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.

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.