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.
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.
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…
Dragon Ogre vs Minotaur!
*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.
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.
Looks quite interesting, proceedurally generated maps, custom warbands and a spell system that has a chance of failing to cast. What I really liked is that it mimics the miniature game in that you don’t know if your guys are wounded, dead or OK until after the battle when they get taken out. It’s in pre-order at the moment for eventual early access on steam.
There is only one best board game in existence and it’s Cosmic Encounter. What’s more, the Fantasy Flight version is absolutely superb and everyone should have it and play it. That said, we can’t always get together to game in person, quite rarely actually, and while I played the current online version, it was really JUST the mechanics and is missing the biggest part– human interaction.
So I’m really quite excited about the direction the Cosmic Encounter iPad version is going. First, they’ve stated that they won’t have a game engine powering the game– the pieces will be there but the PLAYERS figure out what to do with it. That will free us up to handle all the crazy stuff, and they won’t have to program what amounts to an insane amount of edge cases that Cosmic Encounter would require. In fact, Cosmic is a game of almost ALL edge cases! Secondly the focus on Voice. It’s going to be key for Cosmic to be fun in it’s (near to) true form that players can wheel and deal, and a little text box just isn’t going to cut it.
Anyway, I’ve gotten fucking hammered with Kickstarters lately (Feng Shui and the 13th Age Glorantha Kickstarters) and a few of the video game ones I’ve backed have been failures (Planetary Annihilation is a great example) so I was a little hesitant– but this is the king of all board games and could be a great experiment in both implementation of a social game and the evolution of Cosmic.
Awesome shirt steve!I’m back from the con and it was good. I won’t be able to encapsulate my thoughts into a single post, and some of the topics DESERVE their own singular essays– so over the next few days I will try to decompartmentalize the madness. I was planning on posting DURING gencon itself, but other than the few pictures there just wasn’t time or sobriety to do so.
Topics up-cumming:
Hillfolk and the drama system experience
Sad news for Shadowfist
OSR stuff and Other RPG’s
Gencon Nightlife
Picture gallery
Random stuff that looked cool.
While reluctant to play with more than three, due to length, we got in a cracking four man game of Talisman last night– well cracking for some and a descent into madness and death for others (including myself).
This was the first time for the Firelands and print on demand Nether Realm expansions, so we picked one of the alternate endings from Nether Realm: The Hunt. The idea behind this on is that you have to destroy (and turn in as trophies) four Nether Realm creatures and then make it to the crown of command space in the middle. Seem easy? Unlike the very easy Warlock Quests, the Nether Realm cards are absolutely brutal. There are multiple cards that will kill you on certain turns of the dice, and man– the Goblin Baby is one of the best Talisman cards I’ve seen in a long time.
Needless to say, the game last night had the highest death toll of characters I’ve ever seen in a 4th Edition game– and that was with very little PVP. Monsters had much to do with these deaths, which is pretty rare due to fate points now in the game.
Late game, Scott had already lost 3 characters and was out of the running, Matt had lost the Magus and restarted as the Gladiator, and John had a very powerful Bounty Hunter gearing up for the win. At this time, I had a suped-up Valkyrie and just happened to land on the space where the Goblin Baby had done his work (ALL monsters from all regions go to that space). I defeated one of the monsters (the Lord Efrit who didn’t mix with the others we ruled) and then took on the strength stack (at strength 14). I had a pretty good chance of winning with some tricks, but in the stack was the basilisk. This is a strength 2 creature who rolls 2 dice for his attack. If it comes up doubles, your character is killed outright! Of course it was ruled that the whole 14 stack got to roll 2 dice and guess what came up? Box cars. We called it a night as the rest would have likely been John going to the middle for the win (he was at 10+ strength and craft). Great game. Need to play more!
The death toll: Barmaid, Sage, Magus, Valkyrie, Warlord.
Sacrilege, I know, but I hated Arkham Horror. Played once with 6 players and it was a fucking disaster mess that took forever and got nowhere. I was hoping every single turn that the game would be over. I’m not sure if it was the Fantasy Flight version or what, but it sucked… bad.
Since then I have shied away from the cooperative ‘vs the board’ type games like Battlestar Galactica, etc. just assuming they would try to emulate Arkham and be crap. While I did dabble on the iphone with the excellent FF created dice game XXX, that’s about it.
Now let’s talk about a Study in Emerald. It’s a Wallace game, so I’m biased a bit from the outset, but let me tell you this is a fantastic game that really turns both deck building (which are mostly all CRAP) and cooperative play vs the board into an extremely compelling experience of fuckery. Like Bang or various werewolf games, the players don’t know which side they are on at the beginning of the game and cannot know for sure until there is a reveal. Players must watch the other player’s movements in the game to determine which side they are on, and may take action with false or misleading information.
That said, this is not all mental fuckage, the game mechanics are extremely solid for something so chocked full of stuff. Part of the game is bidding, part tile buy, part area control and some light combat. All of it adds up to what at first seems an insurmoutable pile of special rules, but the play is actually quite smooth and easy– offering tons of tactical and strategic choices each turn. While this is not a review of the game per-se (especially after a single play) this game got my gander up from a gameplay perspective.
The theme of the game– a sort of Cthulhu/Sherlock Holmes mash up with all sorts of late 1800’s references and characters works really well when at first you’d think it would be completely stupid. One faction are the loyalists to the Royals who are actually various Cthulhu monsters and the other are revolutionaries trying to free the world from these insidious alien powers. You play as agents involved in a shadow war to either help or hurt the “Royals.” I found it familiar yet strange and mysterious at the same time.
On the cover are two men standing over a tentacled body and the word REVENGE in German is written on the wall behind. To me, this is a game made as revenge for all the people that had to sit through Arkham Horror before a Study in Emerald came along.
Fantasy Flight makes some excellent games and they keep alive many of the games that are the best ever made, such as TALISMAN and Cosmic Encounter. They have done right by these two certainly because they themselves know what players want out of those games. There have been a couple reprints/revisions of classic games that missed the mark. Warrior Knights, so beautifully created with such awesome pieces, was saddled with a terrible version of Wallenstein/Shogun’s action system and amounted to the players playhing VS the game system itself rather than each other. Another beautiful but flawed revision of a Games Workshop classic released just a few years ago was Dungeon Quest. The main issue with the revision being that the combat, extremely simple and deadly in the first version of the game by GW, was rebuilt heavy– very very heavy. Well, there must be life in this game since there is a revision of the revision coming this Fall that I will definitely pick up. I got to play the original only a couple of times at a convention and it’s a rush in and grab the loot before dying game. Since DQ is elimination, the key to such games (such as King of Tokyo, Love Letter and Epic Spell Wars: Duel at Mount Skullsfire) is that they are extremely short and simple–which does NOT mean bad. Simple (that is also good) is also very difficult to do in terms of game design. Take Warrior Knights (new version) vs Shogun. The first is very difficult to learn and especially to play, where Shogun, after the first turn of action selection and resolution, is easily grasped by players and it becomes about who can WIN the game against each other rather than who can learn to play the game system better. I’ve got high hopes for the new DQ.
