Cardboard – Page 8

First Arcadia quest campaign complete!

Arcadia Quest is a monster of a game that tries to fit the glory of MOBA’s into a board game, and does a great job. The last month or so we secretly had a ‘meeting of the four’ so that we could play Arcadia Quest rather than something else for our board game night in order to push through and finish an entire campaign. Overall I think it was a good time, and it’s certainly a fun game, but a small issue both campaigns I’ve played was runaway leaderism. If you do well in the first scenario, you will be set up to do well in the second, etc. We ended up with two players that had very strong Guilds and two that did not. One of the weak guild players ‘won’ the game by doing the final strike on Lord Fang, but he had zero other medals and got the ‘middling victory’ description at the end.

The scenarios were generally good. Only one broke down into a complete slog as players tried to complete a final PVP quest to win the game. Guilds were able to stay away from each other enough to keep the scenario going long after all the monsters and treasure had been destroyed. That was a late night. The rest of the scenarios were short and fun (unless you were one of the players getting their ass kicked!)

So having played about 10 scenarios, including a full campaign, I have to say the game holds up well. It’s not my favorite game, and the first couple times I played I really didn’t like it at all due to the single activation per turn thing. Arcadia has grown on me but certainly not enough to back the new kickstarter. Like Talisman and Republic of Rome, it’s a good game to pull out every once in awhile, but once you start, you are in for a long, long haul to finish a campaign. It does fulfill a certain Necromunda/Mordheim style itch though…

Found Stuff – Necromunda! Man O’War!

Continuing plowing through a bunch of boxes of stuff, in addition to AT-43, I have a largish Necromunda collection squirreled away, apparently on the hopes that it will get someday played again. That said, back in the mid-90’s we really got into Necromunda (or so we thought), playing 20+ games with the gangs on an old Ping Pong table set up in our tiny 3rd floor apartment. As a any good Arbitrator, I desktop published a one-sheet after each week of games. The name of the the ‘village’ the gangs were fighting over was “Poop Town” which for years had lived in peace due to pretending there was a plague outbreak were now (in 1996) plagued with Underhive gangs! If I remember correctly we had Orlocks, Van Saar, Delaques, Cawdor, and the Goliaths. I have gang sets for all of these as well as a ton of Eschers (thanks mouth), plus Spyrers and even Arbiters.

Small blurbs had the following titles:

“Escher not raped by Cawdors” – Any time there is an all-woman gang and members get captured, it begs the question, what is happening to them right now? Since the Cawdors are ‘redemptionists’ they apparently have no interest in sexy female underhive residents with guns.

“Van Saar Deficates” – Since the Van Saar leader was taken out in the first turn of the game vs the Delaques, I decided it must have been while he was going to the loo.

The newsletter included advertisements for local brothels and a lot of phrases about hating the Delaque gang; the “G-Dawgs” which were played by Duvall. A lot of the stuff referenced the players could interact with in certain ways if they asked about it.

Frankly, these skirmish ‘grow your warband’ type of games are my favorite miniatures games. Starting with Chaos Warbands in college, then to Confrontation (the GW game that came out in White Dwarf) then on to Necromunda, Mordhiem and finally Legends of the Old West, which I have collected a ton of stuff for, but have yet to play the main issue being that you need more terrain than miniatures to make it interesting.

Necromunda is no doubt a great game and show the strength of the 40K 2nd Edition rules (that also went on to handle Gorkamorka). People can scream “Hero hammer!” from the rooftops, but that’s just what the core 40K evolved into.

And more ridiculousness. I have a big box of Man O’ War miniatures, rules and chits and have never actually played it. Got it for pretty cheap many years ago. You can see the fleets, I think it’s Empire, Elves and Nurgle with a bunch of sea monsters and flyers mixed in.

They’ve definitely been well cared for since I got them, EXCEPT, again that I’ve never played it. I think I snapped up the deal on account of some of my college friends cutting up and painting pieces of wood to represent ships just in order to play. The game (in 1993 or so) was just that good.

Esoteric order of gamers Blood Rage one sheet

The esoteric order of gamers /Universal Head put out a one-sheet of rules for Blood Rage.

They have LOTS of rule summaries for some very well loved and obscure games as well.

Worth checking out here.

Gamehole Con!

Matt and I made the trek to Gamehole Con yesterday in Madison, WI and it was a fine time. Due to no planning on my part, we didn’t get into any scheduled games, like the bolt action tournament or any of the 5E or other OSR RPG games. However, for me this was just a ‘check out’ year to see what it was all about, so walked around and painted stuff and I busted out BLOOD RAGE and got a few games of that in.

It is not a huge con, maybe twice the size of say Plattcon or Hooplacon. Yet it is a huge OSR con–there were tons of Dungeon Crawl Classics, Swords and Wizardry and other OSR stuff going on. If you count 5E as in the OSR style, the entire con was mostly OSR RPG’s. Absolutely there were Pathfinder games there, but they were in the minority.

We spent about 3 hours at the free painting table where I found an old Talisman Rogue and just had to paint the fucker. They had BOTH of the Kevin Dallimore painting books there was well, so I was able to pour over those. Matt got stuck on painting some sort of samurai and though he spent awhile on it, it was still not finished. The lady that runs it had a ton of great tips so highly recommended.

Matt about to explain why he had already lost the 5 player Blood Rage game.

Stuff I saw:

Tom Wham. He was running Feudality and Dragon Lairds at the con.
Lots of Bolt Action. The tournament brought at least 20 people playing. I should have brought my shit… (and painted it beforehand…)
Rob Heinsoo. One of the designers of 13th Age. He was running a game that we didn’t get into– needless to say it was sold out months ago.
One really fucking hot girl. No joke.

Otherwise it was extremely well run and organized. They really have their shit together and I will be definitely attending again. Likely I will run something next year as well.

BLOOD RAGE – a pretty awesome CMON kickstarter

So this was one that I had to absolutely back on account of Studio McVey (miniatures) and Adrian Smith (art). Regardless of the game design or how the fucker played, this was getting my cold, hard cash way up inside it.

Thankfully, after 3 plays, all of which I’ve lost badly, I can say that Blood Rage is a good game, I’m not going to say it’s great until I have near a dozen plays, but it’s good. Certainly it’s on part with Chaos in the Old World, and while that has a solid appeal and hasn’t gotten played enough, the miniatures alone make Blood Rage a clear champion at the moment.

First, the miniatures are shocking to behold and fun to play with. The plastic is tough and a bit bendy (not like say GW’s hard, easily paintable plastics) and I can’t imagine any of them breaking without something crazy happening. It is most excellent to slap down one of the big ass monsters when you play their upgrade (or later, when you fuck people with the Troll or Fire Giant) because the miniatures are so damn meaty. I finally opened all the monsters and with the exception of the wolf man, which is just OK, all of them are really awesome sculpts.

In terms of the clans, I have all but the Rams opened up. I like the Wolves and the Ravens best. Serpents (the female one) are also swell looking. When on the board, it’s all about the silhouettes and that’s where I think the Boars and bears get a bit muddled. Painted though, who knows, they will all look good.

Gameplay. This is the important bit as this could have just ended up as a game that sat on my shelf and looked good instead of something that got busted out frequently (as frequently as a game can with all the competition these days). It’s a very tight game. It feels very short, even though the games are just under 2 hours. You will feel the Agricola pinch as you just can’t get everything done that you wanted to by the end of the game. Battles are fast and decisive (first time you get your huge monster blown off to valhalla the same age you put them on the table is an eye opener and most importantly, can involve everyone in the game. Taking turns is relatively fast, though there is some brain burn that comes in during the 2nd and 3rd ages. In terms of turn-angst potential, I would say the draft part (that happens at the beginning of each age) will take the longest and with five players, it may be a very long drafting stage.

Strategically, I don’t have much to say yet. My first game I just middled around to little effect. The second game I went Loki as in, lose a lot, steal rage, steal honor, get points for your dead stuff and I still lost. The third game I went Frigga/Tyr and just destroyed everyone in nearly all the battles I was in. Yet I still lost! What I think is important is the balance across all things. You need to win battles, you need to complete quests, you need to get your clan stats up to the VP levels (think tech in eclipse) and you need to draft so your opponents can’t bust out with tons of points. Overall it’s a game that begs to be played, a lot.

So the kickstarter came with a ton of stuff. If you are buying this retail let me tell you straight that you won’t need anything except the base game to have tons of fun. All the extra monsters are great, but most games you will only see about 4-7 monsters out of the whole group anyway. The mystics are neat, but not essential. The GODS expansion is one I may be playing without going forward (need to play it more). Basically two of the gods occupy areas on the board and change the way battles are handled. I’ve only had Tyr and Odin on so I can’t comment on it much but it seemed a bit unnecessary. It may grow on me later though. The five player expansion is only good if you consistently have five. For me, based on our gaming group attendance, it was mandatory to have. The sixth clan, the boars, are simply extra, and you cannot play with 6 players with it (balanced at least) however the box comes with some neat minis that replace the counters in the game with the critical one being the token that shows where Ragnarok is going to hit next. This one is probably the least important to get.

All in all, it was one of the best kickstarters I’ve ever backed– I even followed the fucking boats as they made their way through the med into the atlantic and to Georgia…Blood Rage and those kickstarters like it, despite being almost pre orders, just prove that not everything is like Star Citizen or Exalted 3rd edition (ie – FUCKED).

TALISMAN – How much is too much?

This past weekend we played a long 4 player game of talisman in real life. One of the players, let’s call him Matt to protect the guilty, was new, and being a 4 person game, it took a long time. During and after the game, there was remarking about how much of a monster Talisman 4th edition has become and while 2nd edition became ‘fixed’ in about 1993 with the final Dragons Expansion, the Fantasy Flight version keeps going and going and going. This is a good thing but the question out of last night’s game was how many Talisman expansions are too much, not to own or to exist, but in actual PLAY during a single session? There’s nothing wrong with having and Fantasy Flight creating tons of expansions, but like Cosmic Encounter, we don’t play with all of them all the time and over time, with about 75 games of Cosmic under my belt, I can tailor the playset to what group of players I have*.

First, let’s talk about the boards. The boards are big and beautiful and take up ALL your table space. You cannot physically reach across the boards to move your character without being Kareem Abdul Jabar, and most tables can’t even fit the entire five-part board upon them. In terms of gameplay, the worry that I had with the release of the Highlands expansion; that players would be all over the place and not interact or attack each other, has come to pass in spades with both the City and the Woods boards added to the Dungeon and Highlands. The main board simply does not get much attention except in the beginning of the game or when someone is going for the win the standard way. What’s more, since the means of getting to the middle can be so crippling the normal way with the Vampire on one side and Dice with Death on the other, players nearly always opt to go through the dungeon board which means you can get to the middle WITHOUT a Talisman!

Due to the size of the world, spell casters (Wizard for example), with their ability to reach out and touch someone, have really gotten a boost because it’s easier for them to hit and not get hit back since the strength characters have to give chase all over the regions. One of the main strategies to win is to try to kill off players that may be a threat (like the Wizard, Prophetess, Alchemist as some examples) as an early high-strength character (like the Warrior or the Troll), but when players can run to all sorts of different boards from the outset, some of which are more balanced to the character’s power levels than the main board is, it’s tough to bring a character to ground without the correct items in hand.

Comparing this to 2nd Edition where there is a main board, a dungeon board, a city board and the Timescape board all off to the side and not connected to the main board (physically at least) a lot of the action still occurred on the main board. The city had brutal cards in it so was a get in and get out sort of place, and the Dungeon was so stringent with what you can take in there (no horses, horse and cart, horse FOLLOWERS and the like) that it was usually only used for escape. Timescape is very difficult to get into early game since there is only one way in via the enchantress in the city. Once the adventure cards start dropping, there are typically gates all over the place.

What I want to do is look at the most basic Talisman needed for fun play and see what can reasonably be added to that to make a fun game and not a huge chore to play. The only required sets are the base set and the Reaper expansion (whether or not you actually use the reaper in play is irrelevant, the cards that come with this expansion are essential), everything else I consider non-essential, not that I would ever play with just the reaper expansion and the base set! I’ll do a series of posts in the next month or so on what expansions add and which detract and dilute.

*(with some n00bs at the table, I use 4 planets per player, all the aliens and Hazard cards and that’s it, with experienced players we go 5 planets, throw in tech, satellites and everything else).

3 days before the Others kickstarter!

Given that Blood Rage hasn’t arrived yet it’s tough to back another CMON kickstarter so quickly, but The Others is looking like something special (and another Studio McVey, Eric Lang, Adrian Smith collaboration).

There was a HUGE poster for the game at Gencon 2014 but little else since and very little at Gencon 2015 so I thought it might be in limbo, but the kickstarter starts on Sept 10th. If you are fan of Eric Lang’s work (Chaos in the Old World, Blood Rage), this is one to check out for sure. Likely the price of entry will be about 80$, but because it’s kickstarter and you will get all the stretch goals when it gets funded, you may get double that in retail value (like Blood Rage).

Here’s a vid where Lang talks about it.

Here’s the piece of art that piqued my interest about the game at Gencon.

Blood Bowl 2 vid with Dark Elves

Everyone’s favorite team:

Shows the interface updates pretty well with the character cards. I really like those because you can see everyone’s stats right there and skills. If they were to come out with another board game version, cards like that would be GREAT to have.

September 22nd!

Chaos Warbands! First play since 1993!

Last Saturday, Mouth was in town and we dragged Dan and Amie into a 4-square of the old-school Chaos Warbands using 8th Edition rules and a mish mash of stuff from the two wonderful and awesome Realm of Chaos books.

For those that don’t know about these, they are absolutely essential to any gaming library, whether you play Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Warhammer 40K or none of them. You simply must own them both even if you have to pirate the PDF’s. Inside each are rules for the four major demons of the Warhammer world, plus rules to make your own, plus a kitchen sink of rules for all three of the systems listed above. These are both a MEGA supplement, one that these days would have had content split across 16-20 separate books.

What’s more, there’s a fucking GAME in these books that’s separate from all three games they supplement where you roll up a character and his warband and fight it out to get favor from the dark gods. I played this in college a bunch, probably 50 or so battles with multiple warbands and only one guy “won” the game with his champion becoming a minor daemon. The rest of us either got turned into spawn, or died in pools of blood and urea. And that was fun as shit.

My champion was one MAGROK ROCKSLIDE a chaos dwarf with FITS and a flail. Pretty weak to start except he was accompanied by a Dragon Ogre! After four battles, I ended up with a chaos weapon, four chaos spawn who gave people the evil eye, and eight beastmen. My spawn had 6 chaos attributes a piece and here is where the old Chaos warbands rules start to fray a bit. You can end up generating demon weapons, attributes, spawn inside other spawn that transform into other types of spawn longer than you end up playing out the fights! Now a bit of this is a ton of fun, and the randomness is one of the fantastic elements, but based on the recent play, there would need to be a cap on the amount of chaos attributes at least.

In addition to the chaos attributes, all entities in your warbands that get wounds have them applied individually. What this means is when you have a unit of beastmen or humans, you need to know which one has -1 toughness and which has a busted leg. This gets tedious as hell. More modern designs like Mordheim (which had it’s own terrible problems*) and Legends of the Old West, solve this issue by differentiating between Champions and minions. Minions are treated as a group and have less complex rolls associated with them.

Overall, it was a fun day of gaming. I only got four games in, and probably could have had a bunch more if I had just an hour or so more. I worked on an updated set for Mordheim ages ago (here is the PDF) and I think based on rumors of 9th Edition WFB being skirmish based, it may be a good time to rewrite them for 9th Edition in the coming year. Note, statements in the PDF are contradicted below. We learn stuff over the span of time…

*Mordheim is a fantasy game with swords and stuff should have a focus on close combat, naturally , and yet, it’s sci fi brother with lasguns and bolters and stuff, Necromunda, has much, much better close combat rules. I wouldn’t say Mordheim’s close combat rules are bad, I’d say they are terrible.

New Years Day Cosmic Encounter

For the second time in slightly more than two years, we’ve hosted a New Years Day Cosmic Encounter party– this involves recovering from hangovers by drinking and playing Cosmic Encounter as many times as possible. In both cases, this year was no exception.

We had 11 people this year so split into two tables of 5 and 6. One group played with a base set and one expansion (the one with the Hazards) and the second group played with nearly everything except tech and space ports. We had some cracking games, but my first game was the very first time I’d seen the Entropy Beast in action– it devours planets based on number of ships and a draw of a special card from the destiny deck. Once one player is down to 2 planets, the game is over and everyone loses. In most games that are player vs player, the fact that the board would suddenly ‘win’ the game would normally be a bit shite, but in Cosmic Encounter it’s really just par for the course.

Cosmic, again, shows it’s mettle as the best multiplayer board game in existence. We had at least three people that had never played before and they were able to jump right in among the mimosas.

Party like it's 20015! — Party like it’s 20015!