Game of Thrones Cluedo

Bom-bom baba-bom-bom baba...

Over the weekend, we broke out one of Hanna's birthday presents: Game of Thrones Cluedo.

This game follows the essential rules of Cluedo (Clue if you're American,) but with a twist. Each player takes one of six characters, moves around a map with a number of rooms and has to work out which of the six characters, including themselves, done a murder(1), in which room and with which of six weapons. All of the variables are on cards, and one of each is placed in an envelope to define the terms of the crime. Each turn you aim to get your character to a new room, where you can 'start a rumour', calling a character and a weapon to the same room and putting it about that this is the killer combo. In turn, each of your opponents gets a chance to prove you wrong by showing you one card from their hand that matches your rumour. Eventually, when you think you know the solution, you can make an accusation, check the envelope, and either win or be excluded from the game. Because the game was made in older and simpler times, the win condition is the same for everyone, even if you realise that it was you what done it.

Is anyone significantly murdered with a battle axe in the series?

Game of Thrones Cluedo has the twist of featuring two scenarios on its reversible board: Mereen, in which you are solving a murder in one of nine major buildings; and The Red Keep, in which you are figuring out who was behind a murder plot which reached its grim conclusion in one of eleven rooms, making for a slightly more complex case. In addition, because we no longer live in those simple times, each character has a special ability and an additional mechanic allows you to collect Intrigue cards by various means, which allow you to take extra turns, see additional cards and other such things. Just for funsies, eight of the Intrigue cards are White Walkers, which must be played immediately into a separate discard pile. Drawing the eighth White Walker takes you out of the game, and the card is shuffled back into the deck to potentially kill someone else later.

Varys: Master of Modifiers

Most of the Game of Thrones trappings are just window dressing on your basic Cluedo, and even the special abilities are interesting one-shots at most, but the Intrigue cards are a radical change to the pacing of the game. Given the near-certainty of someone stealing the prize if you stumble on solution – say by guessing the weapon and room out of nowhere, damnit – an extra turn can reverse one's fortunes. With only three players the White Walkers aren't that much of a thing, but I can see that with eight the Intrigue deck would be much more akin to a revolver(2) in a game of Russian roulette. All in all, it's the Intrigue deck that makes this more than just a reskin, with Miss Scarlett wearing some sort of creepy, serial killer Cersei Lannister mask.

Also, the world is clearly ready for a Game of Thrones edition of Kill Doctor Lucky, with Joffrey as the obvious victim.

(1) Murder has its own grammar.

(2) A revolver that fires zombies.

Pandemic: Iberia and Red November

Farewell to Catalonia.

Over the Christmas period, we played a few games. There were Disney's Storytelling Adventures sets, which I'll discuss in another post, as well as Andrews Christmas present, Pandemic: Iberia, and my birthday present, Red November.

Pandemic: Iberia takes the basic principles and gameplay of Pandemic and transplants them to the Iberian peninsula (that's basically Spain and Portugal,) where members of the Second Royal Philanthropic Expedition seek to philanthropically expedite research into the diseases ravaging the region. Unlike regular Pandemic, in which the diseases are non-specific but typically assigned to any two major diseases of recent memory, plus bird flu and the zombie plague, the threats are specific here: malaria, typhoid, cholera and scarlet fever (and not, to many people's surprise, Spanish flu, which was an early 20th century pandemic.) There are new roles, and a few new rules as well, including the unwritten rule: For the sake of us all, someone play the Nurse.

In vanilla Pandemic the Medic is often considered a must-have, but in Iberia the Nurse is essential. The cities on the map are connected by travel lines, as in the regular game, but in this case the lines are deemed to encompass regions, with a number of rules using not the city nodes but the regions to define their effect. The nurse, for example, has a token she can drop in any region adjacent to her current position. No city touching that region can then have disease cubes played into it. This is not quite OP (you can get at most five cities,) but it's still a bit of a game changer. The same is true of the Railway Man, who can build railways at an accelerated rate to make up for the fact that you can't take charter flights in this game. Ordinarily you can move one city or jump from port to port with cards, but once the rails go down you can move any number of cities that are connected by an unbroken railway. The other roles each have their uses, but these two are almost certain to see the most play.

With the lack of modern medicine, diseases in Iberia can not be cured, only researched. You can, however, prevent diseases by purifying water in a region. Purifying puts down tokens which are then removed instead of placing cubes; a potential game saver in a region about to go boom. Purification needs a card that matches one of the cities in a region, or a card of one of the researched colours. You also need to work local: Researching a disease requires a hospital to be built in a city of the appropriate colour.

Other than this, the game is identical to its predecessor, but the small changes make for a surprisingly different paying experience. It's definitely more than just a reskin.

Two gnomes are dead in the water; two have escaped.

Red November is the second edition of the game of peril aboard the eponymous sinking gnomish submarine. The core mechanic of Red November is that your gnomish sailors run around fixing things to keep alive until rescue arrives. The problem is that everything takes time, and as time passes more things go wrong. You track your turn by moving your timekeeper around the track on the outside of the board, and when you've made your move and taken your action, you draw event cards based on how far you've moved, which cause things to break. You can all die because you run out of air, boil alive, get crushed by the merciless pressure of the deep, or when the missiles go off, the reactor melts down, or the Kraken shows up and eats you(1). Individually you can die if trapped in a room that is full of water or fire.

The second edition has slightly bigger cards and a slightly bigger board, and I think there are some rules tweaks which seem to have significantly upped the difficulty. We've had individual deaths in previous games, but the chance of a TPK seems much higher in this version, with a number of instances of the two halves of the sub being completely separated from one another by blocked hatches, floodwaters and/or fire.

Red November is a game that seems extremely fiddly at first, but the timekeeping quickly becomes second nature and the game runs quickly once you get going. It's definitely at its best when things are frantic; the early stages tend to feel a bit too easy, but it's all fun and games once someone loses an eye, a few rooms start catching fire and you need to get into the flooded pump room to stop the fire using up all of the oxygen.

(1) My one sadness about the game is that in multiple playthroughs of both editions, we haven't yet been eaten by the Kraken.

We're Going On a Bear Hunt, Room on the Broom and Go Go Dragons

Oh no! Sticky mud!

This Christmas, we introduced our daughter to board gaming, with the help of her grandparents. I bought her one game, they bought her two.

First up, we played We're Going on a Bear Hunt, the game of the children's classic from former Children's Laureate Michael Rosen. It's a reasonably simple chase game with a twist: Roll the die, move around the board, sometimes skip a go or draw a card which may allow you to roll again. The twist is that once a player wakes up the bear they start rolling two dice while the bear rolls one die to chase after them.

Room on the Broom is likewise based on a children's classic, and is a combination chase and set-collecting game, with an exciting sort of overlapping Moebius loop course and a dragon podding around trying to catch you. The course has two rings and you cross from one to the other each circuit, which actually confused the hell out of Arya. She also found the spinner a little more challenging than the dice. The set collecting just baffled her; the idea that she would just take the top card instead of sorting out the one she needed was clearly alien to her, and when I didn't get the card I needed to beat her, she went through the deck and found it for me, which made me very happy.

Finally, Go, Go Dragons is a race game. A scatter of discs on the table have dragon footprints face up and dragon faces in one of four colours face down. Turn up a disc, move the dragon shown one space forward. Each player 'supports' one dragon, and is supposed to wave their card excitedly when they move. As the last-place dragon reaches each line of the course, another disc is flipped and that dragon goes back a step. It says it's for older children than the other two games, but in a lot of ways is simpler.

The games are all pretty simple, but they delight Arya, which is lovely to see. She's a little wobbly on counting out her moves, but that will come in time.

X-COM the board game

This Christmas, I got my metamour a copy of X-COM the board game, another box full of pieces from complexity merchants Fantasy Flight Games. It's designed for 1-4 players filling four roles between them:

• The Commander places interceptors to shoot down UFOs, but more importantly oversees X-COM's funds each turn.
• The Central Officer controls the placement of satellites to shoot down orbiting UFOs, and controls the digital app which provides UFO placements and random events.
• The Squad Leader controls the deployment of soldiers to complete missions and to defend the X-COM base from alien assault.
• The Chief Scientist assigns research projects and researchers to provide all roles with additional assets in order to do their jobs.

The three marshmallows standing in for
UFOs are a sign that things are not going
well.

So, the key words you may have spotted in there were 'digital app'. You can't actually play X-COM without a tablet or smartphone to run the free companion app which provides random and plotted events and also contains the rules (there is no paper rule book.) But don't let that fool you; there are all the usual cards and tokens you'd expect from Fantasy Flight, and little plastic models to boot.

Each role has a set of accompanying asset and reserve cards. The assets have abilities to aid in the performance of the role, while the reserves are resources to be assigned: Interceptors, Satellites, Soldiers and Researchers. The Commander also gets a stack of credit chips to represent X-COM's money each round. The Chief Scientist gets a deck of technology cards, which can be researched to grant new assets. The Squad Leader has a stack of mission cards, each including three tasks, some or all of which may be filled by drawing from the alien deck, with defeated aliens becoming salvage, which can be spent by the Chief Scientist. The Commander gets a stack of crisis cards which make bad things happen. There is also a set of success tokens to track how well a task is going, and the dice. The game includes five blue six-siders, each with four blank faces and two X-COM symbols, and a red eight-sider.

Each game has an invasion scenario, which determines the base location, one of the Commander's assets, the final mission, the selection of aliens and the shit that goes down when the base gets dinged up.

Each turn begins with a timed phase, in which the app is king: research projects and defence assets are assigned, while aliens are played into base assaults, UFOs placed on the world map and Crisis cards drawn. Each time a crisis turns up, the Commander has a matter of seconds to choose between the top two cards. Similarly, the Squad Leader gets to draw two mission cards and play one, and the Chief Scientist chooses between a hand of six tech cards to fill three research slots. At the end of the timed phase, you count up assigned resources and audit against the available funds. If you've overspent, one of the continents gets more panicky. If there's an underspend, you can get more soldiers or interceptors, and believe me; you'll need them.

When base defence goes wrong, or rather, just before that
point.

The timed phase is followed by the resolution phase. First, all crisis cards are resolved, then each player in turn runs through their tasks: Research, orbital defence, global defence, base defence and the mission. Resolving a task involves rolling a number of the blue X-COM dice and the red alien die. You can roll as many times as you like, but each time the threat level rises, and if the alien die comes up equal to or lower than the threat level, you lose your assets. Satellites and researchers are disabled for a turn; interceptors and soldiers are glooped.

Guess who's coming to dinner. Just FYI,
those are stacks of four UFOs, not single
minis.

If there are UFOs left on any continent, that continent gets more panicked. If any aliens attacking the base aren't killed, the base takes damage. As the base takes damage, more bad shit happens. As panic rises, funding drops (and the chances of getting yet more panic from overspending rises.) It is incredibly easy to enter a spiral of failure, as we discovered in the game where we ended up having to use marshmallows for UFOs because we ran out of the little plastic ones. A key part of that was that our Chief Scientist had a run of terrible dice rolls, so were were shoring up the dyke with no tools. Research really is the key to success, it seems.

Victory comes when - or rather if - you unlock the final mission and complete it, but you can lose by having the base destroyed or too many continents crash into total panic. It's tough; almost Pandemic tough.

The main strength and weakness of the game is the app. It provides a lot of pace and variation, but until you get into the swing of it it can feel a bit mechanical, as if you're just a process not a player. The rest has a fair bit of the old X-COM flavour, from the tech cards which mirror advances from the game to the crushing sense of inevitable doom that creeps over you as a play through becomes untenable and the marshmallows close in.

There is also an issue with the size of the game. The board and additional cards are the absolute limit of what my table can hold, leaving me feeling that my hardware may no longer be adequate to run a modern board game.

Infernal Relics

Shit be getting mystical, yo.

I think it's fair to say that the longer any comic remains in publication, the weirder it gets. It's not surprising then that the second big expansion for the Sentinels of the Multiverse computer game is... a bit out there, even by Sentinels standards. As with 'Rook City', the 'Infernal Relics' DLC brings in all of the new cards from the expansion box of the same name: in this case 2 hero decks, 4 villains and 2 environments.

The heroes are the Argent Adept, a magical musician (or musical magician) and Nightmist, a sorceress made of fog. AA has unfortunate initials and a deck built around combos. He has some one-shots, but mostly his cards are Instruments (a specialised form of Equipment) or Ongoing cards of one of three types, Rhythm, Harmony and Melody. His intrinsic power is used only to activate the powers of the musical cards, while the instruments allow him to kick off multiple musical effects. Nightmist meanwhile has a very particular and fiddly card set. She has a number of powerful Relics, but the bulk of her repertoire is Spells. Each of her cards has a sparkly red icon with a number; when Spells are played, the top card of her deck is revealed and its number determines the magnitude of the Spell effect; and usually the damage she inflicts on herself to use it. Potentially incredibly powerful, there are a lot of gambles in playing Nightmist.

Each of these heroes brings their own nemesis to the table. AA's is Akash'bhuta, an insane extradimensional earth mother goddess determined to destroy all existence and opposed by the Virtuosi of the Void. Her deck builds 'Primal Limbs' which do her attacking, but damage her once destroyed. If that sounds easy, you should note that she has a stonking 200 health to deplete. Nightmist's archenemy is also an outsider to the universe; Gloomweaver, a demonic loa worshipped by degenerate voodoo cults. Gloomweaver rocks a combination of Zombies, Cultists (who are swapped with trashed zombies when destroyed), Relics and Voodoo Pins, a nasty new card type that attach to a Hero card and do horrible things each turn. He is nowhere near as tough as Akash'bhuta, but like the Chairman/Operative he quickly generates a wall of mooks, so you spend a lot of time riding herd.

The remaining villains pair up with heroes from the basic set. Fanatic's nemesis is Apostate, a black-winged, long-haired, shirtless angel-dude ripped from the fevered imaginings of a thousand anime fangirls. Many of his cards are Relics mirroring Fanatics, in particular his personal sword, but he also has a demon horde to call on. Finally, the Ennead is a set of nine villains, of whom only five (or possibly one per hero) are played each time. Each member of the group is a human possessed by one of the Heliopolitan Ennead, and each has an effect that triggers when certain cards are played from their deck, which can lead to quite painful chains of extra plays and damage effects (or healing; they heal a lot, so everyone jumping on one of them at a time is a good strategy.) Beside the Ennead themselves, they lack ongoing cards, and play mostly one-shots.

The environments are Gloomweaver's Realm of Discord, which plays Distortions to change the rules of the game, and the Tomb of Anubis, an Ancient Egyptian complex full of traps and tests and killer mummies.

There's a lot to get to grips with in terms of alternate mechanics in 'Infernal Relics', but overall the new challenges aren't as horrific as those of 'Rook City' and variety more than difficulty is the selling point. This makes it a better addition for a casual gamer like me, although perhaps less satisfying for those who find the game as is lacks bite.

Impressively, the drive for increased complexity and variation has not affected the strengths of the game, and the four-colour artwork and thematic deck construction remains excellent.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Board Game

To be clear, this is the US import, not the UK
version. TARDIS cookie jar, racks of CDs
and Andrew not included.

On Friday night, we introduced a new board game to the repertoire, in the form of a version of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game sufficiently old that it treated Tara as a minor support character and only went up to Season 4. Props though, because it was in sweet condition given age and usage; that's some quality game manufacturing.

In the spirit of the infamously difficult Army of Darkness board game, one player controls the baddies (determined by Season,) the others the heroes (Buffy, Willow, Xander and Oz.) Each hero has their own tray, a long card strip with spaces to place cards representing Help (allies), Weapons (most of which seem to be wooden objects which allow an insta-kill staking attempt,) Artifacts and Research (mostly spells, but also sewer maps allowing fast transit.) Characters are moved around the board by rolling dice, which are pretty standard six-siders, but with the 1 on one and the 6 on the other marked with a moon which progresses the oddest time track ever (I can't find a decent-sized close up, but it basically runs from the new moon to the full moon, then back through the waning phases until sunrise.)

The villain player rolls a die to see how many of the master and minion monsters can move in their turn. Characters move and then take an action, which can be searching for artifacts (one in each corner of the board,) drawing a regular card (in appropriately marked spaces,) or trying to smack the person next to you if they aren't on your side.

Each character has their own strength and weaknesses, which are not balanced (purposely; in a four player game, one player controls Xander and Willow.) Heroes (apart from Oz) can be sired as vampires (mechanically, this functions as the equivalent of the heroes stake option, and requires a specific villain card) and, if sired, re-ensouled with the appropriate spell. Buffy is tough, Willow has lots of magic dice, Xander... is basically likable, since it isn't Season 6 yet, and Oz is fundamentally indestructible. He's only an uber-badass during the full moon phase, but there aren't many monsters to match him (pretty much Veruca the bad werewolf, I think,) and every time he switches form in either direction, he basically heals all his damage. He also can't be one-shotted with the 'Sire' card; he's badass as all get out.

This character tray shows that a) other editions had more playable characters, and b) Giles is a fucking badass.

We actually had a surprisingly good game, beating the Mayor without losing a single character (although things looked very bad for Xander, who was saved by hitting the victory conditions from near certain death at Faith's hands.) We also didn't take out any of the minions, going straight for the Box of Gavrok (or as the card mistakenly insists, Garvok.)

There is a UK version which is a sort of double-blind Cluedo*, which is one of the weirdest concepts for a Buffy licensed game I can think of.

* Or Clue, for Americans.

Blood Bowl - Team Manager

Tuesday night's game night featured a couple of games. First, I took a turn Overlording in Descent. This confirmed a couple of suspicions about the first few games: 1) Don't mess about killing monsters, head straight for the objective, and 2) goblins can just fuck off. My main remaining question is 'how much are the players supposed to know?' Honestly, it makes a huge difference how much information they have on how hard different monsters are to kill and what powers they have. I have a sort of knee jerk reaction that there ought to be a screen, because of the RPGish elements, but from a board game perspective it makes more sense for there to be openness.

Looking at this spread of cards and tokens, I did wonder if some of the bits
were missing.

To round off the night, we played a season of Blood Bowl: Team Manager. Based on the popular GW fantasy American football board game (itself set in a fast and loose analogue of the Warhammer Fantasy Old World, in which a vastly increased interracial harmony has apparently been achieved by channeling all of the hatred and intolerance into a massively violent sport in which barely functional sociopaths of all races line up to compete in a formalised skirmish which may or may not involve a ball, depending on the match) and produced by Fantasy Flight, it has an unexpectedly restrained array of cards and counters, but on the other hand, there are expansions.

The basic set has six teams, and each player starts with a set deck of 12 starting players, a mix of high and low value cards, with each team having different strengths and weaknesses (Dwarfs are tough, Skaven and Chaos cheat a lot.) Play begins with each manager drawing six players, and the first manager (beginning with the youngest, then rotating around the table each 'week') drawing a Spike! magazine card and a number of highlight cards equal to the number of managers. The first of these is either a special rule which is in play for the week, or a tournament; the highlights are the matchups in which teams compete.

Play rotates around the table, with each manager in turn placing a player from their hand against a matchup or tournament (two teams can compete for each matchup, any number in the tournament.) As each player is placed, their skills may be used to pick up the ball, tackle opposing players, or replace cards in your hand (another strength of the Skaven, as I learned.) Some players also cheat, and this is a non-optional skill, requiring a cheat token to be placed on the card.

The dwarfs are dominating this matchup. It looks like the Black Orc is going
to attempt a tackle, but it can't knock down the Runner and that Blocker is
worth a surprising amount knocked down. Beardy bastards (not that James's
Grudgebearers beat my Skaven on Tuesday or anything.)

Once all players are committed, matchups are resolved. Cheat tokens are flipped, and may add fans (victory points,) add extra star power, or get the player sent off, removing them from the matchup. The first manager then counts up the star power on each side (players, plus cheat tokens, plus 2 for holding the ball) and the highest total wins (although there are usually rewards of some sort for all.) Rewards may be fans, a draw from the star player decks, or from the staff and team upgrade decks. Later weeks are similar to the first, but with the added variety of whatever upgrades have been added to each team.

Like many FF games, it's a bit of a struggle to get the hang of it on the first time through, but week on week it becomes more intuitive, and it's actually a lot of fun. I did astonishingly badly most of the way through, but clawed back an impressive stack of points in the closing rounds and got to feed a Beastman to my Rat Ogre, so that was fun.

Descent 2nd Edition

Yesterday, I managed to catch up with some old friends I don't see enough of anymore for a board games evening, wherein we ate pizza and played Descent: Journeys in the Dark (second edition), a sort of Fantasy Flight updating of the classic Advanced Heroquest concept.

Descent is a scenario-based game with a modular board consisting of about 25-30 sturdy, reversible card tiles. On one side of each tile is a dungeon section, on the other is wilderness. Coupled with entrance and exit tiles and a range of connectors and 'dead ends' to cap off unused junctions, these can be assembled into who knows how many possible variations. Each scenario - the game provides plenty, but you could easily write your own - has a map showing which tiles to set up, and what other bits to include.

Naturally there are bits, it's a Fantasy Flight game. The bits which you set up on the board include, but are not limited to: Search tokens, Objective tokens, Villager tokens, Lieutenant tokens and monster miniatures.

There are also hella cards, but we'll get to that.

As an Advanced Heroquest descendant, Descent includes actual plastic minis in the box. There is one for each of the eight hero characters, and a whole bunch of monsters. For reference, assuming you don't paint them all, the heroes are dark grey, the regular monsters tan and the boss monsters red. Aside from the goblins, there's little chance of mistaking the monsters for your characters, however, as the rest of them are all either spiders or simply immense. They are pretty nice miniatures, and those what paint could probably have a good time just gussying them up to look extra shiny on the tabletop.

Down the middle: Movement, Health, Endurance and Defence.
At the bottom are Attributes. On the right are your ability
and your feat.

Each hero also has a card detailing their abilities (each monster has the same, although theirs are half the size because they pretty much just move and attack.) In addition to a picture, the card gives the character or monster's movement rate (in squares), health and defence (represented by a die or dice,)  and any special abilities. Heroes also have endurance and attributes, and a special heroic feat that they can use once per encounter.

The game can be played with up to five people: One Overlord, controlling the dungeon and the monsters, and up to four players, each controlling a hero. The base set has eight heroes in four classes - fighter, scout, mystic and healer, I think they were. You aren't supposed to double up classes, and you customise your character by picking one of two decks of starting equipment and skills for their class (scouts, for example, can be 'thief' or 'wildernessy type'*.)

The hands at the bottom indicate how many hands are
needed to equip the thing. They're all left, indicating
that heroes in Descent are probably southpaws.

Once you get into the game, there are cards for searching, cards for further equipment, cards - and matching tokens - for being stunned, immobilised, poisoned or something else; possibly cursed. The Overlord gets a deck of cards that he draws from once per turn and that can be played to do bad things for the heroes or good things for the monsters. Rather than just killing everything in sight, you have an objective for each mission, which typically feeds into the next encounter in the scenario.

In play, each hero has a turn, followed by the Overlord. Each model gets two actions, which can be chosen from options including, but not limited to, move, attack, search and rest. Heroes can also take extra movement or use some skills by accruing fatigue, limited by their endurance. Resting clears fatigue, and is a more important action than you might think, because you build up fatigue at quite a pace and once you hit your endurance it starts becoming damage.

Dice, dice, baby!

This being a fantasy quest game, combat is the meat of the thing, and is done with dice. Each weapon allows you to roll the blue die and one or more of the yellow and red power dice. As you can see from the picture, each side contains a mixture of symbols: numbers are range, and a ranged attack has to accumulate enough of this to reach the target. Hearts are damage, while the lightning bolt is a surge, which can be used to activate special abilities (usually increasing damage or range, although Jon's character's hero ability meant that we could spend them to heal, which was very important.) The defender rolls one or more defence dice - brown, white or black in ascending order) which are marked with shields which cancel damage. Damage is your goal, but attacks may have other effects; in particular 'stun' was very important to us in the intro games, allowing us to tie up big opponents while we whittled down the little attackers.

This is a later and larger scenario than we played, with the
heroes in  a strong defensive position, yet simultaneously
screwed.

A key difference between this and Heroquest (Advanced or otherwise) is that the entire dungeon and its denizens are laid out to begin with, which means that everything starts to converge on you early. In addition, there is often something you have to stop happening which means that the slow and steady kick-and-search approach is rarely practical. This makes for a pacy game, as the heroes hurry to wrangle the Overlord's forces.

As an observation, fuck goblins. They run like greased pigs, can't be blocked, and invariably need to run somewhere in the scenario, which is something that you basically can not stop from happening, as they tend to be in and out of your line of sight in a single turn, or to have done what they needed to do before you can even get to them. Fuck those little bastards.

Ahem.

A final aspect of the game is progression. Heroes gain experience which allows them to buy additional skills from their class-type deck, and any equipment they pick up from searching can be retained or sold for gold which can then be used to buy more equipment. This is matched against Overlord XP and more powerful monsters and decks of Overlord card to create escalation.

On the basis of the first few scenarios, Descent is a nice little game with a lot of room to grow, even without the inevitable expansions. We - the players - won through the first few scenarios, but it was a close run thing (and mostly happened due to a) blessed stun lock, and b) James forgetting his trap cards during our turns,) which is pretty much what you want in a game like this.

* One of these two may not be the official name on the cards.

Early thoughts on Eldritch Horror

Not all components shown.

On Saturday night, we had a bash at Fantasy Flight's Eldritch Horror, a game of Lovecraftian terror, futile co-op struggle and occasional triumph.

Eldritch Horror is the international expansion of Arkham Horror, with a world map in place of Arkham and notable cities and expedition locations in place of major civic landmarks, but the same - literally; most of the characters are stalwarts of AH, and some also of Elder Sign - bunch of (mostly or) all-American heroes rambling about and taking care of business, Mythos stylee.

The game is pretty straightforward. Each turn you can move and act a certain amount as a matter of choice, then you have an encounter based on where you are, and finally Mythos shit happens and some people get hurt. Players take turns as lead investigator, but I never managed to check whether the token passed to represent this was really called 'the blame' or if that was just local patois, as it were.

Our saviour.

Some early observations:

Each character has a card with their stats and their special abilities, as well as any starting gear and spells. Compared to the sheet for the Outer Gods and Old Ones, it's a respectable size, but depressingly short on meat compared to the comparable card for the antagonist. In a twist, the basic level enemy is the witless, all-devouring force that is the Demon Sultan Azathoth.

The primary mechanic is roll N dice, 5 and 6 are successes. Based on the ability scores of the characters - 1 to 4 in each field - and the stats for the monsters - almost all force a 1 or 2 die penalty to the investigator's attack roll and require 3-4 successes to be accumulated to defeat them - successfully assaulting a monster, let alone bringing one down, is beyond the scope of even the hardiest adventurer without collaboration or serious hardware. As a consequence, Influence, the stat used to acquire weapons and other gear, is somewhat overpowered. Our social monkey quickly outstripped the martial artist in hitting power due to her ability to buy guns.

I'm just saying, my money isn't on the beardy-
weirdy up there.

Gate encounters are fiendishly complicated and may or may not require you to have certain items or a number of clues in han to successfully complete them. You have no way of knowing in advance what you might need and once drawn, an encounter does not persist until defeated; it's blind chance every time, making it hard to strategise to close gates even before the monsters come pouring through them.

The highlight of the game was when Hanna's martial artist got to blow
up a vampire with dynamite. Some things just never get old (both
vampires and blowing up vampires with dynamite count.)

There is a lot to be said for collaboration. There is a lot to be said for splitting up. The game supports 1-8 players, and I suspect that more is better. The Mythos takes one turn when all of the players are done, and only half at most of the encounters involve a risk of bad shit happening. I think that if I were to play this again with three players, my inclination would be to run two characters each.

There are a lot of pieces in this game, even for a Fantasy Flight game. Hearts and brains to track health and sanity; clue tokens; eldritch tokens; gate counters, monster counters and player pawns; mystery and rumour markers; the expedition token (I never even found out what this one was for, I presume it had a special encounter type linked to it); train or ferry tickets; and that's just the punch-out cardboard counters. The cards are a whole other kettle of evil, soul-eating fish! 

There are about nine different types of encounter, each with their own card decks, plus gear, artefacts and conditions, cards representing shitty things happen to you. I think during our initial half-a-game (time and tiredness got the better of us about midnight) we ran up something like four debts, two hallucinations, two curses, two detentions, an injured leg and a miscellaneous dark pact, as well as the occasional delay, which leaves your pawn lying on its side all turn, trying to stand up, and surprisingly doesn't have its own token*.

Hitmen is actually a pretty good thing to find when your debt condition comes
due. At least you can punch a human leg-breaker.

Curses are especially horrible. They reduce your success chance to 6s only and rely on random chance to shake off. At least Arkham Horror had a location where you could get blessed.

The meat of the game is yet another set of cards; the Mysteries, which vary according to the Old One/Outer God in play and must be resolved to win the game. These come out one at a time and stay out, which means it it is at least possible to work out what you plan to do about them.

I am sure that we screwed up at least some of the rules - on top of the ones that I know we screwed up because Andrew spotted it in game - and in particular the 'monster surges' seemed slightly half-arsed and I suspect that gate encounters are intended to persist until resolved.

It's a long game, but plays pretty fast, and would play faster with a greater familiarity with the rules. Well worth a play, if not a must by.

* I constantly expect FF games to include markers to indicate when a player has gone on a snack run, put the kettle on, or is using the facilities.

2014 in Games and Writing

2014 was a bit of an off year for me in terms of writing. I've not been as active as I like to be, and putting together a working collection of short stories is proving almost as difficult as editing up a finished novel. It doesn't help that Dropbox keeps screwing with my versions so I don't know which is the most recent and I end up having to do over, but there is an element of procrastination and another of creative exhaustion.

In part, I think I need to focus more on my writing, rather than running RPGs. I've got one on at the moment, but it's a fortnightly Fate Core game run via G+, which makes it pretty low maintenance. since quitting my STing duties with the IoD I've found the creative flow much easier and I have a number of things on the go, including that short story collection. I'll drop a note here (and probably there and everywhere) if and when I put anything up for sale.

I've been running Agents of CROSSBOW for a year now, although we had a longish break and I effectively rebooted halfway through the year, once I'd got a better handle on the system.  In playing terms I've drifted out of most of my regular LARPS, although I still play a fortnightly skype game and I have something new on the horizon in the form of No Rest for the Wicked.

I did RPG a day, which was pretty cool really, and helped me to think seriously and critically about a lot of my gaming habits. I've also been surprisingly active in writing game criticism (positive and negative) and I took part in Secret Santicore; not that I ever got my Secret Santicore 'present.'

In computer gaming, I have revisited a lot of old 40K games and also started Dishonoured, although I'm rather hung up on that at the moment. My current target is one of three sisters in different-coloured versions of the same masquerade ball suit, all of whom come and cower pitifully in a single room when alarmed. Consequently, I feel like a right git murdering them. I think I'm going to have to go for the non-lethal option and tell myself that it's fine; she'll be out of the way a few weeks while we sort out the country, then I can go and kill her stalker... if she hasn't already.

I don't think it's the right thing to do, but it's probably the least distasteful of the options which will move the game forward.

Board Games: Pandemic and Castle Panic

A couple of weeks ago, I went over to Ipswich for a barbecue (turned grill, due to rain) and board games party. Since Hannah has a strong preference for and no-one had a preference against, we went with two co-op games: Pandemic - In the Lab and Castle Panic.

This is us, one turn and one action from victory, and with
only one turn left of play.

Pandemic is a slickly-designed game of world-saving virology, in which up to four players take on different roles to battle four deadly plagues threatening humanity. Two decks of cards determine the fate of the world. One is used to determine where infection spreads, the other to provide the cards needed to fight it. Just to screw with you, it's the 'good' deck that contains the Epidemic cards that screw you over just when you think you're doing well.

The original version was brilliantly balanced so that victory would be assured with a fifth player, but with the maximum four a win was a rare, rare treat. This, however, was In the Lab, an expansion with a cure-finding mini-game which makes it easier to split the burden of cure-finding, and also adds a whole load of new roles to the game. It also supports five-player play.

We lost, infuriatingly running out of time with pretty much one action left to secure victory. Interestingly, we essentially lost not because there was too much disease, but because there was too little. With the In the Lab expansion, you need to collect disease samples in order to cure them, and the damned red disease - I think we dubbed it a particularly virulent strain of scarlet fever - refused to turn up. We had Andy's engineer parked in Taipei praying for sick people.

Damn you, global viral armageddon; you win this round.

Castle Panic is a castle defence game. Each turn, players play cards to attack monsters in particular zones, trying to take them down before they reach the walls and towers of the castle. Each turn, monsters move forwards and new ones appear in the forest.

The first game we played really failed to live up to its name. There was never much panic, just a little casual slaughter, largely because the last two chips in the box ended up being 'draw three more monsters' and 'draw four more monsters', so we never got rushed.

This made us cocky, and in the second game we were all 'let's play the variation where you start without walls and have to build them all from scratch'. That was the game where draw three and draw four turned up earlier, and while we won it was largely thanks to a couple of very lucky boulders.

Fiasco

Thinking about running tabletop games, while I still want to find the time some time to run a 40K campaign, it occurred to me that something much more doable would be to organise some one-shot Fiasco sessions.

Fiasco has many advantages for the busy gamer. It's highly structured and runs as a one-shot game of about 2-3 hours length. It's focused on a series of one-to-one scenes which the other players watch and adjudicate on, which makes it just about perfect for Skype or Hangout play. There are online dice rollers and simultaneous file sharing software to run the index cards and all-important dice. It requires about four players overall and as there is no chronicle does not require a fixed group.

ETA: Oh yes, and most of the playsets are free, making it a doddle for everyone to get a copy even if playing over Skype.

The more I think of it, the more perfect it seems.

So, now I just need to pitch it to you guys:

Fiasco was designed to accommodate collaborative storytelling in the milieu of modern noir; the world of the Cohen Brothers and Elmore Leonard, where greed and lust and the occasional good intention collide in a catastrophe of post-hubristic downfall, and while later playsets have widened the field a little, it still holds to the same basic structure.

Set-up - Roll a bunch of dice and use those with the playset's tables to determine the relationships between your characters and the needs, objects and locations they will interact with. Once those are established, decide who you're actually playing.

Act 1 - Take it in turns to play out scenes which develop the themes you've selected.

Tilt - Set up a change halfway through.

Act 2 - As Act 1, but with a focus on moving to your resolution.

Epilogue - A final montage for your characters.

The dice not only set the options for plot elements, but also provide a pacing mechanism. Each scene gives someone a die. When you're halfway through, you tilt; when you're out, it's done and you narrate your epilogue based on the dice you've collected. It's not exactly roleplaying the way we're used to it, but it looks like a lot of fun.

Need more explanation/convincing? Here's Table Top doing Fiasco:

Set-up:

Act 1:

Act 2:

The Axemurder Chronicles

"I say, dear; looks like a spot of zombies."
"Dashed bad show, dear. Aziz; bring Daisy in from the garden."
"I'm sorry, my lady; Daisy seems to have run off."
"Well, dash it all. I suppose we'll just have to hop in the jallopy and go looking for her, what."

In this game, the Axemurder family need to retrieve their prized pug Daisy from the far side of a town full of zombies and bereft of a clear sense of civic identity. In turn 1, I opted to take the car and, as this already made a noise, Aziz - the only one of my group with a shooter - shot a zombie.

It was +Stephen Fleetwood who decided that 'Aziz' was actually called Brian, but that his principals were unable to see past the fez.

The 'initiative' system was interesting, with different groups acting on the turn of a card.

"Dashed bad traffic."

Colonel Axemurder proved adept at running down the regulation zombies, but the 'drive like the devil' strategy was somewhat hampered by the lack of space on the board. The hordes (large base of zombies, seen at the bottom of the picture above) were an insurmountable obstacle, and with a truck full of squaddies behind and a jeepload of hillbillies coming the other way, the jallopy dash seemed doomed.

"Better leave the car and continue on foot."

Unable to fit the car down the back of the building, the Axemurders went on foot. This was a weakness we identified in analysis, allowing them to almost completely evade zed contact for the middle game.

Meanwhile, their sterling work - and that of the military - was allowing the Criminal Element free access to the supply depot.

"Daisy! Come away from those hillbillies."

The McCletus Clan had also stopped, faced with traffic and a zombie infection, although the presence of a machinegun on their jeep meant that if there were points, they would have been contenders for victory on them. It did mean that they were constantly attracting zombies however, and perhaps as a result both they and the Military suffered more losses than the Axemurders, who ultimately came through with some light and non-infectious nibbling.

Operation Hillbilly shield.

There was some potential for player conflict as the McCletuses ran to rescue 'Maw' from right by the jallopy. If they'd tried to make a getaway in the Axemurdermobile, it might have gotten ugly, especially as there actually weren't rules for us to fight each other.

!Ramming Speed!"

 The 'Tank' zombies were much harder to run down, and by this point the Colonel was not at his best. Fortunately Lady Axemurder came through with some fine axe work.

"Base!"

After that, we made a pretty straight run home, hampered only by that last horde, as we didn't fancy being in snacking range if they activated.

Zombie Apocalypse - A Weekend at Axemurder Hall

So let's begin with some zombies.

My friend James is a sort of mini painter without portfolio, in that he doesn't have a game that he paints for, so much as a collection of concepts. One of the uses he puts this to is a semi-homebrewed zombie game.

The Axemurder family at home. Colonel Peregrine, Earl Axemurder; Celia, Lady Axemurder (nee McStabberson); the Dowager Countess Letitia 'Gran' Axemurder; Daisy the pug; and Brian 'Aziz' Collins, with the Colonel's beloved jallopy. Pictured in the drive of Axemurder Hall.

The game features several groups scurrying across a post-apocalyptic field to achieve a mission of greater or lesser importance. The Military want to rescue a lost squad and recapture a science station, the Criminal Element to loot a supply station and so on. My team, the Axemurder family, had to cross the board and rescue Daisy, their beloved pet pug.

I'll follow this post with some more images and commentary, but in general the game went well, and one of the more interesting emergent aspects was the way in which the non-conflicting goals of the groups created indirect interaction between the groups. The victorious Criminal Element emerged so partly by sneaking along behind the noisier groups and from the fact that both teams who started at or near the supply station kicked off by clearing a path to drive out, leaving it relatively free from zombies, while my own Axemurder clan emerged almost unscathed by making two quick end runs then leaving the zombies to pursue other, louder teams.

While there is no direct conflict between the teams (nor even rules for it), this indirect influence makes the game interesting and has the potential to make it more so once the players get to know the system. The key to victory in a veteran game is likely to lie in reading the other players' jack moves ahead of time and thus being ready to exploit opportunities.

Photos by me, game, setting and miniatures by +James Holloway.