Board Games and the like
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.
Oh, and this is by the blood bowl guys.
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.
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!
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.
Oh and there’s the final BOARD PIECE for Talisman.
I’ve had my eye on YOMI, a card game that emulates video game fighting games in paper form for awhile now. I initially assumed there was no way anyone could make an actual fun game out of this. From experience as I’ve tried two of them from the olden days (Video Fighter [below] and Heavy Gear) as well as the goo,d but too simple, Brawl.
YOMI is available to play online and I gave that a go and it was just OK, it piqued my interest further, but I didn’t think it was all that great from playing the online version, which is exactly the same as the card game except you can’t read the cards. You can technically read them, they just aren’t the focus of the game enough compared to when they’re in your hand. This is huge detriment for a new player because I can say after playing the physical game that YOMI is absolutely superb at pulling off what it’s trying to do and it’s not well represented in the online version since the cards are small and not in your face. So if you are going to give it a try, I would recommend playing with pieces of paper first.
The core mechanic, well it’s just rock paper scissors between Throw, Attack and Block/Dodge. Seems simple? It’s crazy complicated. The rock paper scissors part is just the most basic mechanic. You play a single card each turn. Based on what you played and your opponent has played you can possibly play more cards to combo, extra defense, etc. and this is where the game gets crazy and the rock paper scissors mind game turns into a mechanic that works brilliantly instead of putting you to sleep as it should. Each character deck that I’ve seen (played about 6 of them) plays very differently. Some characters are good throwers, some rush down with tons of small attacks and combos and others set you up for a big hit the whole match. After just a few plays, one notices the huge depth of the game.
Hand management is huge, card flow is huge, and knowing when and where to lay down your big combos is something that will take hundreds of games to master. I am simply shocked that someone was able to pull this off and do it so brilliantly.
As a game, once you have a single deck of one character, you can play– forever. That character likely will never get any other cards you can buy (unless there is a team fight expansion that changes out cards) so if you just want one character to play, your cost of entry is 12$ and never anything else. You could enter a tournament and win and be a champion with just that 12$ spend as YOMI is not about buying up cards and making decks like Netrunner or Shadowfist then playing, it’s about learning a character completely, just like a fighting game on the boob tube.
I’m not a huge fan of the art– it looks sort of like knockoff anime to me rather than the real deal, which Video Fighter and Heavy gear also had issues with. The overarching brand is ‘fantasy strike’ so it seems like the characters in the game are in some sort of Lodoss War style world. And a Panda? I guess… again, a minor quibble, especially since many of the characters are really awesome looking— they’re just not Last Blade 2 awesome.
Those of you physically near me, trust that you will be coerced into playing despite your hatred of fighting games.
Awesome. The guy from Talisman Island put together a real expansion along with Fantasy Flight. This is a must buy. Deals with having Pandora’s box in the middle if you all remember that from 2nd edition (the ending where you draw spells and adventure cards and cast them on other players until they die).
Check it out here.
I noticed reading the Talisman Island posts that 2013 marks the 30th year of Talisman’s existence. Woah. I wish I had started playing this in the 80’s, but it was always just sitting there on the shelf (next to Dungeon Quest) and I never bought it, then of course college happened and it ended up nearly ALL we played for a couple years there.
We didn’t get the simutaneous rules quite right (at all) but it worked out in the end and was a great time. We ranged around 20 minutes per turn except for a couple turns, which for this many players + combats, is really great. I’d like to see ANY other 4X space board game with 7 players get it done with this level of satisfaction in such a short time.
One thing I guess I would like to see in Eclipse is some better diplomacy, different game objectives– like you don’t know what the game’s objective is when you start whether it’s kill ancients, take other people’s home worlds, etc. VP cards based on actions would be cool– and it would not be a crazy extension from the VP tokens they have (that you really only spend resources for at this point). Again, this would sort of merge in some of the great stuff from NEXUS OPS.
Looking forward to the next game of this, as always.