10th August 2023

Gaming night round Simon's continued with Flashpoint.

So move aside make way for fireman Sam
Cause he's gonna save the day fireman Sam
Cause he's brave to the core
Sam is the hero next door

Victims to rescue, fires to extinguish, buildings to save. All in a day's work for the brave first responders in Flash Point: Fire Rescue, a cooperative board game.

What's in a game?
Board: Flash Point: Fire Rescue has a double-sided board and each side displays what is ostensibly an apartment.
The majority of the board is given over to displaying this apartment which has a 8x6 overlaid on top of it. There are also icons which indicate where doors may be found - some doors also display '2 cubes'.
Along the outside of the board are spaces to place rescued people (or not rescued people!), fire engine and ambulance tokens etc.
Finally a series of fairly discrete dotted red lines separate the board's map into individual quadrants.

Markers: The game comes with a lot of differing card markers, all of which are round and many of which are double sided.

• Threat markers: These markers are double-sided, respectively showing either smoke or fire.

• Point of Interest markers: There are 18 of these Point of Interest (POI) markers, they are also double sided. One side depicts a '?' while on 12 the other side will show a victim, which could be a person or possibly a pet! The other side on the remaining 6 are blank indicating they are false alarms.
• Door markers: More double-sided markers used to track whether doors are open or closed.
• Action markers: These show a running individual in white against a green background. They are essentially a form of action point currency.
• Heal markers: These round tokens each display a red cross and are used in conjunction with one of the specialist firefighters; more on them below.
• Hazmat markers: These tokens depicts things like fuel cans and aerosol cans and are used to represent explosively dangerous materials in the game.

Hot spot tokens: These round tokens are noticeably smaller than the other tokens and they depict a flame against a black background.

3d firefighters: There's a plastic 3d miniature of firefighter in each player colour.

With card tokens and tiles, plastic models and acrylic cubes, Flash Point: Fire Rescue is a bit of an eclectic mix of components and none of them would considered low quality.
The dice are plastic but roll well enough.
The standout components are probably the firefighter models. They look a little cartoony and stylised but I'm sure that's by design. They don't look like the kind of mini that is meant to be painted and meant to serve as playing pieces.

The artwork and illustrations on the game boards is straightforward and uncluttered which is a good thing as the playing area will become quite busy during play. The same can be said of art that can be found on tokens and tiles.
What looks like fully painted art is used on the specialist cards giving each one an individual high quality appearance.

The game's iconography is all self-explanatory and easily understood. None of it should prove a problem for players.

How's it play?
Note: Flash Point: Fire Rescue comes with 2 modes of play, a simpler 'family game' and a more rules heavy 'experienced game' mode. furthermore, the experienced game has 3 levels of difficulty.
This blog discusses the experienced game which essentially also incorporates the family version.
Setup
Board: Choose which side of the board to use, the 'front' side of the board is considered the easier side.

• ​Doors: A door icon (with the closed door side up) should be placed on all door icons that also display 2 cubes.
• Explosions!: A number of explosions should be triggered on the map, the amount is determined by the chosen difficulty.
  ​This is done by rolling the dice and placing a threat marker (fire side up) on the resulting space, then adding a hot spot marker to the same space.
  Each fire token then 'explodes', more on explosions below but basically, a explosion causes the fire to spread.
• Hazmat tokens: Also determined by difficulty, a number of hazmat tokens are placed into the burning building, again determined by rolling dice.
• POIs: Remove POI markers as required, then shuffle the remaining ones into a face-down stack. Roll the dice 3 times to determine where 3 POI tokens are placed face-down, they cannot be placed on a space containing fire.

Players: Players now choose a specialist card and take the fire fighter in their chosen player colour.
More hot spots!: Dictated by difficulty and player count, even more hot spot tokens are added the map on the board.
Furthermore a number of hot spot tokens are kept to the side to be potentially added to the board during the game.
Firefighters: Players now choose which spaces outside the building to place their firefighters, more than 1 firefighter may occupy the same space.
Vehicles: Players now choose where the fire engine and ambulance start the game.
First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Flash Point: Fire Rescue uses a fairly typical turn order for a cooperative game. The active player takes their turn (Spending their action points.) and when their turn is over, the board activates and performs its automated actions. After that, the game progresses to the player to the left of the active player.
3 phases are resolved during the active player's turn.
Actions: During this phase, the active player now performs actions by spending the APs for their selected specialist. Available actions include:

• Change crew: Unusually for a cooperative game, if the active player's specialist is at the the fire engine, they may swap their specialist out for one that is currently not being used by spending 2AP.
• Chop: A firefighter always carries their trusty axe and can use it to break through doors and walls which can be useful to create shortcuts but can also possibly represent a risk. It costs 1AP to inflict a point of damage (represented by a black cube) on a door or wall. Usually when a door/wall takes 2 points of damage, it is destroyed.
• Extinguish: Firefighters can fight the fire! The active character may spend 1AP to remove an adjacent smoke marker from the board or spend 1AP to flip a fire marker to the smoke side.
• Move: A firefighter may spend 1AP to move 1 space orthogonally, they can also move through spaces containing fire markers but this costs 2AP per space. Additionally, firefighters cannot end their movement in space containing fire.
  POIs: If a firefighter moves on to a space containing a POI token, it is flipped to reveal whether it is a victim or just a false alarm.
  Move with victim: A firefighter may bring a victim with them when they move but it costs 2AP to move 1 space, furthermore, a victim cannot move through fire.
  Hazmats: Hazmats can cause explosions if caught in fire, so firefighters can try and move them out of the building before that happens. Moving a hazmat token is identical to moving a victim.
• Open/close door: APs can be spent to open and close doors, sometimes this is more beneficial than simply destroying them.
• Vehicles: If the active character is on the same space as a vehicle tile, they can spend APs to move the vehicle. any other firefighter on the vehicle can also move for free.
  Each type of vehicle also has it's own action which the active character may perform.
  Ambulance:  In the experienced version of the game, a victim is only considered 'rescued' when they are brought to a ambulance.
  Fire engine: The active player may spend APs to use a fire engine's hose, although this costs 4APs! It allows the firefighter to extinguish multiple fire and smoke tokens in a adjacent quadrant.
• Pass: The active player may choose to pass instead of spending all their action points. For every unspent AP, the player take an action marker. These may be spent on later turns to gain action points.
  A character may have no more than 4 action markers at any one time.
• End of player phase: Once a character has spent all their APs or passed to retain some of them, their turn is over and the game goes to the next phase.

Advance fire: In this phase, the fire will spread which is done on a basic level by adding a marker to the board and this can have several consequences.

• ​Roll the dice: The active player rolls the dice and will place a new smoke marker on the space as indicated by the result of the dice roll. However, depending on where the smoke marker is meant to be placed, it's probably not over yet...
  • Empty space: If a space has no smoke or fire marker and is not adjacent to one, simply place the smoke marker on the allotted space.
  • Adjacent to fire marker: If the smoke marker is placed orthogonally adjacent to a fire marker, immediately flip it to the fire side. Smoke is never adjacent to fire, it always becomes fire! This is called a flashover.
  • On a smoke marker: If the smoke marker is to be placed on a smoke marker already in play. Do not add the marker, instead flip the smoke marker already on the board to the fire side.
    Potentially, this can then turn any other adjacent smoke markers to their fire side!
  • On a fire marker: If the smoke token were to go on a fire marker already in play, it causes an explosion instead! The smoke marker is discarded and the explosion is resolved.
• Explosion: When an explosion is triggered, fire will expand 1 space in all 4 orthogonal directions from the point of origin, what happens will depend on what is in the space it expands into.
  • Open space: If the explosion expands into a empty space, it stops there. Place a fire marker on that space.
  • Smoke marker: If the explosion hit a fire marker, flip it to the fire side.
  • Fire marker: If the explosion hits a fire marker, it triggers a 'shockwave', this means the explosion continues to the next space and will continue until it encounters empty space or smoke marker.
    Closed doors and walls will also stop a explosion expanding, at least they will until they are destroyed.
• Damage: When fire expands into a space either via flashpoint or explosions, there can be an effect.
  • Barriers: When fire hits a door or wall, it does damage in the form of putting black cubes on it (Much like when a firefighter uses the chop action.), when a door or wall segment takes 2 damage, it is destroyed.
    Destroyed walls and doors (And also open doors.) do not stop an explosion expanding.
  • POI: If the damage hits a POI marker, that marker is destroyed, if it was a victim, that victim is killed.
  • Hazmat: If fire enters the same space as a hazmat token, another explosion originating from the spot is triggered. Exploding hazmat markers also add hotzones to the board.
  • Firefighter: If fire expands into a space with a firefighter, that firefighter is knocked down and moved to the closest ambulance tile.
• Hotzones: When the 'advance fire' roll targets a space with a hotzone marker, another advance fire roll is made after the current one is resolved. It is possible for multiple hotzones and thus multiple advance fire rolls to be triggered.
  Flare up: Additionally, when a hotzone is the target of an advance fire roll, it also adds another hotzone to the board, thus potentially creating a loop of destruction!

Replenish POIs: Once the advance fire roll and all resulting effects have been resolved, the game proceeds to the final phase of a turn - replenish POIs.
There should always be 3 POI markers on the board, if for any reason, there are less than 3, roll the dice and place a POI marker face-down in the resulting space. There are some restrictions, a POI marker cannot go on a spot with for example, in this instance roll the dice again until a appropriate space is rolled.
Repeat this until 3 POI markers are on the board.
Next turn: Once all the required POI markers have been replenished, the turn is over and play progress to the player to the left of the active player.

That's pretty much it for most of the rules, I've skipped some details that go into how some elements of the fire expanding are managed and also the special actions attributed to individual specialists but this about is the gist of it.

Endgame
Play progresses until 1 of the following conditions is met.

Losses: If 4 or more victims are killed, the players collectively lose.
Damage: If all the back cubes are placed onto the board, the building collapses and the players collectively lose.

Rescued!:If the players between them manage to rescue 7+ victims from the fire, they immediately win the game.

Overall
The board displays a recognisable location that firefighters move around to rescue people while it is inevitably filling with fire at a dramatic pace that causes explosions and damage in a race against time.
All of this makes Flash Point: Fire Rescue thematically a strong game.

On a basic level, in Flash Point: Fire Rescue characters navigate a landscape using action points having to balance the need to complete objectives - in this case rescue victims with the need to prevent or slow the spread of fire.
Players of cooperative games will recognise a lot of the mechanics employed here, it presents them with a classic dilemma that can be found in a lot of cooperative games.
There are a couple of unique elements here though.
Hazmat markers provide an extra risk and thus, extra facet to take into account: Should characters try and remove them from the board at the cost of less focus elsewhere, or ignore them in favour of concentrating on other risks?
The spreading fire also provides an unusual extra conundrum to face. While the spread of fire can be halted or even reversed, the explosions that get triggered cause damage that cannot be removed. The same is also true of hotspot markers.
Ultimately, it means that this is not about trying to put out the fires, I don't think that can ever happen and characters can only hope to hold them back long to rescue victims. It makes this a game of maximising effective use of action points and trying to gauge how much risk can be taken by ignoring fires.
As with many cooperative games, luck plays a not insignificant part here in the form of the dice rolls and this is just something the players will need to react and adapt to.

In terms of gameplay I found Flash Point: Fire Rescue a bit of a mixed bag.
The sense of being in a burning is pretty strong and the game has a genuine urgency regarding the spread of fire. It's actually pretty scary to watch as a single dice roll can lead to a series of events and explosions that wreak havoc and damage across the entire board.
But while the mechanics for the fire feel fast paced, the same is not quite true of player actions. Players typically get 4AP per turn and it can seem a little plodding at times, e.g., if a character has a victim they're trying to get out of the building - they'll get to move 2 spaces in their turn and that's it! It felt a little contrary to the atmosphere.
Although maybe that's the point, contrast the speed and danger of the fire with the relative slow actions of the firefighters to create tension? regardless of that, it made the gameplay feel a little 'off'.

I can't fault Flash Point: Fire Rescue and think overall it's a well constructed game but having played a fair few cooperative games over the years, I found the action point system a little uninspiring but that could simply be down to overfamiliarity. It didn't help that despite being mechanically solid and providing meaningful decisions to make, the game didn't quite gel with me. At the same time though, I'm going to reserve judgement on Flash Point: Fire Rescue. I want to give it at least another go or two.

10th August 2023

It's a Thursday evening and we're round Simon's for some gaming fun.
First game of the night was cooperative, tile-laying game Dorfromantik which is a board game adaptation of a computer game and translates from German as 'village romance' or possibly 'romance of the village'?

What's in a game?
Tiles: Well, this is a tile-laying game, so you're going to get a lot of tiles, in this case hexagonal ones that come in 2 types.

• Landscape tiles: A rural environment is shown on these tiles which will contain 1 or more of 8 different landscape types. These landscapes will include woods, fields, streams, tracks, sheep and so on.
  Additionally, some landscape tiles will feature flags.

Mystery boxes: What are mystery boxes? Well, you'll just have to find out but basically, Dorfromantik has a very light sort of persistent/campaign mode where boxes become 'unlocked' and provide more content to play through in what is a gameplay loop. Suffice to say that 5 boxes numbered 1-5 come with the game.

Score & campaign pads: Usually I don't bother mentioning this kind of component as it's not directly related to the game play. But in this case, how the scoring plays out is important here as it relates to the campaign.
On the left is a column of objectives and targets that can be achieved by completing games, on the right are achievements which can be unlocked in certain ways while in the centre, is an advancement track which can be checked off to unlock more content.
What is this extra content? That's a secret!

The components in Dorfromantik as what we would consider to be average, that is nothing to write home about but the tiles, cards and tokens fell perfectly acceptable: Nothing bad here.

The tiles use bright colours as well as illustrations to display differing landscapes and there's also as surprisingly detailed artwork, especially the village areas which show homes, shops, market stalls and so on. Charming little flourishes of artwork are found throughout the game.
It's crisp art that's clear and easy to comprehend.

Dorfromantik employs a handful of icons to represent different landscape types which are easily recognisable and that's about it. I can't imagine players having any problem here.

How's it play?
Setup
Tiles: Sort the tiles into their 2 types, then shuffle them into face-down stacks and discard 3 landscape tiles out of play.
Task markers: Sort the tokens into their types and shuffle them into face-down stacks.
First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Dorfromantik is a cooperative game were players are collectively creating a landscape with an eye towards typically maximising the victory points (VPs) they earn. Although they may have other objectives/achievements they might be working towards.
The game follows a typical turn order with the active player taking their action which essentially involves drawing and placing a tile before play progresses to the player on their left.

Draw tile: On their turn, the active player will draw a single tile and place it into the central playing area according to the following rules.

• Less than 3 task markers: If there are 2 or less task marker tokens in play, the active player must draw and play a task tile.
  Thus; since there are no tiles of any sort in play at the game start, the first 3 tiles drawn will always be task tiles.
• 3 of more task markers: If there are 3 or more task markers in play, then the active player draws a landscape tile.

Placing tiles: There are slightly different rules for what happens when landscape or task tiles are placed.

• Landscape tiles: When placing landscape tiles, they must be placed with at least 1 edge adjacent to another tile already in play. It's also possible to place a tile so that multiple edges will adjacent to multiple tiles. Not all landscape types need to be honoured, e.g., it's entirely permissible to place a field adjacent to a village. However, rail and stream connections must be honoured, that is, they cannot be blocked.
• Task tiles: For the most part, task tiles follow the same placement rules as landscape tiles (Except of course for the 1st tile played in the game, which cannot be adjacent to another tile!) but with the added element.
  When a task tile is revealed and played, a matching task marker must be drawn, revealed and placed on to that task tile. This will come into play when 'completing' or 'scoring' that task.

​Scoring tasks: As explained above, task markers will appear on tiles during the game and every task marker has a value of 4-6 for its particular landscape type. This means a task will earn VPs if the players manage to create a closed off or completed landscape containing that marker with a size which exactly matches the value.
E.g., if a forest task marker has a value of 5 and the players create a forest across exactly 5 tiles, then the task has been completed.
When a task is completed, the marker should be immediately removed and added to a scoring area. It is possible to immediately complete a task marker on a task tile if that task tile is played in the into a location which matches is requirements. It's theoretically possible to complete more then one task in turn.

• Failed tasks: If a task is ever failed (This can be done by closing off an area which is too small or making an area too big.) then it' task marker cannot be scored and is removed from play.

Next Player: Once the active player has played a tile and resolved any associated actions, play progresses to the player on their left.

Endgame
The game immediately ends if any player has to play a landscape tile and there are none available.
The game then goes to scoring and VPs can come from 3 sources.

• Tasks: Completed tasks earn VPs equal to their value.
• Flags: As mentioned above, some tiles may possess a flag. If the landscape related to a flag has been closed off or 'completed' then it will earn VPs.
• Rails and streams: VPs will be earned to the single longest stretch of rails and for the single longest stretch of stream.

VPs are totted up and that is the final amount that all the players have collectively scored. However, there's just one more thing:

The end is the beginning!
Now that players have achieved a final score, it's time to look at the campaign pad.

On the left side is the column of objectives which can be completed at the game end and these go from score up to 99 VPs all the way score 400 VPs! Every objective that is completed can be crossed off and earns the players a 'X'.

X's can be used to cross off spaces on the advancement track. As more spaces are crossed off, players will gain access to the boxes of extra content that come with the game. This content provides new tiles and new ways to score VPs as well as more achievements to work towards.
Furthermore, on the right are achievements that can be ticked off which contributes to the overall completion of the game.

Overall
Dorfromantik is a game about creating a beautiful village and the tile-laying mechanic does match up with the theme, albeit a little abstractly.

It's also quite a light game rules-wise, the challenge comes from optimising VPs earned from tile placement and this comes from planning ahead.
There seems to be a basic tactic of creating bunches of 3 of each landscape type so that if a 4 point task marker is drawn, it can potentially be used to immediately close and score a landscape - provided the right type and value of task marker is drawn. Although it can backfire if players calculate size 3 landscape types incorrectly.
As with pretty much all cooperative games, luck can play a big part here and players may be forced to make tricky decisions when things don't go their way.
There's also some tricky, meaningful decisions to be made regarding the rails and streams because players will be faced with conflicting scoring objectives: As well as trying to complete tasks related to those landscape types, players will also be looking to score points for the longest rail/stream.

Dorfromantik includes what loosely is described as a campaign mode. As the game is completed multiple times, players will acquire the means to score higher and higher VPs through unlocks but also will need to score higher to unlock more content in order to score even more VPs. It's a classic gameplay loop.

This brings me to another thing, one of the players bounced hard off Dorfromantik. They just did not like how there was no overt way to 'fail' a game.
While this is 'technically' true, a game can still be kind of failed by not achieving any objectives and getting no crosses, but for them it wasn't enough of a 'failure' for them.
Consequently, we didn't really get to give the campaign mode a good try.
I feel this could be a bit of divisive issue that could put people off what is otherwise a fairly solid tile-placement game.

Another curious aspect is that while Dorfromantik can play with a large player count it feels a bit like a solo game. - That is; a solo game where everybody can potentially contribute to the placement every turn!
The choices and options players face do not change with player count or different players. Players do not have hidden hands of tiles or anything like that which could alter their priorities and the dilemma of where to place a tile never alters from player to player.
The same information is open and available to all players at all times which essentially means players are free to confer during a individual's turn or not. I guess that many minds working on optimal moves can make for some strong decisions - or probably more likely, lead to more bickering!

It's also not a game for single occasional plays and I think it would also definitely benefit from repeated plays as unlockable content changes the game.
Dorfromantik is at the lightweight end of games and could appeal to casual or less dedicated gamers and be used as a crossover game.
If a undemanding, cooperative game is what your looking for, then this could be one for you provided you can find some players to dedicate time to it. Alternatively, you could just play it solo as the game experience is identical but quieter.

4th August 2023

It's a Friday night and we're round Simon's which means it's time to welcome in the weekend with some gaming goodness.

Load up the Winchester, strap on the peacemaker and head out to the west: Travel over prairies and along dusty long-dried gulches, see the monolithic sights at Monument Valley and encounter zombie hordes in.... Zombicide: Undead or Alive!

A while back I played a few games of vanilla Zombicide, a cooperative survival game of dispatching zombies while completing objectives.
Zombicide: Undead or Alive takes that game and moves the setting into the wild west.

What's in a game?

Tile boards: There are 9 of these large tiles, they're double-sided and placed out together to create the game's playing area. Each side depicts a bird's eye view of one of various old western buildings on a street. The street on each tile is broken down in 'zones' while interiors of said buildings are also displayed with different rooms also being broken down into 'zones'. 
​Train tiles: There are 3 of the oblong tiles. They're also double-sided and one side shows a railway track while the other show a train on the track.

Player board: Each player gets one of these enormous plastic player 'dashboards' with a faux wood finish and they about A5 in size!
Each dashboard has indented spaces and spots to place tiles, character cards, equipment cards as well as tokens. There's even 3 grooves along the top to hold 'backpack' cards upright.

• Adrenaline track: Running along the bottom is a numbered and colour coded 'adrenaline' track that goes from blue to red for when things go from cool to hot! It is used to track a character's adrenaline numerically and 'danger level' according to colour.

Character cards: Each of the game's named 14 playable 'survivors' has their own card with accompanying illustration.

• Class: The card lists which of the 4 'classes' the character belongs to and thus which 'class ability' is available to them. It has a space to place a specific weapon.
  
• Special actions: There's also a track for unlockable special moves (which is colour coded and linked to their adrenaline bar on the dashboard.)
  
• Hit points: Finally, there's a hit point (HP) tracker.

Cards: There's essentially 2 types of mini-sized which cards are used in Zombicide: Undead or Alive.

• ​Equipment cards: This type is broken down into several further different types, each with their own deck.
  Regardless of this, cards will tend to share a lot of common elements.
  E.g., no matter where a weapon card comes from, it will always show whether it's a melee or ranged weapon - and if so, its associated range along with the type of ammo its uses, number of dice rolled when attacking with it, the target number the roll needs to hit and how much damage it does. Finally it shows how much noise the weapon produces.
  Starting weapons: These are the beginning weapons that characters start the game with.
  Classic equipment: These cards can be acquired during the game and will include a fair variety of items to use as well as weapons.
  Bounty weapons: The weapons found in this deck are particularly effective.

Tokens: Lots of card tokens are used in the game.

• Bang/BOOM! token: This double-sided token is used to represent the last sound a player has made and that which zombies might hear. The BOOM! side is always louder than the bang!
• Exit token: Players always need an exit strategy and this card token is good for that!
• Objective tokens: These are styled to look like crates and come in 3 types all of which are double sided. There are 7 red tokens and 1 green and 1 blue and they can be used in various ways as required by the selected mission.

There's an impressive number of components to Zombicide: Undead or alive and they're all of a uniformly good quality. Cards, board, tokens, they're all good but the standouts are the 3d components and the dice.
The models obviously look good but also, the player dashboard with along with dynamite trackers are a nice touch and they all feel suitably sturdy.
The dice are wooden, nicely rounded and the card themed numbering on them are a nice touch.

A colourful and slightly cartoony style is used across the character and zombie cards, it's a humorous style that suits the game's tone well. The main board tiles seem a bit more subdued in comparison and they are perhaps a bit too busy for my liking but it's not detrimental to the game.
The zombie models, being grey risk sort of merging into one dull greyish blob when on the board but wisely, the runners have been constructed in a distinctly different shade of grey that makes them easily spotted against their undead compatriots while the fatties look distinctly different. The abomination is of course, red.

There's quite a lot that goes on during Zombicide: Undead or Alive, fortunately, much of the game's information is provided via text descriptions.
That's not to say there isn't a fair amount of iconography - because there is but it won't be overwhelming to seasoned gamers or players of previous versions of Zombicide; although this version has some differences to the vanilla game, in this case, adding character classes. More novice players will probably find themselves referring to the rulebook early on in the game.
It all shows that attention and care have been put into the components and presentation.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Mission: First decide which mission will be used for the game. It will list how to set up the tile boards and train tiles. It will also determine where spawn points, objectives etc will be placed on the boards.
  Finally, the chosen mission may restrict which characters may be used.
• ​Players: Generally, the game expects 6 characters to be used regardless of the player count. With a lower player count, some people may well be playing more than one character.
  Character: First give each player a character card and it's matching miniature. Also give them the 3d trackers in their colour.
  Dashboard: Give each player a dashboard. They should place their character card onto the allotted space on the dashboard and trackers on their allotted starting positions on the special moves and HP trackers.
  ​Ensure the adrenaline tracker is placed at '0'.

• Starting spots: Character miniatures should be placed on their starting place as per the chosen mission.
• Bang token: Place the bang token on the playing area as per the mission description.
• Cards: Take all the remaining (Non starting cards.) and sort them by type. Shuffle each pile into a face-down deck.
• ​​First player: Determine a starting player.

Onto play
Zombicide: Undead or Alive is a cooperative game in which the players will be attempting to complete an objective and escape the board before becoming zombie fodder!
A round takes place over 3 phases and players will take their turns using an action point system during the 'player phase', while the 'board' will run the 'zombie phase' in which zombies will spawn and chase characters in an attempt to defeat them.
Player phase: During this phase the active player will act in turn order and will have 3 action points (AP) to perform 3 actions, which include the following.

• Move: The active player may spend 1AP to move their character orthogonally into an adjacent zone - this can be outside or indoors. If there is a door adjacent, then the character may enter or exit a building.
  Entering buildings: Some buildings contain 'corpse piles' and the first time any character enters a building with a corpse pile, a corpse pile spawn tile should be placed on it.
  Zombies: Typically, the walking dead complicate things! If a character exits a zone which contains 1 or more zombies, then they pay 1 extra AP per zombie to exit that zone! This means if a character is in a zone with a lot of zombies, they will potentially be stuck there.
  Additionally, if a character has an ability that allows them to move more than 1 zone per AP and they enter a zone with zombies, that particular move action immediately ends.
• Search: If a character is indoors and there are no zombies in their current zone, the player can spend 1AP to search. This allows them to draw a card from the classic equipment deck and add it to their dashboard, they may then 'reorganise' their inventory (More on this below.)
  Unless a character has the 'Townsfolk' class, they can only perform 1 search per round regardless of AP they have.
• Reorganise/trade: The active player may spend an AP to shift equipment cards around their dashboard. A character may also freely discard a card.
  As part of this action, the active player may also trade with 1 other player sharing their zone. This allows the 2 characters to freely exchange cards in any way they see fit. It also allows the inactive character who is part of the trade to reorganise as well.
• Combat: Now we get to the meat (SIC) of the game! Combat is broken down into 2 types; melee and ranged.
  • Melee: A character may attack any zombie who is in the same zone as them, if there are more than 1 zombie, then the character can choose which zombie to target.
    This is done by rolling the dice as determined by whatever melee weapon they are using and if successful, will deal damage.
  • Ranged: Ranged attacks are somewhat more complex, they roll dice in similar fashion, but there are more factors to take into account.
    Line of sight: First, the character must be able to draw a line of sight to their target. Generally, any target outside can easily be seen, even at several zones away unless they're round a corner.
    However, a character can only see 1 zone into a building or out of it, furthermore, if the character is inside, they can only see into any interior zones if they are adjacent
    Range: Even if a character can see a zombie, it must still be within the scope of the ranged weapons range.
    Some weapons have a range of 0-1 which means a target can be hit up to 1 zone away or in the same zone as the character.
    Some weapons may have a range of 1-2, which means zombies 1 to 2 zones away can be it but zombies in the same zone as the character cannot!
    Target priority: Unlike melee (where when faced with multiple zombies in a single zone, the attacker can choose which to attack,) when a character uses a ranged weapon and there are multiple zombies of different types in the same zone, they must attack zombies as per the targeting priority.
    What does this mean?
    It means that certain types of zombie must be targeted before other types first, depending on what type of zombies are sharing the same zone.
    The priority is:
    Abominations/fatties first.
    If there are no abominations/fatties, then walkers must be targeted first.
    Finally, if there are no other types of zombie present, then runners can be targeted. Phew!
  • Damage: Walkers and runners can be destroyed by 1 point of damage and fatties need 2 points of damage to dispatch and abominations require 3 points to be defeated!
    Damage does not carryover from attack to attack. This means that unless a weapon does 2 damage, it cannot destroy a fattier and unless it does 3 damage, it cannot be used to defeat an abomination!
    This also has an added impact on ranged attacks. If a character is attacking a zone with multiple zombies which includes abominations or fatties with a weapon that only does 1 damage, then it will have no effect! They must target the abomination/fatty first but cannot do it any damage - sucks to be them!
    Noise: Guns are noisy and when used, the bang token is usually moved to the zone where the attacker fired from.
  • Adrenaline: Whenever a character defeats a zombie, their adrenaline goes up by 1 and if they manage to defeat an abomination it goes up by 5! Destroying spawn points can also push up adrenaline.
    When the tracker moves into a different colour it unlocks the linked special ability for that character.
    The first unlock is always 1 extra AP when yellow is reached. When it reaches orange, the player gets to pick 1 of the 2 orange abilities to unlock (Not both!) and when it reaches red, they get to pick from one of the 3 available unlocks.

• Take/activate: By spending an AP, the character may interact with an object in the same zone as them, typically this will be regarding a mission objective and will vary depending on that mission.
• Machine: If a character is in the same zone as a 'machine' such as the Gatling gun, or the wagon then APs can be spent to make use of them.
• Make noise: A character may spend an AP to make noise to distract/lure zombies, this means the bang token is moved to their zone unless it has been flipped to the BOOM! side, in which case, it does not move. A bang is never louder than a BOOM! and zombies cannot be lured away from a BOOM!!
• Do nothing: Finally, the player may pass, this ends their turn immediately, regardless of how many APs they may still possess.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their turn, play progresses to the player on their left.
• End of phase: Once all players have completed their turn, the player phase is over.

Zombie phase: Play now moves on to the zombie phase in which zombies will move or attack character and then more zombies will spawn!

• Activation: Every zombie currently on the board must activate! Players can choose the order in which they do so. When activating, zombies will have 1 of 2 actions available.
  • Attack: If 1 or more zombies is in the same zone as characters, they will attack! When attacking, zombies always automatically hit and each zombie will do 1 point of damage which is dealt to the characters.
    If there is more than one character in that zone, the players may assign the damage between characters as they see fit.
  • Move: Any zombies not attacking must instead move and will move 1 zone.
    A zombie will move towards any character the they see, prioritising a character in the same zone as the noise token. Otherwise they will move towards the largest group of characters they can see.
    If a zombie cannot see any characters, they will move toward the noise token.
    Distance: A zombie will always the shortest route to their destination. In the case of multiple routes of equal distance, players can choose which route the zombie takes. If a mob of zombies is moving along multiple routes, then they should be split between the routes as evenly as possible.
  • Second activation: Once all zombies have resolved their activations, runners get a second activation! This is basically a repeat of the above 2 actions, although a runner may change action.
    E.g., if a runner used it's first activation to move into the same zone as a character, it will use it's second activation to attack. Or if it moved towards the noise token with it's first move and it now sees a character, it will change direction towards that character.
    This also means if it starts the zombie phase in the same zone as a characters, it will attack twice!
• Spawn: In this part of the phase, more zombies will spawn.
  • Danger level: First determine danger level, there are 4 levels and they correspond to the colours on player adrenaline tracks. The danger level will match the colour of the character who is furthest along their adrenaline track.
    I.e., if a character is in the orange part of their adrenaline track and they are furthest along, then the danger level will be orange.
  • Draw cards: Then, beginning with the starting spawn point, draw a zombie card for each active spawn point.
    Generally, the card drawn will be a zombie card. It will list the type of zombie and how many of that type will spawn - it will be colour coded to the danger level. Thus the higher the danger level, the more will spawn.
    Abomination spawn: The abomination its own special rules that occur when its spawn card is drawn.
    Extra activation: Some cards will be activation cards. It means instead of spawning more zombies, those on the board get an extra activation - which means they can move or attack again. This can be bad news!
  • No supply of miniatures: If there are not enough miniatures to put on to the playing area when a spawn card is drawn, then the abomination gets an extra activation.

End of round phase: Once all spawn tokens have been resolved, the game goes to the final phase and the following occurs.

• Bang/BOOM! token: If the BOOM! side of this token is showing, flip it back to the bang side. It's already on the bang side, then move to the zone which contains the largest number of characters.
• New first player: The first player token should be moved to the player to the left of the current first player.
• Next round: A new round starting with another player phase begins

Additional rules: The game also has rules for the Gatling gun, wagon, train and so on. There are also specific rules on how objective tokens are used from mission to mission and there's too many to list here.
If you really want to know, feel free to read the rulebook online, it's only 50 pages long.

​Endgame
There are a couple of other lose conditions that can make the game end badly for the players and which are:
If any time there are 7 active spawn points, then the players lose.
If any character has their HP reduced to 0, then the players lose.

Otherwise play progresses until the chosen mission's win or lose criteria are met in which case the players collectively either win or lose.

Overall
​With it's old western art style and equally styled components, the theme fits well within the frame of Zombicide. Although, it's tricky to think of a setting that wouldn't fit.
The character classes feel right for the theme and work well to differentiate between the characters.

There's quite a lot going on in the game but some of that is down to options and choices available to players. Mechanically, Zombicide: Undead or Alive isn't too complex and wisely, zombies actions are streamlined, although there may well be a lot of zombies to shuffle around the playing area.
Seasoned players won't really find anything tricky to learn.

The only quibble I have with the rules is the targeting priority when performing ranged attacks.
I know why it's there; to stop players targeting runners and using their superior movement to keep out range of all the other types of zombie.
Generally, I consider the runners the most dangerous type of zombie, they can reach characters quicker and attack more often. Tactically, players would likely target runners first if it wasn't for the priority targeting, at least that's what I'd probably do.
Understandable from a game-balance perspective but nonetheless, frustrating.

Because the game is so mission driven, it's hard to give a comprehensive overview of what players will face but in game like this but gameplay-wise, the game has that classic cooperative game structure of slowly, over turns threatening to overwhelm players who will be faced with balancing the need to complete objectives with the need to reduce the burgeoning zombie horde.
It's a fairly common predicament in cooperatives games but it serves this game well by putting the players in situations where they have to make meaningful decisions. Luck also plays a part in games like this and players will need to adapt to manage bad luck - especially if there's a couple of bad draws from the zombie deck.

While the game looks great, particularly so when there's 70 odd zombies that can be stumbling around the playing area, it can feel a little clunky to manage despite the fairly streamlined rules for the zombie phase.
In fact, with it's involved set up it all feels clunky. Playing with 6 characters can also slow it down somewhat with what seemed like lengthy downtime between turns and overall play time.

I don't think this makes Zombicide: Undead or Alive a bad game, there's nothing bad here and if you like the western theme, you'll probably have a fun time with it but for me, it felt like the payoff wasn't worth the effort to get there.​

30th May 2023

It's a Tuesday evening again and that means it's time for some gaming goodness with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns.

Bandido is a wily one!. The sly criminal has finally been caught and sent to jail. But Bandido is never one to rest and soon has found a way to dig tunnels out of his cell.
Can the players manage to coordinate in this cooperative card-laying game to stop Bandido escaping?

There's not much to say about Bandido's minimal components.
The starting tile is notably thick and chunky in contrast to the cards which feel a touch flimsy - possibly due to their unusual proportion. This is not an issue though and unless the cards are mistreated they will be fine.

Bandido's artwork is equally minimal, there's a touch of stylised art for Bandido himself and well.... that's pretty much it other than the illustration representing dead-ends and the tunnels themselves.

You could argue that the hand holding the flashlight is an icon, otherwise there's no iconography in the game. Everything is instantly understandable.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tile: Put the starting tile in the central playing area, select the side with 5 exits or for a supposedly harder game select the side with 6 exits. There didn't seem a discernible difference in difficulty as far as I could tell.
• Cards: shuffle the cards into a face-down deck and deal 3 face-down to each player. Players should keep their hand secret from other players.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

​On to play
In Bandido, players are cooperatively trying to stop Bandido from escaping by playing cards to block off all tunnels.
The game uses a traditional turn order with the active player resolving their turn before play progresses to the player on their left.
A turn plays out as detailed below.

• Play card: The active player must play a card from their hand with the following criteria.
  • Orientation: When playing a card, it can be rotated to any orientation and must be adjacent to the tunnel from at least 1 other card or starting tile.
  • Honour connections: When playing a card, it must honour all connections that it is placed adjacent to, that is, it must connect to all tunnels.
    The placed card cannot cut off a tunnel. If this would occur, then that card cannot be play in that way.
  • Cannot play: If for any reason the active player does not have a card they can legally play, then they must place their entire hand at the bottom of the deck and draw new hand of 3 cards, their turn is now over.
• Draw card: After playing a card, the active player draws back up to a hand of 3 cards.
• Next player:  Play now progresses to the player on the active players left.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of the 2 following conditions are met.

If the deck becomes depleted and none of the players have any cards left to play and there is at least 1 un-blocked off tunnel, then Bandido manages to escape! The player collectively lose.

If on the other hand, the players manage to block off all tunnels at any point during the game, then Bandido is trapped. The players immediately and collectively win!

Overall
Bandido's theme is sort of stuck-on​ and perhaps a little offbeat (I mean stopping the titular character escaping!) but it fits the game well enough and will be understood by all players.

Whilst the game's rules light, don't be fooled by this simplicity. Bandido is quite a hard game to win. This is especially true when playing at a higher player count. In a solo game, the player will know exactly which cards are available but with 3 companions, it becomes much harder to predict.
(One criticism I have of Bandido is that as the tunnel network invariably grows, it may expand in unexpected ways - more than once we've had to shift the entire map because it was going off a table edge - which is a fairly fiddly affair.)

There is without a doubt also a degree of luck involved (As is the case with most cooperative games.) which may not appeal to all players but there's also a good chunk of having to think ahead and trying optimise how cards are played.
 
It's hard to resist the urge to play dead-end cards that close tunnels down in the early game but it can be vital that you don't always do this.
Management of 'moving' tunnels around the playing area is key to success.
E.g., directing tunnels towards each other and connecting them can create 'loops' which essentially closes both. Additionally looping 2 tunnels into 1 then closing it off is equally useful.
There are only a limited amount of dead-end cards and using them up too early means they won't be available to use in the late game.
It's something players must plan for.
Players must also make sure they don't create any situations with card positioning which will render a tunnel impossible to close.

Because Bandido is so straightforward, with a easily recognisable goal and accessibility, it's a great game for all the family, more causal players and younger players and can prove a lot of fun.
That this is a cooperative game is even better, many cooperative games have intricate systems that must be managed in order to make them work, which not the case here.
It's definitely worth trying.

16th April 2023

It's a Sunday and we're logged into Board Game Arena for more gaming fun.

Take on the role of Perseus, Jason or Hercules. Battle The Hydra, vanquish The Gorgon and defeat Cerberus in Legends of Hellas, a cooperative card game of Greek heroes and Greek mythology.

Caveat: We've only ever played this game digitally.

What's in a game?

• Cards: Legends of Hellas features 2 types of cards.
• Action cards: In the top left of each action card is an icon. Each one relates to 1 of 5 different virtues or qualities that a hero might posses. They are 'arms' (As in weapons.), 'courage', 'guile', 'speed' and 'strength.
  Furthermore, cards are also colour coded to each quality.
  Action cards illustrate the kind of events that Greek heroes get involved with using those virtues.
  Divine intervention cards: A final type of card depicts that good old mythological staple; divine intervention. These cards have special uses as explained below and are considered different to 'normal' actions cards.

With a chunky, cartoony style, Legends of Hellas is a bright and colourful looking game. It's crisp, clear artwork and the monsters on the monster cards are all instantly recognisable. I think it looks great.

There's half a dozen icons in the game and they're only used in reference between action and monster cards. Players should have no problems here.

How's it play?
Setup
Legends of Hellas presents players with 12 different missions to undertake which may have some varying setup and game rules. However, broadly speaking, they share a common theme - which defeating monsters until the boss monster 'the chimera' appears then defeating it.​

• Monster cards: Shuffle the monster cards into a face-down deck. Then according to the mission deal a number of them face-up into a central playing area.
• Action cards: First ensure all the divine intervention are separated from the other action cards.
  Then as per the player count (And also difficulty.) add a number of divine intervention cards to the action cards and shuffle them all into a face-down deck.
  Now deal 4 cards to each player.
• Hero discs: Give each player a hero disc in their chosen player colour. Each player should put their disc into their personal playing area with the 'normal' side face-up.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Players in Legends of Hellas are cooperatively attempting to defeat a number of monsters inspired by Greek mythology.
This is done by playing cards but players will also need to perform other actions to facilitate this.
Legends of Hellas uses a traditional turn order with active player completing their action before play progresses to the next player.

• Game start: All players should place their hero disc on any monster card, more than one hero disc may be on a monster card.
• Action: During their turn, the active player may perform 1 of the following actions.
  • Draw card: The active player may draw 1 or more cards from the action deck and may temporarily have a hand of up to 5 cards. However, after drawing cards, the active player must discard a card.
  • Fight monster: This is probably the most common action players will perform and and is required to defeat monsters. The following rules apply to fighting monsters.
    • Location: The active player may only fight the monster at their hero disc's current location.
    • Action: To fight a monster, the active player must play an action card that matches the icons on that monster card. I.e., if a monster card displays the speed and courage icons, then the active player must play a card with either the speed or courage icon.
    • Victory: A monster is only defeated when both of the following 2 conditions have been met:
      Both action types: At least 1 card of each type has been played.
      5 cards: If a total of 5 cards have been across both types has been played.
      When both conditions have been met, the monster is defeated.
    • Divine intervention: These are incredibly useful for defeating monsters and can be used in 1 of 2 ways.
      Wildcard: A divine intervention card be played as a action card of any of the 5 types.
      Instant defeat: Provided the 'both action types' condition has been met, a divine intervention card can be played to instantly defeat a monster regardless of how many cards have already been played against it.
  • Give card: The active player may give any number of their cards to any other player. That player must then discard at least 1 card and must also discard down to 4 cards if they have more.
  • Move: The active player may move their hero disc from one monster card to another by discarding a card. This is regardless of whether the monster the hero disc is currently on has been defeated or not.
  • View cards: The active player may draw 6 cards from the action deck and view them.
    Then they must discard 1 cards and return the other 5 back on top of the action deck in any order they see fit.
• Next player: Once the active player has taken their action, play progresses to the player on their left.
• Other rules:
  • Special action: Each player has a special action available to them that can be activated once per game and is dependant on the colour of their hero disc.
    It means a player can flip their hero disc to the 'broken' side to play any card against a monster, consequently that card is considered to have the same colour (And thus quality.) as the flipped hero disc.
    E.g., if a player has Hercules' red hero disc, they may flip it to play any card against a monster and that card is considered to be a red 'strength' action card.
  • Chimera: Once the allotted number of monsters as per the chosen mission have been defeated, the final boss monster appears - this is the Chimera!
    To form the Chimera draw 2 monster cards and places them so that one is above the other - and the one at the bottom is upside down.
    This means the Chimera will potentially need cards from 4 qualities to defeat! If the Chimera has duplicates of the one quality, then at least 1 action card for each instance of that type must be played.

Endgame
If the players manage to defeat the Chimera once it has appeared, then they collectively win the game!
If however, at any time a player needs to draw cards and there are none left in the action deck, then the players collectively lose the game.

Overall
Between it's bold colourful presentation of Greek mythology and card mechanics which will have heroes travelling about to battle monsters using their guile, strength and so on; Legends of Hellas is pretty strong thematically.
I personally like how The Chimera will be a random amalgam of 2 other monsters.

Mechanically, on the surface it's a pretty straightforward game - play cards with symbols matching symbols on monster cards to defeat them but in practice, Legends of Hellas is quite unforgiving.

This is because players aren't really battling the monsters, they're battling the action deck - or more precisely, fighting to stop the deck running out and luck can play a very big part here.
Every choice and action a player takes ​- not just attacking monsters - will cost a card.
Draw cards - one of them must be discarded.
Give cards to an alley - one must be discarded.
Move or view the deck - you get the idea.
Even deciding which cards to discard is also an important decision. I.e., if none of the current monsters require a certain type of card, is that type safe to discard? A monster requiring it might turn up later

Consequently it can be very easy to run out of cards, players will need to try and play as efficiently as possible with minimal squandering and no frivolous moves. Judicious use of divine interventions can be critical here, playing one at the right time can defeat a monster with only 3 cards instead of 5. It might not seem like a saving of many cards but it can be.
While players can not explicitly discuss the cards in their hand, they will need to coordinate actions, especially actions such as passing cards to each other and viewing the deck.
Being a cooperative game, there's also a degree of luck in Legends of Hellas, perhaps a little too much like for my liking. Sometimes players will draw a hand of cards they just can't use and will have to find a way to adapt.
Conversely, sometimes luck will deliver the exact cards you will need which will make it easier and maybe a little unsatisfying.
It also means that sometimes it felt like my decisions had been taken out my hands by chance and sometimes it felt like any strategy I had was was reduced to simply 'play what you have' and adapt to 'what you get'.

Despite this I found Legends of Hellas to be a fairly enjoyable experience mixed with dollop of frustration from the luck which strangely, could go 2 ways; too much bad luck or too much good luck! 

With it's cartoonish art style and somewhat lightweight rules, Legends of Hellas would appear to be aimed at a family audience but we found it actually quite a tricky game, I'm not sure younger players will have a easy time. however a bit of adult/parent contribution would make a difference, I guess that's what makes it a family game.

If you want a ancient Greece themed cooperative game or in fact any kind of low maintenance cooperative game, Legends of Hellas might fill the bill.

19th February 2023

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

Paint the Roses, it sounds a strange thing but that's what you do when in the kingdom of The Queen of Hearts in this 'Alice in Wonderland' themed cooperative game of deductive reasoning.

Caveat: We have only ever played this game digitally.

What's in a game?

• Game board: The central part of this board displays a cluster of hex-shaped spaces, each space contains a hedge or shrub.
  At the top of the board is a very picturesque palace decorated with a heart motif
  Running around the outside edge is what appears to be a scoring track and at regular points along this track are milestones or breakpoints marked out by white rabbits.

• Models: Not pertinent to the digital version of the game but the physical copy comes with 3d models to represent The White Rabbit, The Gardeners and the The Queen of Hearts.
  Additionally, there are 4 petal tokens that are used in conjunction with The Queen of Hearts and one-by-one are slipped beneath her model's base during the game, increasing her speed - which is not a good thing!
• Bag: This is also only part of the physical game and is used to blind draw shrub tokens.

Paint the Roses' artwork is pretty high quality, Art on whim cards and tiles look good and is easily understood but the standout art is on the game board. It's vibrant, colourful and eye catching, everything I think is good in game artwork.

Only 4 colours and 4 shapes are used in Paint the Roses, these are straightforward to comprehend and there's no other iconography.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Game board: Put out the game board.
  Place The Gardeners tile on the '0' space.
  Place The Queen of Hearts tile on space '44' (Actually 6 spaces behind The Gardeners.).
  Place The White Rabbit on it's first milestone.
  Place the starting shrubs into their determined starting positions.
• Whim cards: Sort the whim cards into their 3 types and shuffle them into 3 face-down decks.
• Shrub tiles: In the physical game, these tiles would go into the bag.
• Greenhouse board: Randomly draw 4 shrub tiles and place them on the 4 available spaces on the greenhouse tile.
• Clue tokens: Give each player the clue tokens in their player colour.
• First player: Determine a starting player.
  Once this has been done, each player in turn order should draw a whim card from 1 of the 3 decks with the proviso that only 1 player can have an easy card at any time.

On to play
In Paint the Roses, the players are trying to collectively fill all 16 empty spaces on the game board while staying ahead of The Queen of Hearts model.
How is this done? By playing tiles, placing clues on them and using those clues to try and guess what is displayed on other player's whim cards.
Players must keep their whim cards hidden from other players, only revealing them when they are correctly guessed.
Paint the Roses uses a traditional turn structure with the active player completing their actions before play progresses to the player on their left. During the active player's turn, the following phases occur.

• Place tile: The active player must take one of the 4 tiles from the greenhouse board and place on any empty space on the board.
• Place clue tokens: All players then place clue tokens on the tile that was just placed.
  The number of clue tokens a player must place should be equal to the the number of ways the currently placed tile matches the colour/shape shown on their whim card.
  E.g., if a diamond shaped bush was just placed next to a spade shaped and any player had a whim card depicting a spade adjacent to a diamond, then that player must put a clue token on the newly placed tile.
  If the placed tile matches a whim card in more than one way, then clue tokens must be placed on the tile for each match. So if a spade was placed adjacent to 2 diamonds, 2 tokens would need to be placed on the tile
  If there are no matches, then no clue tokens are placed on the tile.
• Guess: Once clue tokens have been placed, the players must collaboratively pick any one of the whim cards and try to guess the symbols on that card. That is they're trying to guess which colour/shapes are shown on that particular card. Obviously, players cannot guess the symbols on their own card!
  • Correct!: If the players guess correctly, the following occurs.
    Discard whim card: The whim card that was correctly guessed is discarded.
    Move The Gardeners: The Gardeners figure should be moved a number of spaces equal to the value shown in the bottom right corner of the card that was just guessed. If this moves The Gardeners past The White Rabbit model, add a petal to The Queen of Heart's base (She will move faster from now on!) and move The White Rabbit to it's next milestone.
    Remove clue tokens: All clue tokens related to the correctly guessed whim card are returned to their player's hand.
    Guess again: After making a correct guess, the players may choose to make another guess, this is not mandatory and can be risky - as explained below.
  • Incorrect!: When a incorrect guess is made, the phase immediately ends.
• Move Queen: Once the guessing phase is over, The Queen moves and there are 2 ways this can happened.
  Correct guesses: If all guesses that were made were correct, The Queen moves her speed which is 1 space plus 1 space per petal under her base, thus she can move up to 5 spaces! That's not the worst though!
  Incorrect guess: If the players made a incorrect guess, The Queen of Hearts moves double her speed!
• End of turn: Once the Queen's movement has been resolved and the game has not ended, the following occurs.
  Replenish whim cards: Any player who discarded a whim cad now draws one from any of the 3 decks, the rule about only 1 easy whim card still applies.
  Replenish greenhouse board: A new shrub tile is drawn and placed on the empty space on the greenhouse board.
  Next player: Play progresses to the player left of the active player, who now becomes the new active player and a new turn begins.

Endgame
If the players manage to place shrub tiles in all 16 spaces and survive to the end of the round - that is; survive The Queen's final movement, the players collectively win the game!

If any time The Queen reaches the same space as The Gardeners or overtakes them; it's off with their heads. The players collectively lose the game.

Once a game is concluded, players can record their score, i.e., where they finished on the scoring track.

Overall
Thematically I found Paint the Roses a little abstract. Having The Queen actually chase the player model around the out of the board was a bit silly (Which thinking about matches the absurdness of the source material.) but also reasonably clever.
While I understand how the theme meshes with the mechanics, it all felt a little... detached.

​Mechanically though, Paint the Roses presents players with very tricky decisions and this is twofold.

Firstly, the active player must decide which of 4 shrub tiles to draft and how they can place it on the board to convey the information on their card. I think that there's also a higher level of play here where the active player can choose to play a tile to potentially help another player to convey information.
Secondly, once a tile has been put down, the players must make a guess. It's likely that this will involve a mix of deduction and also blind guessing. Easy whim cards are well... fairly easy to guess which is why players are limited to one easy card at a time, other cards are no so easy. Its important to successfully guess harder cards because it puts more space between the players and The Queen
There's also the element of trying to guess another card after a successful guess but it's genuinely higher stakes: A successful 2nd guess will give the players more breathing room but a wrong guess means that essentially any progress made from a guess has been lost. Double or nothing really.

These mechanics for guessing feel quite unique but also a little obtuse and harder to comprehend than they should be.
I don't think it helped that we were playing the game digitally and clue tokens were added automatically which sort of distanced us from thinking about what was going on.
I also felt being forced to guess every turn was quite harsh and The Queen advanced very quickly after relatively few failures. I feel that if players make a couple of wrong guesses in the early game, they'll be on the back foot for the rest of it - however long that lasts.

This brings me to the rule with the White Rabbit that increases The Queen's speed is quite interesting - although I'm not sure how I feel about it.
If The Queen has a high speed, an incorrect guess can move her a lot of spaces. It increases the stakes as the game progresses, meaning the players can never afford to be complacent.
The drawback is that it felt frustrating and counterintuitive, like we were being punished for being successful.

Between the difficulty and somewhat frustrating way the deduction worked, I found that I did not enjoy Paint the Roses, which is a shame, I like the idea of a cooperative, logic driven game.
I would definitely be open to trying the game physically as I might chance my stance  when actually handling the game but digitally speaking, this is not a game for me.

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.

30th August 2022

Tuesday night gaming with the Woking Gaming Club continued with The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine.

The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is actually an earlier iteration of The Crew: Mission Deep Sea which I've already blogged about and the two games are more or less identical.
Read about The Crew: Mission Deep Sea here and it'll give a good idea how The Quest of Planet Nine plays.
As such I'm not going to do a full write for ​The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, instead I'll just note one area of difference between the two.

Task cards: These are much more straightforward in The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine.
All the objectives are exclusively about acquiring certain numbers in certain colours, e.g., blue 7, yellow 2 and so on.
Consequently, The Quest for Planet Nine is a bit more straightforward, this makes it perhaps a little easier to play as it does not present players with having to deal with more left-field tasks like 'I can only win the first and last hands'.
The upside is that it has greater accessibility and will be easier to play with people who aren't so heavily into games.

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.

20th August 2022

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

Cross an ocean, hop from island to island on a lonely journey to find your paradise island and tranquillity.

Tranquility is a cooperative, game about assessing risks and playing cards.
​Also, the rules state that players should not explicitly discuss their cards between them, so I guess that could be considered a form of tranquillity?

What's in a game?
Tranquility is a card game that comes packaged in a distinctive looking cubic box. All the game's cards are an unusual square shape.

• Island cards: There are 80 of these cards and they are numbered 1-80. There are 8 pictures across the cards and each different illustration depicts a stylised picturesque island that has a reflection which curiously shows the island at night.
• Start cards: There are 5 of these, the illustration shows a boat at an island during sunrise.
• Finish cards: Again there are 5 of these, this time it shows the boat at an island at dusk.
• Border cards: These cards actually have no in-game function. Tranquility uses a 6x6 grid and since the packaging is too small to include a mat, these cards are used to create the border of the grid.
• Expansion cards: There are a number of expansion cards that add extra gameplay elements to Tranquility, although we've never made use of them.

Quality wise, the cards are pretty average. Not much more to say here.

The presentation and artwork for Tranquility is excellent. The illustrations show a series of unique and interesting islands. The colourful artwork has a bright, clean and stylised almost minimalist look to it that does a great job of conveying the subdued isolation of a sea bound journey.

There's barely any iconography in Tranquility and what there is of it is reserved for the expansion cards.

How's it play?
Set up

• Grid: Use the border cards to create a 6x6 grid with 6 border cards per side.
• Players:
  • Start cards: Give each player a start card.
  • Player decks: Shuffle the 5 finish cards into the island cards and shuffle all of them into a face-down deck. Then deal the entire deck out to the players as evenly as possible, thus giving each player their own personal deck.
  • Starting hand: Each player should draw a hand of 5 cards from their personal deck.
  • Add start card: Now each player should shuffle their start card into their personal deck to create a new face-down personal deck.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
The objective in Tranquility is to cooperatively fill all 36 spaces in the 6x6 grid with island cards. Furthermore, all the cards must be positioned in numerical order (Although not necessarily placed in sequence.) going from low to high and left to right, starting in the bottom left corner and ending in the top right one.
It's worth noting that while cards are placed in a 6x6 grid, the numbers 'wrap around', this means they are essentially in a long line.

Tranquility uses a traditional turn order with the active player taking an action before player progress to the player on their left.
During their turn, the active player can do 1 of 2 possible actions.

• Play card: The active player may place a card into the grid with the following provisos.
  • Numeric order: The card being played must be of a higher value than the cards before it and a lower value than cards ahead of it.
  • No adjacent cards: If there are no adjacent cards to the left and right of the card being placed, then it can be placed 'for free'.
  • 1 adjacent card: If there is 1 card in play that would be adjacent to the card being placed, then the active player must discard a number of cards from their hand equal to the numerical difference between the 2 cards. Thus placing a 35 next to a 37 means the player must discard 2 cards.
    Since there is always a difference of at least 1 between cards, the player must always discard at least 1 card.
    Additionally, since a player only ever has 5 cards in hand, the difference between adjacent cards can never be greater than 4.
  • 2 adjacent cards: If a card is put down into a space between 2 cards, then the active player discards cards according to the side that makes them discard the least amount of cards.
    E.g., if there is a 12, then a empty space, then a 18 and the active player puts a 17 into that space, they only discard 1 card.
• Pass: The other action available allows the active to choose not to play a card and pass but must discard 2 cards to do so.
• Draw cards: Regardless of whether the active player played a card or passed, they must refill their hand back up to five cards, if there are less than the required number of cards left in their deck, then they draw whatever they can.
  • Start card: If and when a player draws a start card, it must be played as their card on their next turn, unless a start has already been played, in which case it just sits in the players hand until discarded.
    When a start card is played, all players must collectively discard 8 cards, then all players immediately draw back up to 5 cards.
• Discards: Whenever cards are discarded for any reason, they are done so face-down, players can never look through their own or other players' discard piles.
• Next player: Once the active player has drawn cards, player progresses to the player on the left.

Endgame
Tranquility continues until 1 of the 2 following conditions are met.

Cannot play: If the active player does not have a card to play or cannot discard 2 cards to pass, then the players collectively lose.
Finish card: If all 36 spaces in the grid have been filled and the active player has a finish card in their hand, they can play it and the players collectively win.

Overall
​Tranquility feels like a puzzle orientated game with a minor element of mathematics.

The game is clearly dived into early and late game.
The early game is where players will look to put cards into play without other adjacent cards to avoid discarding cards.
The late game is where players have no choice but to discard in order to play cards and have to decide which and how many cards to discard and discarding is the crux of the game.

Discarding means getting rid of cards which may prove vital later in the game. Players will have to judge which cards are 'safer' to discard and hope alternative cards will appear. It is the chief risk that players take in Tranquility.
This is is why the start card rule can prove tricky for players, especially if it appears early in the game, having to discard 8 cards is harsh - it's nearly 10% of the deck.

Curiously though, discarding cards gets easier as the game progresses. Typically numbers will get locked out as cards are played. E.g., if a 51 is placed adjacent to a 54, then cards 52 & 53 can no longer be used and can be freely discarded. Additionally, once the first start card has been played, any others can be safely discarded. Conversely, it's always risky to discard a finish card.
All of this means that decisions in the early game are the most important and the game will 'settle down' as it progresses.

Having said all of that, there is a issue I have with the game; which is that there's definitely a formula we found that players can employ to greatly increase their chances to win.
It's not a guarantee and I never feel like we could be complacent when we played, even though we now generally win the vast majority of games we play and the game seems 'beaten'.

Tranquility is fairly easy to learn, especially considering it's a cooperative game - quite often cooperative games have complex engines to drive the gameplay but that's not the case here. 
The game provides some conundrums to face and problems to solve. Players will need to manage the risk of their discards and make decisive decisions.

If all of that sounds like some you'll like then Tranquility is definitely a game that's worth playing, just don't play it too often.