20th June 2021

The final game of gaming Sunday night on Board Game Arena was Happy City, read about it here.

20th June 2021

Gaming night on Board Game Arena continues with Dragonwood, read my thoughts about it here.

20th June 2021

It's a Sunday and I'm logged on to Board Game Arena for an evening of gaming.

First game of the night was Potion Explosion, read my blog about it here.

18th June 2021

It's a Friday evening and I'm round Simon's to play a couple of games.

The game of the night was Arkham Horror: The Card Game, read my blog about it here.

15th June 2021

It's a Tuesday evening at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club. Continuing a  theme, the second and concluding game of the night was another cooperative game.
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Previously; we'd defended the kingdom from invaders by rolling for adventure. Now, we're going to defend the kingdom from invaders by being tiny... and epic!

What's in a game?
Like all Tiny Epic games, this comes packaged in a small, sturdy box with a bunch of tiny components.

• Player cards: There are 10 of these oversized cards, one for each playable hero. On one side it depicts info on the hero such as health and special ability, on the other is a larger illustration and a short backstory for the character.
• Defender cards: There are 4 defender cards in the player colours, they're also 2 'all-defenders' cards for 1, 2 or 3 player games.
• Artefact deck: There are 10 of these cards, artefacts are magical items that player's characters may equip.
• ITEMeeples: Not meeples, but ITEMeeples, there are 4 of them in the 4 different player colours. Each ITEMeeple has 4 sockets, 2 on the front and 2 on the back, which allow up to 3 artefacts to be attached to the sockets.
• Artefact items: There are 10 of these tiny 3D items that correspond to the 10 artefact cards. Each one has 1 or 2 pins, so that when a player equips them, they can be attached to an ITEMeeple.
• Heart tokens: There are 4 of them in the player colours, used to track a hero's hit points. There's also a 5th health token used to track the epic foe's hit points
• Region cards: There are 7 of these oversized cards. One of them depicts the capital and the other 6 areas are outer regions, they are areas like the plains, coast, mountain etc. Each region also has a threat track and apart from the capitol city, each region has a different special ability on each side.
• Epic foe cards: There are 6 epic foe cards and again, they're oversized. Each epic enemy has a health track and a couple of special rules/abilities and another ability that can be triggered when their health drops to certain points. Each of the 6 epic foes is also associated with a particular outer region.
• Dire enemy cards: These are normal sized cards and therefore only dire enemies instead of epic! Each dire enemy has a special rule/ability and like epic foe cards, each one is associated with one outer region type.
• Enemy cards: These are the games run-of-the-mill enemies. There are 9 of them and each one shows 2 of the 6 outer regions.
• Threat tokens: There're 7 of these flame shaped tokens and they're used to track the threat (Or damage really.) for each region, so it must depict how much everything is burning. My first thought was:
  ​How does Tiny Epic Defenders end? In fire! Thanks Ambassador Kosh! Yes, it's a Babylon 5 reference, deal with it!

The cards are, as would be expected, of a pretty standard quality and totally acceptable. This is a tiny epic game, so invariably, the tokens are all small and fiddly to handle, but that aside, they all look nice. The artefacts slot into the ITEMeeples with out issue, it's a gimmick, but I like gimmicks! Besides, it does away with that question; how many items can my character use?

Artwork on the region cards is nice enough and fairly evocative of their respective regions, meanwhile the art style used for the enemies and player characters reminds of  art used in various fantasy videogames, which is no bad thing, it's bright and colourful, which I like.

How's it play?
Setup

• Player cards: Randomly deal (Or give.) a player card to each player, along with the ITEMeeple in the player's chosen colour.
• Create landscape: The playing area must be created.
  ​First, put the Capital City in the centre of the playing area, then place 2 region cards adjacent to the capital on it's left and right. Then place 2 regions above those 3 and the remaining 2 below the 3, they should sort of form a diamond/circle shape.
• Epic foe: Shuffle the epic foe cards and deal one face-down, keep the epic foe hidden.
• Turn deck: The starting turn deck will contain a mixture of enemy cards and defender cards.
  Select all the defender cards the players' chosen colours and the all-defenders cards as necessary per the number of participating players, shuffle them and place them into a face-down deck.
  Now shuffle the enemy cards and deal 3 face down, place all 3 on top of the defenders deck, this applies for the first turn only, in subsequent turns all the cards are shuffled as usual.
• Horde deck: The horde deck will contain a mixture of enemy and dire enemy cards that appear later in the game.
  ​Deal 3 more cards from the enemy cards face-down into a deck.
  Now shuffle and deal 2-4 dire enemy cards as required face-down, add them to the 3 enemy cards you just dealt.
  Now shuffle all the cards together and then place them on top of the epic foe card.
  ​This is the horde deck.
• Artefact deck: Shuffle the artefacts and create a face-down deck with all of them.

That's more or less it for setup other than setting out some tokens.

On to play
To some degree, play in Tiny Epic Defenders is determined by the turn deck.
In each turn, reveal a card from the turn deck and activate it's action.

• Defender card: If the card revealed is 1 of the 4 coloured defender card, then the player with correspondingly coloured ITEMeeple gets to act and gets 3-4 action points.
  If a 'all-defenders' card is revealed, then the 3-4 action points are divided among all the defending characters as the players see fit.
  What can players use actions points for?
  Move: 1 action point allows the active player to move to an adjacent region. Players can only move to and from the Capital City region from the 2 adjacent left/right region cards, otherwise they move around the outer regions.
  Secure a region: If a player's character is on region that's had it's threat level increased due to enemy attacks, then the active player may spend actions points to lower that threat level at a cost of 1 action per threat level.
  Use special ability: Each character has a special ability that can be used for the cost of action points.
  Use regional ability: Some outer regions also have special abilities that can be triggered by the active player for action points, provided their ITEMeeple is on that region's card. Additionally, some outer regions have abilities that activate automatically.
  Fight epic foe: If the active player's character is on the same space as the epic foe, then they can spend an action point to attack the epic foe.
  Sacrifice health: Not an action per se, but the active character may once per turn sacrifice 1 health to gain an additional action point.
  Once defender actions have been completed, the card is put into the discard pile.
• Enemy card: If an enemy card is revealed, it immediately attacks the 1st and 2nd regions as listed on the card, increasing the threat level on both by 1.
  However, if any player has their character on one of the regions being attacked, that character can lose a point of health to defend the region and prevent the threat level being increased.
  Once the 2 attacks have been resolved, the enemy card is put into the discard pile.
• Dire Enemy card: When a dire enemy card appears, it only attacks a single region, however, dire enemies also have special ability that get triggered.
  When a character defends against a dire enemy, they must lose 2 or maybe 3 health, in doing so, the character gets to draw a card from the artefacts deck and equip it.
  As with enemies, dire enemy cards are put into the discard pile are being resolved.

That's basically how the turn deck works, there are a couple of other rules though .

• Threat levels: When an outer region's maximum threat level is reached, it's permanently destroyed, as is it's special ability. Further damage done to a destroyed region is redirected at the Capital City region and that's not good.
• Health: If a character's health is reduced to 0, they become exhausted, they can no longer defend, fight or secure, they may only move and use certain special abilities.
• Horde deck: Once all the cards from the turn deck have been revealed, take a card from the horde deck, then without revealing it, shuffle it into the turn deck, which is now ready to be used again. The new enemy will then appear at some point.
• Epic foe: Play continues until the last horde card is added to the turn deck. The next time the turn deck is depleted, the epic foe is revealed.
  Fighting the epic foe is hard and there are special rules for doing so. Each epic foe has a special ability and a lot of health, furthermore, when an epic foe's health is reduced to certain numbers, it will trigger epic events; these screw players over even more!

Endgame
When the epic foe is revealed, the endgame is triggered. The turn deck is still used, but no new cards are added and play continues until one of the following conditions is met.
The players must reduce the epic foe's health to 0 in order to win.
If the threat level of the Capital City reaches maximum at any time during play, then the players lose.

Overall
Tiny Epic Defenders is quick to set up, learn and play, with those artefact tokens it also looks pretty cool when your ITEMeeple is tooled up.
It seems to play a little different to most other cooperative games I've encountered. Those other games tend to make players choose between working towards an objective or managing an ongoing problem of some kind. Tiny Epic Defenders' is mostly about the kingdom and characters surviving the attrition the game throws at them until the epic foe appears, then players have to balance their actions between defeating the epic foe and defending the kingdom.
Like other cooperative games, managing bad luck is vital to victory, in this case it from the turn deck.
This means it's a game about mostly adapting and optimising tactics in preparation for when the epic foe appears and I feel it's particularly important to defend against dire enemies as its the only way to earn artefacts, which can prove vital to victory.

How the turn deck works in conjunction with the horde deck seems like a clever mechanic; players will know how often they get to act and generally how many times enemies attack, but not the order. It makes the game feel like the luck mechanic isn't too unpredictable, which is no bad thing.
Adding cards from the horde deck however, introduces two further elements into this. Firstly, escalating the threat by adding more enemies and secondly, by also introducing a new random facet to the turn deck because the added cards are hidden until they're revealed.
All of this works to raise stakes and tension as the game continues.

Having said that, when defending against enemies, it felt a little unsatisfying and futile when they were only sent to the discard pile instead of being defeated outright, but I guess that's necessary for the turn deck to work.
I also found the tactics a little on the lighter side, ultimately, there were only 6 total locations that needed defending and decisions tended to be between lowering threat in a region or sitting a region waiting to defend it when it was inevitably attacked in an enemy action.
It's not a gamebreaker, I'm just not sure how well it holds up to repetitive play.

If you're looking for a fairly quick-to-play introductory cooperative game to try, you could do worse than look at Tiny Epic Defenders. Or if you like cooperative games and want something a bit lighter, it might also be for you.

15th June 2021

It's a Tuesday evening at The Sovereigns in Woking and if memory serves me correctly, the first time that I've met up with the Woking Gaming Club have met Since October last year!

The first game of the night was Roll For Adventure, a cooperative, dice roller where players must unite to foil the machinations of a Dark Lord wannabe and save the kingdom!

What's in a game?
In Roll for Adventure, our heroes must join forces to defeat The Dark Lord Saur-errr Master of Shadows; how is this done? By collecting the power stones to activate the magical artefact; how is this done? By making lots of dice rolls of course!

• Dice: Lots of dice! 5 dice in the four player colours and 4 grey bonus dice. These are all normal 6-sided dice.
• Territory die: Another dice! This isn't a normal 6-sider though, 4 faces show each of the game's 4 different types of territory, 1 face shows all 4 territories and the final face shows no territory.
• Territory boards: There are 4 of these double-sided triangular boards, with an A-side and a B-side, A-sides are easier to play than B-sides. Each board represents one of the differing territory types.
  Blue is The Ice Cave.
  Green is The Forest.
  Grey is The Fortress.
  Yellow is The Desert.
  The 4 boards are attached together to form a single larger square board, which becomes the game board and its main playing area and is where the players' heroes go adventuring for power stones (Or, in other words, where dice are used to complete tasks.). The centre of the board contains an area called the Vortex of Oblivion.
  Each board will have its own unique rules for how dice are used to acquire the stones and also has its own damage track.
• Adventure boards: There are 4 of these and they're used in conjunction with power stone tokens to track the players progress. When all the spaces on an adventure board are filled with the tokens, the players will be victorious. The boards have 5-8 spaces and thus are used to manage the game's difficulty.
• Power stones: 8 colourful tokens, used as explained above.
• Skull tokens: These pretty cool 3d tokens are used on each of the damage tracks on the adventure boards.
• Enemy cards: These cards are used to 'attack' the game board, they come in 4 colours that correspond to the colours of the territory boards. They are ranked from 1 to 3.
• Special enemy cards: Not content to just have enemy cards, the game provides special enemy cards that can be used to add extra complexity to the game.
• Master of Shadows enemy card: Yep, the game's Big Bad has a card.
• Hero boards: These tiles are randomly dealt to all players, each one has a special ability the controlling player can use. There are 10 hero boards.

There's a plethora of other components, tokens, tiles and markers including the ominously named Vortex of Resurrection that are also used in the game.

The dice are of the smaller variety, which is fine by me, they're made of plastic and finished in a 'marble' look, their edges are nicely rounded and their dots are indentations and not printed. Good quality dice overall.
The territory die is a larger size and has rounded edges, it has artwork related to the territory boards printed on 5 of its 6 sides, the printing seems to be good quality and doesn't look like it'd rub off easily.
The game's variety of boards and tiles are all printed on thick card, as are the components.
The enemy cards are pretty standard quality cards.
Finally; special mention goes to the completely unnecessary and therefore cool little 3d plastic skulls used to track damage on the 4 territories.

Artwork used on the territory boards is fairly minimalist and functional by necessity as space is given over to holding dice. The palette used for the 4 territories extends to the enemy cards and some components.
The quality of artwork used on the enemy cards, hero and adventure boards is all reasonably good. The bright colours scheme used to represent the power stone is pleasantly eye catching.

All-in-all, the components in Roll for Adventure are all of a good quality.

​On to play
Like a lot of cooperative games, Roll for Adventure alternates between a player's turn and then the board's actions before moving on to the next player's turn.
The basic principle behind a turn in Roll for Adventure is simple: The active player rolls all their available dice and uses one or more of them of the same number, then rolls their remaining dice and so on, until they've used all their dice. What those dice are used for however, is the crux of the game.

• Roll the dice: The active player takes their dice and rolls all of them. Now they decide which ones to use, the main restriction being they must use dice of the same value. There are 3 ways these dice can be used.
  Tasks: The active player can put dice on to one of the 4 territory boards, completing the tasks on 3 of these boards will earn the players power stones, the 4th board will earn players grey bonus dice to roll. Each territory board has it's own unique tasks to perform, these are also different between the A & B sides.
  For example; the fortress territory has 3 'subtasks' and 3 'barriers', the players must collectively place 4 dice showing 2 to remove a barrier, 4 showing 3 to remove another and 4 showing 4 to remove the last one. Once all 3 barriers are removed, then the players earn a power stone. Tasks do not need to be completed in one attempt and when players commit dice to a task, they remain on the territory board until it is completed, however, this means that those dice cannot be taken back or used by the player again until that task is completed.
  Enemy cards: Dice can be used to defeat enemies attacking the territory boards, (More on enemies below.). An enemy card is defeated when dice totalling 6+ are placed on that card, this could be a single 6 or a pair of 3s, etc. Once again, an enemy does not need to be defeated in a single action and again, dice remain on an enemy card until it is defeated, in which case the enemy cards discarded out of play and dice used are returned to their respective players.
  Vortex of Resurrection: Dice can be placed on the Vortex of Resurrection, when a value of 10+ is reached, then dice can freed from the Vortex of Oblivion! What does the Vortex of Oblivion do? This is explained below.
  Interestingly, placing dice on the vortex, ends the active player's turn.
• Enemy turn: When the active player has finished their turn, the board will become activated, this will likely cause a series of actions.
  Enemy attack: Reveal the top card from the enemy deck, this enemy card will attack! But before it does so, it will command any card of a lower rank to first attack, thus a rank 3 card will command rank 2 & 1 cards. Enemy cards will attack the territory of their corresponding colour, so a green enemy card attacks the forest territory and should be placed along the forest edge of the board. Special enemy cards have their own rules on where they attack.
  Damage: When a territory is attacked, it takes damage, what does this mean? If an attacked territory has dice from an in-progress task on it, then one or more of those dice will be removed from that territory and placed on the Vortex of Oblivion. The way in dice are removed is unique to each territory.
  If there are no dice on a territory when it's attacked, then the territory itself takes damage and the damage counter is moved along.
  Vortex of Oblivion: Dice are placed here when territories are attacked, they remain here until the Vortex of Resurrection is used to free them.
  Master of Shadows: When the Master of Shadows appears, it's bad news. First of all, every enemy cards in play immediately attacks, then the Master of Shadows attacks. The active player rolls the territory die; if it shows a single territory, then that territory takes 2 damage directly to the territory, no dice are ever removed when the Master of Shadows attacks. If the die shows all 4 territories, then all 4 territories take a point of damage. If the blank face is rolled, the players are lucky and nowhere is attacked.
  Once the Master of Shadows has had their attack, they are shuffled back into the enemy deck, they cannot be defeated by normal methods and will constantly reappear to attack until the players complete their objective.

Play progresses to the player on the left and continues until the endgame is triggered.
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Endgame
If the damage token for any territory reaches its final spot, the players collectively lose the game.
If at anytime all the players collectively have no dice to roll for whatever reason, then the players lose.
If the players manage to collect the last power stone for their adventure board, then the players collectively win.

Overall
​Roll for Adventure is an interesting combination of cooperative gameplay and some unusual dice rolling mechanics.
A good example is the Vortex of Resurrection: Using the vortex ends a player's turn immediately. Early in their turn, it's possible a player have the double 5 or double 6 which will be high enough to trigger the vortex, but doing so is a waste of a turn (And dice rolls.), however, waiting until a player only has 1 or 2 dice left means that getting a good result for the vortex is tricky.
Roll for Adventure has no 'set aside' rules or mechanics in Roll for Adventure here, after players use dice, the remaining ones are re-rolled and you can kiss those other useful results goodbye. It forces players to make decisive moves about what they have available now and collectively players need to really cooperate in these decisions too as spreading dice too thinly throughout the board can be a costly error, dice stuck on half completed tasks are a problem waiting to happen. Players need to concentrate on a couple of tasks only if possible and maintain the loop of using dice and then getting them back to use in the following turn.
The same is true of enemy cards, if they're not dealt with quickly, they can linger and repeatedly attack the board, particularly lower rank enemy, which will be commanded to attack the most often.
Balancing the need to get power stones and the need to defeat enemies is key, along with mitigating bad luck that tends to accompany cooperative games. The extra wrinkle here is the need to also manage your dwindling resources - dice!
Actions (Or inactions.) will frequently have an impact on the game and that's a good thing.

That's not to say the game is without some criticism.
With 4 double-sided territory boards, Roll for Adventure has 8 subsystems, at least 4 of which must be learned to play the game. In my opinion, this makes the game feel a little overly complex for the experience it delivers, which a shortish, almost abstract experience.
The game's theme doesn't gel entirely well with its mechanics for me. Do the dice represent various actions of the the player's hero? Or are they minions of the hero sent off on different missions? Whatever the answer, it felt a little unengaging, closer to an exercise in comprehending probability than going adventuring.

Having said all that: The game's balancing kept the outcome in the air all the way throughout and the tension high at the end. If you like cooperative games, Roll for Adventure is worth a look. If you've spent a lot of time playing those coop games where you spend action points to run around a map to perform tasks, this could give you a fresh take on the cooperative playstyle.

15th June 2021

The last game of gaming Tuesday on Board Game Arena was Potion Explosion, my blog about it can be found here.

15th June 2021

Tuesday online gaming on Board Game Arena continues with Kingdomino, read my blog about it here.

15th June 2021

It's a Tuesday and time for some online gaming on Board Game Arena.

The first game of the day was Draftosaurus, read my blog about it here.

13th June 2021

It's Sunday and our day of gaming on Board Game Arena draws to a close with a final game of Draftosaurus, read my thoughts about it here.