Category: Cardboard

Board Games and the like

1985 Warrior Knights – don’t sleep on this one bros

Why do we play board games? It’s a question I’ve rarely asked myself or group as it’s been so ingrained in my hobby time that it really needs no answer at this point other than “because we do.” Yet, I think the WHY is all about creating the dynamics of conflict within an explorable system that is outside the realm of any real conflict. Of course, Cormac McCarthy put it better in the words of the Judge:

“Men are born for games, nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself, but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents, and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principles and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth, all games aspire to the condition of war, for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.”

Yet a lot of games these days aren’t about conflict at all, they are more like a knitting circle where people sit around for awhile and then show what they made (I did not make this up, there’s a meme around that I got this from). Root and other games like it pushed against this trend hard, but for a long time, there were tons of games with actual ‘dudes on a map’ conflict. With that, let’s talk about Derek Carver’s 1985 classic Warrior Knights, later redeveloped completely by Fantasy Flight into their version. Both are good representations of design ideals of their time (1980s, early 2000’s respectively), the 1985 game especially so.

To start with, I have huge respect for Carver who has given several telling interviews about his design process. He simply made games and played then every week at his house with friends. Games like the ones he wanted to play did not exist (1970’s and 1980’s), so he just went and made them, not to fill a gap in published games (like area-control deck builders after deck-builders were a thing) but just to play. People that came to his house spread the word about some of these games (like Durance Vile which later became GW’s Dr. Who and if I was to guess, influenced Dungeonquest and Talisman in no small way) and some of these folks were at Games Workshop and asked to publish them. Carver did not make games to shoot out the door for publishing and hit some market, he just invented games and played them– a lot. It wasn’t playtesting, it was just play. This is quite a difference from what happens when I go to protospeil events or playtest with friends to the point where personally I will never ask anyone again ‘do you want to playtest a game for me’ but rather ‘would you like to play a game I made?’

After a long time of owning the game (almost 8 years!) I was on a Warrior Knights kick (the Fantasy Flight version) and wanted to do a comparison, so I dragged out Carver’s Warrior Knights and I was shocked even while learning the rules: the game is the absolute antithesis of modern board game design with the following aspects that HORRIFY modern gamers:

  • very long (3+ hours) with an emphasis on the +.
  • potential player elimination (people can come back, but they are weakened badly)
  • insanely random events that can wreck not just the leader, but any of the players, which cannot be avoided when they happen
  • A political phase with tons of negotiation that is central to player advancement /victory in the game
  • Stealing cards from other players both via voting and on the battlefield
  • Requires pencil and paper for various things in the game
  • Has a combat CRT using a single D6
  • You can trade money and cards back and forth between players at any time

What was amazing is that despite everything listed above, everyone had a total blast. The rollercoaster this game generates is absolutely insane. For example, I sent my noble with the biggest army I had to Acre to do a little crusading for cash. All was going well and the siege of Acre was well underway. An event showed up that targeted my noble, but I though ho ho! he’s outside the normal map, but as it turns out, a peasant that noble had somehow offended had snuck onto one of the ships and murdered him in revenge, dissolving my biggest army in an instant. My only benefit was to be able to use that as a wedge to get people to attack someone other than me, or help me with votes in the Assemble. Broken-wing style players can constantly complain about bad events they got to get sympathy votes politically, and people to ease up on them in military conflict, people can sneak in stronghold attacks on unsuspecting players, players can be voted off the island in the Assembly phase and watch while their barony is schralped out by vulture players.

Warrior Knights in action.

This version of the game accomplishes this with few rules, and what rules there are, are usually quite simple. It is absolutely possible to pick up the rules in the first turn of the game and have a decent chance of winning against experienced players because like few other games of this depth, the rules get out of the player’s way so they know what their choices mean.

A few weeks later, I got a 5 player game and while longer, it was also really quite excellent, though one of the players’ goals was to end the game as quickly as possible so went around and razed as many cities as possible to reduce the win conditions. This reduced incomes to a trickle, forcing the massive legions of the mid game to dwindle to shells of armies.

So this is definitely going into rotation and I am amazed there isn’t a modernized (components, cards, board) version out there of this.

I should have bought this in the late 1980’s or at the latest 1990’s and played, a lot. I blame the entire state of Florida for this oversight on my part.

Townsfolk Tussle – a frenemies co-op done right!

Ever since the very early Pandemic craze (not covid-19, the board game), I’ve known deep down that I hate co-op games. There’s something so incredibly lame playing what is essentially a SINGLE PLAYER GAME with a bunch of other people, especially those games where the goal is completely unified. It’s no longer a secret in these types of games (Pandemic, Zombicide, Spirit Island and all of their clones) that one player quarterbacks the entire table and no one has any fun. This is the antithesis of what I want a board game experience to be.

What started to break the mold were semi-coops like Betrayal at House on the Hill and especially Dead of Winter. The simple addition of player goals that may be concomitant to the overall goal, or maybe not, was the sweet sauce that the games needed, but so few clones of Pandemic took the time to do it correctly.

Enter Townsfolk Tussle, one of the meanest co-ops there is! At it’s core it’s a straight up boss battler like Street Masters or Kingdom Death, but with some nasty twists. All the players are trying to become the new sheriff first and foremost, but they have to not only outdo the other players, they have to make sure the Ruffians don’t stomp the town while doing so! Instead of last hitting the boss, players get objective cards to complete during a battle, each giving them points to become sheriff overall, but the player with the most objective cards completed gets the highly sought after Boss items (like Bort’s Face!). Sometimes you will go for a high point objective card, knowing it will be the only one you can get and you won’t get the boss loot this time, just so you are first in line for the sheriff hat.

This creates a situation where players will not only NOT quarterback each other, but will put the others in compromising positions during play in order to prevent them from fulfilling their objectives. If the players do this too much, the bosses can and will end the campaign. Woe to the player who had the 6 point card if they are the last townsfolk standing and the boss ends up winning…

I won’t go too much into the game-play but this game is very simple and clean, and I expected to be pretty bored by how simplistic it was but while the basic actions of the characters are not-complex, the insane terrain and totally berserk bosses (20 of them!) has made every battle so far just a real slap across the mouth.

If you like co-ops like Spirit Island, but know in your heart that it is a single-player game never meant to be played with 2+ players, give Townsfolk Tussle a long hard look.

2024 A year of stuff

Ah it’s Xmas break and I get to write about games that I liked and put a picture of Rebecca Bagnol yet again as by far the undisputed hottest chick on the entire planet. But first, the less important stuff, the games of the year and film, and books.

Board Games

For 2024 Arcs takes the prize but definitely not the base game, which is just goofing around with mechanics compared to the full game with Blighted Reach. The only reason to play Arcs base game is to prepare you for either a one off or campaign game with the expansion. I am only three games in (full game that is) and I’m loving it. The gamespace with the imperials and the Fates is crazy, there is REAL negotiation which Oath was completely missing, you are not at each others throats from turn 1 and may well work together to meet each other’s goals, as long as you are getting farther ahead in power than the other player. Can’t wait to play more.

Video Games

2024 was a bit soft on the video game front compared to 2023, which had a ton of great games. This year there are two that stand out above the rest (that I had time to play). I’m getting a bit older and I just sort of want to play the stuff I know well with some exceptions. Give me Quake 3 and the original MOO and I’ll be… almost happy. That said, as predicted when it came out, my favorite single player game of 2024 was far and away UNICORN OVERLORD. I’m not even completely done with the game but it has been my go to for car trips and plane rides and sitting around time on the Switch (which my kids finally got tired of playing on after years of never seeing the thing). The art, the theme, the combat, the food porn and the incredibly depth you can go to equipping and setting the ‘programming’ for your battle groups makes Ogre Battle fanatics like myself blush with joy. That game and ‘Soul Nomad and the World Eaters’ paved the way to Unicorn Overlord being one of my favorite games in that genre, despite the fact that the main two characters are straight out of every generic anime game. I am a horny old goat, so the subtle (compared to Dragon’s Crown) and in some cases hilarious naughtiness of the female character’s outfits and bouncy/swaying just pushes this over the edge into fantastic land in addition to the hilarious food porn sequences. Vanillaware just went to 11 on the tactical and artistic aspects of this game. Overall, a total package that I will be playing for a long time.

Unicorn Overlord is a single player game though, and does not really encompass the full joy of personal computer or console gaming with frenemies. For 2024, the most excellent, frustrating and deep multiplayer game goes solidly to Solium Infernum.

SI is fundamentally Fantasy Flight’s Warrior Knights but taken to 11 in complexity with way, way too many options to even conceptualize into any coherent strategy as a new player. Yet with more plays, the daemonic flower of this game opens up and it is a thing of beauty and madness extraordinaire. I’m going to do a review of the game on here so I won’t wax and tax much more until then, but like Armello (by the same developers), this is a very strong PC Computer “board game” style game, made even better by having tick-based turns (where everyone turns in their turns to the server and then it runs the turns with the orders all in). It’s pretty fun to play against the AI, but they will lay a beat down on you if you don’t know how to play, which I appreciate greatly as it helps vs human players more than a poofter AI.

over time, you learn to whip the AI’s ass, even though it seems to cheat, which is fitting really.

Movies

This is so obvious it’s barely worth mentioning as it’s DUNE 2 for sure. I went to see it three times in the theater and it held up every time. I liked Terrifier 3 and the new Mad Max movie quite a bit, but neither hold a candle to the DUUUUUUNNNE. The first one had some dialog problems here and there that annoyed me, a few times the characters spoke a bit too 1990’s if that makes sense rather than ten thousand years in the future. I didn’t notice this much at all in the second installment. The key things for Dune 2 to pull off were the battle scenes and man they knocked those out of the park.

Books

I got stuck on a few books this year, mistakenly starting off the year with the poorly written Gideon the Ninth which I got for my daughter to read and wanted to check it out first. I barely finished and she set it aside after about 100 pages. I then went on to the excellent and horrifying ‘Thirty Years War’ by Wedgwood, then THE TERROR, which was probably the best book I’ve read in a long time. Give it a go (it’s better than the show, which was also quite good).

I re-read Good Night, My Sweet by Jim Thompson before starting Confessions of an Economic Hit-man, which is a solid read but really could use a complete rewrite. It reads like a self help book a bit with addons and addons and addons rather than a cohesive text. The core ideas and accounts are important enough to push through the whole thing. You can learn why so many countries despise the United States.

RPG

Tabletop RPG wise I only played /ran Dungeon Crawl Classics this year and I have no regrets! I ran Beneath the Well of Brass twice (followed up by Temple Siege) and in my kid’s campaign, the great little crime module from the Lankhmar line: No Small Crimes. Well of Brass is a great starter module as it has a lot of chances for a TPK, but if those are avoided it’s not super deadly.

FLUX AI

I spanned a lot of time learning FLUX and COMFYUI: how to write prompts, build out LORAs and generally do silly as things with it. Now in a pinch I could whip out an advertising campaign for just about anything with photos in about 2 days or less of jagging around with it. Of course, I’m using it for stupid stuff such as the following:

Hottest Chick on the planet, 2024

It’s the same again this year: le Bagnol.

2024: Bagnol’d.

Arcs – Leder Games takes it’s shot at Twilight Imperium and Eclipse

I have been waiting for Arcs since the kickstarter announcement with some trepidation after playing and being pretty lukewarm on Oath which was a fairly expensive game to which has been sitting for a long time on the shelf after a mere 4 plays. I can happily say after 4 games of Arcs that it was well worth the price and wait, especially with the Blighted Reach expansion. I have no idea if it will dethrone Twilight Imperium (or more importantly to our group, Eclipse), but I have some thoughts on this game after about 10 hours of playtime so far, discussions with the play groups (one group more dirty casuls and one as heavy as they can get).

Base Game

Arcs base game comes in a Root sized box and is moderately complex to learn a due to a player’s operations economy being controlled by a card bidding mechanism echoing Twilight Imperium’s role selection mechanic. At it’s core, players play a card from their hand to give them operations (stuff you can do with your pieces) for the turn, a lot like A Study in Emerald except that the first card played during a round effects the cards and operations that the other player’s can play for that round. There is NO trick-taking in Arcs, and if you read or watch a video where someone says that there is, they don’t know shit from shinola as we would say at the Sheepshead table. That said, players of Bridge, Hearts, Euchre, et al will see some similarities in the way cards are played but it is thin and more in the spirit of those games than anything mechanically borrowed. Operation types come in suits, and players must overplay the lead card in the lead suit played in order to get a full set of operations from that suit. For example, if someone plays a Construction card with a 5 on it, the other players must play a Construction card with a higher number, or have a reduced number of Construction operations that turn. Players can also play a card from another suit to get a single operation from that card during that round. While mechanically different with the lead, follow mechanic, it’s a bit like the COIN games where certain players that got operations cannot play any for the next turn or turns.

Victory points are scored by players who fulfill that hand’s Ambitions which, a bit like bids in Bridge, are selected by the leading players at some point during the hand. These include stuff like ‘most stuff blown up,’ ‘most enemy agents captured’ or some accumulation of resources over the other players. The fight over being the lead player is both to get the most out of your operations and to be able to select the ambitions you want to go for during the hand rather than the ones the others want to go for.

With all that, Arcs seems like a card game, but it’s not. The real game involves players running their operations, whether moving ships around and attacking, building stuff or controlling the various parts of the guild in a set of mechanics exactly like bidding for cards from Study in Emerald. The way the Ambitions work can allow long play combos that score massive points in areas the other players may have completely ignored earlier in the game.

My favorite part of the base game and where Leder Games really showed their smarts is the battle mechanic. Part of me thinks LG would like to go back to OATH and use Arcs battle dice instead of the Attack/Defense dice. In Arcs, only the attacker rolls the dice. They have three types to choose from: all out attack, raid and skirmish. Each one has some risk/reward that players have to mull over before rolling. All out attacking can do as much damage to your own fleet as to the enemy’s but you will hammer the crap out of them regardless of your own damage. Skirmishing has no risk to your ships, but has a good chance of not doing much and Raiding gives some ability to steal things from other players with some big risks. It’s a tough decision in the game to make and yet it resolves VERY quickly. Of all the parts of Arcs that are good, the dice combat is great.

Blighted Reach / Campaign game

with Dr pepper product placement….

While fun, the base game isn’t super compelling for me– it lacks the meat on the bone for this type of game, and isn’t a ‘smash everyone in the mouth quick’ game like Nexus Ops either. Base Arcs is also extremely reliant on the cards you get and can be very frustrating turn after turn when you just don’t have what you need to do anything and the other players do! it’s not like Euchre or Sheepshead where you get some bad hands but, if you play right, you can mitigate the damage. In base Arcs, a couple rounds of bad cards and you are going to struggle with cobbling together any type of points. It’s fun, but for the time it takes, I would rather throw down Root or Study in Emerald.

The base game IS a good base for Arcs’ massive and completely insane expansion, Blighted Reach. I’ve only gotten one game of this but it was between 4-5 hours long, so I got a solid feel for what this game has to offer in it’s full form. While longer, it is superior to the base game by a wide margin.

I love games where you do not engage with all of the mechanics of the game with a single or even a few play throughs (hello Bios Megafauna and Pax Renaissance!). Arcs has this in spades (trick taking pun detected). The expansion adds four major things to the base game: the Imperial regency/ fleets, the blight, event cards, and best of all: Fates.

The Imperial fleets and Regency which does not allow players to fight each other early game and taxes the game by sucking much needed resources from the Reach to the Imperium. I was quite worried about the complexity of this addition as there is a first Regent who has to run a set of operations in a little booklet periodically in the game and the activities and effects of the Imperial fleet seems pretty daunting at first, but it’s all plainly and logically designed. Since there are regents, of course there are rebels (outlaws) who can attack anyone anywhere (but don’t get the protection of the Imperial fleets).

Secondly is the Blight, which is some alien entity that spreads from planet to planet, much like the Amoeba in the old Amoeba Wars game from the early 80’s. This had very little effect in our game, but again, you do not see all the game’s mechanics in a single play through (or even a campaign).

Third are Event cards (gasp! is this really a Cole Wherle game?) that add the much needed roller coaster aspect to Arcs that was totally missing in Oath (and is not needed at all in Root). These can be mitigated pretty easily by the players, but when they fire off, they can do a lot of damage to everyone. They are triggered when a player plays an Event card from their hand and some dice decide whether the Regent governs the reach or an event takes place. Players have some control over whether the events happen most of the time.

Lastly are the Fate cards, which are most analogous to the Aliens from Cosmic Encounter but not only do they have different rules and cards, they have their own way to ‘win’ as that Fate through the entire campaign. At the end of a game (in the campaign) players “Resolve their Fates” and determine if they can (if they won their Fate’s goals) or want to continue with their original Fate into the next game or draw new ones. Where have I read the exact phrase “Resolve fates at the end of an Act before” ? Tenra Bansho Zero! If Leder Games wasn’t familiar with the Karma system in TBZ I would be uncannily surprised based on this part of Arcs.

Fates are the part of the game design where Arcs goes from a somewhat normal 4X space game with interesting mechanical flourishes into one of the most monstrous and insane games I’ve ever played. Each Fate has a path through the Acts of the campaign games that must be abandoned if the player fails to meet their Fate’s objectives, at which point they choose from Fates only available in later Acts of the campaign– and these are much more aggressive and dangerous Fates to the Reach AND the other players. So, if a sad sack of a player takes the high hard one from the other players in the game, you can bet they are going to come back with the nastiest Fate they can choose and anal-ly re-thread the occupants of the Reach as much as possible. The amazing thing about FATES in the first game of a campaign is that they can and will often have common goals and the objectives of one may compliment the objectives of the other. While under the thumb of the Imperium (or as outlaws too), players may work together to further their own goals as there is no winner until the last game of the campaign. One player may WANT another player to outlaw and attack the Imperium to free up some of those juice resources taxed away for Imperial use.

All that said, how does the game play? It’s smooth, has lots of interesting choices but for ‘modern’ game sensibilities, it’s extremely long (for older gamers, it’s not that long at all compared to some of the true monsters), and I won’t pretend the complexity level wasn’t daunting at first. You are not going to be able to get an Act (game) in a campaign on a school night unless you plan to start early and GO LATE. I think the fumbling over the rules in a group’s early games will be replaced with ANALysis paralysis and negotiation in later plays, so I would guess at minimum you are looking at 45 minutes to an hour per player. This length puts Arcs in a completely different realm than Root and Ahoy, and joins the mega-game zone like Republic of Rome, Twlight Imperium, Warrior Knights, Here I Stand/Virgin Queen and AH Civilization. I couldn’t be happier about that! With Arcs, we do not have a game that will compete with Root or Eclipse, both of which can be played in an hour and a half to two hours, nor with deeper but shorter games like Study in Emerald or Pax Renaissance that can be completed in about an hour with experienced players. If we bust out Arcs, it’s because we want to play a long, in depth game with a lot of player interaction.

So far after just 4 plays, Arcs base game is Ok, but with Blighted Reach, Arcs is a totally insane engine for a huge scope of play as well as a massive design accomplishment from Leder games. I cannot wait to get more games in. Time will tell if this hits the same spot folks want hit from Twilight Imperium, but I suspect we will be playing this game for many years.

Someone thought the El Grande marker was too smooth…

Divine Right Kickstarter!

What on earth!? This is a game I never, ever expected to get remade (yet someone did TITAN right?).

Divine Right is a fantasy game where you play as a kingdom and try to get neutral kingdoms to join your empire and then…. go and attack other players. The art and map was done by none other than Dave Trampier. We had this map on our wall as kids for about 10 years at least, and as recently as a few years ago we ran a campaign set in this ‘world’ (around the Port Lork area).

I have both the original version (or rather, pieces of it) and the 25th Anniversary edition which had cool stuff, but the WORST printed counters I’ve ever seen (even worse than Princes of The Renaissance which was just printed on cardstock!

Anyway here’s the new cover (looks awesome) and link below. It has a GIANT Neoprene map option.

Kickstarter Link

Armello the Board Game Kickstarter March 12

Armello has been a staple of online ‘board gaming’ for a long time now with it’s multiple paths to victory, tricks and traps and all sorts of various builds, the game is a strategic smorgasbord that can be completed in just over an hour most sessions. The actual board game version has taken WAY longer than I thought it would since it doesn’t seem like that difficult of a translation, and here it is! It also has a name that makes me hungry for chocolate items.

While I personally want to avoid backing more than a kickstarter or two a year, this looks like it could be most excellent. For people with bigger collections, think about what game this could replace?

2023: a Retrospective in consumable media

Ah 2023, a great year for gaming at least, even if looking at the news on any given day was a complete shitstorm. As expected, I’m fixing to go through my favorite games for this year both board, card and video variety as well as movies and favorite book (not from 2023). We were starved for choice in everything this year. If there’s an interest, here is my 2022 version and beyond

Board Games

The game we played the most this year, per play at least, was A Study In Emerald 2nd edition, which is just proving again and again to be one of the best multiplayer deckbuilders there is. I love Ascension, but Study In Emerald, if you can handle just a WEE bit more complexity, is just off the hook with replay value and backstabby fun in and hour and a half. There are still cards I’ve never seen before in play after 30+ plays and I still laugh when Cthulhu blows the shit out of London yet again. The game will be rehashed by CMON next year and we’ll see if that stands up to 1E and 2E of Study in Emerald. That said, the best game FROM 2023 is….

My favorite so far (I don’t get to play much, so something may have slipped by) is Stationfall. This is just a complete hoot to play and absolute madness. It has a high learning curve, so make sure that someone in your group really knows the rules. I’d love to get more plays of this, but it’s on the long side for game nights. Absolutely crazy game and goes against EVERY standard bullshit clone of Viticulture that is fills nearly every kallax game shelves right now.

Books

I did not read much this year, finishing only like 3-4 books. My favorite this year was my re-read of Treasure Island with the N.C. Wyeth illustrations. A profound romp through a fairly realistic story of pirate treasure. I kids book for sure, but I needed something light before I started in on the classic ‘The 30 Years War’ by C.V. Wedgewood.

Movies

I barely watched any films this year for lots of reasons, but two stand out, Godzilla Minus One and The Dungeons and Dragons movie. I didn’t see Sisu or a lot of other great films (well, probably great) including not seeing the French language adaption of 3 Musketeers, so I gotta give it to the D&D movie, which I’ve seen twice now and it holds up well, knows exactly what it is and has tons of Easter eggs for fans. I really never saw this coming, that D&D would be such a great cheesy trash film instead of just unwatchable trash. Make more please, a lot more.

This movie is definitely more 13th Age than 5th edition and folks should take note of that. Crazy set-piece battles > hide bound, balanced encounters with 100% predictable magic systems and bog standard combat effects. 5E and it’s ilk isn’t what you want in your games if you liked this film.

Video Games

This is a double game of the year, and it’s because both of these games are so incredibly different that I feel justified in deeming both the game of the year. First is, of course, Street Fighter 6. I’ve already expounded on the game, and I just can’t wait to play it more after I play it for awhile. It’s easy to pick up for beginners and while I play primarily locally, it has a solid online version as well. Absolutely top drawer– and again like the D&D movie, I never thought I would say this!

The second is a sleeper– Jagged Alliance 3. While I haven’t played Balder’s Gate 3 yet, I never really got into the RPG games all that much other than Temple of Elemental Evil, so I’m holding off. I know BG3 will be awesome, but having put about 20 hours into JA3 so far with MANY more on the horizon, JA3 is the GOTY for sure. It is EVERYTHING I have hoped for in a JA follow up title since 1999. These guys did everything exactly how they were supposed to and if you were a fan of the older games, you will be blown away– not at first, but within a few hours when you see how well everything is designed. I’m going to do a full review when I’ve finished the game so that’s all I’m going to say for now. Incredible.

Hottest Chick on the planet 2023

It’s the same as last year, was the same the year before that, will be the same next year: Rebecca Bagnol.

yep

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