24th October 2021

We've logged into Board Game Arena for some Sunday night gaming.

The first game of the night was The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.

Clearly the lost continent of Mu has fascinated gamers since times immemorial, so what better than a game about discovering the sunken land: Or at least the plot for a very good trick taking game.​

What's in a game?

• Cards: There are a total of 40 cards used in the game:
  Suits: There are 5 suits. In each of 4 of the suits there are cards numbered 1-9.
  Submarine cards: This is the 5th suit, they are numbered 1-4 and are also trump cards, obviously they depict pictures of submarines.
• Task cards: This deck of 96 half-sized cards contains objectives for players to complete. On the back of each card is its 'value', the card's value may differ for 3, 4 & 5 player games.
• Communication tokens: These are double-sided tokens used for... well communicating, they displayed used and unused on either side
• Distress signal: Another double-sided token, again showing used and unused on either side.
• Captain's token: This is a standee and represents first player.
• Logbook: The game comes with a 'logbook', this serves 2 functions, firstly it provides the game's campaign information and secondly, provides space to record the results of those missions, if you like writing in the book that is.

That's more or less it for components.
Quality-wise, they're all pretty average quality and what you'd expect.
Artwork is repeated across the game's 4 main suits which are colour themed and tend to feature monochrome illustrations decorated in the suit's colour. The trump cards all feature submarines of progressively larger size.
The task deck utilises a fair amount of iconography for objectives, mostly it's fairly clear, sometimes some smaller writing appears on a card to clarify, occasionally the rulebook had to be referred to, nothing game breaking.

How's it play?
Setup

• Cards: Shuffle the deck and deal it all out to all the players face-down, in a 3-player game, 1 player will end up with an extra card which will unused by the end of the game.
  Players must keep their hand secret.
• Captain: Whoever was dealt the 4 of submarines becomes the captain and thus first player.
• Communication tokens: Give one token to each player who should put it on the unused side.
• Distress signal: Put the distress signal on its unused side into the central playing area.
• Campaign play: The Crew: Mission Deep Sea plays over a series of over 30 progressively harder and harder missions which is displayed numerically. Each mission has it's own intro story and may have unique rules such as 1 player taking all task cards etc.
• Task deck: Shuffle the task deck and deal task cards face-down.
  The number of task cards dealt depends on the difficulty of the mission, easy missions have low numbers, getting progressively higher as the missions get harder.
  Thus if a mission has a difficulty of 5, keep dealing task cards until their exact value equals 5, any task card with a value that would take the total value over 5 is discarded. This means the number of task cards that appear in a mission will not very in their objectives but also amount of objectives.
  Now task cards must be assigned to players. There are various ways of doing this and it will vary from mission to mission, sometimes players will have option to pass, sometimes the captain assigns them.
  In order to win the mission, the objectives on these task cards must be completed before players run out of cards, some objectives can be failed, which immediately ends the mission in failure.

Once the task cards have been assigned, then the game's ready to play.

​On to play
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea is a trick-taking game where one player starts a round by playing a card and the others must follow suit. 

• Distress signal: Once all cards and task cards have been allotted out and before play begins, any player can choose to trigger the distress signal. 
  When this is done, every player must pass a card to another player, whether it's clockwise or anti-clockwise is decided by the activating player.
  Once the game has started, the distress signal cannot be used.
• Communication token: Before any round begins, any player may use their communication token.
  When a player chooses to do this, they take a card from their hand and place it face-up in front of themselves and place their token on part of the card. This can be done to communicate 1 of 3 pieces of information about that card.
  Top: If the token is placed at the top of card, it means 'this is the highest value card I have in this suit'.
  Bottom: If the token is placed at the bottom of the card, it indicates that 'this is the lowest value card I have in this suit'.
  Middle: If the token is placed in the middle of the card, it communicates 'this is the ONLY card I have in this suit'.
• Opening play: The first round begins with the captain, after that, each subsequent round begins with whoever 'won' the previous round.
  The starting player plays any card of a suit of their choice face-up into the playing area.
• Following: Now, going clockwise, each player must follow.
  This means that if they can, players that follow must play a card of the same suit. They can choose which card to play if they have more than one, but they must follow suit if they can.
  If a player has no cards of the same suit, they then have other options. They may play any other card of a different suit, this includes a submarine - which is a trump, more on trumps below.
• Taking the trick: Once each player has played their card, the winner of the trick must be determined.
  Whoever played the card with the highest value wins the trick and collects all cards played in that round. A player who had to play a card in a different suit can never win the trick.
  Trump: If a submarine was played, then it trumps a card of any value, only a higher value submarine card may trump a trump. Thus the 4 submarine cannot be beaten.
• Win/lose: Once the winner of the trick has been determined, players should check to see if any of their task cards have been completed or failed.
  If all tasks have been completed, the mission is a success. Some tasks can be completed immediately, some are only completed when the round ends.
  Any failure at all ends the mission.

Endgame
Players collectively win or lose at The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.
Ultimately they win when all the missions have been completed.

Overall
A friend described The Crew: Mission Deep Sea as whist with a twist and that's sort of accurate but barely describes how much of a good game this is.

The task cards are what makes so good, there are 96 of them, providing a vast combination of objectives that can appear. Even if you complete the 30-odd missions in the logbook (Which could take a while!), there's nothing to stop players from just choosing a difficulty and playing!

Players must always pay attention during missions, simple mistakes can very quickly end them and each one will provide a distinct randomly generated challenge to face - and pitfalls to avoid! Players will have to silently co-ordinate their efforts, task cards will force them to learn to exploit all the game's rules to be successful, they'll have to learn that winning a trick is not always the way they should go and at times not having the right suit is the right choice!
I could spend ages going on about how we've played the game but instead i'll say: 

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea packs a lot of gameplay into a little package of what is essentially a couple of decks of cards and a handful of tokens. It's a game everyone should definitely try.

18th May 2021

Lockdown restrictions are easing and we're meeting at Simon's on a Tuesday IN PERSON for the first time THIS YEAR!

​Today's game was Arkham Horror: The Card Game, you too can have fun watching your character's inevitable spiral into madness as they get caught up in unsettling investigations and tangle with unspeakable Lovecraftian ​horrors through the medium of flipping over cards!

What's in a game?
​The first thing to say about Arkham Horror: The Card Game is that it's actually a Living Card Game, what does this mean? It means it's a game that has lots of expansions, extra character decks, add-ons and so on. This is Simon's game and I have no idea what packs were used, but it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this blog post.

​Unsurprisingly, most of the game's components consist of various types of cards.

• Investigator card& mini investigator card: These cards represent the character that a player uses throughout the game. Each investigator has a special ability along with a rating in each of 4 attributes (Willpower, intellect, combat & agility), finally the character will have health and sanity scores.
  The mini card is used in the actual game and placed on locations cards, the main card is kept in front of the player during play.
• Player deck: Each player in the game has their own 30 card player deck that represents a different investigator/character and consists of numerous different types of player cards, including cards unique to each character. All of a player's actions are done through their deck, this means that different characters will not only have different strengths and weaknesses, but they will also employ widely differing strategies when approaching a problem or obstacle.
  Skill cards: These cards will give the investigator a benefit to a specific skill roll and are only played when the player chooses to attempt the pertinent skill roll. Skill cards are discarded after one use.
  ​Event Card: Can be played to give the investigator some sort of situational benefit or bonus, as with skill cards, event cards are discarded after one use.
  Asset cards: Assets can be items, clothes, weapons or even people. When assets cards are played they stay in play and provide an ongoing benefit until destroyed/discarded. There are limits to the number of asset cards a investigator can have in play at any one time.
  Weakness cards: Every investigator has flaws and foibles, these are represented by weakness cards. Every player deck must include them, when they appear, they will hinder the investigator in some way or other.
• Location cards: These double-sided cards represent places that the investigators can go to investigate. Initially, they will be face-down and when an investigator arrives there, they'll be flipped over and the investigator must deal with with whatever is revealed.
• Encounter cards: Inevitably, the players will trigger encounters during play and this being a Cthulhu Mythos game; don't expect them to be pleasant!
• Act cards: This series of cards will represent narrative that drives the characters investigation.
  Agenda cards: As play progresses, so will events in the investigation, represented by the agenda cards.
• Damage tokens: There are 2 types of damage token, for health and sanity.
• Clue/Doom tokens: These double-sided tokens are used to represent clues that the investigators find or the onset of well.... doom!
• Resources: Along with clues, resource tokens are the game's main currency, often spent to activate or track abilities or assets.
• Chaos tokens: Used as the game's randomiser, they range in value from +1 to -8! Some tokens have special symbols that can trigger events in the investigation or investigator abilities.
• Chaos bag: What the tokens go into.

LEGO not included! Some of the photos will include Lego. Let me make it clear; this game does not include any Lego! Simon put together Lego minifigs that looked like the premade character deck portraits. Why? What else is a boardgamer going to do during lockdown.
All of the tokens and cards are made to the typical quality that are expected from games nowadays.
From the cards that I did get to see, they contain a lot of high quality artwork. Iconography is generally easy to read.

How's it play?
In Arkham Horror: The Card Game player's take the role of characters investigating into the Cthulhu Mythos through the form of scenarios and campaigns in a RPG-esque experience that shares the same setting as the seminal Call of Cthulhu RPG.
Setup

• Player decks: Players construct 30 card decks using the available cards. There some restrictions on what cards are used at any time specific time and some cards have levels and must be 'bought' with experience points.
  Alternatively there are several premade character decks that can be bought, which is what we used.
  Player decks are then shuffled and each player draws a hand of 5 cards.
• Resource tokens: each player takes 5 resource tokens.
• Populate chaos bag: Put the pertinent chaos tokens into the chaos bag, not all tokens are used in every scenario, this means that results drawn from the bag will alter according to the scenario's requirements.
  Interestingly; during campaign play, the same spread of tokens is used in the bag throughout the campaign, however, in-game events can cause tokens to be permanently added or removed from the bag, having a ongoing effect during the campaign.
  It's a clever mechanic in my opinion.
• Create scenario location: By placing the location cards face-down the game area is created, they are put in a certain order, such as a 3x3 or 2x3 grid or whatever and is dictated by the scenario. A scenario might take place in a nightclub with cards representing different rooms, a university campus with cards for different facilities or even a town with cards for different buildings.
• Construct act deck: Specific act cards are placed face-up stack in a particular order as dictated by the scenario. 
• Construct agenda deck: Agenda cards placed face up in a stack as dictated by the scenario. 
• Construct encounter deck: Again dictated by the scenario, the encounter deck is however, shuffled and placed face-down.

Overall
Arkham Horror: The Card Game has some interesting gameplay dynamics, the exploration and investigation elements blend quite well the unpredictable changes brought about by the changing of the agenda and act decks. Players can't take anything for granted as twists and unexpected events occur. Challenges and enemies provided by the encounter deck are varied and interesting.
Finally, I like how the chaos bag works, I like how it's stacked against the characters and playing skill and event cards is how tests are overcome, it's suitably pessimistic. I also like how the bag's effect on gameplay can be tailored and can evolve over a campaign. It's a nice mechanic.

This brings me to the campaign play, campaign scenarios seem to feature at least 3-4 outcomes that influence the next scenario with interesting changes, which is pretty good.
Characters also earn experience points from scenarios, these points can be used to buy better cards to swap into the player deck, progressively making characters better.
Being a living card game, there are a lot of accessories, expansions and extra campaigns available to purchase, these can extend the game

Rules-wise, there are a lot of rules in Arkham Horror: The Card Game about specific situations and events. Despite this, as a game it's actually in some ways fairly straightforward, player's have three actions to perform per round, that never quite feels like enough, which makes you have to prioritise and try to come up with optimal strategies, which is a good thing.
However, like other games I've played that try to provide GM-less RPG-like gameplay, the game gets fiddly and complex when managing 'GM' elements and this seems to be where the bulk of the rules are applied, especially to enemy behaviour.
It seems like a lot of effort for what somehow ultimately feels a little bit like average gameplay. The rules and glossary run to over 30 pages, in contrast, there're Cthulhu Mythos inspired pen and paper RPGS that have lower page counts.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy playing Arkham Horror: The Card Game because I did, I'm just glad that I played with someone familiar with the game.