Chairman of the Board

How Much is Too Much?

2008-07-22T10:57:00.000-07:00

I sometimes talk about what makes the games me and my friends play different from the games that the average person plays. One big thing that makes them different is the idea of expansions.

Expansions are simply put, add-ons to an existing game. Imagine you own Monopoly, and there was an expansion set released that added more Community Chest or Chance cards to the base game. Maybe there could be some new player tokens in the expansion too. Of course you probably will never see an expansion for a mainstream game like Monopoly. I think that most people don’t want to have to buy one thing to be able to play another. But to hardcore gamers, expansions go over very well. Just look at the game company Fantasy Flight Games. They make expansions for a lot of their games, and they seem to sell very well. Some games have several expansions, and sometimes it seems like it might just be to much. I’m gonna talk about two games that have a lot of expansions, Runebound and Arkham Horror.

Runebound is a Fantasy adventure game where the players each take control of a Fantasy type Hero character and travel around the board defeating various challenges that are represented by four decks of cards. The four different card decks are separated by four different colors, green, yellow, blue and red. These represent different difficulty levels with green being the easiest and red the hardest. The Heroes can also take the gold they win in beating these challenges to the market and buy more powerful items to aid in their quest. Their quest is to be the first Hero to beat the Red challenge card that contains the Evil Dragon Lord Margath and thus save the world.

Now the game comes with many components like; dice, plastic figures, cardboard counters, the game board and of coarse a lot of Cards! Since the game was released in 2005 there have been several expansions that add even more components, including even more cards! To date there have been three “Large Expansions” that add more characters, counters and even new game boards.

Then there have been 18 “small” expansions that just add more cards! More cards to the Market deck, more cards to the challenge decks and even cards that change the conditions to win.

To demonstrate the massive amount that these expansions add to the base game let me throw some numbers at you. The base game comes with 12 Hero Characters to choose from. If you add all the new Heroes from all the expansions you would now have 34 to choose from, that’s kinda cool. How about the market cards? The base game comes with 84 market cards, that’s 84 items and and allies you can buy with your hard earned gold. But add in all the market cards from the expansions and that total shoots up to 327. That can make it hard to draw that one kick butt item your looking for, unless you use one of the market variant rules that are out on the net. Then there is the challenge decks which were made up of 72 cards in the base game but when you add the cards from the expansion you are looking at 252, and that’s not counting the challenge cards that are for specific storylines. That many adventure cards, some argue, can upset the balance of the game, especially when you are drawing Red Cards looking for Margath. With that many cards it can be harder to find the guy.

This exponential growth also extends to the game Arkham Horror.

What is Arkham Horror? Well let me steal a description from Boardgamegeek.com;
Arkham Horror is a cooperative adventure game themed around H.P Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Players choose from 16 Investigators and take to the streets of Arkham. Before the game, one of the eight Ancient Ones is chosen and it's up to the Investigators to prevent it from breaking into our world. During the course of the game, players will upgrade their characters by acquiring skills, allies, items, weapons, and spells. It's up to the players to clean out the streets of Arkham by fighting many different types of monsters, but their main goal is to close portals to other dimensions that are opening up around town. With too many portals open the Ancient One awakens and the players only have one last chance to save the world. Defeat the Ancient One in combat!

Since it was released, also in 2005, there have been 4 expansions printed.
Two of them were termed “small expansions” that added more cards.

The other two were “full expansions” that not only add more cards but whole new board sections.

With all this laid out on the table the game is huge!!!

You can see from this picture how big this game is when set up to play, what you don’t see is how much more has been added to the base game. Not just in what is out on the table, but in new rules and mechanics. I could break down the numbers again for you on all the cards that were added but I don’t think I need to. I think it is enough to say that the number of Items, and Monsters and Characters, has almost tripled!! But like I was saying, it’s not just the sheer amount of stuff that makes this game somewhat unwieldy, but all the new rules and complexity that are being added with each new expansion. For example, the original rulebook was pretty big at 24 pages. If you added all the rulebooks from the expansions to it, the original rulebook would be 56 pages! Wow! Add to that the rumors that there is another expansion due out at the end of the year, oh boy!

Admittedly, you don’t have to play with all the expansions at once, as a matter of fact they are all designed to be playable without having the other expansions. But these are very long games and when you do have time to sit down and play them you just can’t sway the feeling that you want to use everything. I know that I am not the only person feeling overwhelmed, there is a forum on Boardgamegeek.com were fans of the game are discussing the rumored expansion and how they propose handling this now massive game. Here is a link to that discussion; http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/322334

You know, I do believe that variety is the spice of life, and it really is great that these games have so much of that variety, but how much is too much?

The More the Merrier

2008-05-30T17:26:00.000-07:00

So it’s should be no surprise that more players means more enjoyable games, but I was surprised this past weekend to find a game that seems to be just for two players is actually better with four. First let me tell you what we played first.

First up was History of the World.

I have been trying to get my own copy of this game for awhile now. My friend Ed bought it awhile back but it is out of print now. So I bought a copy on ebay for over $100 bucks, but it was worth it. It is such a fun game. Think of it as a Historically based Risk type game where you control not just one army throughout the whole game but several different armies throughout history. The game starts in 3000 B.C. with the Sumerians and ends in 1914 with pre WWI Germany. That spans a lot of history and the game divides that time into 7 Epochs. Each Epoch has 7 major Empires from roughly the same time frame and the players are randomly given control of one of those empires. Then the goal is to try and expand that empire as much as possible in the one turn that represents that Epoch. Then you move on to the next Epoch leaving the remnants of your old empire on the board and picking up the mantle of another empire trying to expand.

So this past weekend the four of us got together and played.

It was Me, Brandon, Scott, and Jessica, and like the title at the top of the page suggests, it was very fun to play this great game with more people. In the past Scott and I usually only got to play it with Ed so we were used to 3 player games. But History of the World is designed to be played with up to 6 players so it was no surprise that we enjoyed it more with 4 people.

I have to say that Scott might not have enjoyed it as much as I did because he had his worst game ever. Based on his score through out the game he was constantly in last place. Even the fact that the last place player gets to draw Empire Cards first could not save him.

Here is what the board looked like at the end of the game;

Scott was Green and Brandon was Yellow. I was Blue, and as you can see I was able to take control of Northern Europe and a good portion of Southern Europe too. This was thanks to the fact that I drew the Romans in Epoch 3 and Spain in Epoch 6 and then finished up with the Germans in Epoch 7. But it did not win me the game. I came in Second. Jessica, who was Red, won the game with a hefty score of 239.

So the final scores were; Scott 160, Brandon 203, Me (Mike) 212, and Jessica 239.

I guess the big surprise and the reason for the title up top, is the 4 player game of Crokinole we played. Scott and I had played some 2 player Crokinole the day before, and it was typically one sided, in more ways then one.

Not only did Scott kick my butt, but as usual in a 2 player game of Crokinole, each players discs are mostly on one side or the other. This had never bothered me before until the next day when we all got together and played a 4 player game. It makes total sense to me now. There are 4 quadrants to shoot from, duh! And when you play in teams of two you and your team mate shoot from opposite sides of the board. This completely changes the dynamics of the game. Now there is nowhere to hide. Your discs can be shot at and knocked of the board from both sides now, and in turn the goal in the center is more accessible for your team, you don’t get blocked out as much. If you are wondering what I’m talking about I suggest that you read my last blog entry where I explain the basics of Crokinole.

Well the bottom line is that it is always preferable to try a game with more people, even though it is a lot easier to get small groups together. I am just very glad that Scott and I have found some fellow gamers that we like to hang out with and enjoy these games together. Thanks a lot fellow gamers!!

Descent into……Crokinole?!?

2008-05-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

Well it’s been awhile since I wrote but I hope to avoid that in the future by doing shorter articles. We’ll see how it goes.

My last blog was about my hopes for Descent, the yet to be determined ultimate dungeon crawl boardgame!

The Road to Legend expansion is supposed to make this game everything I ever wanted. Well I bought everything, the base game and all the expansions, plus the Road to Legend expansion. I have read through everything and I can say that the game sure looks great but I have not played it yet. Scott and I have been too busy with other games like Galaxy Trucker and Kingsburg. We have also been playing some Magic the Gathering since both Scott and I have been buying lots of cool pre-construct decks. Mostly we have avoided playing Descent because we have been busy breaking in some new players! Scott’s friend Brandon and my friend Jessica, have been joining us for few gaming sessions and learning the ropes. We have to start them slow and Descent would be a lot to deal with for first time players.

But the big thing that we have been focusing on right now is Crokinole!

Crokinole is an old dexterity game from the 1800s. It involves players taking turns flicking little wooden discs across a circular board and trying to get there discs as close to the center hole as possible, or, if your lucky, getting it into the hole for a GOAL!!! A goal is worth 20 points, and that’s a guaranteed 20 points. You can get other points if you can keep your discs on the board without them getting knocked off the board and falling into the outer ditch. It is difficult though because one of the main rules in Crokinole is that if your opponent has a disc on the board you have to try and hit it with your next shot. This usually results in your opponent getting his disc knocked into the ditch and if you are not careful and you overshoot, your disc might wind up next to his. At the end of the round when everyone has shot all 12 of their discs you give points for the discs that are left on the board dependant on what ring they are in; the outer ring is worth 5 points, the inner ring is worth 10 points, and the center ring is worth 15 points. As I mentioned earlier getting a disc into the hole in the very center is worth 20 points and you get those points immediately and remove your disc, your opponent can not take those 20 points away now, because your disc cannot be knocked off since it’s removed from the board. This obviously makes getting a goal very valuable. At the end of the round you take all the points awarded for that round and they cancel each other out and if a player still has points left after that they keep them and mark them down on the scoreboard. They you play another round. You keep going this way until someone passes 100 points and wins the game.

Scott and I have been playing a lot of Crokinole because he just bought a custom hand crafted board from the Hilinski Brothers. They make a lot of unique and beautiful boards and you can get one from their website at www.crokinoleworld.com. Scott ordered the Cat Balou board.

It’s a very nice board and blast to play on. Of course we just had to break it in, so needless to say we spent a lot of time last weekend doing so.

The Mechanix

2008-02-14T14:32:00.000-08:00

Every boardgame has at least one “mechanic”. A mechanic is a system of rules that when looked at in a generic sense can be applied to anygame. When a game designer sits down to create his game he has to decide how to achieve the effect his going for with a system of rules. For example Monopoly has the very basic and often used mechanic of random movement determined by dice roll. This may seem like such a no brainer game mechanic that it is practically transparent, but you know someone somewhere had to think it up first, and not every game uses it. Look at Chess, that game defiantly doesn’t have random movement. That is because game designers have different goals when designing a game, and sometime they can achieve those goals by coming up with there very own unique game mechanic, but a lot of time they borrow a mechanic from another game and tweek it slightly to work within the parameters of their game. Some gameplay mechanics are just that good and that much fun that they have to be used again and again. As a matter of fact if you go on Boardgamegeek.com you can browse through games by what kinda of mechanics it has, it’s true! All the games on BGG are categorized by mechanics, and there is a good reason for it. Some gamers just really like certain types of game mechanics. I always love a game that has great mechanics. When I sit down and play a new game for the first time I will always get more excited about it if it has a really cool mechanic or better yet if it shares a mechanic with a game I’ve already played before and enjoyed. Recently I got a chance to play some new games that have mechanics that remind me of other games I’ve enjoyed in the past.

Kingsburg is a game where you try to influence members of the King’s Court in order to give you things that will help you win the game. In the game you roll three dice, and if the total on any one, two or all three of your dice equal the number attributed to one of the King’s Court you can place these dice on that person. Then you gain influence over them and consequently gain materials or favors that help you build your province. In the end if you have the most prosperous province your win.

This method of rolling dice and assigning them to spots on the board to gain various actions reminds me a lot of another game I have played in the past called Yspahan.

In Yspahan the dice that are rolled are assigned to a “Dice Tower” that determines what actions the players can take during the game. Each player only gets one choice and when they choose, the dice for that selection are removed. So there is a lot of opportunity to screw the other players, but that makes it so much fun.

Another game I recently played was Race for the Galaxy.

This is a simple card game but contains a lot of strategy in the play of its many planet and development cards. There are so many combinations and different directions you can take with the cards that you play that the game might not seem that simple after all.

One aspect of the game that is similar to another game I’ve played, are the Action Cards.

These action cards determine what phases of the game are performed and since the cards are played simultaneously and face down, every player has no idea what phases they will get to perform except of coarse for the action phases they themselves select. Also there is no way to pick all the phases you will want to perform at the same time. So there is an element of guessing what phases the other players might choose. This is very similar to another favorite game of mine called Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico is a game about building settlements and growing and shipping crops. The settlements and crops are represented by card board chits and wooden pieces, it’s a boardgame with all the euro type pieces. In the first step of each players turn they select a “role”.

In the picture above you can see these roles fanned out across the top. Each role selected enables all the players to perform an action, with the person who selected the action getting some sort of bonus. Not all roles will be selected so in every round there will be actions that no one will be able to perform, just like in Race for the Galaxy.

Of coarse this similarity should not be surprising since Race for the Galaxy was originally slated to be the card game version of Puerto Rico. The guy that was working on Race had his initial design turned down by the company that publishes Puerto Rico, so he decided to slap a Sci-Fi theme on it and tweek the game play a little and tada, Race for the Galaxy happened. I’m very glad he did not give up on his design, Race is a very fun game.

The last new game that I played that reminds me of other game mechanics was Tikal.

This is a fun game were you control an expedition force that is out exploring a jungle in order to uncover lost treasures and the Temples of an ancient civilization. The game represents this exploration aspect with large hexagonal tiles that are drawn randomly from a face down stack.

I’ve always loved games where you get to flip up tiles as you explore, in this case a jungle, but in most games of this type, a dungeon. Warhammer Quest is one such game that comes to mind. I find that I am always drawn to any game that has an exploration mechanic and there are more then a few, and too many to mention here.

So if you are new to these types of boardgames you may have been wondering what makes some more popular that others. Well there is usually a lot of focus put on the theme or the storyline. Or maybe people will look intently at the amount of strategy or the “fun factor”. Also people are concerned about how hard it is to learn, or how fast it is to play. For me though, one of the first things I look at is the mechanics, and it always gives me a thrill when I play a game that does a good job of incorporating my favorite mechanics.

RPG’s and Me Part 3: The Future

2008-01-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

In my last blog I prayed for a game company to make a game like Warhammer Quest, but with higher production values and full ongoing support for the game, I hoped that it would contain everything that a player would need to play the game to the fullest and that it would all be available in the base game and it’s subsequent expansions. I believe that my favorite game publisher, Fantasy Flight, may soon deliver this Holy Grail to myself and others that have searched for the definitive mix of RPG, Dungeon Crawl, and boardgame all in one.

When Fantasy Flight released Descent in 2005 my friend Ed bought it right away. We were both very excited and I was very jealous that he had gotten it before me. He was telling my friend Scott and I all about the game via e-mail and phone and he insisted that we make the 3 hour drive to his home so we could all play it. Scott and I had many fond memories of playing Warhammer Quest together and always wished that we could have played it with Ed. Now here was a game that promised to be better than Warhammer Quest and Ed had it. Needless to say we made that 3 hour drive.

So we played and we were disappointed. When I say “we” I mean Scott and myself. Ed thought it was great, but he had never played Warhammer Quest. We explained to Ed that one of the most addictive qualities of WQ was building your character up over many game sessions. Descent did not have this ability. Descent was designed to take a character from “zero to hero” in one session. Your character literally starts with nothing and then over the course of crawling through this one dungeon finds items that give them tremendous power. Also there is some boosting of the characters innate abilities. In WQ, we argued, the player really becomes attached to their character because of the time invested in trying to not only make them more powerful but customize them with all the various skills and special items available. The characters in WQ had so many different options that each character pack came with a small rulebook that was typically 8 to 12 pages long. That is what Scott and I wanted out of Descent, not some quick “play with them once and throw them away” characters.

Descent had some great things about it though. The production values were high. Every component was great quality. The miniatures for the monsters and characters; lots of cardboard tokens for keeping track of health and potions; cards that represented your magic items with fantastic artwork; modular board pieces for designing the dungeon; all these were great. Also the player that ran the game and acted as the “Overlord” got to do all kinds of fun things to stop the Heroes. Like setting off traps, and spawning more and more and even more monsters for the Heroes to fight. Best of all these things though was the combat system. It used a unique set of dice that simplified combat but retained enough depth to make things exciting.

There were two expansions released for Descent. The Well of Darkness in 2006, which added more monsters, more Heroes, and more Traps for the Overlord to use.

Then there was Altar of Despair in 2007, which added even more Monsters and Heroes and Traps.

I have to admit that all this extra stuff coming out was making me excited for the game again. It was exactly what I had always wanted for Warhammer Quest, affordable expansions that added more of everything. It really showed that Fantasy Flight was dedicated to supporting the game. With all this cool new stuff Ed was able to talk Scott and me into playing with him again, I even borrowed it from him and played it again with Scott by ourselves. Once again we just could not get passed our disappointment with not being able to flush out and build our characters over time. I scoured the internet trying to find anyone that might have come up with their own rules to play the game this way, I even spent sometime while I was borrowing the game from Ed to see if I could come up with my own rules, but it was all hopeless, I gave the game back to Ed and gave up on it.

Well now there is some very interesting news. The designers of Descent have heard the pleas of other Descent players that feel the same way as I do. Fantasy Flight has announced another expansion for Descent to come out in 2008, but this one will be different. It is called The Road to Legend.

This expansion promises to add “Campaign Rules”, which means finally you can make a character and watch them grow and improve over multiple adventures. It’s what I’ve been waiting for all these years. As far as I can see it is the only missing piece that will make Descent the RPG Boardgame I have been questing for. In addition this expansion claims that it will shorten play time from long arduous 3-4 hour sessions to quick 1 hour sessions. This is possible because of the new rules that enable the carrying over of characters from one quest to the next, these new rules simply enable shorter play sessions because you can just pick up from where you left off. There will also be mechanics in place that will even give the Overlord player a chance to experience the joys of character building themselves, by giving them evil boss characters to grow and cultivate, striving to turn them in to the ultimate super-villain, a true nemesis for the Heroes.

I know I have been so nit picky about finding the perfect RPG Boardgame, that most people will say that I won’t be anything but letdown by The Road to Legend. I have hope though, I think that this has been a long time in coming and I believe in Fantasy Flight. They are my favorite game publisher after all.

RPG’s and Me Part 2: The Recent Past

2007-11-29T15:24:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-05T10:14:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-10-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

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 .

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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

2007-09-21T13:13:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-31T09:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-15T13:59:00.000-07:00

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.