Reprint of Seven Masters vs the Underworld is available NOW. It’s an absolutely essential expansion if you want to use the Seven Masters (the best new faction IMO) and great for everyone else (Big Bruiser PAP!).
Also, online play will be available via LackeyCCG soon. Great news for everyone that moved from the nerd kingdoms to hipsterville or the sticks…
We made it. Great to see everyone that was in town for the week between Xmas and New Years and we had a bit of a gaming deluge, though it cost a shocking amount of sleep to pull off. I’m hoping someday in the future the fruit of my loins learn how nice it is for them to sleep in. When you’re thanking your lucky stars that you don’t have to get up until 6:30AM on a day you have off, that’s pretty sad.
Yesterday was our first annual Cosmic Encounter tournament on New Year’s day. We had 9 players and split into two tables, the winners of which moved on to a final at the champions table. The first two games had two shared wins so the final was a four person instead of five.
The final was Tripler, Fungus, Bully, and the Mercenary. The Fungus won the day with an attack on the Bully with four huge stacks of fungaloided ships. Appropriately, Fungus was played by the notorious JP Duvall. He shared a win in the preliminary and then convinced everyone in the final that they should only try to win it alone and only he was able to pull it off. Hopefully everyone had fun and had good eats and got to talk a lot of trash. I thought we should have a best of the worst game for the losers, but we ended up playing Dragon Lairds instead.
Today was Warhammer madness. I got in a 3 man game with my beastmen vs the Vampire Counts and Lizardmen at 3000 points per side which meant I had to put every model I owned on the table (so many still sadly unpainted). We rolled ‘Battle for the Pass’ so the board was cramped like craze with no real flanks to speak of. My beastmen ambush was useless, but I managed to pull out a win due to a very very stubborn and extremely pissed off Gor unit that started 50 in number and ended the game with a mere nine after trashing a unit of Blood Knights, a Skink/Kroxigor mixed unit and some grave guard that were ineffective on the flank. The highlights of the game include both of my ‘flanks’ evaporating as beastmen ran away at the sight of Chaos Hounds being spanked in combat, the Stegadon getting sucked down into a Pit of Shades (after the dispell dice came up one short!) and Skinks taking out a razorgor and my Giant in the same turn (gahhh!). Lord Lobo may post a battle report so I don’t want to go into too much detail but it was quite a butchers bill. After 10 games or so with the Beasts, my tactical advice is to–no matter what–get stuck in as fast as possible– don’t mill about at all, and don’t let a few units of zombies get in the way– if you hit tarpits– HIT them and move on. The beasts insane close combat prowess will likely carry the day if you can get them into touch. If your opponent feels like they were randomly punched in the face on the bus when playing your beastmen, you’re doing it right.
Richard Garfield. A wealthy man, living the dream of all game designers everywhere to put out something that just PRINTS money for the publisher. He did it and I won’t besmirch Magic the Gathering one bit because without it we wouldn’t have Shadowfist or Jyhad and probably would not have had the sexplosion of boardgames we have today.
You’d figure a guy like this would just buy an island somewhere with the proceeds off his black lotuses alone– but he didn’t, he kept cranking out games left and right, and none of them were bad– just nothing like Magic in terms of making the greenbacks. Jyhad is superior in everyway to his first CCG for multiplayer, and I would rather plow through the rules again for a game of Netrunner with starter decks than play Magic. However, these were CCG’s in the same vein as his blockbuster and with the deluge of CCG’s at the time, who needed them? It wasn’t until Roborally that he moved into the boardgame region– and that’s a great game. Now decades later we get what is essentially a spin on Yahtzee with a lot of rolling of the dice: King of Tokyo. I was more than a little confused to see his name on the box, what with the kawaii style illustrations along the lines of Small World and the like– and a dice game of all things!
I’ve only gotten in 10 games so far (my absolute minimum before writing a review) and that said, Mr. Garfield knows what he’s doing and he’s put out what I think could be the best game of 2011.
The chrome is all about monsters tearing all sorts of shit up in Tokyo ala King of the Monsters or Godzilla Final Wars (an awesome film that has to be seen to be believed). Each player picks one of the arch-typical monsters (a Godzilla clone, King Kong type big ape, a giant crab, etc.) and takes a very well made stand up/illustrated figure and slaps it in front of him along with a cardboard piece with a couple dials in it for scoring (Victory Points and Health). All of the monstrosities are exactly the same with the exception of the names and aesthetics. As you will see below, the game starts symmetrical, but becomes asymmetrical as the players play the game. The board itself has only two spaces, Tokyo and Tokyo Bay. With 4 or less players, Tokyo Bay is not used so essentially the game has a board with a single space! The goal of the game is either take out all the other monsters by reducing their health to zero or getting to 20 victory points first. This is accomplished by sitting on the Tokyo space at the beginning of your turn, having another player concede Tokyo to your monster after doing damage to them, scoring sets on the dice or by purchasing power up cards that give VP’s (such as a bullet train or a bunch of tanks). The game comes with a deck of cards that consists of a mess of zany stuff– most of the fluff and crazy mechanics are here–and four are laid out for purchase at all times by any monster with enough power points (little green cubes).
Each players turn consists of rolling six huge dice that have different icons on each side– one is an attack that will do damage to all creatures not in your current location, one gains health (not in Tokyo though) one gives power points with which you can buy power cards and a set of 1, 2 and 3 that when rolled in a set of 3 give that many victory points. So if a player rolls three 1’s they get one VP. Players get two rerolls of any of the dice after their first roll and after the final reroll, must take the actions shown on the dice (you cannot choose not to attack for example). Attacking hurts Monsters inside Tokyo if you are outside and ALL the monsters outside Tokyo if you are inside. Once the dice actions are complete, players can buy the power cards with available power and then the turn passes.
The rerolls are where the decisions start to get interesting. Players have a lot of control, not so much over what they roll, but what they don’t want to use. So when you sit down to a game you can think– I want to try X tactic this time, such as set collecting, holding Tokyo or powering up my monster. Set collection is a very viable way to win the game, as well as simply going for as many power points as you can get and buying up VP’s. Since there is a lot of interaction between players, nothing you do is in a vacuum.
The first time I played I found it odd that the monsters were all exactly the same, but this is where some of the genius of this design shines through– as you play the game, you get to build up your beastie using the power cards to the creature you want. As the game goes along, each monsters starts to have stuff that it alone does– such as hitting all other players with it’s attacks or shrinking the other monsters down to a squashable size, etc.
There are some terrible translation problems on quite a few of the cards (this was originally a French game) but if you play in the spirit of the rules these are easily figured out. I do mean terrible though so watch the card text closely the first few times you play.
That said, this is not a heavy game, but I absolutely refuse to agree with reviewers that call this the damning “light filler,” I have had nights where we played only this game and it was a shitstorm of awesome monster smack talk and derision. Certainly it’s not Wallenstein or Blood Royale, but how often can you bust out something heavy like that and have it play well with all the chatter and drinking that goes on in a typical board game night? Not very often: while King of Tokyo can be busted out in 5 minutes and played in 20-30 (some games are even shorter).
Two for two after last night in the not-often-played Shogun, I hearby proclaim Scooter J Mclintock the official Shogunt.
It was a harrowing game, played to distraction while 13 Assassins (and later super troopers) played in the background. While Graham and I fought for table scraps in the periphery, scooters legions of samurai held all of central Japan while a brutal winter raked across the land, peasants went into revolt eliminating a province containing a Fortress, No Theater and a Temple. Now all that’s left for the rest of us is the living in shame.
As the actual Xmas days don’t count as vacation by any stretch of the imagination with all the madness and chaos and driving around, so today is the first day of my official holiday. I was up until 1AM getting in a game of Starcraft the board game–only my third or fourth play so I was up inside the rulebook most of the time– while the game has all these FF patented fiddly bits, the combat system is excellent. Four hours later I’m still up with the kids who were right on schedule screaming and crying at 5:30AM. After I get some sleep, I’m going to drum up some nerdery interest and try to get some painting in between rounds of KOF 13– that’s right– finally SNK’s masterpiece of punchery fell into my craven little hands from Santa Claus– while KOF 12 was all stripped down, 13 has all the extras you want on top of it’s already excellent fighting engine. I started playing straight away online and cheered after seeing King’s clothes rip off (I was using King and I lost of course) like earlier (MUCH earlier) KOFs. Now, I don’t want to be a sexist pig here, especially with KOF that has it’s share of cute little man-boys for the girl-otaku to pine over, but fighting games are all about the cheesecake at times. As silly as the clothes ripping off is, what’s indicative by little touches like this means SNK was confident enough in the engine an the rest of the game to throw in these extras. Well enough about KOF– except that you should get it. Fair warning: if you care about your Xbox rep, do not play online right away as the Japs will rate you a 1 if they play you and don’t feel you’re good enough.
I also got the second Legends of the Old West supplement (Blood on the Plains) from MAAT who will now have to suffer some old west miniatures gaming for his trouble tracking that fucker down.
As of last night I am officially on Xmas vacation. This means GAMING. I got in a game of Agricola and Dreamblade last night with my buddy JP who has the pleasure of having worked quite a large chunk of the last few years on that little game we call Skyrim. I pumped him for information which he was happy to give since the game was OUT– a far cry from last year when we couldn’t get him to say anything about this new ES game.
It looks like we’re going to get in on the most vicious of all games during the off week: Republic of Rome and try out the new fangled (not that it hasn’t been out for awhile) Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition. What’s more, a big game of Cosmic Encounter is in the works as well. I promise to post something stupid every day about what ever sort of nerd crap we are all doing. I know I will be trying to plow through my beastmen army, but I started getting an interest again in EPIC 40K and pulled out all that old stuff to give it a painting improvement before hopefully getting in a game. If anyone wants to read a run down of the sad epic (pun intended) of this failed game: read here. It wasn’t because it was not a great design, it was because no one would give it a chance that played the old version.
As for useless and redundant blog posts, I also want to give a run down of 2011’s games that were great and those that were disappointments. We have had the greatest deluge of AAA class titles in human history this Fall, and there just won’t be a year like this for probably another decade.. but I digress. Vacation. Nerdery. Drinking. Yes!
I’ve had to read the snow white golden book probably 50 times in the last few months. Here’s the GenX revision:
It’s ironic to see all the movies around fairy tales get gruesome and scary while any book (re)written for kids will be 100% politically correct and won’t even have threats of torture or death or being eaten– even though almost EVERY children’s story from the ancient times (and not so ancient) is all about the threat of kids being eaten as that’s the point of the lesson! “Childe–don’t act this way or you will be EATEN.” What else would they bother to remember or consider using their 3 second attention spans to ponder?
Fantasy Flight is going berserk with new game announcements this fall– and this is an absolute shocker, first because it’s so obscure and second because it’s not the best old game out there by far:
I played this once in 10th grade and I have to say, aside from the ridiculous 80’s setting, that was plenty for me. There’s apocryphal and there’s “apocryphal”… However, it’s good to see the MB big box (Game Master Series) games getting some love. Shogun/Samurai Swords came out again as IKUSA and both Axis and Allies and Conquest of the Empire are still in print. With this game FF can really do no wrong with the development of the game– they’re not going to have a legion of fans complaining about how it deviated from the original with Fortress America as it wasn’t all that great. You can really see FF’s Petersen reliving his childhood via these old rehashed games though, and since I’m just a few years younger, I can get behind it!
FF just released a smidgen of details for the up coming Cosmic Alliance expansion.
Races for sure in: Gorgon, Schizoid, Animal (new), Cyborg (I think new too). I’m going to dig out my Mayfair version tonight to review the aliens I think will be in this new expansion. I’m hoping for SILENCER above all as that is a doozy of a power. While it has pieces for another player, what’s best about this expansion is what it does not have in it: LUCRE. Lucre is essentially Cosmic Encounters version of money/trade goods and it made playing with ‘everything’ in the Mayfair expansion a tower of suck. By this time with the FF version we have tech, we have hazards– so the designers were probably reaching for new stuff to put in (obviously they have tons of aliens to choose from) and lucre was undoubtedly on the list of considerations. Here’s to the designers for not putting that in the game!
What’s sad is we have only played four times this year…