Disney Storytelling Adventures

One of Arya's presents that I'm hoping to get plenty of use out of was a double helping of Storytelling Adventures tins. Produced by Parragon publishing and largely themed around Disney products (although there is also a PAW Patrol one,) these are basically a kind of child's first roleplaying set, or perhaps an introductory version of the card game Once Upon a Time. Each tin - Arya has the Disney Princess and Marvel Avengers sets - contains a set of storybooks and a few cardboard models, and more importantly a set of character cards and storytelling dice (one each for feelings, actions, props and locations.)

To play the game, you pick a card and role one of the dice and use the combination to tell a part of a story. The next player can either pick a new card or use one that's already out, then rolls another die. Arya's not bad at it, although she has does tend to want to sort out the Tangled characters from the deck beforehand and roll the feelings die exclusively. Honestly, I think this is okay as long as we're telling stories together.

The Numbers Game

I have no sample cards, so here's a picture of a fireplace.
Because.

Any given card in the Bad Movie Mogul card game has between 1 and 4 associated numbers, and several additional pieces of information. Performers are currently the worst, having various characteristics which relate to other cards (are the a lead or supporting actor? are they foreign?) a cost to play and as many as three pay out rates.

Balancing these numbers is a challenge, and one that is only weakly solvable by maths (or by my maths anyway). We'll need to play another test game to see how they balance up and whether the game plays too fast, too slow, or just about right. Essentially the balance to be struck is between guaranteed income and futility. The pay-off when a card works out needs to be high enough to be worth the cost, without the pay-off if it doesn't being so high that it doesn't matter what you play. If the reward never varies, there's no strategy; if there is too little chance of making good, the game will drag.

Now, I suspect that the numbers part of this is going to be simple compared to brainstorming the images and flavour text, but right now it's proving a challenge. While it may not matter how well the game plays if the presentation is off-putting, it is equally unlikely to matter if the game is shiny if it plays more awkwardly than a ninety pound piccolo.

B-Movie Mogul - The Card Game

Alpha Prime

Last night, James Holloway and I gathered with friends Bob and Jon to playtest version 0.1 of our B-Movie Mogul card game.

I won't lie; it was... bad, but in a good way. Play was slow and clunky, we had a lot of dead cards and the all-important movie pitch phase was pretty much killed by the fact that half the players didn't have a film out most of the time. It was, however, a really strong learning experience, and not as shockingly bad as it might have been given that this was the first test of the first version of the first card game James and I have ever developed.

For version 0.2 we're expanding the number of performers, since they are the most interesting cards, and making some of the supporting cards more general, as a lot of them ended up sitting around with nothing to use them on. We've also revised the rules a lot and overhauled one of the core mechanics.

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.

Rook City Blues

Forget it, Jake. It's Rook City.

The first full update of the Sentinels of the Multiverse computer game is Rook City, bringing a spiffed up dynamic interface along with four new villains, two new heroes and two new environments. The Villain decks in particular each have a unique variation which alters the pace and strategy of the game significantly.

The Chairman is the ultimate crime boss of Rook City, a shadowy figure protected by his Operative and a network of criminals. As the handler for all of his gangs, the Operative plays out lesser Underbosses at a rate of knots - many of whom also play out other cards - and hits heroes as villain cards go down. The Chairman is invulnerable until flipped, and then smacks anyone who strikes him, making him hard to whittle down.

The Matriarch makes the card progression in the Chairman's deck look slow. Her minion cards (mostly corvids, some other birds) just keep playing, and while all relatively weak she attacks heroes each time one is destroyed and there are cards in her deck that play every Flock card back out of the trash, just to fuck with you. One of the nice things about the deck is that the Matriarch's nemesis, Tachyon, has one of the most effective cards to use on her.

Drug-fuelled super serial killer Spite is the Wraith's nemesis (the Chairman, the other obvious choice, is paired with new hero Mr Fixer.) His deck is mostly made up of drugs and victims. Victims can be rescued, if not destroyed first, and placed under the safe house card, dealing damage when Spite flips. The drugs make him tough to kill, however, and he heals each time he does damage or destroys a victim. I find him especially tough as I have to quit when he destroys one of the Lost Child victim cards.

The last villain is Plague Rat, a mutated drug dealer who can infect Heroes with his vile plagues and drive them to attack one another. He's not too hard a kill, but overbuffed heroes will quickly start beating one another down.

The Chairman and the Matriarch are tough; like, really tough. Spite and Plague Rat are just regular nasty.

The first hero is Expatriette, gunslinging daughter of Citizen Dawn. She's a damage monkey, and her deck gimick is a mixture of Gun and Ammo cards; the latter attaching to the former for one-shot bonuses. Her 'use one power for every gun you have in play' is potentially hilarious; as long as Spite doesn't have his 'take damage when you use a power' drug in play.

The second is Mr Fixer, janitor and kung fu master, who thus combines Style and Equipment cards which modify how he does damage with his basic 'punch you in the face' power. He is only allowed one of each, so he is more about choices than buff stacking.

Finally, Rook City brings out the scum of the streets to harry your hard-working heroes, while the Pike Industrial Complex is all about the Vats, universal buffs and prospective bombs all.

To add a further challenge, Mr Fixer and Expatriette each have a variant to unlock, and the update adds a new Legacy unlock, America's Greatest Legacy.

Sentinels of the Multiverse - Cowboy Golem Hunters

Because nothing says mechanic like a bright pink sweater.

Just a quick update, having played around with the new options available in the first Sentinels of the Multiverse mini-expansion pack, consisting of one hero deck, one villain deck and one environment.

The hero is Unity, a maker of mechanical golems, who is either amazing or completely useless depending on how her cards come out, making her most effective paired with a deck controller like Visionary or Tachyon. About half of her deck is made up of 'Mechanical Golem' cards, which can only be played from her hand using her power or those on her other cards. Each of these little metal chaps is based on a card from another deck (there are versions of many of the original set heroes, Baron Blade's floating platforms, the raptors from Insula Primaris) and they each have a power that triggers automatically each round, meaning that if you get the right balance of golems and cards to activate them, Unity quickly becomes very powerful. On the other hand, the bots are relatively fragile, and it is also possible to end up with a hand full of unplayable golems or useless equipment.

The villain is Haka's nemesis, Ambuscade, a masked big game hunter who uses tech devices (and in particular a stealth field) to hunt superheroes. Fighting him is all about device control, and as a number of his gizmos explode if destroyed, scatter damage (for example, Tempest's innate power) is best avoided. He mostly uses projectile or energy damage, so heroes with a damage type nullifier can be very effective (Tempest once KOd is his worst nightmare.)

Finally, the environment is 19th century Silver Gulch, a mining town in the old west, packed full of cards representing a) time portals, b) bandits and c) cover for the bandits to use during gunfights.

It's well called a mini-expansion, but as part and parcel of my season pass is a welcome expansion to the game.

Early Thoughts on Sentinels of the Multiverse

As part of my birthday present to myself, I picked up a copy of the computer version of Sentinels of the Multiverse, a co-op card game I've played a time or two with friends, in which each player takes on the role of a superhero who is part of a team battling a supervillain in a particular environment. Each hero has their own card deck, as does the villain and the environment.

The genius of the game is that the villain and environment phases are effectively automated. Aside from occasionally needing to agree who has to discard some cards or choose which of two or more equally apt targets will get hit, no-one has to make any calls for what the villain does or to whom. Nothing is personal.

Basic set heroes: The Visionary, Ra God of the Sun, Haka, Bunker, Fanatic,
Tachyon, Tempest, Absolute Zero, Legacy and Wraith

While a much less effective way to play at parties, the advantages of the computer game over the card game are 1) cost, 2) no worry about card damage and 3) you feel less of a fool playing solo.

The basic release gets you 10 heroes (who can be combined into teams of between 3 and 5), 4 villains and 4 environments, for a total of... well, a lot of potential games (they say over 9,000, but it might even be more if you consider the order of the hero team to be important, and it can be.)

The heroes are a four-colour grab bag of classic types, each with clearly identifiable antecedents in the classic heroes of the Silver Age (Wraith and Tachyon are gender-flipped versions of Batman and the Flash, Bunker is Iron Man and Legacy a cross between Superman and Captain America) but bags of their own personality. Their decks are tailored both to maintain game balance and to match and model those personalities. Wraith is a gadget monkey, for example*, while many of Tachyon's cards have the special 'burst' type, which enable her to make powerful attacks based on the number of burst cards in her trash pile. Legacy is a classic buffer.

The villains meanwhile are glorious. Grand Warlord Voss is a Darkseid wannabe with an army of minions, although the real minion swarm comes from superfolk demogogue Citizen Dawn. Omnitron is a mad robot/self-aware factory who throws robots and guns at you, and Baron Blade wants to crash the moon into the Earth, just to show them all**. Each has their own challenges: Blade is relatively fragile, but has a lot of direct attacks and sneaky defences, whereas Dawn can go from nothing to an army in a couple of turns, and also has an annoying habit of wiping out your carefully assembled combos of ongoing cards.

Add to this the effects of the environment (be it the ruins of Atlantis or downtown Megalopolis) and the strategy quickly becomes quite complex. Thus far, I've kept to the fairly straightforward approach, but for enemies like Citizen Dawn I suspect that correct use of deck controllers like Visionary and Tachyon may be key. And all this before the forthcoming DLC adds more heroes, more villains, more environments and even rule variations into the mix. It's easy to see why people find the card game so compelling, and the computer game does a pretty bang up job of modelling the original. I think the only facet of the original that is missed out is that the computer never forgets to apply modifiers in your favour or accidentally skips the draw phase while reaching for the crisps.

Sentinels of the Multiverse: The Video Game is not a replacement for the card game, but is an excellent supplement for solo play. It's biggest failing, to my mind, is the lack of a distributed multiplayer mode, allowing geographically disparate players to take on different heroes and battle villains together

* As a Batman analogue, she is also a detective, although this is played up not in her basic set but in her Rook City variant.

** No other villain in the main set is as cool as Baron Blade with his TerraLunar Impulsion Beam.