30th January 2022

A long day of gaming had come to it's conclusion and we were logged into Board Game Arena for the final game of the evening; Love Letter.

Read my thoughts on it here.

30th January 2022

Sunday night gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Lucky Numbers.

Read my blog on it here.

30th January 2022

Can't Stop was the next game we played on Board Game Arena during Sunday evening gaming.
Read my blog about it here.

30th January 2022

The next Sunday evening game on Board Game Arena was Dice Hospital.

Read my blog on it here.

30th January 2022

Sunday gaming continued in the evening on Board Game Arena.

The first game of the night was 6 nimmit!
Read my blog on it here.

30th January 2022

Sunday and we're at The Sovereigns for a rare afternoon of gaming and the beginning of a day of gaming.

Twirl your moustache and laugh your evil cackle! It's time for Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power, a game about the poor misunderstood bad guys of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

What's in a game?

• Player pawns: The most eye-catching component of Marvel Villainous are the oversized pawns, which are busts of 5 Marvel's villains; Hela, Killmonger, Taskmaster, Thanos and Ultron.
• Token holder: The next most noticeable component is the oversized token holder called the Vault by the in game text.
• Player board: These are long, rectangular boards. At the left end is a portrait of the pertinent supervillain, going rightwards are 4 central spaces or locations and then a 'speciality' space at the other end.
  Each central location contains 4 icons of some sort or other. Some icons will be in the top row of a location and some on the bottom row. There are also spaces to place cards at the bottom of each location or to cover the top row of each location. More on this below.
  Icons represent the actions that will be available for the player to perform.
  Marvel Villainous features asymmetrical gameplay and this is apparent in the player board. They all display broadly similar layout but with different details in the central locations.
• Villain guides: Each villain in the game has their own objective and own manner to reaching it, so there's one of these little guidebooks for each villain and they explain what the player needs to do to win.
• Cards: Marvel Villainous makes use of 2 types of deck.
  Villain decks: There's a unique deck for each villain. Cards have cost to play in the top left corner and if they're allies, they'll also have a strength score in the bottom left. Villain decks contain the following types of card.
  Fate decks: These decks are used to provide extra, unpredictable challenges for the players to overcome. There are actually 6 decks here, as well as decks tailored to target each villain, there's also a common deck.
• Tiles: There are 3 sets of speciality tiles which are used by the Killmonger, Thanos and Ultron player.
• Tokens: These are standard round card tokens and come in 3 types.
  Power tokens: Used as the game's currency to pay for actions and card activations.
  +1/-1 tokens: These double-sided tokens are used to modify characters' strength scores.
  Soul mark tokens: Soul mark tokens! These are actually only used if Hela is being played.

The quality of the components is good, nothing felt flimsy or cheap. The tokens, tiles and cards all felt suitably good, the oversized pawns in particular are chunky but they look suspiciously like they're 3d printed as they're single coloured. Having said that, I don't  see it as a drawback, they are pawns. I found the addition of the 'Vault' token holder a bit strange and unnecessary, not that it's unwelcome, it's always good to have something to organise tokens.

It's clear that the game's art direction draws influence from the Marvel films but wisely steers clear of actually using stills from them. Instead the art looks familiar but also comicbook-like, which means it's mostly brash and colourful. There's a lot of illustrations throughout the cards and none of it seemed bad.

Marvel Villainous uses a fair amount of icons and to be honest they weren't very clear initially but the reference sheet provided meant that it wasn't an issue and after a coupe of turns it was pretty clear.

How's it play?
Setup

• Villains: All players should select a villain. They should then take the relevant pawn, villain cards, player board, tiles and guide.
  The villain deck should be shuffled into a face-down deck and 4 cards should be drawn.
• Fate deck: Take the common event cards and the event cards specific to the villains being used in the game, then shuffle them all into a face-down deck.
• The Vault: Put all the pertinent tokens into the Vault token container.
• First player: Determine a first player.

On to play
In Marvel Villainous, the active player moves their pawn to a location performs an action from that new location, play then progresses clockwise to the next active player.

• ​​​Move pawn: The active player moves their pawn to one of the 4 locations on their board. They can them perform 1 of the actions displayed there. If the top row of actions are covered by a card, then they cannot be used. Furthermore, a pawn cannot​ move on to it's current space, it must move to a different location, although the player can use the same action if it's both on the location they're leaving and the one they're heading to.
• Actions: Once the pawn has been used, the active player can use one of the available actions.
  • Activate: The active player can spend the required amount of power to activate any card With an activation icon on it to trigger it's ability.
  • Discard cards: The active player may discard any numbers of cards from their hand.
  • Fate: The active player may reveal a card from the fate deck and resolve it.
    ​There are several types of fate card, when a fate card is drawn it never costs power and the active player is free to use it how they wish unless it targets a specific villain.
    Effects: Similar to the villain deck equivalent.
    Events: There are 2 types of event, global and targeted - which only affects it's specified villain.
    ​When an event card is put into play, it will penalise the villain(s) in some way, this is a ongoing condition until the event is vanquished.  As with villains and heroes, events also have a strength score and when they are 'vanquished', they confer a reward.
    Heroes: You can't have villains without heroes. Hero cards can be placed along the top row of a player's locations. Like allies, hero cards have a strength score.
    Items: Also similar to the villain deck equivalent.
  • ​Gain power: This action allows the active player to gain one or more power tokens.
  • Play card: There are several types of card the active player can put into play.
    Ally: As explained above, ally cards have a strength as well a cost. Strength is used when vanquishing, as explained below. Allies are played on the bottom row of a player's 4 locations to assist them in various ways or on an event if ones  is active. Alternatively, sometimes they can be placed on to the top row of opponents' locations (Covering any top row actions on that location.). Many allies also have some sort of special ability, they may have a activation cost though.
    Item: Item cards have a cost and will also have some sort of bonus or special action. Item cards must be played on to an ally. Item cards may have an ongoing effect or a activation cost.
    Effect: These are one-and-done special actions, once played, they're put into the discard pile.
    Speciality: These are the opposite of one-and-done, when a speciality card is played, it's put into it's pertinent space and its effects are ongoing. Sometimes, speciality cards are tied to a character's unique objectives.
    Relocate: When performing this action, the active player is able to change the position of an ally or item card, Usually this is to the bottom row of their player board or to an event.
    Vanquish: This action can be used equally on heroes/enemy allies that are hindering the active player's board or used on an event, the process is more or less the same. This action does require the active player to have allies in the relevant areas.
    To vanquish cards covering the top row of a location, the active player must have 1 or more allies in the bottom row the same location. To vanquish an event, there must allies assigned to it.
    In either case, the strength of the active player's allies is compared the strength of the card being vanquished and if the allies combined strength meets-or-beats the opposing strength, then the target card is vanquished. All cards involved are discarded.
• Draw cards: If the active player has less than 4 cards in their hand, they draw from their deck until they have 4.
• Next player: Play progresses to the plyer on the left who now becomes the active player.

There are some other rules, but that's the gist of how the game flows

Endgame
The first player to complete their objectives immediately wins.

Overall
In Marvel Villainous, players for the most part will be concerned with advancing their own particular objective (Unless they're playing Thanos!) and will look to optimise their plays. Since a pawn cannot stay on the same location for 2 consecutive turns, players will also want to think at least a turn ahead.
Occasionally the opportunity to mess with other players will arise. Players can also employ the fate deck to interfere with opponents as well but this has the chance to backfire. Having said that, players will need to keep an eye on their opponents who might be close to completing their objectives, in which case priorities will no doubt change, forcing players to decide which is most important.

Thematically I think the game is strong and I like the asymmetrical play and objectives, how they follow the storylines from the related films is well done and shows some flexibility and scope in the game's mechanics.

The core mechanics are pretty solid but I did have few issues with the game. The asymmetrical objectives are good, it also didn't feel very well balanced. Certain supervillains had easier objectives to complete, or so it seemed. I'm not 100% on this though
I found the event cards slowed the actions down without adding any noticeable value to the game, they're just added obstacles and resolving them is identical to vanquishing enemies, only with a harder, higher strength to overcome.
Consequently, it probably extended game, making it a little too long.

I also found the game perhaps a little unengaging. I think this is down to how each supervillain has their own deck and that deck never changes. It means the only strategies available are the ones granted to me by the deck and it feels like the game is holding my hand.
There's definitely some card synergy going on in each deck but a hand size of 4 feels like it limits that synergy and is something I feel was a deliberate decision. As result, I'm unsure of the game's longevity.

I feel that the rules are a little fiddly as a result of the asymmetrical elements but ultimately, Marvel Villainous is for the most a pretty straightforward game and looks more complicated on paper than in play. This is no surprise as I'm sure it's a game meant to have crossover appeal.
So, having said all of that however, I'm probably not the target audience here.

​Core gamers probably won't find much to get their teeth into here but for more casual players, particularly those who are fans of the Marvel films, this light-ish game might be some fun.

28th January 2022

We're round Simon's for some Friday night fun, the next and final game of the evening was Dice Hospital.
Read my blog on it here.

28th January 2022

It's Friday evening and we're round Simon's for a night of gaming.

The game of the night was Apollo.

Houston.... we've had a game here.
One small step for gaming and errr, umm... one cooperative game for gamers?

Anyway, enough of the bad jokes.

What's in a game?
​Apollo is an symmetrical cooperative game where 1 player take on the role of mission control and the other players take on the role of astronauts on the titular mission.

• Game boards: Apollo uses 2 game boards of differing difficulty. One each for the Gemini and Apollo missions. The Gemini board depicts a flight path orbiting the Earth while the Apollo board shows a flight plan to the Moon and back to Earth.
• Mission packs: There are mission packs for both the Gemini and Apollo missions which each come in a silvery pouch reminiscent of the pouches used to store astronaut food.
  Each mission pack contains a set of double-sided flight stage cards and some experiment cards. These determine some of the challenges that each mission will face.
• Player screen: This is used by the mission control player to hide stuff that the other player should not know about. Inside, is artwork that various mission control systems and displays.
  The screen comes with widgets that can be clipped to it and then flipped up by mission control to alert the other players that comms are down or something else is wrong.
• Mission control board: This board is used by mission control to track how much damage the flight has taken. This is done with 5 sliders that track the module's 5 different systems; flight control, power distribution, life support, communications and experiments.
  Each go from 8 to 0. When the slider is at 8, everything is hunky dory, when it's at the lower numbers, those systems start encountering problems and when it's a 0, it's quite literally a crisis!
  The mission control board also has a space to place the current experiment card.
• Crisis cards: There are 5 sets of five crisis cards, obviously each set relates to one of the 5 systems.
  When a system crisis occurs occurs, a pertinent card is drawn and resolved, either by mission control or the astronauts.
• Crisis puzzle boards: There are 4 of these square boards, each with a slightly different layout. Certain crisis cards may force the mission control player to complete one.
• Tetrominoes: Used in conjunction with the puzzle boards.
• Astronaut board: This board is designed to look like the controls panels on the flight module and is obviously used by the astronaut players, it essentially has 5 spaces to place dice that correspond to the 5 areas on the mission control board.
• Flight damage board: This square board is used to track damage that occurs to the module.
  It consists of 5 'gridded' rows which again correspond to the 5 systems. Each row has 3 spaces which each contain a 'X' symbol and 3 bonus spaces. Finally there's a 6th 'blank' row at the bottom.
• Dice: There are 12 normal six-siders that come with the game, 6 come in yellow and 6 in black.
• Tokens: Apollo makes use of 2 types of tokens.
  Comm tokens: These tokens display COMM on one side and some will display an icon/action on the other side.
  +/- tokens: These double sided tokens are green on one side and red on the other, they also display a '+' symbol and a '-' symbol. These can be spent to modify the results of dice rolls during the game.
• Pawn: There are 2 types of astronaut shaped pawn/meeple (Astreeple?) in Apollo.
  Black pawn: This the experiment meeple and is used by mission control to track the astronauts' experiments
  Red pawns: these 5 meeples can be used by the astronauts to track information.
• Standees: There are Gemini and Apollo standees used to track mission progress on their associated boards.
• First player token: This coaster sized token displays a picture of an astronaut walking on the moon.

Apollo's components are pretty good throughout and it's clear effort and thought has gone into creating some of them.

The boards, tokens and player screen are all constructed of suitability thick card. While the dice are not wooden, they use a old school LCD numeric font for the numbers which is pretty cool, as are the pouches to store the mission cards.

The astronaut board and particularly the player screen feature very well themed artwork that calls back to sixties computer tech. The art on the astronaut board displays various dials and buttons is perhaps a little sparse but is also clean and doesn't interfere with the game element. Most of the player screen is decorated with evocative artwork of of what I imagine is module controls, the inside has some game information but the rest is an illustration of what mission control might look like. Dig the cup of coffee!
The art that depicts the Earth and the Moon is perfectly fine, they look like what they're meant to.
Finally, the flight stage cards are double-sided and as each one is completed, it's flipped over to show an illustration of that actual stage, which is a nice touch.

The game features little in the way of dedicated iconography, all the information is presented clear terms and is easy to comprehend.

How's it play?
Setup
Since Apollo is a asymmetrical game, it has a asymmetrical setup.

• Player Screen: The mission control player must put up the screen in their playing area and clip on the alert widgets on to it.
  Mission control board: Behind the screen they should place the mission control board and set all the sliders to '8'.
  Crisis cards: The mission control player should then sort all the crisis cards into their respective stacks, then shuffle them into 5 face-down decks and place them close to their related systems.
  Dice: the mission control player should take 1 yellow and 1 black dice and place it behind the screen.
  Comms tokens: The mission control player place 2 'blank' comms tokens behind the screen, then shuffles the remaining tokens into face-down stacks.
• Mission pack: Select the mission pack which has been chosen and set out the flight stage cards sequentially in a row.
  Then shuffle the experiment cards into a face-up deck and place the 1st one on it's space on the mission control board.
• Astronaut players: The astronaut players should put the astronaut board, flight damage board and remaining dice in their playing area.
• First player: A first player should be determined among the astronaut players.

On to play
Apollo is played over a number of rounds, each round has its setup and then is played over a number of turns.​ To make matters worse, Apollo is played in real time and each round only lasts 4 minutes.

• Setup: The mission control player tells the astronaut players how many dice they can roll - this is dependant on the life support rating - the higher the better and only the mission control player knows what the actual rating is.
• Roll the dice: One of the astronauts rolls the dice allotted number of dice.
  Assign dice: Dice results 1-5 are placed into their pertinent rows, covering up the 'X' symbols. 6's are put into the bottom row. After this, the 6's can be reallocated to any of the other 5 rows.
  Resolve dice: Any 'X' symbols not covered inflict that much damage to their system. If the flight control row is displaying 2 'X' symbols, the flight control system slider on the mission control board would have to be moved down 2 points.
  Additionally, each die in any bonus spaces, earns the astronauts +/- tokens (These cannot be used to change the results on the damage board.).

That's it for the setup, then the game goes into the round.

• Mission control player: The mission control player has a number of actions they can perform.
  Track flight: The mission control player moves the standee along its flightpath at the end of every player turn and also tracks when it will encounter a flight stage.
  Additionally, when a flight stage is completed, mission control should flip the relevant card over, revealing the picture on the back.
  Track damage: Mission controls tracks all the damage the flight takes, furthermore they can flip up an alert to tell the players something is wrong somewhere. Mission control may also spend comms tokens to verbally provide the astronauts with more information about damaged systems.
  Comms: Some comms tokens will also have icons or action on the flipside which mission control can spend to aid the astronauts.
  Track experiments: Mission control also tracks the astronauts progress on whatever experiment they're on.
  Deal with a crisis: When a system rating drops to 0, mission control must complete a puzzle board to get it up and running again.

The round goes differently for the astronaut players. Starting with the first player, each astronaut player takes a turn going clockwise and a turn consists of exactly 1 action. An action involves moving one or more dice from the flight damage board on to the astronaut board and resolving them
What are these actions and how do they work?

• Allocating dice: Actions usually require several dice and differing actions will have different dice requirements, they might require only yellow or black dice, or even alternating colours, some might require identical or ascending numbers and so on. Some actions (Generally flight stages and experiments.) require a set number of dice to complete, most of these actions can be completed over a number of turns, in this case, they stay on the relevant space until the 
  Other actions scale, i.e. the action gets better the more dice are allocated to it.
• Flight control: This action allows the astronaut players to contribute dice to completing the flight stage goal.
• Power distribution: This action allows mission control to adjust the sliders on their mission control board, this is also a scaling action, so the more dice allocated to the action, the more adjustments mission control can make.
• Life support: Using this action allows the astronauts to gain +/- tokens.
• Experiments: This action allows the astronauts to contribute dice towards completing the current experiment.
• Communications: Performing this action allows mission control to acquire more comms tokens.
• Repair systems: Allocating dice to this action allows mission control to increase the rating of one of the systems.
• End of turn: Once the active player has had their action, mission control moves the standee 1 space along the flight path and the next astronaut player become the active player.
• End of round: The current round ends when 1 of 3 criteria is met.
  All dice have been allocated.
  4 minutes are up.
  The astronauts decide to end the round.
  Regardless of how the round ends, the following round begins with mission control announcing how many dice the astronauts may roll.

Play progresses with the players (Hopefully!) successfully completing the required number of flight stages and experiments

Endgame
During play, if the module passes a flight stage space on the board without completing its requisite task or the flight control rating is lower then 4, then the mission immediately fails.
If the module reaches splashdown without completing the required number of experiments, then the mission fails.

However, if all the flight stages and experiments are completed, then mission is a success and the players win the game.

Overall
The rules for Apollo sound quite clunky in writing but in actual play, they felt straightforward and once players begin performing actions, it becomes quite understandable.  I wouldn't call it a crossover game but I imagine that it would be easy to pick up.

Apollo is quite unusual, being an asymmetrical cooperative game and I think it fits its theme quite well too.
Having that slight disconnect between mission control and the astronauts somehow lends the game a greater sense of teamwork.
Astronauts having to rely on mission control to get information and mission control having to rely on the astronauts to get comms tokens and to be able to make changes to systems means players have to work together.
It's definitely a bit different to the typical cooperative game where players are cooperating but generally sort of off doing their own thing. Another noticeable and welcome difference is how there's no characters running round a global board trying to stop the spread of something here.

​During the game, players will be, broadly speaking, faced with 3 types of obstacle; successfully completing flight stages, successfully completing experiments and firefighting damage that occurs during the flight.
There's a real need to strike a balance between these 3 priorities and players will also have to approach this as efficiently as possible, the flight module moves along the board after every turn and is in essence another countdown timer. It means planning for the known variables of the flight stages, somewhat knowable experiments and also reacting and adapting to unpredictable damage inflicted on the command module and there will be damage!  There are 15 damage spaces on the flight damage board and only 10 dice to cover them, that means at least 5 damage to the systems every round.
Being a cooperative game, Apollo uses the luck or specifically the bad luck that arises from rolling those dice to challenge players.

The game also features a time limit in the form of a 4 minute timer: On paper this might not seem like much time but in play it's perhaps a little overgenerous.
4 minutes to assign 10 dice works out to be 240 seconds for 10 dice or 24 seconds per die, which we did not find much of an issue.

We played the Gemini mission board a couple of times and it didn't present too much challenge for us, there were a definite couple hiccups and dicey (sic) moments but otherwise it was pretty much plain sailing or more accurately, plain err.... orbiting? Mission control never had to reach for the puzzle boards.
However, we are a fairly experienced band of players and maybe for once, the luck went our way this time.
We didn't get round to playing the Apollo mission board which is probably where the meat of the game lies and certainly looks more challenging, so I'm reserving judgement on the game's difficulty.

I'm not certain about the game's replay-ability either, it wasn't boring but at the same time felt a little samey, players are ultimately just assigning dice to tasks, some of which may become quite familiar over multiple plays.

Easy to learn with a reasonable play time and providing some interesting decisions to make, I'd say that Apollo is a good game to play every once in awhile and if cooperative games are your cup of tea, then it's definitely worth checking out this fresh take on cooperative gameplay.

27th January 2022

The final day of Thursday gaming on Board Game Arena was Love Letter.
Read my blog on it here.

27th January 2022

Thursday afternoon gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Lucky Numbers.
Read my blog on it here.