15th August 2021

Sunday evening is here again and I'm my living room logged into Board Game Arena on my PC for some gaming goodness.

First up was 6 nimmit!. 6 nimmit! is 6 takes in German, it's quite an abstract game and the name will make sense when you seen the rules.

What's in a game?
6 nimmit is a card game and comes with a deck of 104 cards number from 1 to... you guessed it... 104 and that's it for game components. Each card also displays one or more symbols which are endearingly known as ​bullheads. Bullheads are bad.

The cards are normal quality as you'd expect.
There's pretty much no artwork to speak off, other than the symbol for bullheads and colours used to mark out cards which have more than 1 bullhead symbol.
The game has no iconography other than numbers and bullheads and being an abstract game, doesn't need anything else.

How's it play?
Setup

• Shuffle all the cards into a face-down deck.
• Draw 4 cards and place them face-up into a column in the central play area. These form the beginnings of the 4 rows into which players will place their cards
• Deal 10 face-down cards to each player.

On to play
6 nimmit! is played over several rounds and the goal is for players to empty their hand of cards and avoid collecting other cards as much as possible each round, which is not as easy as you might think...
How is this done, well read on.

• Pick a card: Each player chooses a card and plays it face-down in front of them. Once everybody done this, all cards are simultaneously ​turned face-up.
• Lowest first: Whoever played the lowest valued card, plays their card first, play then progresses to the player of the highest card, who goes last.
• Play a card: The active player must play their card on to one of the 4 rows, going from left to right and using the following rules.
  Go higher: When playing a card, it's value must be higher than the card it is placed next to.
  Go closer: Also when playing card, it must be placed next card that is closest in value to it. E.G., if 40 is played, it must be placed next to a 30 instead of a 25.
  Go low: If the card played is not higher than any row, then the active player must take all the cards in a row of their choice and place the played card as the first card in a new row.
  6 takes: If a player would place a 6th card into a row, they instead collect all the cards in that row and place what would've been the 6th card and place it as the first card in a new row.
  Who played the 6th card takes the row; 6 takes - geddit!
• Round end: Play continues until all players have played the 10 cards in their hand.
  Players tally the bullheads they've acquired this round, then all cards are shuffled back into a new deck and a new round is set up.

Endgame
Play continues through rounds until at the end of a round, in which at least one player has accumulated 66 or more bullheads..
Points are tallied, the player who has collected the lowest number of bullheads wins.

Overall
As per the brevity of this blog post, 6 nimmit! is a very simple game to learn, it's also a curious mix of strategy and unpredictability.

The objective is obviously to try and not collect cards, they'll be times that a player will want to play lower value cards to 'get into' a row before it gets to 5 cards, conversely, they'll times they want to play higher cards to go later and hope someone plays the 6th card in a row to clear it out.
Sometimes players will want to play very low and choose which row to take because it's the best of a bad set of choices, the bullheads a row may contain can vary greatly. Also choosing which row to take presents a player with the opportunity to mess with other players.
Watching a row you planned to play a card into vanish and leave a much worse alternative is quite the surprise.

And that's the thing, while some card plays can be much safer than others, it's almost always never 100% safe and it's other players bring that element of aforementioned of unpredictability to the game.

Quick to pick-up-and-play, 6 nimmit! can be a lot of fun with its surprises and reversals -of-fortune, provided you don't find playing fairly randomised games frustrating and you're not too much of a serious gamer.

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.
​
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.