can get a few of them). Steve had better power reactors than others (3/reactor) and I had a super-reactor (5 power) with infinite range (Normally 2) but couldn’t build extras.

When we came to the games end, I was sitting in 4th place until I added my objectives (I got 2, one for the first to 2 of each type as I mentioned, and the other was ‘least power reactors’, amusingly easy when I literally couldn’t build more), after which I shot up to first. The others weren’t far behind though! I think I could have eked out a few more points but I was stingy on power usage because I worried about having only 5 ^^…awkward considering I still had 2 left at the end =P. A fun time was had, and hopefully will lead to being able to play next week with the ambassadors module added (Or any of the other gazillion modules that I haven’t touched as I keep introducing new players rather than doing repeat plays with the same people ^^).

—

Great evening, as always. Again, super happy that I got to play Cosmic Encounter for the first time, as well as Among the Stars which is one of my favourite games.

So this last Saturday myself and a few friends were set to meet for our “monthly” (In quotes because we’re literally terrible at arranging consistent dates) RP event. As one of the 5 of us was unable to attend, due ‘has-a-new-ish-girlfriend’ continuity rifts, we opted to meet anyway and play some board games.

Voluspa

First to arrive (Well, asides from Ken, who lives in the same house :P) was Chris A, and with us expecting Dave to be a while we went for a fairly quick game – Voluspa. This tile-laying game has players take turns to place tiles (From hands of 5), trying to play the highest in the row/column its’ part of to score them (e.g. adding a 7 to a 5-6-2-2 to make 7-5-6-2-2 would score 5 points). So far, so simple. Each tile (Except the 7/8 which just rely on being high numbers) has a special ability, such as ‘swap with a tile in play’ or ‘all adjacent tiles are worth 0’, and the way these interact are what make the game interesting and enjoyable.

As this was the first play for Chris A & Ken, I gave them the choice of whether we play with any expansion tiles (They aren’t complicated, but it does mean more stuff) which they opted not to, so we set things up to be the basic tiles and got into the game.

Things took a very interesting route on this occasion, as almost the entire outer edge of the layout got surrounded by Loki’s/Troll’s (Loki 0’s adjacent, and you can’t place adjacent to trolls), making it so there was extremely few places for valid placements around the middle of the game. Eventually things started to speed up again near the end, but it certainly leads to a tense few turns when you know that someone is going to have to take a bit of a sacrifice in playing a low-scoring tile that opens up stronger placements ^^.

While I was leading for most of the game, I got myself stuck with an awkward hand and had a couple of turns in a row where I had nothing that I could do other than block a 7 point opportunity from others or score 2 point rows, giving Ken & Chris A the opportunity to slip ahead. We finished close on scores, but Ken was the overall Winner!

Eldritch Horror

The next game we went for is one with a particularly similar theme to the Roleplaying game we might have been playing instead (Laundry Files btw, a sort of modern-day cthulhu setting) – Eldritch Horror. This fantastically epic game has players travelling across the planet in search of clues, as they fight off monsters, wrestle to close mystical gates and try not to die or go insane in the process. To win, players must solve 3 mysteries before the various lose conditions occur.

I recently picked up Forsaken Lore, the first expansion, which I’ve mixed into the game already (It’s basically a ton of extra cards for variety, rather than any deeper changes), so things looked to be interesting from the start. As the expansion triples the size of all the old-one decks, we eschewed the opportunity to fight the new addition of Yig in favour of going up against Azathoth, which I understand to be the ‘easist’ of the them to beat (Easiest to prevent from awakening I should say, as it’s instant loss if he does).

As Dave had arrived by this point, we now had 4 of us to play the game with. Chris A went the supportive route, with Charlie Kane as his investigator (Who excels at obtaining gear for all players), Ken went er…someone with spells, Dave was the character who can spawn clues when she doesn’t have any, and I was the ‘the expedition leader’ (I forget the actual name, but that’s the subtitle), who gets bonuses on wilderness spaces. The plan from the start was pretty much that Chris A gives us all awesome standard gear, Ken gets as many spells as possible, I get artifacts from expeditions and Dave gathers clues.

I don’t remember details, but I know we didn’t have too much trouble getting the first mystery completed, with most encounters causing minimal issues. As the game progressed however, Dave’s character seemed to become an omen of bad luck, becoming poisoned, cursed, nearly dying and just before the end going insane (I don’t blame the character after the life he’d been living, ^^).

I was able to get a rather ridiculous amount of ally assets and artifacts, such that beating monsters would give me clues, and not beating them would barely hurt me (But I was unable to really get anywhere this was useful, as there wasn’t any conveniently huge stack of monsters for me to slaughter with my lightning gun, magic sword, requiem per shuggay, flute of the outer gods…etc (The latter which auto-kills, although that wouldn’t give me the combat rewards such as clues).

Ken’s character did indeed pick up a good number of spells, and Chris A did do a great job of dealing out equipment to the group. Unfortunately many of the spells which can provide ongoing bonuses (Such as buffing stats) were found later in the game when there wasn’t time to use them effectively, and an unfortunate series of events that had 3 eldritch tokens on the green comet of the omen track (Making it advance doom, i.e. the main ‘advancement towards death’ track, by 4 times as much as normal) left us in a dire situation.

We battled on, and right as the doom track hit 0 (Well, -4, as it went down by 5 in one go) solved the second Mystery. That might not seem close at a glance, until you realize the 3rd, and final to win mystery, just required one character to give up 4 clues and the requiem per shuggay to solve – At that time my character had 3 clues and the requiem, making it almost certain that one more turn would have won us the game, ack! Anyway, glory to Azathoth, may he let me live another day… (Not likely seeing as he’s not the kind of elder-god thing to actually care about humans…not that any of the others do either ^^).

Space Cadets

For the final game before everyone would likely have to leave, I suggested Space Cadets: Dice Duel, which I recently picked up at the UK Games Expo. Ken seemed rather vehemently against the team-competitive idea, so I also suggested the original Space Cadets which I’ve only placed once before also. I think we had a third option suggested but whatever it was I know I didn’t fancy it, and we eventually settled on the original Space Cadets plan.

Space Cadets is a real-time rounded space game where players trying to complete missions by flying the ship and shooting down enemies. Each ‘station’ has various mini-games to make them happen (Such as tetris-style matching of tiles to load missies, or choosing from a limited set of movement cards for helm), which with the short 30-second timer of rounds lead to hectic attempts to do well and many amusing mistakes.

Setup and learning how to play took a while, as while I’ve played the game before, and while all the individual roles are relatively simple, bringing it all together is a heavy task. We chose roles and all read up on what we needed to do, set up one of the tutorial/training missions and went in with partial-blindless as to what to expect ^^.

The valiant crew of our starship consisted of Dave S on Shields and Sensors, Chris A on Weapons and Damage Control, Myself on Helm and Jump and finally our glorious Captain Ken, who also ran the engineering department. Our mission, to boldly go barely outside our own star system and take out a pitiful number of enemy ships, hopefully not dying horrifically in the process…I mean…yeah.

First up we had an easy ship to deal with. Brimming with confidence as we started, I went for rull ramming speed (There’s not actual ramming in the game, sadly) at the first foe, while shields put up a weak defense and we successfully locked on, loading torpedoes and….missed at near melee range, twice. Fortunatey the enemy ship was equally useless, with its’ first attack bouncing harmlessly off our shields. We were able to despatch it not much later…taking only a little damage and totally not because I left our ships starboard unshielded side to the enemy..

Moving onto our next target we’d all become a little more comfortable with our roles, although further damage led to another role switch (The starboard damage switch Dave/Chris A) only a short while after the first. This enemy had a fair bit more health and was tougher to take on, with us taking damage to a number of stations in the process, most of which we fixed in short order (Except jump, as we weren’t actually supposed to be using it for the tutorial mission so we figured we’d leave it till later ^^).

As we went to fight the final, hard enemy ship (Or maybe near the end of the 2nd) we took a ton of damage to the front and had our first core-breach. When this happens players gain an additional mini-game of matching shapes which they have to deal with during the other real-time work they have to do. Fortunately both this and a subsequent core breah we took were dealt with relatively easily, and we got a big hit on the enemy ship just before we had another role-switch pushed upon us (This time me & Chris A swapped). Thanks to heroic-level loading of missiles and a maximum damage hit (Oh btw…hitting with missiles required flicking a disc up a track, and it has to stay on to actually hit) on my behalf (Omg I did something competant, something that I had totally not been achieving as helm the last few rounds..ahem).

With the last ship blown up, we set ourselves up for jumping out of the sector (Again, we didn’t need to, but it seemed like a fun thing to do at the end of the mission). 5-5-3-3-1 got rolled, so we flipped the two fives to 2-2-3-3-1, increases the 1 to a 2 and reduced the 2 3’s to a 1 using the jump-cards we’d gained over the game (Essentially you build up the cards over a game, which are things like ‘Roll >23 and you gain a once-use ability to reduce the value of two dice by 1’, such that eventually you can use the gained abilities to make 5 of a kind, which powers up the drive and jumps the ship! Huzzah!

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It was a fantastic day, and I’m so glad that we got together for board games after skipping the RP plans. It was a lot of fun playing everything, particularly space cadets which I’ve been worried won’t come to the table much (Real-time games aren’t exactly my core-preference, but the Space-Cadets series caught my attention thanks to Artemis, which is a sort of video-game version of the same thing that we’ve played). Hopefully the others had enough fun to play again sometime, perhaps for an ‘incompetant space-persons’ night where we’d play Galaxy Trucker, Space Cadets & then an extended Artemis session ^^.

News Bulletin!

Yeah, that’s right, I’m going to bring up random bits of information that I think people might be interested in and make them out as being ‘news’. Deal with it ;)

UK Games Expo Math Trade
– The Math Trade discussion thread has been opened up early, so if you’re interested in some no-ship trading when at the expo you might want to hit subscribe on it to be notified when the trade goes up.
– If anyone wants to trade and can’t get there in person, I’m happy to proxy – we can pass the games at halesowen the week before/after.
– Link: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1165072/uk-games-expo-2014-no-ship-maths-trade-discussion

Kickstarter
– Among the Stars latest kickstarter is almost finished, so if you’re interested in this space-station building drafting game that in my opinion kicks 7-wonders ass, take a look!
– Heavy Steam is another interesting looking (EU Friendly) project running at the moment. It’s a strategic resource-management combat game with some awesome looking pieces. Too expensive for me right now though at $95 =( Run by the same people as Zpocalypse.

Halesowen

Anyway you probably don’t actually care about me trying to not-so-subtly convince you to spend your money, so here’s my session report =)

Lords of Waterdeep

Lords of Waterdeep is a worker-placement game loosely themed on the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Players are trying to get the most points over 8(?) rounds, by sending adventurers off on quests to do whatever adventurer’s do. By managing their workers, constructing buildings and playing intrigue cards players compete to be the best upper-management in the D&D world.

As is standard with worker-placement games, players take turns placing workers on the various available spots. The standard spaces include gaining adventurers (1 space for each of the 4 types – Wizards, Clerics, Fighters & Rogues), gaining money, gaining intrigue cards, playing intrigue cards, constructing a building and gaining quests. Most spaces are limited to 1 worker/round, which generally means it’ll take multiple rounds to achieve much. In additional to the standard spaces, when a player constructs a building it becomes a new space on the board for everyone to visit – ownership of that building provides an additional effect when someone goes there (As well as a few points – each round 1VP is added to each unbought building, of the 3 available, such that even a less-attractive building becomes worth it eventually).

After players have placed their worker for a turn, they may complete a quest. Each player starts with 2 quests face up in front of them, and if at this point they meet the requirements, they can pay those resources back to the supply to gain the reward for the quest. This is the primary source of points in the game, so completing lots of quests is important to have a chance at victory. Also, each player has an individual character card that provides additional points for certain tasks, which for the most part are along the lines of ‘gain 4 points per X or Y quest completed’, X/Y being a quest type, of which there are 4 in a presumably even distribution.

Asides from the intrigue cards which throw various spanners into the works (Such as ‘all other players return a wizard to the supply, gain 2 coins for each that cannot, or ‘discard a building and replace it with one from the builders space at no cost’), that’s about it!

In our game, I played an ugly character called ‘miirt the moneylender’ (Which is hidden till the end, so I didn’t see the others long enough to remember them), which meant I’d get 4 points per piety or commerce quest completed. That was fine as I started with a commerce plot quest (Plot quests give less points, but provide ongoing abilities) to have something to go for for my first game. I rushed this as quick as I could, as well as taking first player to try and get a building down (Which got ruined by the cursed ambassador…as everyone in the game will attest to, I disprove of that). The plot quest meant for the last 5/6 rounds I got 1 of any adventurer at the start of each round. Ian also completed a fairly early plot quest, letting him place a worker somewhere even if it was blocked (Once/round I think). Despite sitting next to Steve I barely know what he was up to, but he seemed to get nice early lead on points.

As we got a bit further into the game, I finally got a couple of buildings down, one to gain 1 coin/building out and one that let someone use an occupied action as if they’d placed there. Steve had a pretty nice one to pay 2 coins and gain 4 fighters/rogues in any combination. Ians included the cursed ambassador one aaaand I don’t remember what else anyone had. I was able to pick up/complete a second plot quest that let me gain a rogue every time I used an action to gain money, as well as mildly annoy Steve by replacing the ‘use an occupied spot’ building with a VP-generating one, which was generally because I think it was giving everyone else way more points than it was to me. I also did a nice quest that cost lots of stuff but gave me 25VP in one go, catching me up to Ian/Steve who were steaming ahead.

As we came into the endgame, despite being quite spread during play, the 3 of us on higher points ended fairly close, while Stan unfortunately dropped back a fair amount (Which is odd, because there didn’t seem to be anything particularly wrong with what he was doing, with him finishing just as many quests as the rest of us). Ian won, with Steve in second and myself in third.

I think it’s a pretty well designed game, but I really struggle to appreciate the theme and that’s a bit of a problem for me. Rather than feeling like I’m going around hiring adventurer’s to go on grand quests, it’s just a bit ‘I get some purple and white cubes, then turn them into VP (What happens to them…I send them to do stuff and they just disapear, with an arbitrary ‘points’ value in return). I still had fun, and I think the game is well made, but without more thematic mechanics or at least wizard-meeples it’s just ‘ok’ for me ^^. Glad to have had the opportunity to play though!

Voluspa

Afterwards, we looked to play something shorter, and someone pointed out Voluspa that I’d bought along so we went with that. I talked about it a bit more last week so I won’t repeat, but suffice to say it’s a tile-placement/hand-management game where you’re trying to score the most victory points.

After I got explanation out of the way we jumped into playing with little issue. It’s not really a game I can explain what happened in, but I did make quite a mistake with a valkyrie I placed when I could have done better things, and saw a couple of good moves after placements at other points in the game. We were playing with 1 of the expansion tiles (The included expansion, saga of edda. I’m adding 1 tile/game to see how they change things) – hermod. This tile gives you a second-turn after placing, but can be difficult to score as it’s a value of only 3. I quite like the effect they’ve had, although I only got one near the end of the game by using a skadi, just because I wanted to try it out and was losing anyway ^^.

Final tally had Steve winning, with Stan 2nd, Ian 3rd & myself trailing in last place again. I’m not 100% sure of Steve/Stans thoughts of their first game of this, but Ian commented (I think, maybe I’m imagining it) that a second play does indeed improve on your feel for how things are going – although seeing as I was last and he was 3rd, I’m not sure how convinced I am that it helps (I’m still not sure if its’ just a case of 4 being too many to strategise much – I think 3 could be a sweet spot as with many games. Would still happily play with 5 though).

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Anyway that’s all for this week, I hope I wasn’t too vague (Although I was pretty airy-fairy with talking about Voluspa again ^^). Till next week! =)

On Saturday night I invited a friend over to join me, Grace & my housemate Ken to play some board games. It was quite late already, but the only different that made was that we had a few beers over the night ^^. I wanted to introduce people to something new, so while Grace has played it plenty, I went with Ticket To Ride: Europe, as while it’s a very well known gateway game, it’s not one that Ken or Handy had tried yet, and I recently got it in a trade so wanted to give it a play!

Ticket To Ride: Europe

The Ticket To Ride series are set-building route-claiming games, where players vie to fulfill ‘destination tickets’ that are drawn at the start of the game, by drafting sets of coloured train cards to then play in sets of colour to take individual routes on the board. If a player manages to reach the start and end point of a destination ticket, then at the game he/she receives the

number of points shown on the card, if he/she doesn’t fulfill those requirements, then they become negative points against his/her score. Each turn a player can either claim a route by discarding a set and placing his trains on the board (Each player has 44, game ends when someone is down to 2 or less), takes 2 cards from the 5 available face-up, or random from the pile (Or only 1 if it’s a rainbow wildcard faceup) or takes an additional 3 destination tickets, of which he/she must keep at least 1 (Even if they can’t complete it).

I quickly got the game taught and we jumped right in. Then right from the start whatever Ken was trying to do made a big mess of how I planned to do my routes, as he filled 3 of the 4 ways out from Athina, one of the destinations for my longest route (Forcing me to go a longer way around), which had also been a convenient place to go through for a secondary route, which also had to get re-planned. Handy/Grace both had routes along the other side of the map entirely, making a large chunk of the game feel a bit like a pair of 1v1 battles, with it feeling like Grace/Handy had the advantage with their getting in each others way less. To complete my other secondary I’d kept of 3 destination tickets, I had to go across to their side a bit, and found myself blocked twice from the destination of it that end making me need a station to reach the endpoint (Stations are a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free in ticket-to-ride europe, as they count a second of route that you’ve not actually got trains on for destination tickets, but if you don’t use them [You have 3] then area worth 5 points each at the end of the game). My routes overall were so haphazard to get around blocks that I then needed another station to do the other end of that same secondary route.

At the end of the game, I actually got quite a lot of points as while I’d done it in a ridiculously haphazard way, I had more trains down than everyone else and had ended the game too early for at least one person (Handy needed 2-3 more turns to finsh up routes). It wasn’t quite enough though, with Grace taking a tidy lead and victory by completing everything she’d be given, as well as having the longest route (Another TTR:Europe thing, person with the longest continuous track gets +10 points).

Eldritch Horror

After TTR, we jumped into a game that Ken requested to be played – Eldritch Horror. In Eldritch Horror we play a team of investigators travelling the world to find a way to prevent the awakening of one of the great old ones. In some cases it’s possible to still win even if they awaken, but on this occasion we chose to fight Azathoth, which is to say a foe so powerful that his awakening is an instant loss – He’s also the easiest to beat however, as while we would never beat him in combat, he’s easier than the others to prevent from awakening in the first place, at least within this board game he is ^^.

A game of Eldritch Horror is played over a number of rounds, each consisting of 3 phases. The number of rounds is defined by the great old one you’re going up against, both in a strict limit, and with a ‘doom’ track/timer which upon hitting 0, has the old one awaken and probably destroy the world (Some can be beaten still, such as Shub-Niggurath, but the game ramps up in difficulty a ton at that point so unless you were about to win anyway, it’s probably ‘gg’ time ^^). The 3 phases are the action phase, encounter phase and mythos phase. In the action phase each investigator/player takes 2 actions (Rest, Travel, Acquire Assets, Gain Tickets, Other) to get into position and prepare for the encounter phase. The encounter phase is where things happen and dice are rolled, each player in turn draws an encounter card depending on where they are and what’s on their space (Or fights monsters first if there’s any on their space), then reads the text on that card, rolling for any checks as asked for on the card. Finally there’s the Mythos phase, where the game-timer ticks down and some effects happen based on the Mythos card drawn (Such as monsters spawning, clues spawning, epic monsters turning up, ongoing effects, etc) – The lead investigator token (1st player) is then passed to another investigator (Optionally) and the next round begins.

In our game, I was playing Charlie Kane (Asset-Acquiring hacks), Handy played Ronan Dex (Sea Hacks, disclaimer – Ronan is not the characters actual name), Grace played Spell-Person and Ken played a Spy…I’m shocked at that last one, truly. Our team worked well throughout the game, as I was able to get some good items to people (Including the double-barrelled shotgun which is awesome for combat), Grace did a good job of getting clues and working on the mysteries, Handy became artifact-man, getting both a lightning gun and the sword of saint jerome (That luck ^^) from his seafaring adventures and Ken well, played somewhat jack-of-all-trades.

While everything seemed to be going great, halfway to completing the second mystery we had an unfortunate research encounter that got our solved one shuffled back into the deck. This was quite a setback as it was already late (1 or 2am I think at that time). This might have been ok, but Grace’s character ran into a slight utter-lack-of-sanity issue, and we decided to leave it there to go and sleep. I think that if we’d have continued we could have won, so I’m going to call victory on this one. Hopefully next time I decide to hold an impromptu games evening I sort it out at a more reasonable time!

Paperback

The Morning after…Um, well, The Midday after, I sorted out a cooked breakfast for us all (Plus Ruth, another of my housemates), before suggesting another game before people filtered off for the day. My initial suggestion was Voluspa, but I got overruled with a request to play Paperback from Grace, backed up by Ruth who I’d talked to about it too – I’m glad for that as it’s an awesome feeling to have people say what they’d like to play instead of feeling like I’ve forcing games on them ^^. We got it set up, to a few confused looks as to the fact this game is well, a bit outside-the-box, and I explained how it works – which is blissfully simple – to be ready to get started.

My strategy for the game was to um…er…I really can’t seem to work out the best way to play this one to be honest! In the end I went for an attack-card focus, more in response to Handy picking up an attack card first, and partly as I never seemed to get an opportunity to grab card draws. Handy managed to get a lot of card draws on the other hand, having huge hands for a large chunk of the game, Ruth/Ken just did as best as they could with it being their first time (Handy’s first time with it too..but damn he’s lucky ^^), and Grace just did what she could with some words I’d never heard of (Which were still legit…Grace’s knowledge of random words scares me ;D). The game went on a bit longer than it has before, with people not really rushing for victory point cards overly much and long words being fairly few and far between – Ken decided he couldn’t be bothered to play it out and stopped playing because he couldn’t win so we pushed for an end soon after, doing a mild bit of cheating to get a 10-letter word from a large hand he’d managed to get. I left things a bit late to get victory point cards so had very few in my deck, so Handy got victory, Grace in second then I don’t remember the positions of the last 3 of us (Think I might have been 3rd, I did get one of the long words to Handy’s 3 -_-).

I think everyone had fun (Maybe not Ken, who seemed pretty annoyed at not being able to compete for whatever reason :S), which is good overall, as I think it’s a brilliant game I like to play, and in Ruth’s case is one of the few games I have that appeals ^^. I don’t think I’m ever going to win unless I really up my knowledge, but to be honest I’m totally cool with that as it’s an enjoyable experience ^^.

Voluspa

With Ken/Ruth having retreated to their rooms, I suggested one more game while Handy was in earshot – Voluspa. As I mentioned, it was going to be my first suggestion but got overruled, but I wanted to play anyway as it’s a more recent acquisition (Through trade, hooray ^^). Voluspa is a tile-laying game, with each player having a hand of 3 tiles, taking turns to place them adjacent to any already in play to try and score points. Each tile has a number from 1-8, with the 1-6 tiles having special abilities to work with for scoring points. To score, the tile you placed must be the highest in the row/column you’re checking (I.e. the 7/8 tiles don’t need an ability as they can probably score anyway ^^). The game ends when everyone’s tiles and the draw stack runs out, at which point the player with the highest score wins.

I don’t think there’s any way I can really go through how out game went, as it’s very tactical and abstract, but it was fairly close in the last few turns. Unfortunately, the last opportunity I got for enough points to nip into the lead got locked, as my placement to set up for a Loki tile fell through when Grace also turned out to have a Loki tile in hand, (Loki being a 1 value, but who makes all adjacent tiles worth 0). Grace managed to take the win, and on the last turn Handy slipped past me as I just didn’t have the right tiles remaining to get a decent amount of points with the layout of the tiles already out. Fun game, and I look forward to more plays to come, as well as to getting comfortable enough with play to put the included expansion tiles back into the game (We included them in our very first game, but 12 different tiles to think about is a bit much for the first few games I think). Still…looking forward to eventually having them all in play, as well as with the order-of-the-gods expansion and lightning tile promo…I think this game will be worth all the extra stuff ^^.

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Right, that’s all I have to talk about for the moment. I had a brilliant easter weekend with my girlfriend & friends, including the games above, lots of League of Legends, a cinema visit to see Amazing Spider Man 2 (Which seemed like an experiment in cramming 4-5 films into 1 film) and Tv/Food/etc besides. Good times!