RPG’s and Me Part 2: The Recent Past

As I mentioned in my last blog I had determined that what I wanted from an RPG game was a more visual presentation with hard and fast rules that were not so much left up to the interpretation or neglect of a DM or Game Master. What I wanted in essence was more of a Boardgame and less of a storytelling session. I will list four games that came very close to fulfilling my dream but failed in some way or another.

First off, Mage Knight Dungeons .

This was not the first game I found in my search for an RPG Boardgame, but I will talk about it first because it was the farthest from the mark. The game had lots of cool miniatures for monsters and heroes and there were all kinds of cool paraphernalia like little plastic treasure chests with spin dials that would randomize the treasure that was hidden inside, plastic pieces for chairs and tables, altars, fountains, stone columns and magical pools. All of these actually had effects on the game, they weren’t just decorative. They came out with a builders set that had cut up board sections that enabled you to build the dungeon in a multitude of ways, even randomly. One of the last things to be release for Mage Knight Dungeons was the “3-D dungeons” set which had plastic tiles for floors, walls and doors. There was also at 3-D traps set released with miniatures for cages, spikes, and flame jets!

It all sounded very cool and it is fun to play, but it had two problems that made it not what I was looking for. First it was a “collectable” miniatures game, and anyone that has read my blog on Magic knows how I feel about “collectable” games. For the game I was hoping for it does not bode well that you can’t buy a monster that you really need without spending tons of money. I have to admit that needing a specific monster was less important in this game because of the randomly generated monster pool, but still to have a good selection you needed to be able to populate that pool with the right selection of monsters. Second, at its heart Mage Knight Dungeons was just a skirmish game with a few RPG elements thrown in. It was just about fighting and getting treasure, there was no quest storyline. The characters you played as were just a collection of stats, yes you could “level them up” but they had no flavor. They also lacked customizable skills that could give the player the chance to distinguish his character and make it their own. As an RPG boardgame Mage Knight Dungeons fell way short.

The second game which came much later but was very similar in concept to Mage Knight Dungeons was the new Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures game .

Just like Mage Knight it had collectable miniatures, but this was D&D! I figured that it would have all the RPG elements that normal D&D would have but slimlined into a more boardgame approach. I found out the hard way that it was even more slimlined then I wanted. It was simplified down into just a skirmish game, it was just the combat no dungeon crawling. There was a new “Basic Game” released that had a pre-made dungeon adventure and included miniatures, but there was only enough there to give you a taste, and no subsequent products to expand on this basic set. I guess you would have to make your own dungeon crawls past the basic set and of coarse buy more miniatures which, did I mention, are“collectable” which means good like trying to find that “rare” piece for the adventure you just created. No Thank-You!

The third game has quite a different approach to dungeon crawling, it’s called Dungeoneer .

This game makes Dungeon Crawling cheaper and quicker to setup by being entirely card based. It has RPG elements in the sense that your characters can level up and become more powerful and you have a wide assortment of quests to embark on from slaying an evil creature to escorting a helpless princess to safety. This is all represented by cards. You have cards that represent dungeon rooms and cards that represent monsters and magic items. You even have cards that will allow you to give your character new skills or pump up the monsters that you play against your opponents. I just have two complaints about this game. First there is a major runaway factor. Every adventure has a major bad guy in the deck of monster cards and if you draw this guy early in the game you can totally destroy your opponents because they are potentially to low of a level to fight off such a powerful foe. Secondly and the biggest deal breaker is the fact that this game looses the RPG feel that I’m looking for based simply on the fact that you play out your character in one sitting. In one game you go from a wimpy first level character to a more powerful character by the end of the game. The next time you play you are taking on a new character. There is a great joy and addictive quality to building your character up over several game sessions, that is something else that I am looking for in my search.

The fourth game I’ll mention has come so close to fulfilling my needs that is almost painful to talk about. That game is Warhammer Quest .

This game has everything I ever wanted in an RPG Boardgame. It has “on the fly” random dungeon generation that is so easy to do that you don’t even need a DM, you can play the game solo. It also has random quests that once again don’t require a DM, everyone gets to play the heroes. There are lots of different characters to play as and they all have so many options that you will sometimes have difficulty deciding what you want to do with your guy. Also, the game will require you to build your character over several game sessions, but it is so much fun it can become addictive. I discovered how addictive it can be when there were several incidents of my friends begging to keep playing well into the early morning hours, “Just one more dungeon” or “I just need to get my guy up to level 4” were pleas that I heard many times.

So with such praise you might wonder how this game could disappoint me. Well the only problem with this game is a very large one. The game only includes just enough to get you started. There are only enough monsters for low level characters, and only the four basic character types are included. This game was put out by Games Workshop back in 1995 and while they did support it pretty well by putting out a lot of great character expansions, of which I was able to buy all but one, they never addressed the problem of not enough monsters. Sure the rules booklet has stats for high level monsters but without miniatures for them what could you do. Games Workshop did make the miniatures, but they were expensive and had to be bought individually, and now in 2007 these miniatures are not being made and are hard to find. Also the miniatures are marketed to the Wargamers that play the Warhammer Fantasy Battles game and they are very hardcore and have no qualms about paying high prices for minis. They also have no problem having to paint and assemble all those miniatures. But that kind of mentality is contrary to most boardgammers attitudes. We buy a game and expect it to be all in the box and ready to go. Sure expansions that add more monsters and characters would have been fine too, it didn’t have to all be included in the base set but having to hunt down hundreds of figures is just too much, and is now almost impossible.

Despite this set back I was not going to give up. Even though the game was out of print and not supported by Games Workshop I was going to try and enhance the game myself. I was originally just going to find a way to add more monsters on my own. I looked around on the web for suggestions. I looked at casting my own plastic pieces, or finding images of the now out of print pieces and printing them off and making them in paper miniatures. In the coarse of my searching I found a lot of fan made supplemental material. My favorite of which were cards and counters made by a guy calling himself Mystified Michael. He made cards that could be printed out to represent the skills and equipment of the different player characters. I liked these so much I took on the monumental task of printing them all out, and trying to make them look like real professional cards and cardboard tokens. Here are some pictures to show you just how determined I was to make this game better.

First I made up some of the new Dungeon Rooms and treasure cards that people had posted online;

These turned out OK.

Then I started making the cards that’s Mystified Michael designed, I even created the backs of the cards to match the equipment cards the came with the game.

I was very happy with these as the matched the original game’s equipment tokens very well, front and back. I even affixed them to thick posterboard which I cut into small rectangles to give them that cardboard token feel. I even bought special pre-perforated card stock from plaincards.com with a special laminating spray to do all the spell, treasure, and dungeon cards. It was a pain to do but most of them turned out OK.

I even made boxes for the basic characters by scanning in the original character pack’s box art and using photoshop to make new box art for all the characters that I was going to add into the game.

The bottom two rows are the character boxes that Games Workshop made, the three in the top row are the ones I made. I think they match pretty well. Unfortunately I never made more than these, but I still have my photoshop templates to make more.

You can see here why these boxes are useful. With all the cards that I made for all the characters skills and equipment, the boxes helped organize it all.

You can see here all the characters out of their boxes with all their cards. Whew, it’s a lot!

Well after I did all this work for the characters I inevitably had to start focusing on the monsters. No matter what I did I just was not happy. Making 2-D paper miniatures just does not stand up well against 3-D plastic miniatures. Also I could not find images online for all the Warhammer monsters. I also had put in so much time and work into the character cards that when I thought of all the work required to do the remaining Dungeon Rooms, Treasure Cards, and the other fan made Characters, which Mystified Michael designed cards for, I just had to cringe. So I gave up! Maybe if I could have been satisfied with the monsters I would have kept going but it just wasn’t worth it if that one crucial aspect of the game was going to be such a letdown.

I thought that if just some game company could make a game like Warhammer Quest, but with higher production values and full support for the game, and give you everything you need to really play the game to the fullest. If they would give you all of this with the base game and subsequent expansions I would be very happy. Well in the last part of my series I will talk about the game that could possibly deliver on this idea, I hope……..

RPGs and Me – Part 1 of 3: The Distant Past

No I’m not going to be talking about Rocket Propelled Grenades, I’m not some Wargammer. I’m talking about Role Playing Games, specifically Fantasy Role Playing Games. I have always been into Fantasy no matter what form it took whether it be a movie, book, TV show, or video game. But a RPG is a fantasy story that you get to interact in, you get to play the Hero, and your friends can be heroes too. Yet another friend can play the villains and set up obstacles for your heroes to overcome, it’s the ultimate way to enjoy a fantasy story.

My first exposure to the concept of interactive fantasy was, like most people, Dungeons and Dragons. Unlike most people though I was not introduced to it by a group of friends, I found it on my own, in this book;

The Monster Manual for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I did not have any of the other rule books to learn how to play the game, and I was too young to figure it out anyway, but I remember leafing through the book and looking at all the monsters and understanding that they all had their own statistics and information that would be used in playing against your character. Even at that young age I was fascinated with the concept, actually playing a fantasy story where you face off against such strange and fearsome creatures.

I never actually got to play D&D until a few years later when I got the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules set.

Even though I could not get any friends together to play there was a “solo adventure” that played a lot like a choose your own adventure game. Remember the old Choose you own Adventure games?

Choose Your Own Adventure was about reading a story and making decisions that would effect what happened next in the story. The “solo adventure” in the D&D Basic Rules was aimed at giving you a “taste” of what playing a role playing game was like but was more complex then Choose Your Own Adventure in that you had statistics and skills for you character and you actually rolled dice for combating a monster and things like that. I really liked the Idea of a more complex Choose Your Own Adventure and I thought it would be so much fun if someone came out with a series of books like that. I especially liked the idea since I could not find anyone to play D&D with. That’s when I found the Lone Wolf series of books.

I loved these books and bought everyone I could get my hands on. You played the character of Lone Wolf the last of the Kai Lords, who must save his country from invasion by the Darklords of Helgedad who massacred all his kinsmen. When you successfully completed the first book you could then take your character’s powers and magic items into the second book and learn new skills and watch your character grow just like in D&D. There were 32 Lone Wolf books written, but only 24 were published here in the US and the last 8 were abridged and edited in such a way as to make some of the books unplayable if you made certain choices in the book. Also these books are now out of print. Gladly a few years back I stumbled upon this website called Project Aon. They are working, with the original Author’s blessing, to republish the full and corrected versions of these books on the web. I have even helped them out by transcribing some of my copies of the books. Lone Wolf was fun to play but it’s still not like playing a real RPG like D&D.

Eventually I did get to play D&D with some friends from school and it was fun but it felt like it was missing something. I never knew what until I discovered Pool of Radiance.

Pool of Radiance was the first in a series of Dungeons & Dragons games that you could play on your computer, I had the IBM version and I played it on my smoking fast 12 Mhz 286. There might have been RPG games on the computer before this but none were an actually D&D adventure like this. You could create up to 6 characters for your party and go questing in a very large computer generated world complete with overland, dungeon, and city maps that were presented to you in a simulated 3-D view window. You could also encounter monsters and other friendly characters and converse with them.

You could even get into combat and gain magic items and weaponry from your defeated foes. You would also gain experience points for all these deeds that would allow you to level up your characters and make them more powerful. When the whole adventure was done and you had defeated the big bad guy you could then take your powered up characters and transfer them into the next game in the series, “Curse of the Azure Bonds”. This was cutting edge at the time and really made you feel like you were playing D&D. There were 9 of these so called “Gold Box” games released and I bought them all as fast as SSI could make them. The thing that these games added that I felt was missing from the “pen and paper” D&D sessions I had played with my friends was the visual way of presenting the combat.

SSI or Strategic Simulations Incorporated, who made the games, started out as a software company with the goal of bringing strategic wargames to the PC. Since most of the wargames they were emulating were played with miniatures on a table with opponents taking turns moving and attacking with their pieces the combat in SSI’s games was very tactical and kinda felt like a boardgame, and their D&D games were no different. I personally loved this way of combat in D&D. To actually be able to visualize your characters position relative to obstructions like walls and doors and trees and other characters not only helped you but the other people you were playing with. I can’t tell you how many times I would play “pen & paper” D&D with a group of people where someone decides to cast a huge area of effect spell like a Fireball and ends up not only hurting the enemy but his comrades as well because he had “no idea they were that close”. Of coarse the DM wouldn’t be any help because he would not properly describe the area you were fighting in, and certainly not keep track in anyway where everyone was. This was because most of the people I played with thought of D&D as an interactive storytelling session, whereas I always wanted it to be a boardgame with hard and fast rules with and interactive story throw in.

After playing the SSI computer D&D games, “pen & paper” D&D was forever ruined for me. I would refuse to play with anyone unless we had some visual element to keep track of characters and monsters positions in combat, but back then miniatures were hard to find and expensive. I also insisted that the DM pay attention to the ranges and areas of effect for spells and weapons, none of them wanted to do that. I still wanted to find something that would allow for an RPG experience with my friends and me sitting around the table together. The SSI games were fun but I was playing them alone. I resolved myself to start looking for something that was more like a boardgame but had D&D like elements thrown in. I will talk about that in the next part of “RPG’s and Me”

In The Spotlight

Well my friend Scott was in the spotlight recently when one of my co-workers here at KVEW TV, Amy Bouska, decided to do a story on our boardgaming for the KVEW website.

She came by on a Friday night when it was just me, Ed and Scott sitting down to play Thebes. Even though Amy felt kinda overwhelmed when Scott tried to teach her how to play and she ultimately ended up bowing out of the game, we all had fun and her video ended up great.


I think everyone reading this should go watch Amy’s video right NOW!
Click HERE to watch it.


OK are you done? It was pretty good huh? If you truly did watch it, you might have noticed that the main theme was centered around the fact that the kind of boardgames being discussed, the kind me and my friends play, are not what the typical American is used to. Amy made a hilarious display in pointing out that learning to play the games was intimidating and even confusing. This is the typical reaction we get whenever any of us Boardgame Geeks tries to teach someone that has only ever played the “standard” American boardgames, like Monopoly, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, Scrabble, etc. etc. I have often wondered why people are so intimidated buy learning a boardgame like the ones we play. I know that people do buy the “standard” type American games, if they didn’t you wouldn’t see them in stores like Toys ‘R Us and Wal-Mart. But when it comes to learning the games that we play, especially the “Euro-Games” like Thebes, most people get kinda nervous and look like your asking them to do your taxes. After thinking about it a lot I think I might have stumbled upon part of the answer.

Most Americans are used to a fast paced lifestyle and they just feel like it takes too much time to learn things from scratch. I think that most people when they have to “learn” something use shortcuts. The shortcut that I am referring to is past learning association. If you have had to learn something somewhat new or complicated in the past, the next time you are put in a similar situation you try to match up what you are attempting to understand with something you have firmly grasped before. In applying that to boardgames, for example, if someone is teaching you a new game and they say something like “Ok, first you roll the dice and move the number of spaces indicated on the dice” you might instantly flash back to every other boardgame where you “rolled dice” and “moved the number of spaces indicated on the dice”, and that aspect of the new game would be completely natural to you and not intimidating at all, and it would make learning other less familiar aspects easier to swallow. It’s a totally natural way of learning and my friends and I do it too. Whenever one of us gets a new game and we sit down to learn it we see similarities all the time that make it easier to learn the new game. Even in these “complicated” games there are similarities especially in “Euro-Games”.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the first time you are exposed to a new game it will seem intimidating because you have little if any frame of reference, but once you have be exposed to a new type of gaming it will get easier and easier every time you pick up a new game. So if you have never played these types of games before just give it a chance. Yes the first time will be hard but it will get easier and it will be worth it, you’ll see.

It’s Magic!

Well I took two more small steps in completing my seemingly eternal quest to buy every Magic theme deck ever made. I bought two decks from the Urza’s Destiny block that was released back in 1999, just 8 more years of Magic Decks to go! The two decks are “Enchanter” and “Fiendish Nature”. “What’s this about buying every Magic Deck ever made?” you might ask, well let me Explain.

Even though my friends and I play board games we also include a lot of card games too. My friend Scott owns quite a few card games published by companies that also put out board games. Fantasy Flight is one such company. They have games like Blue Moon and Colossal Arena .

Thanks to my girlfriend I now own another of Fantasy Flight’s card games called “Anima”


There are also plenty of other Card Games out there by companies other than Fantasy Flight. Scott has recently purchased games such as Infernal Contraption by Privateer Press and Boomtown by Face 2 Face Games .


---------------------------------------------------
What all these card games have in common is that they are self contained non-collectable games. All the cards you need to play are in the box. Sure some of these games have expansions that add more to the game but they are not required. If you do elect to buy an expansion, all the cards for the expansion are included, you don’t have to keep buying pack after pack to find all the cards for a set, which is the problem with Collectable Card Games like Magic. So why after praising these non-collectable card games would I be spending so much on Magic? Well to put it simply Magic the Gathering (its full title) is in my opinion the best card game ever made! There is so much strategy and variety in this game that has been around since 1993. It was the first Collectable Card Game and it is the best. Every new set that comes out, about 3 every year, adds new game mechanics and strategy. There have been around 14,000 cards made for this game, if that isn’t variety I don’t know what is.

You might still be saying “Ok Mike we get it , the game is great, and there is lots of cards out, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s collectable!” Your right, the collectable aspect would still be a huge turn off for me and my friends. When we first got into the game we tried to get some of the best cards and build our own decks. Building decks is one of the key aspects of the game. But it was just too crazy, trying to find the perfect cards to build a deck around and always coming up short unless you spent a lot of money was frustrating. Then Scott and Ed started buying these pre-built Theme Decks and it all started to make sense. The Theme Decks came out with every new set and showcased some of the new cards and play mechanics that came with them, and the decks were built by the game designers and they have access to all the cards, so you could really get a good feel for what the new sets added to the game. The theme decks are also very affordable and widely available and they are not random, you know what you are going to get. Now I know that hardcore Magic players turn their noses up at these “entry level” Theme Decks, mainly because they take away what most Magic players consider the key element of Magic, Deck Building, but I have found something just as fun and entertaining as building your own deck. That is the fun of playing a deck that you haven’t built! Think about it. When you build your own deck you know it inside and out, but when you pick up a pre-constructed deck you get to learn all about it as you play, you get to see all the strategies and combos on the fly, and since you hardly ever go through the whole deck in one game you get to learn more about the deck as you play it more. I really find it more enjoyable, and it takes a lot less time. As soon as you open the deck all you have to do is shuffle the cards and your ready to play, and there are so many decks to choose from, at any time you can just reach for another one and play another game. I wish that other CCG makers would follow this approach to their games.

As I said I have set out to buy every Theme Deck every made. They have been making these Theme Decks since 1997 and I have only bought all the ones up to 1999, and a few more recent ones. In all, I own 34 Theme Decks.



There are probably around 150 Theme Decks produced so I still have a ways to go. Of coarse there are always new sets coming out with new decks to go along with them. The newest set that is coming out in October is called Lorwyn .

This set already has my interest with the fact that instead of the usual four Theme Decks this set will have five, one of which brings back the concept of a 5 color Deck. It would take a long time to explain what a 5 color deck is to someone who has never played, but let me just say that they are a challenge to play. They are also great fun when you can get them to work, most decks only use 2-3 colors, but when you have to work with all 5 colors it can be daunting, but when they work they work well. As hard as they can be to play I could imagine they would be even harder to make, there is another reason to buy Theme Decks, for decks you might not have the patience or money to make yourself.

The Money Pit

Even though I swore that I was done buying Heroscape stuff here I am $110.00 later with two bags full of it. For those that don’t know, Heroscape is a battle/war game where you and friend draft an army of small miniatures and fight it out on a multi-level battlefield made up of modular hexagonal plastic pieces that all fit together to create thousands of different types of battlefields.


http://www.hasbro.com/heroscape
There are a lot of miniature based wargames out there, one of the most popular is probably Warhammer, but games like Warhammer are very expensive as they rely on pewter/lead miniatures. These figures are also unpainted so if ya want them to look like anything more than a lump of silver you’ve got to paint them, which can be very time consuming. Now sure there are lots of folks that LOVE to paint their miniatures, some it seems focus more on the painting then actually playing, and boy some of them do fantastic jobs! But I’m a gamer and I would rather play, so I’ve always been on the look out for a game like Heroscape where the miniatures are plastic, i.e. cheaper, and pre-painted. But before I found Heroscape I stumbled upon Mage Knight and Heroclix.

Now Mage Knight and Heroclix were great, Mage Knight fulfilled my need for a Fantasy based wargame and Heroclix featured Comic Book heroes from both DC and Marvel Universes, but these games were “collectable” miniature games. What this means is that you would buy “packs” of random figures, so you were never sure exactly what you were getting, and some figures were rarer then others. My friends and I literally went crazy trying to get a decent representation of all the figures available, we spent way too much money. We eventually realized it was just a gimmick to get us to waste money and stopped. Then came Heroscape.

When my friend Ed and I, Scott did not and still doesn’t want anything to do with it, discovered Heroscape we were very excited, here is a game with cheep plastic pre-painted figures and they are not collectable. You can actually buy the figures you want and there are not any that are more rare they the others, cool! Also at first Hasbro, the makers of the game, promised just a couple expansions a year, we felt it would be pretty cheap to keep up with that. Then they started producing more and more special sets that added new types of terrain like snow and glaciers, and molten rock and lava rivers. Then there were special packs of giant size figures like Dragons and huge Robot Mechs. Then there was even a Castle Wall and Gate set. It was getting really hard to keep up. The final straw for me was when they came out with the Flag Bearers set. These were 5 individual figures with special powers that would boost other figures in your army. What really burned me about them was the fact that they were only available at Toys R Us and they were $13 bucks. “$13 bucks for one figure! That’s Crazy!” I thought. Then a couple things happened and I caved.

First Hasbro announced that they were developing a Marvel Superheroes version of Heroscape, and when I started seeing pictures of the game I was drooling. I then resigned my self to just buy the Marvel set. Then I was at Wal-mart, where Heroscape stuff is very cheap, and I saw the new Wave 6 expansion figures, they were awesome. The name of the set is Dawn of Darkness and it really excited me cause part of the set was focusing on a horror theme because there were Zombies and ghostly Shades. It made me remember one of the other major things I like about Heroscape, that it doesn’t rely on just one theme. There are Fantasy and Sci-Fi based characters; Historical based characters like Roman Legionaries, Musketmen, and WWII army guys; Oriental based Samurai and Ninjas; and the aforementioned Horror types like Warewolves, Ghosts, Zombies, and soon there will be Vampires. How could I give up on such a diverse game? Especially when I did some research and found out that there are some very cool expansions coming out. There will be a Jungle Set coming out, a Wave 7 set of figures including the Vampires I spoke of, and Right now there is a second Master Set out. The Master Set is what you need to start playing the game, and now there is a whole new one that includes a couple dozen brand new figures and new terrain pieces. Also there is already an expansion planed for the Marvel Superheroes version of the game. So with all this excitement over the new stuff that is out and is coming out I totally caved and went shopping.


As you can see I bought the Wave 6 figures they are on the top row, and because like I have said before I am a completist I went ahead and bought the overpriced Flag Bearers set. They are on the bottom row. I still have more to buy too, the Marvel Set is out as well as the Master Set 2. I wonder if my girlfriend, my family and my friends are concerned that I am dumping all this money into this game, sometimes it really does feel like a bottomless Money Pit, but what can I say, I am a total sucker.

This is What it’s All About

More Games!!! My order from Thoughthammer arrived, www.thoughthammer.com It has been almost a year since the last time I placed a game order, due to a personal shake up in my life. Now I am settled down and ready to whittle away at the massive wish list of games I have been building up on Thoughthammer over the past year, all the games that I’ve been wanting to buy but had to wait on. Most of the games on my list are expansions for games I bought in the past and so because I like the original game and because I am a completist of almost OCD like proportions I had to put those games on my list first. Strangely enough though, the first games I ordered when I got back in the saddle are for the most part not expansions.



Sure I did buy the 2nd wave of expansion decks for Runebound, you can see them in the picture above, they are the little yellow card boxes. The games I bought that are not expansions are a little bit of a branching out for me.



Colosseum is a game from Days of Wonder, www.daysofwonder.com/en the same company responsible for great games like Ticket to Ride, Battlelore, Memoir ’44 and Shadows over Camelot (which I own). This game obviously has a Roman Gladiator theme to it but with a twist. The game focuses on gaining points for putting on a good show and gaining spectators for your Colosseum. This is different from a lot of games of this theme that would focus on Gladiatorial Combat. This game looks like a lot of fun, I can’t wait to play it, but it looks more complicated then other games from Days of Wonder. There is a ton of stuff in the box, and boy is that box heavy. It took my girlfriend and I over an hour and a half just to punch out all the cardboard counters and tokens in this game, whew!

Formula De’ is not the usual type of game that I would buy. I am not attracted to games based on real sports, probably because I do not follow any professional spots. Football is the only sport that I will actually sit down and watch with any real enthusiasm. But I was blown away when Scott introduced me to Pizza Box Football, www.boardgamegeek.com/game/17851 I was really surprised that I like that game. So when Ed showed up with Formula De’, which is based on Formula One racing, I was willing to give it a try. Once again I was blown away, “how can a game about racing be this much fun” I thought. When the rules were first explained to me I thought “this is like racing in slow motion, that can’t be fun.” But I was willing to try and boy was I wrong. Is it fast paced like a real race? Do you feel like you are driving a car at a high rate of speed? No. How could a board game feel like that, it’s not a video game, but the game does focus on the strategy of lane positioning and speed management, you can’t just floor it all the way. You have to figure out the best way to take turns and shift into higher gears when it is safe to do so. It’s just fun and competitive, and I really enjoyed it. Of coarse after playing it I was horrified to learn that the game is out of print now, and that there are some 30+ expansion tracks out for the game that are also out of print. For a completist like me this is very scary, but when I found a copy of the base game on hammer I just had to buy it. I just need to figure out what I will do about all those track expansions, some sell on e-bay for over a hundred bucks!! Forget that! I’ll just secretly hope that they get reprinted some day, ugh.

I think the my biggest branch out from the norm would have to be Yspahan, www.boardgamegeek.com/game/22345 This game is very “Euro”, and it’s got camels in it for Pete’s sake!! I usually leave the “Camel” games to Scott. As a matter of fact Scott should be all over this game. Well what made me decide to branch out and get this game, besides a grudging acknowledgement that Scott maybe onto something with these “euro” games, is a video review of the game on “Boardgames with Scott”, http://www.boardgameswithscott.com/?p=65. I love the “Boardgames with Scott” website, it really helps to see the games in action. It was seeing Yspahan in action that convinced me that it would be fun, I don’t think anything else could have done that. The thing that most enticed me about this game was it’s unique “Dice Tower” mechanic, where the first player rolls 9 dice (or possibly more) and depending on what the results are and how the dice get grouped together will make a difference on what actions will be available in the game. That little bit of randomization ensures that no two games will be the same. It also makes certain outcomes more rare and desirable, which if you are player one when these outcome come up will probably make you giddy with excitement.

Well I am going to tear into these games this weekend and I guess it’s a good sign that I am very excited to do so. Hey gaming isn’t cheap you should get your money’s worth.

The Next Big Thing

Well like I said last time my friends and I have been on the look out for the next big game, that new game that will excite and compel us to play for hours and hours until we finally succumb to sleep depravation and pass out in what we hope will be a graceful manner. Scott sure picked a winner last time with “Thebes” but that did not slow him down on his mission to always search out new sources of gaming goodness. So here is what Scott and the rest of us are considering for purchase.

I know that Ed is looking strongly at a game called “Through the Ages”,
www.boardgamegeek.com/game/25613



Ed says that this game is like the “Civilization” Board Game but a lite version as it only uses cards. We all liked the “Civilization” Board Game, but as it was mentioned elsewhere on this blog the game was a marathon, requiring 2-3 days to play. This “Through the Ages” game promises to be much shorter, but contain all the depth and feel of “Civilization”. I find it interesting from the standpoint that it appears to have even more depth in some areas, like all the advancements your civilization can attain. The game is supposed to be re-printed soon with better components and hopefully better artwork on the cards, if it does get the re-print Ed says he will buy it, GO FOR IT ED! I will play it with ya, even if Scott won’t.

Now Scott, always looking for the next game to hook us with, has also been on the look out for a good Horror game. We both really like the Avalon Hill game “Betrayal at House on the Hill”, but it is only really fun with 4 players. A while back I bought “Arkham Horror”, an HP Lovecraft based Horror game by Fantasy Flight. I really like it, but Scott absolutely despises it. Well now Scott has his eye on this game called “Last Night on Earth, The Zombie Game”,
www.boardgamegeek.com/game/25613



This game definitely has the right “atmosfear”. The artwork really sells the theme. I’ve been hearing about this game for awhile now and I know Scott has been watching it for a long time too, but I don’t know much about the play mechanics of the game, I wonder when this game will be done so we can find out more. I do have to say that the theme looks great and the idea of a modular board which will make every game different sounds very appealing.

As for myself, I have been watching very intently the big release from Fantasy Flight Games called “Starcraft the Board Game”, www.boardgamegeek.com/game/22827



I know that lots of people have been waiting for this one and there was no information for a long time, this, I think, was due to the fact that the game went through a process of having its early design completely scrapped and reworked from scratch. I have to say my enthusiasm for this game did die down quite a bit once information was finally released. I really thought the game would be completely different than the way I now know it will be. I was envisioning more of a huge warfare/skirmish game with tons of tiny plastic army units battling it out on a modular board that changed for every game, and contained hidden resources that you would move in and take possession of and defend. In short I thought it would be like the computer game in slow motion, some people think that would be boring, but I thought it could work if there were more resource management and strategic decisions for the player to make in order to keep it interesting while the battles were being fought. I was also a little bit disappointed that the game looks and has a lot of similarities to the game “Twilight Imperium” or TI, don’t get me wrong, I like TI, I own TI, but let me say that it is so obvious that Christian T. Peterson (the designer of TI) helped in the design of “Starcraft”. Like I said there is nothing wrong with TI or Christian Peterson, I was just hoping that “Starcraft” would be more unique. Despite my reservations I still plan to purchase the game, I still think it looks very cool, and I know that the other guys will play it and in the end I guess that is all we really want; to find a game that we all enjoy playing together.

A New Addiction

Once in a while a game comes along that is so enjoyable that you just wanna keep playing it. It is mildly disturbing that most of the games I have felt that way about are not ones that I have bought for myself. No, the last few addictions I’ve had can be directly attributed to my friend Scott, a self professed “Euro-gamer”. He admits to loving almost all games that have been designed by European game designers, especially the designer he considers nothing short of a deity of boardgame creation, Reiner Knizia.

My previous Addiction was a game called “Ra”, http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/12. At it’s heart Ra is just a simple Auction game with an Egyptian theme, but it has an interesting twist that allows any player to force an auction on their turn. I was amazed that such a simple game could be so engrossing, but it was. The tension can be quite thick as every player waits with great anticipation for the next tile to be drawn, only to cry in frustration when another player calls an auction when the time is not quite right and they suffer the conflict of bidding on tiles that aren’t as valuable as they would have been if that jerk of another player hadn’t called the auction so soon. My new Addiction is very similar to Ra in its simplicity.

This new Addiction called “Thebes” http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/30869, was not designed by Reiner, but is “Euro” as it is designed by Euro designer Peter Prinz, and it was once again brought to my attention and purchased by my friend Scott. Thebes has a theme that grabbed my attention right away, Archeology. The players take on the roles of Archeologists who have 3 years to dig up as many valuable artifacts as possible. There are five ancient cities where these artifacts are found and the players travel around modern day European cities searching for special knowledge cards that will help you when you go on a “dig” to one of these ancient cities. One of the best mechanics of the game is how these “digs” are played out. There are 5 cloth bags, one for each ancient city, inside the bags are placed round cardboard tokens representing ancient artifacts, some are more valuable then others and their point value is printed on the tokens. The trick is that each bag also has a lot of blank “debris” tokens that are not worth anything, and they go back in the bag after your dig, but you get to keep the artifacts you “excavate”. You can probably guess that as the game progresses the ratio of Artifacts to Debris tokens swings in the favor of more Debris, this is counterbalanced by the assumption that later in the game you will have gained more special knowledge cards to give you more and more draws from the bag. In the end, the winner is determined buy adding up you total points from all the artifacts as well as how many “Exhibition” cards you’ve collected, assuming you had the right combination of artifacts to meet the requirements for the exhibition and are in the right city as well. You are also awarded points for being the player with the most knowledge on a specific ancient city, gaining that knowledge also requires that you be in the right city at the right time. It’s really quite a simple game once you get into it but it keeps you enthralled as you watch the other players travel around the board gobbling up the knowledge cards you need, or some of the other special cards you want. All the while you plot what you are going to do on your turn, so you can get as much accomplished before the three years is up.

I guess I find the game so addictive, because I always want to play it again. After playing a game I always feel like I could have done better. You tell yourself, “if only better cards had come up” or “if I had only had better luck in drawing from the bags”. This game is pretty unusual as far as “Euro” games go because it has a lot of luck in it, while most “Euro” games pride themselves on having little if any luck factor in them. But this game definitely has that “Euro” feel to it, despite having a large amount of luck involved, it still feels well balanced like a strong “Euro” game. Also I just love the Theme, I guess I’ve always fantasized about being an archeologist since I first saw Indiana Jones, even though this game doesn’t seem anything like an Indiana Jones Movie, it still stoked my imagination and made me think of traveling the world, gaining knowledge of ancient cultures, and then searching for their long lost treasures.

Well, as always, my friends and I have been keeping our eyes on certain games, hoping that one of them will become our next addiction. I will talk about what games we are scoping out next time.

Blogs.....and Boardgames

My first Blog, and it’s about…..Boardgames. These aren’t your Daddy’s Boardgames, no Monopoly or Life here. You won’t see much about Checkers or Chess either. I’m talking about some really geeky stuff. They have a website for people like us it’s called WWW.Boardgamegeek.com. If you were to go there and start reading about just a few of the “Hot” games right now you would bump into a lot that will leave you saying “This is really complicated”. But that is the point, immersive complex games with very in-depth mechanics and strategy, covering themes from the standard Fantasy and Sci-fi genres to obscure even mundane themes like Sheering Sheep.

Most people I talk to refer to Boardgames as “bored” games, and I can see where that is coming from. When I was growing up we had the typical family boardgame get togethers usually around Thanksgiving and Christmas. We would play stuff like Life or Monopoly or Scrabble. I always considered these games “boring” but of course as a kid I never considered why they were boring, I just wanted to get out of playing them so I could go off and play video games. Looking back now I see that these types of “classic” Boardgames were not grabbing my attention because they were either too simplistic or required little if any imagination. Even the Flashier Gimmick type games like Mousetrap or Hungry, Hungry Hippos were too silly or lacking in depth to spark my interest for long. I was pretty much resigned to believing that the old, flat, 2-D world of Boardgames would never compare to the exciting dynamic new world of Video Games. Then two things happened, Video Games started to get lame, there were so many bad games being churned out, eventually this lead to the video game crash of '84 and video game cartridges weren’t selling and ended up in landfills, and I was bored. The next thing that happened was a friend of the family brought a new boardgame over. "Yeah a new "bored" game" I thought sarcastically. This new game was called "Dark Tower" and it was amazing. It was the perfect way to grab a video game geek's attention because the game was run by an electronic black tower, which sat ominously in the center of the game board. The tower had lighted pictures and sound effects that grabbed your attention. The game had very cool fantasy art that sold the theme very well and stoked your imagination. There also was very basic concepts of resource management that gave you (or at least a young boy) an intellectual challenge. Needless to say this thing set my brain on fire, I could not get enough. The game was very expensive for the time, $50, and even though my family liked the game, there was no way my parents were gonna buy it. So when this friend of the family moved away I did not get to play Dark Tower again until years later when I was making my own money and was able to purchase an old beat up copy for myself. As I grew up I had a changed attitude about boardgames. Through the years I have always kept an eye out for those rare games that offer a more immersive, imaginative, and challenging experience. Most of the time it was a fruitless search. New games would come out and draw some of my attention but somehow or another would not measure up. That all changed a few years ago when I was having a conversation with some friends of mine about boardgames and we all remembered with great fondness "that old Dark Tower game". That sparked it, and before I knew I was being shown a new world of gaming, and my friends Scott and Ed were finding new things too. Before long the three of us were hip deep in a plethora of gaming nirvana.

Like I said this nirvana began with a discussion that involved reminiscing about Dark Tower and soon Scott and Ed where introducing me to Axis and Allies. I had never been in to World War II stuff or wargames that simulated it, but it was a lot of fun and exactly what I had been waiting for years to play, it had the depth and complexity I was looking for. I returned the favor by exposing Scott and Ed to Magic the Gathering, not really a boardgame, it’s a collectable card game. But it has a great fantasy theme and teaches some basic tactics that we use in the boardgames we play. After our initial buying frenzy we now approach Magic more like boardgamers by sticking to only buying and playing with the pre-constructed decks. On a side note Magic was not Scott’s first Fantasy gaming exposure a few years before I played Axis and Allies with him and Ed we had a short stint of intense sessions playing Warhammer Quest, a wonderful blend of boardgames meets Dungeons and Dragons, Scott and I loved this game. When Ed came on board and we started things with Axis and Allies and Magic, but we quickly started looking for other games more in this vein.

It was such a flurry of new games that I can’t really remember what came first but before I knew it I was being exposed to all kinds of new games; Card games like Blue Moon, Citadels and Colossal Arena. World Conquest/War Games like Risk 2210, Civilization, Axis and Allies expansions like Pacific and Europe. Then we found great gaming companies like Fantasy Flight Games, Days of Wonder and Rio Grande. Fantasy Flight brought great games like Runebound, Descent, Warcraft, Fury of Dracula, and Arkham Horror. Rio Grand was responsible for my first exposure to Euro-Games like Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, and Caylus. Days of Wonder with fun titles like Ticket to Ride, Shadows over Camelot and Memoir ’44.

All these games just scratch the surface of all the gaming experiences that I will be talking about in this blog. I hope to give those that read this blog some education and exposure to these wonderful games, whether you’ve played some of them and are just looking for more of the same. Or if you are one of those unfortunates that is still stuck in a world of Monopoly and Sorry, consider this a beginning to a better world.