7th February 2023

Tuesday has come around again, that means it's time for more gaming goodness with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns in Woking.

Horrified: American Monsters is the follow up to the excellent Horrified and you can read my blog on it here.
Like the original, this is a cooperative adventure in which the heroes (In this instance investigators from the Federal Bureau of Paranormal Investigation) stop the encroachment of monsters from American folklore into a town/city.

So how does Horrified: American Monsters game stack up against the original?

Monster mats: As with the original game, each of the game's monsters comes with their own mat that manages how to defeat them.

All the components for Horrified: American Monsters are good.
The tokens and tiles feel sturdy while cards are of a normal quality. Because the monster mats are fairly large, they feel a little flimsy but unless you go out of your way to abuse them, they should be fine.
The game uses card standees for both players and citizen which means there's about 20 of them - which is a lot. They're constructed of thick card and will stand up to being handled.
While plastic, the dice with their slightly rounded corners are good quality.
As with the original, each of the game's monsters is represented by a plastic figure in their respective colour. The quality is fairly good, which is to say good enough for a board game.

The game's artwork is high quality with good portraits for the heroes, citizens and monsters. Artwork on the tokens, cards and monster mats also look good and suitably moody.
The game board contains probably the most notable artwork; a eye catching city with recognisable buildings but is importantly, also free of clutter.
Wisely, the game has a sort of mid twentieth century theme to the art which gives it a sort of timeless quality.

Most of the game's iconography can be found on the bottom of the monster cards and generally, the complexity is equal to that of the original. 

How's it play?
Like the original, Horrified: American Monsters is a cooperative game about squaring up to monsters threatening the game's town/city, There's a few differences from the original, most obviously in the interactions with the monsters the manner in which they are rendered vulnerable and defeated
The rules for frenzy work a little differently and the events on the monster cards are tailored for the game and possibly, so are the perk cards.
Otherwise, the game is pretty much identical with its predecessor. I'm not going to blog about at length about the rules or game play.
For that you can just read my original blog.

3rd February 2023

Friday is here! I'm at the office in Woking for some after work gaming.

As the name might suggest, Formula D is a game based on Formula 1 racing - but with dice! It's also the spiritual successor to the fantastic Formula Dé, a game I played 'back in the day'.
How does it hold up? Let's see.

All of Formula D's components are good quality. The game board and player tiles feel sturdy, as does the player board.
While the cars are quite tiny, they are all well sculpted, colourful and overall look great.
I was a bit sceptical of having player boards with pegs and a groove for the gearstick but in practice works well enough and does away the need for pencils and erasers which were needed for the original Formula Dé.
Perhaps the only criticism would be for the tokens, which are a bit small and fiddly. However, there's no other way to fit them on the track so it's a bit of a necessary evil.

The player tiles feature some nice colourful art with F1 drivers on one side and street racers on the other side. The street racers have definite anime look to them.
But the standout artwork appears on the game boards which feature fantastic illustrations of their locales. A lot detail has been put into the art, you can even see crowds of people.

All the iconography on the track are numbers and arrows and are easily understood. The colours/shapes of the gears are also easy to understand.
However, the icons used on player tiles could be a little clearer, I think more stylised icons would have been more helpful.
Finally the positioning of the resource tracks on the player board could have been done differently to improve usability. Specifically, the gearbox, brake and engine tracks could have been put together, since these are spent when skipping gears - more on skipping gears below.

How's it play?
Setup
The setup and rules description here are for the standard version of the game using the F1 setup

• Players: Give each player a player board, holder and associated pegs and gearstick. Put the standard side of the board into the holder.
  Then give each player a player tile and the F1 car with colours that correspond to their player tile. Position the tile alongside the holder. Place the pegs in their corresponding positions as dictated by their player.
• Game board: Put out the game board with the F1 side-up.
• First player: Determine the order on the starting grid and place each player's car in the relevant spot.
  This can be done by players rolling the black 20-sided die.
  Alternatively, the game has rules for getting qualifying times which involve each player doing a lap in the fewest number of moves and shortest time.

On to play
Formula D does not use a traditional turn order, instead a player's position on the track determines when they take their turn in the round. Whoever is in the lead goes first and becomes the active player, whoever is 2nd goes second and so on, until the last player has had their turn.
Then a new round begins and any changes in position will be carried over to the player turn order.
During a player's turn, they must perform the following.

• Start: This actually only occurs for each player's first action of the game and determines if they get a good start or not.
  The player rolls the black die, a bad start means they only move 1 space, a flying start means they move 4 spaces, in either instance they end their turn in 1st gear. If they got an average start, they move into 1st gear and roll the 1st gear die.
• Change gear: Other than the race start, at the beginning of every turn, the active player must decide whether to stay in the same gear or go up or down a gear. The gear they are in will determine which die they roll for movement.
  Change up: The active player may go up 1 gear.
  Change down: The active player may go down 1 gear, or possibly more.
  • Skipping gears: When going down gear, a player may choose to skip gears, i.e., go down more than one gear. E.g., skipping a gear allows a player to drop from 5th gear to 3rd by skipping 4th. A player may skip up to a maximum of 3 gears, allowing them to go from 6th to 2nd gear for example.
    However for each gear skipped a resource must be spent, they come from gearbox, brake and engine.
• Roll and move: Once the active player has settled on their gear, they must roll the pertinent die and move their car as many spaces as the die rolls according to the following rules:
  Full move: The active player must use all the movement for their car.
  Traffic: The active player's car cannot move through other cars' spaces, they must go around them instead.
  Arrows: If the active player's car moves on to a space with an arrow, they must follow the direction(s) of that arrow when moving on.
  Straights: If the active player is moving their car along a straight, they cannot zigzag to use up movement. Furthermore, they can only do 2 lane changes and cannot go back into a lane they were already in during the current turn. Essentially players should move their car along the shortest route possible.
  Having said that, players can change lanes to avoid other cars or hazards.
  ​Corners: When a car enters a corner, it must end or 'stop' a number of turns in that corner as determined by the corner's details. Thus, a 2-stop corner requires the player's car to end 2 turns in that corner.
  • Overshooting a corner: If a car is in a 1-stop corner (Or only has 1 stop left in a 2 or 3 stop corner.), then they can go through the corner's exit and overshoot the it to some degree.
    For each space a car overshoots the corner, they must spend 1 tyre WP. Additionally, brake WPs can be spent to lessen movement and thus move less spaces.
    If a car needs to make 2 or more stops in a corner and it overshoots, then it is eliminated from play.
• Additional rules: The description above covers the gist of the game but Formula D has numerous situational rules. Many of these are resolved by using the black 20-sided die.
  Contact: If a car ends its movement adjacent to one or more other cars, there is a chance they will make contact. This costs body WPs
  Overrevving: There's a chance that cars in 5th & 6th gears will lose a engine WP when any car in 5th or 6th gear gets a maximum result on their gear die.
  Debris: Certain events can leave debris on the track, if a car has to go over the debris, there's a chance they can loose a handling WP.
  Pits: In a race with more than 1 lap, there are rules to pitting, which allows a car to recover all their tyre WPs.
• Advanced rules: There are a number of optional advanced rules that can be applied to the game. Mostly these are to do with 3 lap races and running a championship.
  ​Custom cars: Instead of having WPs assigned to a car as per a player tile. With these rules, players can assign WPs to the resources as they see fit.
  Tyres: With these rules, just F1, players can choose different types of tyres, such as hard, soft and wets. They can each have an effect on a car's performance, they are also effected by weather.
  Weather: There are rules for different weather conditions such as dry and rainy or changeable weather. Different weather conditions will effect cars differently. Furthermore different types of tyres will behave differently in differing weather conditions.
  I think that's pretty much it for the F1 rules.

Endgame
The first car to cross the start/finish line after completing the prescribed number of laps, wins! Second across the line finishes 2nd and so on.

Overall
I'll start by mentioning that while not part of the base game, there are 6 map packs for Formula D, each providing 2 additional tracks to the game. generally each pack features a street racing track as well as a real-world inspired circuit.
​It should also be noted that Formula D is almost identical to earlier iterations of the game, this means the game is fully compatible with all the racetracks from those previous games. This is fantastic, because if like me, you have a bunch of tracks from Formula Dé, it greatly increases the longevity of the game.
I'm sure it was deliberate on the part of the producers of Formula D and was a wise move.

I've seen Formula D criticised for being too luck based but without that element of luck, there's no risk and risk is at the heart of what makes Formula D so good.

You see, as a racing game, Formula D is not really a 'simulation', I mean how could it be? However, one thing it does emulate very well is the feel of having to 'push the envelope', how racers try to take it to the edge, how they take risks and how players in Formula D will also need to take risks, or more precisely, when to take risks
Unlike many games, playing too sensibly or prudently is a sure way to finish second in Formula D!

This all ties in with what Formula D is all about - which is managing corners, specifically the gear and consequently the speed of a car when it goes through corners.
This is not quite as simple as it sounds though: ​Ideally, players will want to be in as higher gear as possible for optimal movement at all times. However, players will need to be mindful of their resources, overshooting corners by too much or too often (Especially early in a race.) can have ramifications later. Sometimes overshooting will have an advantage, sometimes it won't it'll just be a waste of WPs.
This is all contextual of course, depending on a car's position relative to a corner, players will need to adapt their tactics to racing through that corner, even the position of opponent's cars can effect the players behind.
Players will also need to be wary of 2 or 3 stop corners and resist the temptation entering the corner in too higher a gear and too fast: In real racing, sometimes going into a corner slower means coming out faster, this can hold true in Formula D too.

Another time a player may take a big is when an opponent is ahead in a corner.
E.g., if that opponent ahead exits the corner in 3rd gear to avoid overshooting, the player behind may want to risk taking going up a gear and exiting in 4th. It's a real advantage to exit corners in a gear higher than your rivals. If you look at the distribution of numbers on the dice, the maximum speed on a gear die is generally the lowest speed on the next highest die.

In terms of negatives, player elimination is a thing here (I'm not a fan of player elimination.) and players can crash out and be sat twiddling their thumbs. Although this sort of thing generally only might occur when approaching the end of a race and back markers push hard to try and get on the podium.
Playing time can also potentially be an issue. Races can last 1-3 laps and you can expect a race to on average last 1 hour per lap. If you decide to play a full race, don't be surprised to lose an entire afternoon or morning to the race. Which is not necessarily a bad if that's what you want.
Also, with it's small components and 6 resources, Formula D can be a little fiddly.

Quibbles aside, Formula D is a fun, game and it's satisfying when you manage pull if risky manoeuvres and manage to fly from corner to corner. There's also a genuine, palpable surge of pleasure when you go into 6th gear, roll that 30-sided die and blasting down that straight.
Formula D is mid-weight game that fits it theme well and presents players with conundrum of when and how much risk to take. Who would have thought roll-and-move mechanics could be so well implemented.
Formula D is a game I have played a lot in its various iterations and I've always enjoyed it. If you want a racing game with a strong thread of push-you-luck running through it, then this is one to try. 

28th January 2023

Wogglecon 6, a day of gaming at the Bisley Scout Hall continues and the next game of the day is Skulk Hollow.

I didn't know that it turns out that little anthropomorphic fox dudes and giant stone creatures seem to really hate each: Which is what Skulk Hollow is all about in this asymmetrical strategy game!

What's in a game?
Skulk Hollow is a 2-player game where one player takes on the role of a 'Foxen' hero who leads a band of Foxen warriors against a lone guardian who is a literal colossal stony force of nature.
​Each player has their own unique decks, components and gameplay.

• Board: Skulk Hollow uses a modestly sized square board which is divided into a 3x3 grid. Unusually, during play the board is rotated 45' diamond configuration, this all the spaces are actually diamond shaped.
  Each of the 9 grid spaces sort of have their own visual theme. Additionally, 2 opposing corners are the 'start spaces'.

• Green wound tokens: These wooden tokens are used to track damage on the guard board.​
  ​

The component quality in Skulk is excellent.
The tokens and meeples all feel solid and look great. Obviously the massive guardian meeple is the notable standout component, yes, perhaps you could call it a gimmick but it fits thematically.
The use of card boxes is a nice touch of presentation.

The art is equally high quality. Skulk Hollow uses a coloured line illustration somewhat cartoonish style that's colourful, bright, detailed and suits the games slight whimsical (At least as whimsical as 2 factions battling each other can get!) nature.
I've found that anthropomorphic art can be divisive as a style but I think the anthropomorphic character art on card looks pretty good regardless of what your stance is.
The game board also looks great and I like how compact it is.

With regards to iconography, Skulk Hollow uses fair amount but it all seems pretty self-explanatory. Icons for movement are easily understood, as are the icons for actions such melee, leap, etc.
I don't imagine players having any problem understanding the game.

How's it play?
Setup

• Roles: First determine who will play the Foxten hero and guardian.
• Board: Put out the game board, as stated earlier, it should positioned in a 'diamond' orientation.
• Guardian player: The guardian chooses a guardian card box of their choice, then they take the relevant guardian player mat and guardian board.
  The player mat will tell the player how to set up for the game.
  Finally the guardian player takes their action deck and shuffles it into a face-down deck and draws cards to their hand limit - which is determined by the guardian player mat.
• Foxen player: This player now chooses one of the Foxen Leaders takes the Foxen player mat.
  ​The Foxen leader and Sentinel cards are immediately put into play and their respective meeples should be placed on their starting spaces.
  Then all the hero unit cards and order cards should be shuffled into a face-down deck, the Foxen player should then draws up to their hand limit - as determined by their Foxen hero mat.

On to play
Being a 2-player game, Skulk Hollow uses a very traditional turn order with one player completing their turn before play moves over to their opponent and continues alternating between them for the entirety of the game.
Additionally, the Foxen hero player always starts.

During their turn, the player will have a number of actions points (AP) available to them which is determined by which Foxen hero/guardian they chose, although typically this is 2-3 APs.

• Actions: The active player can choose from the following actions.
  • Play card: This is the most common action in Skulk Hollow and there  are a wide variety of actions that can be performed, some common to both players and some unique to each. 
    Gain power: This action is available to the Foxen hero player but only certain guardians. Functionally, it works the same for both players. The player will gain power cubes as listed on the played card. These cubes do not go directly on to either any heroes cards or guardian board, instead they go into a central 'reserve'. More on power later.
    Move: This action allows the Foxen player to move one of their units or the guardian player to move the guardian 1 space. Arrows on the card will indicate how the movement can occur.
    Play hero card: This action is only available to the Foxen hero player. If they have a hero unit card in their hand, they can spend a AP to put it into play. When the card is played, it's pertinent meeple should be placed on the board.
    Use power: This is only available to the guardian player and it allows the guardian to use the power listed on the card and as per it's description on the guardian player mat.
    Guardians have a range of powers but generally they involve dealing wounds to the Foxen heroes.
    Hero actions: Only the Foxen player can use these 3 actions for their units.
    When playing a card, the player choose from the action at the top of the card or the bottom, not both. furthermore, only heroes with a symbol matching the action can use it. Thus, a hero unit must have a boot symbol on their card to use the leap action.
    • Leap: If the hero unit is on the same space as the guardian, they can use the leap action to jump on it! This means their meeple is moved on to the guardian board. Additionally, if a hero unit is already on the guardian board, they can use the leap action to move to a different location, following one of the dotted lines.
    • Melee: A hero unit that is on the guardian board may use the melee action to inflict 1 wound on their current location
    • Missile: This action allows a hero with the missile icon to make a ranged attack on the guardian and they do not need to be on the guardian board to inflict wounds. There are some restrictions including:
      Fire: If a hero has the 'fire' tag, they can only launch a missile attack from a space on the board adjacent to the guardian's space.
      Hurl: This tag allows a hero to launch a missile attack while on the same space as the guardian on the game board.
  • Prepare: This action requires an AP and either player may perform it. It allows the player to discard a card and draw 2 new ones.
  • Spend power: This action does not actually require any APs. Instead it uses a power cube that has been allocated to either a hero or guardian.
    Each cube spent this ways grants the respective player an additional action to the unit/guardian that spend the cube. This allows them to perform an action as displayed on their respective card/board, or to move.
• End of turn: Once the active player has used all their APs, they must do the following.
  Draw cards: The player should draw cards to reach their hand limit. If their current hand is equal to or above the limit, ignore this step.
  Allocate power: If the active player had gained power cubes during this turn, they now allocate them to their units/guardian as they see fit.
  Opponent's turn: Play now progresses to the active player's opponent.

​Additional rules

• Wounds: There are some rules regarding how wounds are manged, which is slightly different for each player:
  • Hero unit: If all the heart spaces on a hero unit's card are filled, that hero is eliminated, it's meeple is removed from play and it's card is placed into the discard pile. Potentially that hero can come back into play if the discard pile is shuffled into a new deck.
  • Foxen leader: If the Foxen leader has all its heart spaces filled, it's pretty bad news for the Foxen player. However, there is something the Foxen leader can do to avoid damage, which is called...
    Banding: Basically, if there are other Foxen hero units in the same game board space as the leader, then the unit(s) take the damage instead, presumably as they throw themselves into harm's way. Thus the leader cannot be targeted when not alone.
  • Guardian: Wounds affect the guardian in 2 ways.
    Powers: On the guardian board, each power's location will have several heart spaces, if all  wound spaces on a power's location are filled, then the guardian player can no longer use that power until they somehow heal at least 1 wound.
    Full wounds: If the guardian board has all it's heart spaces filled, then it's bad news for the guardian player...
• Depleting action deck: If any time a player empties their action deck, they then simply shuffle their discard pile into a new deck.

​Endgame
There are 3 ways the game end can be triggered.

• If the Foxen leader has all the heart spaces on their card filled, they are defeated and the guardian player immediately wins.
• If the guardian board has all it's heart spaces filled, the guardian is defeated and the Foxen heroes player immediately wins.
• Each guardian has their own unique victory condition. If that condition is met, then the guardian player immediately wins.

Overall
Skulk Hollow has asymmetrical and card driven gameplay which presents players with some challenging, meaningful choices and options.

Players will instinctively want to play cards with maximum efficiency to inflict maximum damage but sometimes because of their hand of cards, players won't be guaranteed having the card to make the move they they need and they'll be forced to adapt.
This can be a little frustrating but also makes hand management quite important, sure a player can use a strong card now but sometimes it's worth keeping hold of it for perhaps a more effective use in a later round. It should be mentioned that some of the guardians have smaller hand sizes, meaning they are trickier to play.

Of course, players will also want to watch their opponents, paying attention to which cards they play and when. - There's a bit of higher level play here about tracking opponent's actions, essentially a bit of card counting.

Otherwise it's quite tricky to describe gameplay; with 4 Foxen leaders and 4 guardians, the various combinations will at least to some extent dictate player tactics - as will the actions of opponents. Skulk Hollow feels like it's about playing the player as much as playing the game.

Finally; Skulk Hollow is a 2-player game and I'm always a bit wary of 2-player games as they can revert to a traditional 1-on-1 directly confrontational game, this is definitely the case with Skulk Hollow. While the game is not particularly chess-like, with moving pieces about a board to eliminate your opponent, it does provide something of a chess-like experience and to be honest, it's a playstyle that I'm not personally overly enamoured with. Your mileage will of course vary.

Having said all of that; I like to think that I can recognise a well crafted game when I play one and that's what I think this is.

Thematically, Skulk Hollow is quite strong.
The 'numerous weaker units vs a single giant enemy' gameplay draws inspiration from some classic older games.
While, with its climbing on to, running around and stabbing bits of a colossal monster, it's undeniable that Skulk Hollow also takes some thematic inspiration from a certain videogame and it makes for a entertaining concept to add to a board game.
It adds up to an interesting game, both visually and mechanically.

it is a mid-weight, asymmetrical game that features a lot of player interaction and conflict with moderate tactics and touch of luck. The various combinations of the 2 battling factions also provides a fair bit of replayability.
If you want a 2-player game with those elements, Skulk Hollow is worth a look.

19th November 2022

It's a Saturday morning and we're at Bisley for Wogglecon 5 'It's a alive!' - a day of gaming goodness and a bit of charity.

Have you ever fancied travelling South American highlands with nothing but a cart of goods to keep you company, going from place to place, hunting for fish, chopping down trees, trading and so forth. If the answer is yes, then maybe Altiplano is the game for you.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game area: Set the central playing area up.
  • Location boards: Randomly arrange the 7 location tiles in a ring shape.
    • Tokens: Sort all the tokens as per player count and add them to their pertinent location tiles. Only food and money do not go on to a location tile.
    • Cards: Add the boat, house and order cards face-up to their pertinent location tiles.
  • Extension strip: Put the extension strip in the centre of the ring.
    • Extension tiles: First sort the extension tiles as per player count, then sort them by type (A, B, C and D.) and shuffle each type into face-down stacks. Finally arrange them into a single face-down stack, with the A stack at the top, going down to the D stack at the bottom.
    • Place extension tiles: Draw and place 5 tiles from the stack along the 5 spaces on the edge of the extension strip.
• Players: Give each player an action board, warehouse board and bag.
  • Meeples: Give each player the meeple, cube and container in their colour. Each player's cube should go on the '0' space on the road location.
  • Role tile: Randomly assign a role tile to each player. The tile should be placed adjacent its location on the player's action board.
    Each player should then take their starting resources as indicated on the tile, goods and food should be placed them into their bag. Money should be put to the side in a personal supply.
    Finally each player should take a brown cart cube from the village location and place it in the topmost space in the movement track on their action board.
• First player: Determine a starting player then each player places their meeple on any one of the 7 location tiles. Now we're ready to play.

On to play
In Altiplano players will be making plans to travel around the location tiles and use their goods to carry out the actions specific to those locations.
This is done over 4 phases:

• Drawing phase: This phase is carried simultaneously with all players drawing tokens from their bag and placing them on their planning spaces.
  At the start of the game, players can only use 4 planning spaces, thus only draw 4 tokens from their bag. However, by moving their cube up the road location, players will unlock more planning spaces which mean they can draw and use more goods tokens.
  Empty bag: If at any time a player needs to draw 1 or more tokens from their bag and it's empty, then they tip the contents of their container into the bag, give it a good shake and continue drawing.
  Taking tokens back: Obviously, this does not apply during the first round but before drawing tokens, a player can choose to take tokens they have previously placed on action spaces but not resolved off of those action spaces. However, these tokens must be placed on planning spaces which consequently lessen the number of tokens they can draw. Money retrieved in this manner is returned to the player's personal play.
• Planning phase: This phase is also performed simultaneously. In this phase players take goods from their planning spaces (Or money from their personal supply.) and place them on action spaces on the board. This includes the movement track and also extension tiles a player may have acquired.
  All actions require specific goods to activate them.
  Most locations have 1 or 2 spaces, except the village which has 3. Some actions require 1 good (And thus may be performed more than once.) while many actions require 2 goods.
  A player may choose not to place all the goods on their action spaces but this would mean they draw less tokens in the following round.
  When placing goods and money, players do not need to complete the action to place them. If an action requires 2 tokens, they can place just one of them even if it won't complete the action. It's a useful way to keep planning spaces free.
• Action phase: This phase represents the bulk of the game's activities and thus has many elements.
  • Turns: Unlike the previous 2 phases, starting with the current first player, actions are carried out in turn order one action at a time. The active player resolves one action, then play progresses to the next player.
    Passing: If a player cannot complete an action, they must pass. Additionally, a player may choose to pass even if they could complete an action. In either case, when a player passes, they are no longer involved in the action phase for the current round.
  • Movement: Movement does not count as an action but can be performed as part of an action.
    Timing: Movement may be performed before or after an action.
    Moving: Each player starts the game with 1 cart cube. A player can slide it to the 'used' side on their movement track to move their meeple up to 3 location either way around the circle of locations.
    Additional movement If a player has put food on to other movement track spaces, they may 'spend' it to move during another action. However they can only move 1 location unless they have acquired additional carts, in which case they can move 3 locations.
  • Actions: There are lot of actions a player can perform and several rules associated with them.
    Location: A player's meeple must be at the action's location in order to perform that action, this includes extension and role tiles.
    Paying tokens: Actions require players to pay the required tokens to resolve them. Other than money, anytime a token is 'spent' the token(s) are not actually spent instead they are put into the player's container and will ultimately end up going back into the player's bag. Only money is actually spent and returned to the central supply.
    Acquiring goods: When acquired, most goods tokens immediately go into a player's container. The exceptions are money which goes into the player's personal supply and corn, which is explained below.
  • Resolving actions: Each location has one or more actions which can be resolved by players.
    • Farm: cloth, food and wool can be acquired here.
    • Forest: cloth, food, glass and wood can be acquired here
    • Harbor: Fish and food can be acquired.
      Boat cards can also be acquired here which allow players to add tokens to their container. A player may choose any available boat card.
    • Market: The market has several actions.
      Sell goods: Some goods can be sold for 1-3 coins each, as with all actions, goods that are sold are actually put into the player's container.
      Buy extension: A player can purchase 1 extension tile per round. The total cost is the cost on the tile plus the cost from it's position on the extension strip. If a extension is bought, it is not replaced until the last phase.
      Order cards: These can be bought here too, which allows the player to choose any available order card.. A player may only have 1 unfulfilled order card at a time.
      Deliver goods: This action allows the player to move goods placed here on to an order card. When a order is completed, it will earn the controlling player VPs during the endgame, generally it will also give the player a corn token, more on these later. 
    • Mine: Silver and stone can be acquired here.
    • Road: Completing the road action may have 1 of 2 effects. Either it unlocks a planning space for a player or it provides them with a corn token, again, more on corn below.
    • Village: The village also has several types of action.
      Buy cart: Players can buy a cart and place it on an available space on their movement track.
      Buy house card: A player can buy any available house card. House cards increase the VP value of the displayed good during the endgame.
      Store goods: This action allows the player to move goods off of the action spaces and into their warehouse. There are however, several restrictions here.
      • No food: Food tokens cannot be placed into the warehouse.
        Same goods: A row can only have 1 type of good in it. Thus if the 1st good in a row is a fish token, all the subsequent tokens in that row must be fish tokens. Additionally, there can only be 1 incomplete per type of good. A row of fish must be completed before a second row can be started.
        Bottom-to-top: When a good is placed in the warehouse, it must be in the lowest available space, either in a new row or an existing one.
        Left-to-right: A good must also be placed into the leftmost open space in the row it is placed into. A row is considered complete when the rightmost space has been filled.
      • Corn: There are several rules regarding corn.
        Store immediately: Regardless of how a player gains a corn token, when they gain it, it must immediately be stored in the warehouse.
        Wildcard: Corn can be used as any type of good for a row that has already been started. E.g., if a player has started a row of fish, it can be added to that row and even complete it.
        If there is no incomplete row to add the corn token to, then it starts it's own row!
        Corn rows takes priority: When storing corn, if there is a row that was started with corn, then corn tokens must go into that row before any other until it's completed!
• End of round phase: Once all players have passed, the game goes to end of round and several events occur.
  New first player: The first player marker is passed on to the player on the left who will be the new first player.
  Reset carts: All carts are put back to their initial positions.
  Manage extension strip: If any extension tiles we bought during the action phase, remaining tiles are slid downwards to fill the gaps and new tiles are added to the gaps now at the top.
  If no extension tiles were brought during the action phase, the bottommost extension tile is discarded, the other tiles are slid down and a new tile is added to the top.
  Now a new round begins with the first phase.

​Endgame
Play continues until one of the following 2 criteria are met.
Any one location becomes fully emptied of all tokens, cards, etc.
Or, a space along the extension strip cannot be filled, i.e., the extension tiles supply has emptied.
In either instance, the current round is completed and 1 further round is played, then the game goes to scoring.

VPs will come from a variety of sources.

• Goods tokens: Tokens can score 0-4 VPs each depending on the type. Tokens on a player's action board, warehouse, in their bag and container all count.
  Tokens on order cards are not counted.
• Warehouse: Each completed row in a player's warehouse will score it's associated VPs.
• Cards: Boat and house cards earn their respective VPs. Completed order cards also earn their VPs.
• Bonus VPs: If a player has house cards, they will earn bonus VPs for the corresponding goods.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
As you can see from the write up so far, there's quite a lot going on in Altiplano and a lot for players to think about.

There's a recognisable quandary going on with the bag building mechanic.
Players will naturally be looking to acquire tokens to carry out actions but invariably there will be times they end up getting pulled from the bag when they're not needed and unneeded tokens can 'water down' a player's strategies.
Unwanted tokens can of course be left on planning spaces but most players will find that irritatingly suboptimal. Alternatively, they can placed on spaces for action that a player does not immediately want to perform but they will eventually end up coming back  to again though. Another option albeit fairly situational, is to put them on to order cards, although removes the goods from the remainder of the game.
Finally, they can be put into the warehouse, this means those tokens have greater scoring opportunities but again, permanently removes them from a player's container/bag which may or may not be a good thing. layers will have judge the merits of storing tokens contextually - except when dealing with glass tokens. The thing with glass tokens is that they don't produce any other type of token, all they do is produce the most VPs per token, storing them in the warehouse where they contribute to more VPs and declutter a player's bag is a no-brainer and usually I consider no-brainers a bad thing for a board game but I feel this is a deliberate decision on the part of the game - more on that below.

If you've been paying attention (And I'm sure you have!) you will also have noticed that several goods such as a cacao, alpacas and even something that seems that it should be common such as fish cannot be produced from the action board.
So how are these acquired?
There's a couple of opportunities to get them, namely boat cards, extension tiles and possibly role tiles.
However, this brings me to a bit of a bugbear I have with this scarcity mechanic. It means there can be a race by experienced players to get those hard-to-produce goods, particularly cacao which produces glass which can be worth so many VPs. In fact I feel the whole of the forest location is especially strong location since cacao alone is used there for 3 separate actions in the same location. A player who can produce cacao and concentrates on doing so can soon be producing lots of goods at the forest.
Having said that, the game is a bit of a point salad with various avenues to scoring VPs, it's just that I feel going for glass is the strongest way and experienced players will end competing in that tactic.

While the bulk of the game's activity takes place during the action phase, the planning phase is where players will do most of their well... planning. They'll look to optimise there actions to get the most out of their available tokens.
Because players will generally need to move around to perform multiple actions, efficient use of the movement track is important, especially so in the early game when food tokens will be scarcer. A player can move their meeple before or after an action may make it seem unimportant but sometimes players will need to think ahead about where they need to be at the start of the next round.
As well as having to think about movement and balancing their goods with their bags, players will also have to think about gaining extensions, house and order cards, as well as boat cards if they are needed. 
Add to this increasing their planning spaces and acquiring corn to fill out their warehouse and players have lot of ways to approach the game
​
In this regard Altiplano does that thing which presents players with lots of options but frequently not enough opportunity to do everything they want, forcing them to make tricky decisions, which I consider a good thing in games.

Altiplano is a mid-to-heavy game with a longish playtime, it's probably not for beginners and perhaps could be criticised for being a bit over-elaborate although personally I didn't find it that much of a problem
In conclusion; the mechanics blend together to give players choices and essentially problems to solve in optimising their actions. If bag-building style games and resource management are your thing, Altiplano is worth a try.

9th October 2022

Another Sunday, another session of gaming goodness on Board Game Arena.

Travel around North America, fulfil tickets, draft cards, create routes in Ticket to Ride. 

• Cards: Ticket to Ride uses 2 types of cards:
  Train car cards: These cards come in 8 different colours that correspond to the connection colours on the board and each colour also displays a different type of train car such a freight or passenger car.
  There also 14 'locomotion' cards, which are 'wild' cards.
  Destination cards: Each one of the destination cards shows the same map of North America as shown on the game board, 2 of the destinations on the card will be highlighted. Finally, each destination card has a associated victory point (VP) value.
• Train meeples: Should these be called 'treeples'? Hmm maybe not, could be confused with trees!
  ​There are 45 trains in each of the game's 5 player colours. The trains are sized so that 1 train meeple fits on 1 segment in a route.

I suppose that you could call the art on the board muted but I would say it's functional and unobtrusive. The board is quite busy as it is with all the routes crossing back and forth, overly elaborate art would just obfuscate important information, so it feels like a good decision to me.
Each colour of train card has it's own unique illustration which helps with accessibility issues. The illustrations are perfectly good if a little plain.
The destination cards essentially replicate the art on the board.

There's no notable iconography in Ticket to Ride and the game is straightforward to comprehend. There's just the 9 types of train car to remember and that's easy and intuitive. I imagine the biggest hurdle to overcome in the game's presentation is finding destinations on the map and the iconography does a lot to make that as easy as it can.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Game board: Put out the game board.
• Train car cards: Shuffle the cards into a face-down deck, deal 5 cards face-up adjacent to the board.
• Destination cards: Also shuffle these into a face-down deck.
• Players: First give each player all the train meeples in their player colour.
  Train car cards: Deal 4 to each player, this is their starting hand.
  Destination cards: Deal 3 destination cards to each player. Everyone decides how many to keep. A player must keep 1-3 destination cards.
  Destination cards should be kept secret players until the end game scoring, only then should they be revealed.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Ticket to Ride, players broadly speaking have 3 objectives, these are; build as many routes as possible, create a connection between the locations on their destination cards and finally, create the longest contiguous set of connections.
All of these will contribute VPs towards their final score.
This is done by drafting cards which in turn allows players to create routes.
Ticket to Ride uses the typical turn structure of the active player taking their action before play progresses to the player on their left.
In their turn, the active player can perform exactly 1 of the 3 following actions.

• Draft train car cards: This action allows the player to draw 2 of the standard 8 types of train car cards. This can be done by taking it from the 5 available face-up cards or drawing blindly from the deck.
  Locomotion cards: A player can only claim 1 locomotion card as their enntire drafting action.
  Shuffling: If at anytime there's 3 or more locomotion cards in the face-up line of cards, then all 5 are discarded and 5 new cards are drawn. Additionally, if the train car card deck becomes empty, the discard pile is shuffled into a new deck.
• Claim route: A route is a line of oblong spaces between 2 destinations. A route may a have a colour or may be 'grey'.
  To claim a route, the active player must discard train car cards of the matching colour and equal number of spaces to the route. A grey route can be claimed with cards of any colour provided they are all of the same colour.
  Locomotion cards: These can be used as train car cards of any colour.
  Place train meeples: Once a route has been claimed, the active player places a train meeple on every space on the route.
  ​This also means that no other player may claim this route.
  Some adjacent destinations will have 2 routes running in parallel, in games with 4+ players, the 2nd route can be also claimed. In 2 or 3 player games, 2nd routes are not in play.
  Scoring: When a route is claimed, it is immediately scored on the tracker. Routes run 1-6 spaces in length and correspondingly score 1-15 VPs.
• Draw destination cards: As their action, the active player may draw 3 cards and keep 1-3 of them, providing them with additional scoring opportunities (Or not as explained below!).
  Discarded cards are returned to the bottom of the destination deck.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their action, play progresses to the player on their left.

Endgame
When the active player has 2 or less train meeples remaining, the end game is triggered. Every player including the active player has 1 more turn then the game goes to scoring.

Players will add points from destination cards to their running total from the game and the player with the longest set of connections gains bonus VPs.

Destination cards are now revealed:

• Completed destination cards: Players earn the listed VPs for every destination card that they have completed (That is; any destination card where the owning player may trace a connection of their routes between the 2 destinations.).
• Incomplete destination cards: Every incomplete destination a play has will deduct VPs from that player's total.

Finally, whichever players has the longest contiguous set of routes earns a bonus 10 VPs!

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Ticket to Ride is a very popular, well regarded game and it's easy to see why. Lightweight rules that are genuinely elegant, almost minimalist that're easy to learn, a game that's intuitive to play with a theme anybody can understand. Ticket to Ride is definitely a game with crossover appeal, is a good game for casual play and introduction to board games.
It also has a fairly random distribution of destination cards throughout a game which provides a good level of variety to games.

This pared down set of rules means that Ticket to Ride also provides players with clear meaningful decisions to make.
Basic tactics are pretty straightforward: Players are in a race to connect their personal destinations before they risk getting blocked by other players. They'll need to balance getting cards they need to draft and claiming routes.
Since a player's routes do not need to connect, any player essentially can claim any route, anytime if they have the appropriate cards.

Completing destination cards can be quite satisfying and they add an extra wrinkle to the gameplay. Being able to acquire more of them during play can be a game changer, earning more VPs but conversely, is also risky, getting a card that is not completed obviously costs VPs.
What makes this even more interesting is during the late game this risk/reward mechanic becomes even more pronounced.
Acquiring a destination card late in the game can be very risky because the player may not have the required time to complete the connection. However, late in the game is when a player's train network is at it's biggest, consequently it's possible to gain destination cards which have already​ been connected.

There's also a higher level of play in Ticket to Ride. Watching what opponents are doing and successfully anticipating what connections they're trying to make can allow a player to block or slow their progress down by claim routes they might want. If you look at the map, you will see that that there are numerous routes which are only 1 or 2 space grey routes that are very easy for a player to claim, e.g., a 1 space grey route can be claimed with any train rail card. It's obvious this is by design.

This brings me to my main contention with Ticket to Ride: It's a game that promotes negative gameplay. What do I mean by that?
Claiming a route another player needs will force them to spend additional turns acquiring train car cards and then taking longer to claim routes around the block.
In terms of action economy, a player wasting 1 action to make an opponent waste 5 or 6 can be pretty advantageous.
Preventing an opponent completing a destination card may earn that player no VPs but for their opponents, it will cost them points.

Many Eurogames have mechanics which have sort of a balance to them where if a player screws over an opponent, they will also frequently screw themselves over and only occasionally can they screw an opponent over while advance themselves.
Ticket to Ride is not like that!

Although, in part this will be down to the type of people playing.
Dedicated players will learn and exploit blocking at every opportunity and why not? Games are for winning and getting a score of 1 while opponents get 0 is still winning.

More casual players may not care about higher level tactics. Early games will be light and fun but even so, after a while they'll end up realising (Probably by accident!) how powerful blocking can be.

Remember, earlier I said how connecting destinations can feel satisfying, well getting blocked can feel equally unsatisfying.

There's a lot that's good about Ticket to Ride and I wanted to like it but the negative aspect can just be too frustrating. I understand why the game has a lot of fans, I'm not one of them.

26th September 2022

It's a Monday and we're round Simon's for Firefly: The Game.
It 'aint' the time to misbehave, it's actually time to play a Sandbox board game in the world of the cult short lived sci-fi show, Firefly.
Now with the requisite joke quote out of the way, it's time to get down to business.

• Cards: Firefly: The Game uses cards to power the game play and a lot of them too, about 400 cards in fact! Mostly in 13 decks at my counting!
  • Story cards: Objectives and winning criteria will vary from game to game and the story card selected at the game start will determine the objectives.
  • Starter Cards: There are 2 types of starter card and each player will have one of each
    Leader cards: These are captains that each player will be given. Leader cards are illustrated and are also similar to crew cards, they have professions, skills and special abilities.
    Drive Core cards: Each player will also have one of these which are placed in the respective slot on their ship board. The drive core determines how far a ship can move.
  • Supply cards: There are 5 decks of supply cards, 1 deck corresponds to a specific sector on the maps. Supply cards are broken down into 3 types.
    Crew: These are characters that can be hired by players. Crew have various stats, including profession, skills and special abilities. Crew can be 'moral' (Or not.), they also have a hiring cost.
    Gear: These can be weapons or other items which can be assigned to crew.
    Upgrades: These cards can be assigned to the player's ship to improve it's capabilities or add new ones.
  • Contract cards: There are another 5 decks of contract cards, again 1 each for each of a specific sector. Contracts represent 'jobs' or 'missions' that players can undertake. Usually this is a delivery of some sort or committing a criminal enterprise.
  • Nav cards: There's a mere 2 decks of nav cards! One deck for Alliance space and the other for border space.
    When player's move their ships through space, they will draw a card from the relevant deck and resolve it. Mostly these have no effect but sometimes they will be an encounter or problem to overcome. Sometimes it'll move the Alliance ship (Bad news.) or the Reaver ship (Really bad news!).
  • Misbehave cards: This is the final deck! Players be frequently directed to 'misbehave', this involves drawing and resolving these cards. They represent crimes or capers that players will need to successfully complete. Usually players will be presented to 2 different capers which will present a different task each to achieve.
• Tokens: Firefly: The Game also makes use of a lot of tokens.
  • Cargo/Contraband: These square cardboard tokens each fit on to 1 space in the ship's hold and can be shipped or smuggled.
  • Passenger/fugitive: Again these are square tokens that fill 1 space on a ship board.
  • Fuel: These card tokens are oblong and half the size of square tokens, thus 2 can fit in 1 space in a hold. Fuel is spent to power a ship's drive core.
  • Parts: These are also oblong tokens and are spent to fix problem with a ship.
  • Disgruntled tokens: These round card tokens feature a unhappy face and are used to track crew when they become unhappy.
  • Goal tokens: These are also round tokens. Story cards will have multiple goals that must be completed. Whenever a player completes one of the goals, they acquire a goal token.
  • Warrant tokens: When a player commits crime or misbehaves badly, they may acquire one of these round tokens. It means that the authorities have noticed the player and may make life hard for the ship or crew.
• Models: There are no meeples here, instead there are little plastic models to represent space ships.
  • Firefly ships: There's 4 firefly ship models on stands, 1 in each of the player colours.
  • Reaver ship: Used to represent Reavers who prowl Border Space, these models are also on stands.
  • Alliance ship: This model is relatively and suitably huge compared to the others and represents an Alliance cruiser.
• Money: Firefly: The Game uses paper money! That's both unusual for a modern game and also pretty cool.
• Dice: There are 2 dice that come with the game. They are normal six-siders except the '6' has been replaced with a firefly ship logo, although it still counts as a '6'.

I don't usually talk about this because it has no impact on the game itself but Firefly: The game has a huge footprint, i.e., it takes up a lot of table space.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Put out the game board and complete the following steps.
  • Ships: Put the Alliance and Reaver ships in their respective starting spots.
  • Supply cards: Sort the supply cards into their 5 types and shuffle each into a face-down deck. Finally draw 3 cards from each deck to form a discard pile for each supply deck.
  • Contract cards: Also sort contract cards by type and shuffle them into 5 face-down decks. Again draw and discard 3 cards from each deck for create their  respective discard piles.
  • Nav decks: Sort the nav decks by type, then shuffle the remaining cards into face-down decks.
  • Misbehave deck: Shuffle the misbehave cards into a face-down deck.
  • Story card: Shuffle all the story cards into a face-down deck and draw one. This will be this game's objective.
    Alternatively, players may collectively decide on a story card to use.
• Players: Put out the starter cards and shipboards. Players then roll off with a die to determine the order in which they choose their starter cards and ship boards.
  Then in reverse player order, players choose where to place their ships on the game board.​
  The player to last put their firefly model on the board starts the game as the first player.
  Next, give each player 3,000 credits, 6 fuel tokens and 2 parts tokens. The tokens should all be placed on cargo spaces on each player's ship board.
  Finally, all players draw 1 contract card from each contract deck, giving them 5 contract cards. Players are allowed to keep up to 3 contract cards in hand and may have up to 3 active contracts at a time.

On to play
Firefly: The Game doesn't have set objective, instead it has differing story cards, one of which will be used during a game. Each story card will have a series of goals that must be completed and whoever does them all first, wins!

Firefly: The Game follows the usual turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progresses to the player on their left.

• Actions: During the active player's turn, they can perform 2 actions as described below. They may perform 2 different actions or repeat the same action twice.
  • ​Move: There are 2 types of movement a player can chose when moving their ship.
    Mosey: The player can move their ship 1 sector, this is slow but safe movement. If a player is adjacent to their destination, they'll probably mosey there.
    Full burn: Now this is more like it. This requires the player to spend a fuel but allows them to move their ship a number of sectors equal to the range of their drive core.
    There's a consequence for doing this though...
    Every time their ship enters a sector, they must draw a card from the nav deck for the region of space they entered.
    Nav cards mostly have no effect and allow the active player to continue moving but some will give them encounters to resolve or problems to address, usually in the form of a skill roll (More on skill rolls below.) or may force them to full stop which means their movement for that action ends. Sometimes it will allow the active player - or another player move the Alliance or Reaver ship a space and sometimes it will pull the ship directly on to the players sector, in which case they must deal with it.
    The Alliance ship will search the player's ship but won't do much to a player unless they're carrying contraband/fugitives or there's a warrant on the ship or crew. In this they'll lose the contraband/fugitives and may lose outlaw crew, they'll also have to bribe the Alliance to get rid of warrants.
    Encountering Reavers is much simpler, if deadlier. They Reavers will kill all passengers/fugitives and kill some of the crew too! However, if the player has the right crew and fuel, they can evade the Reavers.
  • Buy: If the player's ship is in a sector with a supply deck, they may buy stuff!
    Players may look through the pertinent supply deck discard pile for cards they want or draw from the deck until they have 3 cards, then they may buy up to 2 of them. returning any unbought cards to the discard pile.
    Additionally, the buy action also allows the active player to purchase fuel or parts.
    ​If for any reason, any of the crew has disgruntled tokens, the active player may spend credits to remove them with shore leave.
  • Deal: When the active player is in sector with a contract deck, they may use an action to look at 3 cards from either the discard pile or drawn from the deck and keep 2 of them to complete at a later stage of the game.
    Players can also buy or sell contraband if they have a 'solid' reputation i.e., good reputation in that sector.
  • Work: The active player may spend an action to work, there are several types of work that can be undertaken.
    Cash: If they active player is in a sector with a planet, they may spend an action to earn some credits.
    Job: Each active job a player has will require several steps that need completing in order to finish that contract. An action may be spent to complete a step, sometimes this requires a skill roll.
• End turn: Once the active player has completed their 2 actions, player progresses to the player on their left.
• Other rules: There are a whole bunch of situational rules, some of which are touched upon below.
  • Skill rolls: Many tasks and actions will require a skill roll to complete. Some tasks will offer a choice in how to resolve it with differing difficulties and outcomes. Some tasks may also require certain prerequisites before rolling.
    Difficulty: A skill roll's difficulty is determined by a number, the higher the number, the harder it is to successfully complete.
    Bonuses: A player may gain bonuses from various sources, predominantly, this will come from characters. Every point a character has in the relevant skill will be added to the roll. Gear cards may also add to a skill roll.
    ​​​​​Roll the dice: When a skill roll is attempted, the active player rolls a single die. If the result (Plus any applicable bonus.) is equal or higher than the difficulty, they succeed. If the active player rolls the firefly icon icon it counts as a 6, then they get to roll the die again and add it to the result of the first roll (Which will be a 6.), thus, no matter the difficulty, there's always the possibility of succeeding at the roll.

Endgame
Firefly: The game works hard to replicate the feel of the show and to a certain extent, it does this very well. It successfully captures the feel of hustling round a system, wheeling and dealing, dodging authorities and making profit.
All of this though, is only half of what the TV show was, the show was also about the family you make and the stories they collectively create, stuff that's quite hard to replicate in a game and is missing here since players are each playing separate crews. Having said that, there's definitely a bit of emergent gameplay and some elements of storytelling going on here but his brings me to one of my bugbears about the game.

When you're playing it feels a bit like a single-player game that happens to have other players in it. There's a little bit of interaction here and there that comes from sending the Alliance or Reavers after other players or trading and crew poaching but it doesn't feel significant.

Firefly: The Game is sandbox game that appears to offer a lot of choice, is a lot of game with a lot of rules and rules exceptions and also a lot of components which I feel will be off putting to more casual gamers. A fan of the show who isn't a gamer will probably find Firefly: The Game hard going at the start.

Despite the breadth of rules, the game is fairly straightforward in what it asks players to do.

One of my other bugbears is that players will often find themselves delivering something, this might be legal or illegal or performing a crime/misbehaving. All of this will involve travelling around and risking running into the Alliance or Reavers or other obstacles and so on.
The consequence of this is that because the game is so single-player driven that ultimately, it's a race to complete the goals as efficiently as possible and even though it's meant to be have open sandbox gameplay, players are being somewhat funnelled through the game by those goals. I.e., the game-winning goals are all the same, it's how those goals are achieved that will differ between player.

The game also has a fairly long playtime, we played a beginner story card with a low player count and it still took 2 hours. Although, to be fair, that's not really uncommon with this style of play so it comes with the territory but be prepared to commit a few hours to a playthrough.

If you're a fan of the Firefly TV show and are prepared to prepared to invest some effort learning the rules time to play, you'll probably enjoy this.
Personally, I'm not sure how I feel about Firefly: The Game overall, it was a fun experience and my decisions generally felt meaningful, it also fairly involved and having players run around dong their own thing also felt a little unengaging. However, if someone else wanted to play it, I wouldn't object.

8th September 2022

It's a Thursday evening, it's Aldershot, it's time for some gaming goodness.

​Channel your inner Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Kevin McCloud as you attempt to build your... Dream Home in this drafting, set collecting game.

What's in the game?

• Game board: This is not really a game board but more of a drafting board.
  There are 2 rows of 6 card spaces each, the first space of each row is dedicated to placing the game's 2 deck of cards.
  Thus the top row is the resource card row and the bottom row is the room card row.
• Home board: These are actually player boards. Each one depicts a 3 level idyllic suburban home.
  The bottom floor depicts a porch or entrance (Which essentially uses up 3 spaces) along with a 'garage' (Which is actually the basement) and consists of 2 card spaces. 
  The middle floor has 5 card spaces.
  Finally, the top floor also have 5 card spaces - giving a total of 12
• Cards: Dream Home uses 2 decks of cards.
  Room cards: These cards all show various rooms you would find in a typical house, bathrooms, kitchens and so on. Room cards are used by players create their home and are colour-coded according to type. There are normal rooms, basement rooms and unique rooms.
  Many types of room cards can be placed adjacent to cards of the identical type. 
  At the bottom of each room card it will display 1 or more numbers, which indicate both the maximum 'size' that room can reach and also victory point (VP) value of that card for reaching the that size if other cards of the same type are placed adjacent to it.
  Resource cards: This type of card provides players with benefits or bonuses, which may be once-only, ongoing or game end VPs.
  There are roof cards, décor cards, tool and helper cards.
• Tokens: These are décor tokens, each one is uniquely shaped according to the resource card it corresponds to and will also display a VP value.
• First player token: I don't usually write about the first player token but this is a fairly chunky wooden styled in the shape of a house.

​Component quality is the usual good standard found in most modern board games. The cards are fine, the board and tokens are constructed from sturdy cardboard. The first player token is chunky and made from wood, it's obviously a bit of a gimmick but it's the kind of gimmick I'm a sucker for!

Dream Home has fantastic artwork throughout. The Illustration used on the home board is good, however, the standouts are the cards and tokens which feature excellent colourful and distinct depictions of home spaces. Interestingly, many cards will feature children hidden among the furniture. This is more than just a aesthetic choice which will be explained below.

Most information is conveyed via text and there's no iconography that needs learning.

How's it play?
​Setup
This is the setup for 4-player games, in game with lower player counts, some cards will be discarded after being placed on the game board.

• Game board: Sort the cards by type and shuffle them into 2 face-down decks.
  Resource row: Place the resource deck on to the leftmost space on the top row.
  Next, leave the 1st space to the right of the deck empty, it's used to indicate the first player token, a resource card never goes here.
  Finally deal 4 face-up cards on to the 4 remaining spaces in the row.
  Rooms row: Put the room deck on the leftmost space on the bottom row, deal 5 face-up cards on to the 5 spaces in this row.
• Player board: Give each player a player board.
• First player: Determine a starting player and give them the first player token.

On to play
Dream Home is played over exactly 12 rounds and players will be putting room cards on to their personal game board to build their home and gaining resource cards.
This is done by drafting pairs of cards from the same column, that is, 1 resource and 1 room card - except for the leftmost space, in which case they acquire a room card and the first player token.

Turn order is slightly different to the usual here: The player with the first player token goes first and play progresses to the left until all players have taken their turn. However, it's possible that the first player token will change hands during a round, consequently, in the following round a new turn order would be established.

During their turn, the active player takes the following actions.

• Take cards: The active player must choose a column and take the resource and room card from that column.
  First player token: If the active player chooses the first column, they only get a room card, however, they also gain the first player marker and will go first in the next round.
• Place room: The active player must place the room card they just drafted with the following restrictions:
  Basement: Basement cards must go on to 1 of the 2 basement spaces.
  Build up: All other room cards must be placed on top of the porch or on top of another room card, this can a basement card or be another room card in the case of placing room cards on the top floor.
  ​Size limit: Players will want to put cards of the same type adjacent to each other to maximise VP scoring but a room cannot exceed it's size limit. E.g., a bedroom can consist of 2 adjacent bedroom cards, a 3rd bedroom card cannot be placed adjacent to that room.
  ​Can't play: If for any reason, the active player cannot play a card, they can place it face-down as an empty room which will score 0 VPs. Empty rooms follow the same placement rules as explained above.
• Resource cards: There are 4 types of resource card.
  Décor cards: When one of these cards is taken, the active player also takes the corresponding décor token. The token must immediately be placed on a room that matches the token and can provide bonus VPs at the game end. When this is done, the room is considered finished, that is, no more room cards can be added to that room.
  If a décor token cannot be placed on a matching room, it is discarded.
  Helper cards: These cards generally provide some sort of bonus scoring criteria during the game end.
  Roof cards: These come in several different colours and when a player acquires a roof, they turn it face-down and place it on their home board's roof.
  These cards cannot be looked at again until final scoring at game end!
  4 Roof cards can score bonus VPs at the game end and more if they are of a matching colour. This means players will need to memorise those colours.
  Tool cards: These usually provide some sort of benefit during the game.
• Next player: Once the active player has resolved the cards they took, play progresses to the player on their left.
• Next round: Once all player's have taken their turn, play progresses to the next round and the following occur.
  Clear board: All face-up cards remaining on the game board are discarded out of play. 4 new resource and 5 new room cards are drawn and placed as per the setup rules.
  Turn order: Whoever has the first player token will be the starting player in the new round. If the first player token did not change hands because nobody chose the left most column, then whoever retained the token will be the starting player again in the new round.

Endgame
Dream Home is played over 12 rounds and after the last round, the game goes to scoring. There are various avenues to earning VPs.

• ​Room cards: These score points according to their type and size. E.g., a living room consisting of 3 cards will score 9 VPs.
• Décor: These tokens will score points as listed on them.
• Functionality: Players earn points for having certain type of rooms in their home. A home with a bathroom, bedroom and kitchen will earn VPs for example.
• Roof: Players can now look at their roof cards. If a player has at least 4 roof cards on their roof, they score 3 points. If a player can have set of at least 4 roof cards of the same colour then they earn 8 VPs.
  Windows: Every roof card that has a window scores and additional VP.
• Additionally; certain cards can also provide VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins. In the case of a tie, the player with home board showing the most children on the cards wins!

Overall
Dream Home strikes a balance between ease of play and depth. Players will be faced with the conundrum of having to build outwards before building upwards.
It might not seem like much but it's unlikely that players will get all the cards they need at the time they need them.
The larger room sets will score more points per card but unless a player gets the right cards at the right time, it's likely that they will have to leave gaps when collecting bigger sets, which can make it tricky to build upwards.

The drafting mechanic also provides players with a meaningful choice. Again, it's unlikely that players will always get the 2 cards they want, often they will need to compromise on which resource and room card to take as well as adapt to circumstances as they are occur.

Finally, the first player mechanic is also interesting. Gaining the first player token feels costly because the player only gets a room card but it can play dividends in the following turn. There will times when going first can be extremely useful.
Conversely going last can be painful as the last player will only ever have a choice of 2 columns to pick from.

None of this is ever too complicated, the sets are never too big and intricacies that can arise from syncing resource cards such as décor cards with room cards is never too complex.

Dream Home also doesn't outstay its welcome. Being played over 12 rounds keeps it moving along briskly and provides a fairly concise experience, unless you're playing with a sufferer of analysis paralysis!

It's fair to say that Dream Home is a lightweight and accessible iteration of the 'draft-and-place' multiple components, set collecting mechanic seen in quite a few games.
This accessibility along with it's top-notch presentation means that it's probably a good game to play with younger participants or more casual gamers.

For me though: While I feel that Dream Home does provide a good experience for younger and more casual gamers, I'm not sure it has long term appeal to more dedicated gamers. I enjoyed the game but it's fairly simplistic nature means I'm not sure how often I'd like to play it.

28th August 2022

It's a Sunday evening and we're logged into Board Game Arena for some gaming goodness.

Burgle Bros is a cooperative tile based bank heist/caper game: Can you sneak through the building, dodge the guards, disarm the alarms, find and crack the safes.
Time to find out in... Burgle Bros.

Caveat: We have only played this digitally.

What's in a game?

• Room tiles: These represent rooms/encounters players will have, there is a wide variety and some will prove useful while many will create obstacles for players. Each one features a black and white line art illustration representing its room. Tiles also have a splash of colour to indicate what kind of encounter they will be. e.g., red means a trap or alarm.
  Numbers: Finally, all room tiles except safe tiles are numbered 1-6, these are used to create the safe combination which must be cracked when trying to open a safe.
• Cards: Burgle Bros uses several different decks of cards.
  • Character cards: There are numerous different burglar characters in the game and each one has a unique ability. Additionally, burglar cards are double sided with a basic and advanced version of each character.
  • Event cards: Certain actions (Or lack of to be precise.) can cause a event card to be drawn and resolved. Event cards can be beneficial or detrimental.
  • Loot cards: This is what the game is all about - getting loot. However, carrying loot always causes a problem of some sort kind!
  • Patrol cards: Pesky security guards patrol the building you're robbing. Patrol cards display a red space on a 4x4 grid which is used determine where guards wander to! The standard game is played of 3 floors and each floor has its own individual patrol deck.
  • Tool cards: When picked up by players, tools can be very helpful to players.
• Tokens: Burgle Bros also makes use of several types of token to represent various situations such as alarms being triggered, door becoming unlocked. etc.
  3 types of token are a little different.
  • Alarm Tokens: There are various types of alarm and each type has their own tokens that get placed on the playing area when the respective alarm is triggered.
  • Stair tokens: These are used to indicate whether stairs go up, down or both - depending on what floor the tokens are on.
  • Stealth tokens: These are vital for players, if a player loses all of them... it's bad news.
  • Wall tokens: These long straight tokens are used to as the name suggests, represent walls on each floor, they determine how players and guards move and may also block line of sight.
• Meeples: It wouldn't be much of a heist game without burglars and of course, guards. The physical game comes with a meeple for each burglar character and 3 guard meeples - one for each of the 3 floors.
• Dice: Burgle Bros uses normal six-siders, which come in 2 colours and each has a different use.
  Red dice: These are used to track both guard patrol routine and the speed they move at.
  Green dice: Players will frequently be called upon to make dice rolls, especially to open safes.

The art direction for Burgle Bros has some unusual choices.
Room tiles have detailed, realistic looking line art illustrations while on the  other hand, characters are depicted with highly stylised and exaggerated cartoony art that looks like it's out of the opening titles of a sixties crime caper movie - which is appropriate.
It's a weird clash of styles but in this instance it actually works quite well.

There are a few icons that are used throughout Burgle Bros but they're all fairly easy to learn, a lot of the game's information is conveyed via text.

How's it play?
Setup

• Playing area: The building is the main playing area of the game and in standard difficulty the building has 3 floors. This means setting out 3 sets of cards - 1 for each floor to create the building.
  Floors: Remove all the 'Safe' and 'Stairs' room tiles from the room tiles deck. Now shuffle the remaining cards and deal them into 3 face-down decks.
  Next add 1 safe and 1 stairs to each deck and then re-shuffle them into a deck again. Finally put out each deck into a face-down 4x4 grid. Thus, you should have 3 sets of 4x4 cards,
  Walls: Put out 8 wall tokens between cards to form walls for all floors as directed by the rules.
• Patrol decks: Sort the patrols decks by floor and shuffle them into 3 face-down decks. Some cards may have to be randomly removed according to player count.
  Dice: Place 1 red die adjacent to each patrol deck. Set the value of each die to 2-4 depending for floors 1-3 respectively. This value determines how many spaces a guard moves during their action.
• Events, tools & loot cards: Sort these into their respective types and then shuffle each into a face-down deck
• Players: Each should randomly draw a character card and decide whether to use the standard or advanced side. give each player the corresponding meeple for that character.
  Stealth tokens: give 3 stealth tokens to each player.
• Guard: Flip over the top card of the patrol deck for floor 1, place the guard meeple for that floor on that tile - do not reveal the tile.
• Burglars: Flip over any 1 room tile on floor 1. This is the entry point for the burglars, a 'goes downstairs' stair token should be placed on that tile. All players should also place their meeple on the entry space.
• Destination: Flip over a 2nd patrol cards for floor 1. It will indicate the room tile that the guard is heading for.
  Red die: Place the red dice (Showing a 2 for floor 1.) on the destination tile. This indicates the speed at which the guard moves.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
​The objective in Burgle Bros is to find and crack all 3 safes, gain 3 loot cards, then escape to the roof, all without being caught by the security guards.
This is done by the use of action points (APs).

In Burgle Bros, the active player spends their APs to perform certain actions.
Then the security guard on their floor moves along their patrol route.
Then play progresses to the player to the left of the active player.
A turn is broadly speaking, broken down into 3 phases.

• Player action: The active player has 4 APs they can use to perform the following actions.
  • Peek: The active player may spend 1 AP to flip a orthogonally adjacent face-down tile face-up, revealing what it is. This may seem like a waste of an AP but blundering into unknown rooms is a high risk proposition.
  • Move: An AP can be spent to move the active player's meeple to a orthogonally adjacent tile, regardless of whether it is face-down or face-up, a face-down tile is immediately flipped face-up.
    Once a meeple has entered a new tile, its action must be resolved. There are a variety of effects that can occur. Sometimes nothing will occur, or an alarm may be triggered, a meeple might be forced to stop or make a roll to enter the tile and so on.
    Alarm: This isn't a player action per se but whenever an alarm is triggered, 2 events occur.
    Firstly, the red dice is moved to the tile which triggered an alarm, secondly a alarm token is also added to that tile.
    Note: A meeple obviously may not move through a wall token.
    Going to a new floor: If the active player's meeple moves to a new floor. Flip a patrol card from that floor to reveal the starting position of that floor's security guard, then flip a 2nd patrol card to provide him a patrol route.
  • Hack: Some room tiles contain computers a which can be hacked to remove alarm tokens (More on alarm tokens below.). If the active player is in a computer room, they may spend an AP to add 1 hack token to that room. There are different hack tokens that correspond to the different alarm types.
    Later, when an alarm is triggered, a hack token can be removed to remove a matching alarm token.
  • Add dice to safe tile: If a safe tile has been revealed and the active player is standing on it, they may spend 2AP to place a die on the safe tile. A safe tile may hold up to 6 dice.
    These will be used to crack the safe - which is explained below.
  • Crack safe: If the active player is on a safe tile, they may attempt to open (Or work towards opening.) the safe. The following occurs
    Discover combination: Each safe has a 6 digit combination. Look at the 3 cards in the same row and the 3 cards in the same column to get the numbers for this combination. This may include doubles.
    Roll dice: For the cost of 1AP, the active player now rolls all the dice that have been placed on the safe tile.
    For each result on the dice that matches a number in the combination, that number is 'covered'. A single die result that matches multiple numbers in the combination, covers all of them.
    When all 6 numbers in the combination have been covered, the safe has been opened!
    Note: A safe does not need to be opened in a single roll and the assigned dice can be re-rolled at the cost of another AP.
    The following occur after a safe has been opened
    Tool: When the active player opens a safe, they draw a tool card from it's deck. Tools provide some benefit to the player that holds it.
    Loot: The active player also draws a loot card. Generally, loot cards are a hinderance to the players but are also vital to victory.
    ​Guard: Finally, increase the value on the red guard die for that floor. Thus; if the safe on floor 1 is opened, the red die goes up from 2 to 3. It also means that the guard on floor 3 will have a basic speed of 5 after that floor's safe has been opened!
• Check for events: If the active player has only used 1 or 2 APs during their turn, then they must draw a card from the event deck and resolve it.
  Event cards may prove beneficial to players... or may prove detrimental.
• Move guard: Once the active player has finished their actions and possibly resolved and event card, play moves over to the security guard. There are a number of factors to remember when moving the guard.
  1 guard only: Only 1 guard moves, which will be the guard on the same floor where the active player ended their turn. All other guard do not move.
  Speed: The security guard will move at least a number of spaces equal to the value for the red die for the floor.
  Alarms: Alarm tokens increase the speed of a guard, the more tokens, the more movement they have!
  Destination:​ The guard always takes the shortest route towards the red die.
  If the guard reaches their destination, they will deactivate any alarm tokens there.
  If they still have movement left after reaching their destination, flip a new patrol card, move the red die to the new location and begin moving the guard towards it.
  Catching players: If a guard moves on to the same tile as a player's meeple, that player's burglar has been spotted. The player must discard a stealth token. A player must also discard a stealth token, if they move their meeple on to a space with a guard for any reason. Essentially, this allows the burglar to somehow avoid the guard.
  What happens if a player cannot discard a stealth token? Let's just say it's bad news for that burglar!
• Next player: Once the guard has acted, play progresses to the player on the left of the active player.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of 2 ending conditions are met.

If a player has to discard a stealth token and they cannot because they've already used them up, then the burglar has been caught, players immediately and collectively lose the game.

If the players manage to open all 3 safes, get the loot and all of the burglars off the top of floor 3, they collectively win.

Overall
First thing to say is that we played Burgle Bros digitally and I felt there was a bit of a disconnect with the game because of this.
In the physical copy, all 3 floors are laid out next to each other but the digital copy required visually switching between them. It means the digital copy can never feel as intuitive as the physical one.

Anyway, on to the game.
Players will need to balance the need to be cautious with the need explore and turn over tiles. Avoiding or neutralising the many alarms is good but so is reaching the objective as quickly as possible.

That's because the real challenge in Burgle Bros is managing the movement and behaviour of the guard. This requires thinking ahead and I mean really thinking ahead! There's almost a puzzle-like logic to it but there's also the potential for a lot of randomness too!
Players will need to anticipate where the guard will go (And when!) and at times try to manipulate the guard by deliberately triggering an alarm and the like.

This is compounded by the fact that the more players there are on a floor; the more a guard may move.
E.g., in a 4-player game, a player may think their meeple is 'safe' but if all players'  meeples are on the same floor (And they will be in the early game.), the security guard will move at least 8 spaces before that player gets to act again, that's enough to cross an entire floor twice! It can become very hard to predict where the guard is going whenever a new patrol tile is flipped over - which can happen often when the guard moves a lot.
I guess the solution to this is for players to get their meeples to other floors ASAP and this will slow down individual guards.

From a gameplay perspective though, this feels a little counterintuitive. It turns what is meant to be a cooperative challenge into 3 sub-games with a only tenuous cooperative link between players.
From a player perspective, it also feels somewhat counterintuitive. For players, the instinct will be to cooperate; opening a safe can be hard and adding dice to it is vital but also expensive in terms if AP. Multiple players will naturally want to quickly contribute as many dice as possible dice to a single safe to help each other open it sooner rather than later.
This is certainly how we played Burgle Bros and in retrospect, that was probably a mistake, it seemed to be that the game punished players for playing this way.

Personally I found it the intricacies of having to deal with so many alarms paired with just too unpredictable guard actions a little futile and frustrating to be enjoyable.

I suspect that Burgle Bros probably plays best at a 2-player count and could be a good couples game if puzzle type gameplay interests you.

27th August 2022

It's a Saturday night and were logged in Board Game Arena for some gaming fun.

Now that I think about it; a crossover game of Dungeons & Dragons and Twister would be pretty interesting.
Unfortunately, that's not what Dungeon Twister is about. Instead we get a 2-player sort of chess-like game about manipulating dungeon tiles and running around them.

Caveat: We have only ever played this online.

What's in a game?

• Tiles: There are several types of tiles.
  • Room tiles: The game comes with 8 large square tiles. Each one depicts a dungeon 'room', although it looks more like a intricate series of corridors and passageways than anything else. There are also items and obstacles such as portcullises and rotation gears.
    On the back of each room tile is a number, this determines the maximum number of tokens that can be placed on that tile during setup. More on this below.
  • Starting line: This long tile is the width of 2 room tiles and they are placed at either end of the playing area to form starting areas. There are spaces to place 4 characters on each tile.
• Screen: The physical game comes with a dungeon master style screen for each player to hide their standees and tokens.
• Tokens: Dungeon Twister uses several types of tokens.
  • Equipment tokens: Players have 6 tokens for their respective equipment.
  • Character tokens: Players have tokens for all of their 8 characters.
    These are generally the classic characters you might find in a fantasy themed game and include, wizard, fighter, thief and so on.
    Different characters has a combat and speed value, additionally, each character also has unique abilities they can make use of that are themed to the character. E.g., the thief character can pick locks and disarm traps.
  • Tracking tokens: There are also a number of tokens used to track certain actions.
• Standees: As well as tokens, The physical game also comes with 8 standees for each player depicting each of the 8 characters a player has on their team.
  Standees can be used in place of their corresponding tokens.
• Cards: Each player has their own deck of 16 cards which consist of the following.
  • Action cards: These confer 2-5 action points (APs) when played.
  • Combat cards: During combat, these are played to grant a bonus of 0-6 combat points.
  • Jump cards: These allow a character to errr... jump! Mostly used to circumvent pit traps.

Dungeon Twister has bright and colourful artwork. The room tiles don't feature much in the way of illustrations but do have clearly delineated features. Artwork on the tokens and standees is that sort of chunky and cartoony fantasy style that has been used on a lot fantasy themed games over the last few years, it's a little bit of an unoriginal art direction - but to be fair, it's a style I quite like, so for me it's good.

There isn't too much in the way of iconography in Dungeon Twister and I don't imagine it would provide any obstacle to playing.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Create the playing area by shuffling the room tiles into a face-down stack and while keeping them face-down deal them into a 4x2 grid.
• Starting line: Each player should take a starting line tile and place it along the short edge of the playing era. These are the 2 'ends' of the board.
• Players: Give both players the cards, screen, standees and tokens in their colour. All the tokens and standees should be placed behind the player's screen.
• Starting team: From their selection of 8 characters, both players choose 4 to be their starting team.
  Take the 4 tokens for these characters and place them face-down on the 4 starting spots on the starting line. The standees are not used at this time and each player's selection remains secret to their opponent for the time being.
• First player: Determine a starting player.
• Populate board: Beginning with the first player, each player should alternately put one of their 6 equipment tokens or 4 remaining character tokens on to the face-down room tiles.
  These can go on to any tile, provided it does not increase the number of tokens on a room tile higher than the number shown on the back of that room tile.
  Continue placing tokens until both players have put down all their tokens.

On to play
The objective in Dungeon Twister is to accumulate 5 Victory Points. A player can achieve this in 2 ways; by defeating opposing characters or by getting their own characters out of the opposite end of the dungeon from their starting side.
Players take alternate turns becoming the active player, playing action cards and resolving them. This is done over 3 phases.

• Play action card phase: When an action is played, it is done so face-up and in a stack, so only the last played action card is visible.
  The active player receives a number of APs equal to the value of the action card they played. APs are then spent to carry out actions, APs can be split between characters as the active player sees fit.
• Use APs phase: APs can be spent on the following.
  • Movement: Each AP spent allows a character to move a number of spaces equal to that character's speed, all movement is orthogonally.
    Additionally, there are some restrictions on how a character move or end their turn.
  • Reveal room: If a character is adjacent to a face-down room tile which they can enter, the active player can then spend 1 AP to flip that room tile face up.
    Flipping a room involves sliding it out and flipping it back into position but face- up.
    The active player then places any tokens that were put on the face-down tile during setup on to spaces or their choosing. However, they cannot place tokens of their own colour, instead the opposing player does that!
  • Rotate room: Each room tile will have a rotation gear. If the active player has a character on the same space a rotation gear. they can spin the tile! Each AP spent can spin the tile 90', the room tile will indicate whether this goes clockwise or anticlockwise.
    The corridors on the room tiles have been put there in such a way that they can trap characters or create new passageways when a room tile is rotated. Rotating room tiles can even be used as short cuts.
    Any tokens on a room tile that is rotated, also rotate along with the tile.
  • Combat: If an active player's character ends movement adjacent to an opposing character, the active player can choose to trigger combat by spending 1 AP. A fight can include more than 2 characters if more are also adjacent.
    Combat is resolved by each player playing a ingle combat card face-down. When this done, both are revealed.
    Each player totals the combat value of all their characters who are participating in the fight with the value on their played cards to get a final combat value.
    These 2 final values are then compared, if it results in a tie, there is no effect. Otherwise, whoever has the highest value wins the encounter.
    All participants on the losing side are wounded.
    Wounds: The combat value of a wounded character drops to 0, furthermore, a wounded character no longer take any actions. Healing can reverse all of this.
    A wounded character who receives a 2nd wound is instead killed and removed from play.
    Cards: Finally, the combat cards used during the fight are discarded out of play, except for the +0 card which is always returned to the player's hand.
  • Use ability: Some character abilities require the active player to spend 1 AP to activate them.
  • Use Item: As with abilities, some items require the active player to spend 1 AP to use them.
    • Other rules: Without going into detail, there are rules for picking up and using items, carrying wounded characters and the such. Encountering pit traps and using jump cards to avoid them.
    • Point scoring: There are 2 avenues for scoring points. The first is eliminating the other player's characters which earns 1 VP per elimination. The other is for a player to get their characters out of the other side of the dungeon, this earns 1 VP per escaping character, bonus points can be earned for getting certain characters/items out of the dungeon.
• Recycle phase: When a player has used their last action card, they draw off them back into their hand.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed all 3 phases play moves on to the other player.

Endgame
When any player earns 5 VPs, the end game is triggered. It is possible for the inactive player to score VPs in the active player's turn by winning combat which means the inactive player can potentially trigger the endgame.
In any case, the active player finishes their current turn and the game goes to scoring.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​Dungeon Twister is a fairly straightforward game but despite this I feel the game is a little cumbersome, there's quite a bit of exception-driven rules here.

For example:
No character can stand on a pit trap space except the thief or except a character with a rope token.
If a thief standing on pit trap is wounded, they are killed, except any character carrying rope will not be killed, except if an opposing character comes and takes a rope - in which case the wound character is then killed.

These are not gamebreakers by any means but they feel counterintuitive and may be obstacles to play. Until players are familiar with the rules, they'll be hunting through the rulebook to get clarifications, it's also likely players may forget some rules even exist!

Players will need to employ quite of lot of tactics in Dungeon Twister and generally that's a good thing. Since there are 2 ways to score points, players will need to constantly assess the viability of both approaches.
It means playing close attention to the positions of all characters, every one of which will have their own strengths and weaknesses. Characters that are strong in combat will tend to slow at movement. Players will need to exploit the strengths and special abilities while minimising exposure of weaknesses. This is especially true of combat.

This neatly brings me to the game's main schtick, that is; rotating room tiles. Well planned use of rotating the tiles can be a game changer, it can trap or free characters, create blockages or short cuts, it can be used to move gear or move a correctly positioned character across the board, etc.
It keeps the gameplay fresh and to a degree, unpredictable. It can be tricky to see the outcome of rotating of all tiles to all position.

The rule where a player gets to place their opponent's tokens is quite interesting, it allows canny players to exploit the situation to trap opposing tokens but they will need to remember that a twist of the tile can change everything.

Dungeon Twister provides players with meaningful decisions when choosing their actions and tactics.

​Yet somehow, I found it unengaging. Despite fairly extensive rules and a clever premise, Dungeon Twister felt a bit like a simplistic grid based wargame that involves direct confrontation and to be honest, it's not what I look for in a board game.

Obviously, you mileage may vary, maybe a fantasy themed 1-on-1 combative game is right up your street but Dungeon Twister is not for me.

18th August 2022

Broadsword! It's a Thursday and we're in Aldershot for some gaming fun!

According to Wikipedia, HeroQuest was originally published in 1989, which makes me feel very old.
The version that we are playing though, is the 21st iteration.

So grab your staff and pull on your loincloth as we set into vaguely generic fantasy world of HeroQuest in search of treasure.
Alternatively, take on the role of Zargon and oppose the heroes.

What's in a game?

• ​Game board: The game board depicts was is essentially a underground dungeon. It displays rooms of varying size differentiated by colour which are boarded by a perimeter corridor, 4 more corridors go north, south, east, west and sort of divide the rooms into 4 areas along with a large central room.
• Miniatures: HeroQuest is a miniatures heavy game and comes with several types of all plastic miniature.
  • Heroes: There is a miniature for each of the game's heroes; barbarian, elf, dwarf & wizard.
  • Monsters: Enemies abound in HeroQuest and include goblins, orcs, skeletons, zombies and more.
  • Furniture: As well as closed and open doors, there's dungeon dressing for tables, altars, bookcases and so forth.
• Tiles: card tiles are used to represent hidden doors, traps and dead ends among other things.
• Cards: There's also a variety of cards in the game.
  • Hero cards: Each hero has their own card that details their stats, which are
    Attack
    Defence
    Body
    Mind
    Also listed are their movement dice and starting equipment.
  • Monster cards: Each type of monster also has its own card. Monster basically have the same set of stats as the heroes.
  • Spell cards: There are 5 sets of spell cards, 1 set of 15 (Dread Spells) is for the Zargon player. The remaining 4 sets of 3 cards each (Based on fire, earth, water & air.) are for the wizard and elf players.
  • Treasure cards: This is a deck of cards that contain both treasure and booby traps such as wandering monster and the like.
  • Equipment cards: This deck contains various pieces of equipment that can be purchased with the cash the heroes acquire and will improve their abilities and stats.
  • Artefact cards: These cards represent items that are particularly powerful, they cannot be bought but only found in specific dungeons throughout the campaign.
• Game master's screen: This is a 3-panel card panel of the kind that could be found for RPGs and is used by the Zargon player to hide their stuff.
• Quest book: HeroQuest has a 14-part campaign that is detailed in the quest book. There's also space for industrious players to create their own quests.
• Dice: 2 types of dice are used in HeroQuest.
  • Red dice: There are 2 red dice, these are typical six-siders.
  • Combat dice: These are not the usual six-siders. Instead 3 faces show a Skull, 2 faces show a White Shield and the remaining face shows a Black Shield.
• Character pad: A pad of character sheets to be used by players to track the stats and wounds of their characters.

HeroQuest's components are all generally good.
The board, tiles and cards are of an acceptable quality.
The dice are also fine and in a move that pays homage to the original HeroQuest, there still aren't enough of them to split conveniently between the hero players and Zargon player! The game really could do with a few more combat dice!

Probably the biggest components are the miniatures. All the heroes and monsters miniatures come in single colour plastic according to type, heroes are red, goblinoids are green, undead are beige and so on.
I'm pretty certain the sculpts are all new as well, the games has undergone cosmetic changes due to licensing issues regarding the original.
Speaking of sculpts, I found their quality to be... OK. If I were assessing the miniatures exclusive of the game, they wouldn't be good but since they are meant to be part of a game; and in that context they're pretty cool. Especially since I feel that they're designed to hark back to the original style and design, which I think they do a good job of doing.

The scenery and dressing is also a bit of a mixed bag. The scenery in this version is all made of plastic and is much more durable than the original scenery which in part was made of cardboard.
However, that cardboard scenery with its printed artwork was a lot more colourful. The modern scenery in comparison is a just drab, monochrome, grey plastic.

HeroQuest's art is good wherever it appears, mostly on cards and has a brash, chunky cartoony aesthetic that suitably fits the style of the game.

There are a few icons in the game that are easily learned, the Zargon player has to learn a bit more due to having to comprehend the scenarios in the quest book but again, it's not an obstacle.

How's it play?
​Setup
Before any play can begin, one player must decide to take the role of Zargon who is essentially the 'Games Master' in RPG parlance and controls all the enemy forces that oppose the players. Whoever plays Zargon will probably be doing so for all 14 quests presented in the quest book.
Up to 4 other players will assume the role of heroes adventuring through the campaign. Generally, once players have chosen a hero, they will stick with that hero until the end of the campaign. Having said that, there's nothing to stop players swapping or switching around heroes if they so desire.

• Zargon player: The Zargon player should familiarise themselves with whichever quest is being played from the quest book. It will tell them how many doors they need, how much scenery, what and how many monsters, which dread spells to use and so on.
  The Zargon player should gather all the required items and place them adjacent to the central playing area.
  Monster cards: Place these face-up adjacent to the central playing area so they are visible to all players.
  Treasure cards: These should be shuffled into a face-down deck adjacent to the central playing area.
  ​Screen: The Zargon player should keep the quest book hidden behind their screen.
• Hero players: Players should decide which of the available heroes they are using between them.
  Copy stats: Each player should take a sheet from the character pad and copy the stats and information from the hero card for their chosen hero on to the sheet.
  Spells: Whoever is playing the wizard should take 3 sets of spell cards, that is a total of 9 spell cards. The elf player should take the final set of 3.
  The wizard and elf players are free to decide who gets what sets.
• Game board: Place the game board in the central playing area. The Zargon player should place the stairs tile in its appropriate spot as dictated by the quest book. All players should put the miniature representing their hero on the stairs tile.
  Then the Zargon player should read out the quest's flavour text to the other players.

On to play
In HeroQuest, all the hero players will each take their individual turns and then the Zargon player will finally take their turn.
Generally this is done with the player to the left of the Zargon player going first with turns progressing to the left until eventually the Zargon player goes last.

The general flow of play will involve the heroes exploring the dungeon game board (Which is unpopulated at the game start.) and in response, Zargon revealing what the heroes encounter, be it doors, dead ends, traps or monsters and so on.
Once the heroes have had their turns, Zargon can act. This means they can move any visible monsters to attack the heroes. Thus if no monsters are visible on the board, Zargon basically does nothing.

• Heroes: The hero players can move and perform one of the following actions.
  • Move: A hero can move before or after performing an action. They cannot split their movement.
    Roll dice: The active player rolls the 2 normal red dice and the result is how far they can choose to move in their turn. There are some limits though.
    Orthogonal movement: Heroes cannot move diagonally.
    Other heroes: A hero may move through a space containing another hero but cannot  end their movement there.
    Monsters: Heroes cannot move through spaces occupied by monsters.
    Trap: When a hero steps on to a space with a trap, their movement immediately end and the trap is triggered.
  • Actions: One of the following actions may be performed by a hero.
    • Attack: A hero may attack a monster, this can be melee or ranged.
      Melee: To engage a monster in melee, a hero must generally be orthogonally adjacent to it (No diagonals allowed!), there are some weapons such as staffs that allow heroes to attack to attack diagonally adjacent enemies.
      Ranged: A hero with a ranged weapon can pretty much attack any enemy they can see and is in line of sight. More on line of sight below.
      Roll the dice: The attacking player rolls a number of white combat dice equal to their attack score and each skull result deals 1 wound to a monster.
      Monster defends: When a monster takes 1 or more wounds, the Zargon player rolls combat dice equal to targeted monsters defence. Each black shield result blocks a wound! Any wounds which are not blocked by the defence roll are inflicted on the targeted monster and they lose an equivalent amount of body points.
      Weaker monsters tend to have only 1 body point and will be eliminated by any damage.
    • Cast spell: The wizard and elf may cast 1 spell. Depending on the spell, this can target themselves, an ally or a hostile monster. If cast on a ally or monster, line of sight rules apply.
      Each spell card will describe its effect and once it is resolved, it is discarded from player and cannot be used again in the current quest.
    • Search for treasure: When a hero is inside a room (Corridors cannot be searched for treasure.) and there are no monsters present in that room. The active player may search for treasure, this will have one of several results:
      Draw treasure card: The active player draws a card from the treasure deck. This may result in them receiving gold or potions. It may also result in encountering a wandering monster, which must be fought or triggering a trap.
      Quest treasure: As per the quest book, some rooms will contain a specific item or treasure, usually as part of the scenario.
      Artefact: Also as per the quest book, searching certain rooms will grant a specified artefact card to the active. Artefacts are generally better than mundane items.
    • Search for secret door: Provided there are no monsters in sight, the active player may search for hidden doors. This can be done when the hero is in a room or corridor and searches the entire room and in the case of a corridor all the corridor which is in line of sight.
      If there is a secret door in a room or corridor, the Zargon player must reveal it to the hero players and place a secret door tile on the relevant space on the board:
    • Search for traps: This is fundamentally identical to searching for secret doors except it reveals traps.
    • Disarm trap: If a hero has a tool kit they may attempt to disarm a trap that has been revealed by moving on to the trap space on the board.
      The dwarf hero as his special ability may disarm traps without a tool kit.
      Roll the die: A combat die is rolled, the result will determine if the trap is neutralised or trigged - in this case whoever was attempting to disarm the trap suffers whatever effect it deals out.
• Zargon player: For a large part of the game, the Zargon player will be reacting to player actions in their turns. Revealing doors, traps, monsters and dead ends as they are encountered by the players.
  • Monsters: Monsters are only active during the Zargon player's turn and even then only revealed monsters become active.
    Movement: No dice are rolled to move monsters, instead they have a set number of squares they can move before or after acting. The fastest monsters move 10 spaces which will nearly always outpace heroes!
    Attack: Functionally, combat for monsters is identical to how it works for heroes except as far as I know, monsters do not get ranged attacks. When monsters are adjacent to heroes they can attack them. The Zargon player rolls a number of combat dice equal to the monsters attack value and each skull potentially inflicts a point of damage to a hero.
    Hero defends: Heroes can defend damage by rolling dice equal to their defence value and each white shield result blocks 1 point of damage. Any unblocked damage is dealt to the hero's body points.
    Dread spells: As per the quest book, some monsters may be equipped with dread spells which can be used against the heroes. As with all spells, the caster of a dread spell must have line of sight on their target. Once a dread spell is resolved, the card is discarded out of play.
• Other rules: There are some other rules which also apply in HeroQuest.
  • Line of sight: Both heroes and monsters can see as far as a straight line could be drawn. Thus they can see all the way down a straight corridor but not round a corner.
    For the purpose of targeting ranged attacks, allies do not block each other's line of sight but opponents do block line of sight. Thus a hero cannot target the 2nd monster in a line of monsters and vice versa.
  • Looking: This is a free action and can be used at any time in their turn even in between moving spaces and as often as desired.
    When a hero player decides to look, the Zargon player must reveal any features, traps or monsters which are in line of sight.
  • Doors: Doors always closed when encountered and can be opened as a free action.
    Once opened, doors cannot be closed again
  • Treasure: When the heroes acquire any kind of treasure (Other than that found on a card.) it should be recorded on one player's character sheet.
    Gol coins can be collectively spent at the end of a quest,
  • Traps: Various types of traps are featured in HeroQuest, there are spike traps, pit traps and so on. Generally inflict 1 wound as well as a some other effect (Such as falling down a pit.). Triggering a trap generally ends a hero's movement.
  • Death: Monsters die when they reach 0 body points and the same is true of heroes. If a hero reaches 0 body points, they are killed and their controlling player is eliminated from the current quest.
    Fortunately, new heroes can be recruited in between quests.
  • Potions: Players can discard potion cards out of play to gain their benefits.
    Using a potion is a free action and can be done at any time. They can even be used in Zargon's turn and in fact can be used by a hero player after they reach 0 body points. Needless to say, potions can be lifesavers.

Endgame
Play continues until the hero players complete quest objective, in which case, they collectively win! Otherwise, if all the heroes are instead killed, then the Zargon player wins.
Additionally, if the hero players retreat (By returning to the stairs tile.) for whatever reason then they also lose.

That's not the end!
Once a quest has ended, players can spend their hard won loot and cash to buy equipment. Weapons can increase a hero's attack score and armour can increases defence scores, while daggers and crossbows offer ranged attacks and so on.
When buying equipment, the player who will use it takes possession of the card. Furthermore, once all copies of a certain item are bought from the equipment deck , then that item can no longer be bought. Conversely, consumable items such as potions and daggers are returned to the equipment deck when used.

End Endgame!
If the hero players manage to succeed at all 14 quests, they have won the campaign.

Overall
There's quite a lot to write about here and my thoughts will probably wander, so please indulge me - and let's get started!

HeroQuest was a pretty ground-breaking game in 1989. Published by a mainstream games producer, it offered people who had never played an RPG an accessible slice of the RPG experience and introduced some game concepts to people who had never encountered them before.
It's also a window into how games played 35 years ago and what player expectations were like back then.

For example, a modern game with similar themes to HeroQuest probably wouldn't employ a roll-and-move mechanic.
Another example are rewards and the game's equivalent of levelling up: As explained below, HeroQuest rarely rewards to players - which come in the form of equipment upgrades. These upgrades occur quite infrequently but are quite significant statistically, i.e., going from 2 combat dice to 3 is a big jump.
A modern game would try and find a way to do the opposite and drip-feed players constant but low-impact rewards in what would be called a gameplay loop or moment-to-moment engagement.

HeroQuest occasionally also trolls player, forcing them to deal with multiple traps and putting no reward on the other side.

Mechanically, HeroQuest is actually a fairly straightforward game.
While heroes have 6 actions they can perform, 3 of those are almost identical actions and 1 is very situational. Players will find themselves moving and searching, opening doors and defeating monsters behind them, searching, then moving on.
Rinse and repeat.
While there are definitely some tactics that players can adopt and repeatedly employ, the random placement of challenges - particularly monsters who form the majority of heroes' encounters - means that players will need to adapt to situations and respond effectively.
There's also some randomness to player actions - the roll-and-move mechanic means that heroes may not reach their opponent when they need to and also may not be able to escape enemies when they need to.

The combat system is also straightforward and runs smoothly enough, it does feel quite swingy and unpredictable though but that might just be me grumbling about dice rolls!
We found that the tougher monsters are very hard to wound. Once their defence is high enough, they're generally guaranteed being able to absorb 1 wound from an attack. This means the heroes will need to rely on luck to get 2 wounds in an attack or use at least 4 dice to attack and have a passable chance of getting 2 wounds.
How do the heroes get higher attack scores?

This brings me to equipment. Generally, we ended up equipping the 2 front line fighters (Primarily the barbarian but to a lesser extent also the dwarf.) with weapons above anyone else as well as providing the elf with a crossbow. Getting an attack stat up to 4  and gaining ranged attacks were real game changers.

Getting the right equipment or getting equipment and using it the right way can enhance or change tactics, improve the odds of surviving, winning fights and so on.
What's also interesting is that at the end of a quest, the hero players have the opportunity to buy equipment. However, because the cost is so high, in practice it means they will only get to buy something once after every 2 or 3 quests. It means that the heroes will get maybe 6 or 7 pieces of equipment throughout the entire campaign and will need to choose wisely. 

Some equipment such as consumables seem very expensive for what they provide. During our playthroughs, we never seriously considered buying things like throwing daggers or holy water.

Thematically, HeroQuest is a bit of a strange beast.

It has obvious elements derived from tabletop RPGs such as having a games master, combat screen, dungeons to explore, character classes and stats, scenarios, campaigns and narratives, rolling dice for combat etc but there are also some key differences.

There's no experience points or levelling, instead character improvements happen via buying better equipment.
Also, a key difference for me is the role the Zargon player has, they are part games master but also part antagonist and opponent to the heroes which is different to the majority of RPGs. Why is this significant? Let me explain.

The HeroQuest campaign has 14 quests, it took us a total of 15 attempts to complete all of them, in other words we only failed 1 of the quests, the other 13 were completed successfully at the first try.

I think that in part this is due to the fact that we're all experienced gamers and it feels the game is targeted at the early teenage market so we mostly breezed through it.
(A little more about this below.)
I also think this because the game utilises a 'one vs many' system and I've always felt that it's very hard to balance this type of game fairly, 3 or 4 human brains will always have the advantage over 1 human brain.

This is compounded by the fact that HeroQuest has a campaign.
It means that if the heroes fail a quest, they will invariably have to repeat it again, why is this significant? The purpose of a campaign is to advance through the multitude of quests until the final one can be completed and it can be tedious repeating failed quests, especially if more than once.
When the surprise of knowing what is behind a door is gone, the game can become an exercise in rolling dice over strategy.

Returning to difficulty: I read that it was originally envisioned that the hero players would behave competitively and cooperation between them would make the game too easy.
This of course contradicts the RPG nature of the game and it contradicts the rule book too, which states the players should cooperate and they will collectively win or lose.
Finally, it also contradicts player sensibilities; without cooperation, the wizard in particular for example, has a fairly low chance of surviving a dungeon.

All of this leads me to suspect that either deliberately or accidentally, the game is skewed in favour of the players.
It sort of makes sense because it gives the campaign momentum and keeps events moving forward.
The problem though, is that it can become a frustrating experience for the Zargon player, who in essence has to lose over and over.
It may have been better to do away with having a antagonistic games master role and have a more traditional games master. I get the feeling though that it was done that way to make HeroQuest seem a little more like a 'traditional' board game.
It would have been even better if the game master role could have been automated entirely. I imagine though, that it would've increased the game's difficulty significantly.

Ultimately, I found HeroQuest just about engaging enough to keep my attention, you could never afford to become complacent. Not paying attention was a sure-fire way to get your hero into trouble.
​The campaign does have a narrative, however it's fairly generic and also fairly forgettable.
For me, the pleasure I think, came from the opportunity to play a game cooperatively along with friends.

If you want a light and accessible RPG adjacent experience that's easy to manage without much prep time, you could do a lot worse than HeroQuest.

If you're a parent or adult looking for a way to introduce youngsters to some more elaborate game mechanics and concepts or introduce them to a beginner RPG, then HeroQuest is definitely worth a look in.