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.

18th August 2022

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

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thematically, HeroQuest is a bit of a strange beast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16th August 2022

It's a Tuesday and were at The Sovereigns with the Woking Board Gaming Club for some gaming goodness.

​Have you ever watched the classic Jaws movie and decided, 'y'know I wanna be the shark going round chomping on hapless swimmers'?
Then this might be the game for you!

Jaws is a asymmetrical game of 2 halves where up to 3 players take on the roles of film's 3 protagonists and 1 player becomes the shark. 
At first the protagonists will seek to defend Amity Island from shark attacks before finally engaging it in a deadly cat-and-mouse game.

Jaws is played over 2 acts (Essentially 2 different games in reality.) and as such, has a lot of double-sided components mostly relevant to each act.
For the purposes of this blog, I'm mostly going to write about each act separately.

Act 1
What's in a game?

• Game board: This is a double-sided board.
  Amity Island: For act 1 on one side is depicted Amity Island, the fictional setting for the film. It looks like Amity Island is modelled after Martha's Vineyard - which is cool as Martha's Vineyard was used for location filming.
  The island is divided into several different areas, Many of which are numbered 1-8 as well as beaches denominated as N,S,E & W. These areas also include features suck as the docks or mayor's office.
• Meeples: Jaws uses quite a few meeples. They are all wooden tokens
  There are meeples not only for Brody, Hooper and Quint but also their boats which have room to hold their respective meeples! - Except for Brody, he has some binoculars to make up for it instead!
  Obviously there's a big meeple for the shark.
• Cards: Only 1 type of card is used for Act 1.
  Event cards: Each event card will list some of the sections on the map where swimmers will appear. E.g, if an event card states NN3, 2 swimmers will in section N and 1 swimmer will appear in section 3. They may also list a special move that becomes available to the 3 crew or hero protagonists.
• Player boards: Player boards are also double sided.
  Each of the 3 crew (Brody, Hooper & Quint.) gets their own player board. These boards list the moves and abilities of each hero, many of which are similar but some of which are unique to each hero.
• Shark board: That's right, the shark gets their own double-sided board.
  The side used for act 1 allows the shark player to track how swimmers they've eaten. It also has spaces to track barrels attached to the shark.
• Tokens: Jaws has several types of card tokens.
  Crew tokens: To go along with their boards, the 3 crew get tokens. Quint gets 2 barrel tokens, Hooper gets a... fish finder token and Brody gets binoculars and 'beach closed' tokens.
  Swimmers: There 16 swimmer tokens in the game, all of them can be tasty treats for the shark.
  Shark tokens: There are 4 'power tokens' that the shark player can use once per game to give them an edge during act 1.
• Action log: This allows the shark player to secretly track their hidden movement, usage of power tokens and also track what information they have to give to the other players.

That's it for the Act 1 components, now on to...

Act 2
What's in a game?

• Game board: The other side of the game is used for Quint's boat, 'The Orca'.
  The Orca: This side of the board shows open sea and has 8 spaces to place the 8 tiles that form Quint's boat in this act. There are also spaces to place the 'Resurface' deck, 3 cards and a discard pile. More on resurface cards below.
• ​Orca tiles: There are 8 tiles used to represent Quint's boat which appears in act 2. They are double-sided, with one side showing the boat undamaged and the other wrecked. 
• Meeples: Act 2 uses the meeples for the 3 crew and the shark, the boat meeples are not used.
• Player boards: The other side of the player boards provide information on the actions that players can perform in Act 2. It also has a tracker for their hit points.
• Shark board: The shark board for act 2 displays the moves the shark player can perform and tracks the shark's (Very High!) hit points.
• Cards: Act 2 uses several of types of card.
  Gear cards: There are general gear cards as well as specific gear cards for each of the 3 crew. Generally they will be weapons and will show many dice are rolled to inflict damage. Although they are also attachable weapons and accessories which negatively affect the shark.
  Resurface cards: These cards will show areas where the shark might resurface to attack The Orca. It also shows how may dice the shark player rolls to attack and how hard it is for heroes to hit the shark back.
  Shark powers: The shark player will have a number of these that they can use to surprise the hero players.
• Tokens: There are tokens for both the crew and the shark.
  Targeting tokens: There is 1 round card targeting token for each player.
  Resurface tokens: There are 2 sets of 3 resurface tokens, each token in a set is labelled A, B or C. They are also round and made of card.
• Dice: There are 3 red six-sided dice that come with the game. They are not typical six-siders, instead of numbers they show 0, 1 or 2 'hit' icons.

Phew, I think that's it for rules!

Component quality for Jaws ranges from average to very good. Things like the cards and tokens are your pretty standard cardboard affair, which is fine.
The dice seem to be made of acrylic and although they're not as nice as wood, they feel quality with engraved icons instead of printed ones.
The wooden meeples are the standout component, particularly the wooden boats for Hooper and Quint, as well the shark meeple inspired by the films iconic artwork and I think they're cool.

As far as I can tell, the Jaws game has a relatively restrained use of photo art sourced from the film which only appears on a number of the event cards and even then it is used sparingly. It's wise decision in my opinion, as too much can make a game look cheap. The game also seems to reference artwork used for the shark from the film but because it's actually art, it looks good.
Otherwise, art used throughout the game is good, the swimmers tokens and player boards all look good.
The best artwork is found the Amity Island side of the game board though, it's an excellent illustration with lots of pretty detail.

There isn't too much iconography and what there is, is easily understood. Most of the rules information on components comes as written text.

Act 1
How's it play?
​Setup

• Choose players: 1 player should be the playing the shark and the other players will be taking on the roles of the 3 crewmates. If there are less players than heroes, then they should split the roles between them.
  Player boards: Give all players their relevant boards, meeples and tokens.
  Brody gets his board, as well as his binocular and beach closed tokens.
  Hooper gets his board, meeple, boat and fish finder token.
  Quint get his board, meeple, boat and 2 barrels.
  The shark player gets their shark meeple, power tokens and action log.
• Player board: Put out the player board.
  Brody: Put the Brody meeple on the Amity P.D. space.
  Hooper: Put the Hooper meeple on his boat and put the boat on the western dock.
  Quint: Put the Quint meeple on his boat and place it on the eastern dock.
  Put all the remaining barrels on the shop space.
• Shark: The shark player should put their marker on the 0 space on their swimmer tracker. They should keep their 4 power moves face-down and hidden from the other players.
  The shark meeple IS NOT placed on the board at the game start.
• Event cards: Shuffle the event cards into a face-down deck.

On to play
During Act 1, the shark player will be attempting to eat as many hapless swimmers as possible!
Meanwhile, the crew players will be using barrels both to try and locate the shark and to attach them to the shark. The more swimmers the shark eats, the more advantage the shark player has during Act 2.
The round is broken down into several phases and follows a more or less traditional turn order with each player having a number of action points they can spend to achieve their actions.
Phase occur as follows.

• Event phase: 1 card is drawn from the event deck, it will distribute swimmers to various locations throughout Amity Island's beaches. It may also confer a special rule for this round
• Shark phase: The shark player has 3 action points to spend in this phase and basically has 2 types of actions they can perform:
  • Move: All shark movement is hidden and tracked by noting it in the movement log. For 1 action point, the shark can move a space.
  • Eat: For 1 action point, the shark may eat a swimmer. This is hidden from the other players (For Now.) and also logged in the action log.
  • Power tile: The shark player may play on their power tiles, which they do by playing it face-down. Power tiles are once-only special abilities such as extra movement or extra stealth. Once used, they are removed from play.
  • Declare: Once the shark player has finished their actions, they must declare certain information to the other players. This can be done in any order the shark player sees fit.
    They must how many swimmers they've eaten and at what beaches is was at.
    They declare and name regions they passed through that contains a barrel.
    Finally, they must declare if they used a power token but not which one was used.
• Crew phase: The hero protagonists each get 4 action points to spend in this phase and the player can choose the order in which the 3 crew act. However, a hero must complete all their actions before play progresses to another hero.
  There are a number of similar but also unique actions available to the hero protagonists.
  • Move: All the hero protagonists can spend action points to move. Brody doesn't have a boat and must stay on land, while the other 2 must stay in their boats on the sea.
  • Pick up barrels: Brody can carry and deliver 1 barrel from the shop space. Hooper and Quint can pick up multiple barrels from the sea or docks. Hooper can also deliver barrels to Quint.
  • Rescue swimmer: All the hero protagonists can spend an action to remove a swimmer at their current space from the board.
  • Use binoculars: Once per turn, the Brody player can spend an action use their binoculars while at a beach. If the shark player is at the targeted space, they must reveal their position and put the shark meeple on the board.
  • Close beach: Another Brody ability. If the Brody player is at a empty beach, they may spend an action point to put their 'Beach Closed' token on that beach.
    The next time an event card would place any number of swimmers on the closed beach, flip the token to the 'Opening Soon'. Then if a following event card would add swimmers to that beach, instead return the token to the Brody player. Thus, this action protects a beach from 2 event cards.
  • Fish finder: Once per turn and for an action point, the Hooper player may put their fish finder token into their current location.
    Then the shark player must respond in one of the following ways.
    If the shark is in the same space as the fish finder, they must put their shark meeple on the relevant space on the board.
    If the shark is on a orthogonally adjacent space, the shark player must declare 'nearby'.
    If neither of the 2 above conditions it met, then the shark player must state 'neither'.
  • Launch barrel: Once per turn and for action point, the Quint player may fire a barrel into their space or a orthogonally adjacent sea space.
    If the shark is in the space that was targeted by the Quint player, they must declare the barrel has hit them and add it to their shark board.
    If no shark was in the space, the barrel remains there and acts as a sensor to detect shark movement during the remainder of Act 1 or until it is picked up again.
• Next turn: Once all the crew have taken all their turns, play progress to the next round, beginning with the event phase.

Act 1
​Endgame
Act 1 will immediately end if 1 of the following 2 criteria is met:
Barrels: 2 barrels are attached to the shark by the Quint player.
Swimmers: The shark player has eaten 9 swimmers.

On to play
During Act 2, the shark player will be attempting to either totally destroy The Orca or deal enough damage to the crew to what amounts to eating them. Meanwhile, in turn, they will be attempting to deal enough damage to the shark to defeat it.
Play takes place over a number of phases.

• Resurface options: The shark player draws 3 resurface cards and places them in their allotted spaces on the game board.
  Each card has information on the location of where the shark might attack as well how many damage dice will be rolled, how hard it will be for the crew to attack the shark and finally, if the shark will 'shake off' any attached objects.
• Shark player choices: The shark player now decides on an action.
  Resurface token: From the 3 available resurface options, the shark player chooses which one to use and places the corresponding resurface token face-down in front of them.
  Shark abilities: The shark player may play one of their shark ability cards face-down in front of them. Each one of these cards provides the shark player with a bonus or surprise special move of some sort.
  Once played, a shark ability card is discarded out of play.
• Crew Preparation: Now it's the turn of the crew players to make plans.
  Move: Each hero can move up to 2 tiles on The Orca unless they are in water, in which case, they must spend their entire movement to get aboard The Orca.
  Prepare gear: From their hand, each hero chooses a weapon to use, there are slightly different rules for the 3 weapon types which is explained below.
  Crew players may also use a 'chum' card that forces the shark player to reveal one of the 2 resurface tokens they didn't use which narrows the choices down for the crew.
  Use targeting token: Each crew player now puts down their targeting token on to a space, obviously choosing one of the spaces shown on the resurface cards. There are some rules for this though.
  Ranged: When using a ranged weapon, crew player can put their targeting token anywhere on The Orca.
  Melee weapon: While using a melee weapon, a crew player can only put their token on their own space or a orthogonally adjacent space.
  Attachable weapons: Targeting for these weapons is identical to melee weapons.
• Shark reveal: The shark player now reveals the resurface token they chose and places their shark meeple there.
• Crew attacks: Any crew players who correctly targeted the space that the shark resurfaced in, can attack it.
  The weapon that the player is using determines the number of dice used, sometimes it includes a bonus. The amount of 'hits' results rolled becomes the damage done to the shark. However, the resurface card will have a 'evade' value which is deducted from the damage dealt. If 4 damage is done and the evade value is 2, only 2 damage is done, it's possible to reduce damage to 0 this way.
  Attachable weapons are a little different, they automatically hit the shark and have a ongoing effect until the shark player manages to shake them off with a shake off action on a resurface card.
  To be honest, we found the attachable weapons to be of little value as the shark player generally managed to shake them off almost immediately.
  
• Shark attack: Once the crew have had their attacks, it's the turn of the shark! 
  The shark player can attack a part of the boat that they are adjacent to or a member of the crew that is in the water.
  In a similar manner to the crew players, the shark player rolls a number of dice as shown on the resurface card they chose.
  If it is dealt to a crewmate, then that's the damage they take.
  Attacking the boat is a little more complex, each tile 2 numbers, one is the attack value needed to damage the tile and the second larger number is the value needed to outright destroy the tile. Damage does not accumulate and must be applied in a single roll to have an effect.
  Damaged tiles: These are flipped to the other side and have a new value to beat to destroy.
  Destroyed tiles: Are removed from play.
  In either case, any crewmates on a affected tile are put into the water.
  Finally, as a bonus action, the shark player gets a free attack at crewmates who are in the water adjacent to them.
• Next turn: Once the shark player has had their attack, they remove their meeple from the water surrounding The Orca and take back any resurface tokens that were used. The resurface cards are then discarded
  The crew players take their targeting tokens.
  Then a new round begins.

​Endgame
Play continues until 1 of 3 criteria are met.

If the shark's damage exceeds its tracker, it is defeated and the crew collectively win.
If The Orca is totally destroyed, the shark player wins, or, if the damage on all the hero protagonists exceed their tracker, they are all eaten and the shark wins!

Overall
It's been a long time (And I do mean a long time!) since I watched Jaws but I feel the game does for the most part a good job of thematically emulating the movie.
Having Brody rushing around the island kicking pesky swimmers off the beaches and closing them only to have them open and fill with swimmers again felt like the movie. On the other hand, having Brody run around collecting barrels for Quint was strange.
While the shark popping up to attack swimmers before vanishing was cool, Hooper and Quint in their boats playing a cat and mouse game with the shark while trying to rescue swimmers seemed a bit strange. Especially considering the heroes are the cats and the shark is the mouse, which is a bit of a reverse of how the film plays out.
Having said all of that, Act 2 does a excellent job of emulating the protagonist's final confrontation with the shark.

So overall... This is more of a comment than a criticism on the game's theme.

Now, on to game play.
Act 1 presents an interesting cat-and-mouse challenge to the players which will change contextually according to how swimmers are distributed by event cards.
The shark player needs to eat swimmers but avoid spaces that the crew players might target and if possible, avoid the barrels that detect the shark.

Astute crew players will need to balance their efforts between trying to protect beaches with lots of swimmers and also covering lesser used areas. While the busier beaches might provide a target-rich environment for the shark, the shark player may anticipate the crew players protecting those beaches and avoid them for smaller 'quieter' targets.

I get the feeling that if the shark gets a lot of kills or very few, it will have a big influence on who will win in Act 2. Certainly, the shark getting 5 kills (Which is exactly in the middle.) led to a very close finish.

Act 2 also presents a sort of cat and mouse scenario with differing dilemmas for the shark player and the crew players.
The shark player will generally be faced with deciding whether doing damage or avoiding it, often the resurface cards will not allow the shark player to do both. The shark player will may also have the opportunity to target the crew instead of the ship. Eliminating one of the crew can be very beneficial as it lowers the number of attacks the shark may have to face but generally, it's harder and will take longer to kill a crewmate than it is to destroy one of The Orca tiles.

The crew players also face a dilemma. They know the 3 locations where the shark might resurface so with 3 protagonists could target all 3 locations, but this means spreading their firepower and it'll be a tall order defeating the shark this way. So the crew will need to try and anticipate which option the shark player will choose and this require assessing a bunch of contextual elements such as how much damage the shark will do, how high it's evade is and how damaged that part of The Orca is. 

All players will need to adapt to the random circumstances provided by the resurface cards and will probably have to trade off one strategy for another.
It presents the players will meaningful decisions to make, which is always a good thing.

However, there are somethings I definitely do not like about the game.
Firstly, Jaws is a one-vs-many game and I'm not a fan of this game type. Generally the mechanics of one-vs-many games can never balance for the fact that multiple human brains will have an advantage a single human brain. For the most part, it's fairly inherent that 3 players will see more strategies and opportunities than a single player.
Also; when someone is playing the 'one', games can be become a lonely experience since all the other players will be against them.
I can't help but wonder if the shark could have been automated and have the game be fully cooperative.

Secondly, because this is such a asymmetrical game, it means that one set of rules must be learned by the crew players and another by the shark player.
That's not the end of it!
Because there are 2 acts, it means that there are actually 4 sub-games that must be learned.
Luckily, none of the rules are particularly complex or hard to comprehend but even so, it feels like a lot of effort to play a game, then have to learn a new set of rules to continue. More effort than the entertainment the game delivers.

Normally I don't bother blogging about marketing or sales but I have to wonder who this is aimed at? Dedicated games, movie fans?

Most dedicated gamers are with good reason wary of licensed games. They tend to be quick cash-ins with lacking game.
To be clear I don't think that's the case for Jaws, while the rules are light-ish, there's depth of gameplay to found in the cat-and mouse mechanics that pits players against each other. I just didn't find it particularly compelling.

Jaws is a great, classic movie and I'm sure there are collectors of Jaws memorabilia and merchandise but will they care enough about the game to play it. I'm sure it will end up in the collections of those fans but will they be compelled enough to make make the effort to learn and play the game?

If you're really after a Jaws experience and are happy with the game's 2 act structure and cat-and-mouse gameplay. This is by no means a bad game and worth a try.
For me this didn't hit the spot and I have no desire to play it.

26th July 2022

It's Tuesday! That means it's time to meet up with the Woking Board Gaming Club at the The Sovereigns.

Time to steal the idol... and escape, Indiana Jones has nothing on this real-time, cooperative dice game, well at least until those crappy rolls inevitably turn up!

What's in a game?

• ​Tiles: The game comes with about 20 tiles, they depict various different kinds of underground sandstone chamber from a top down view. There are several different types of tile but all of them display a number of exits and also show icons of some sort.
  Main tiles: This includes the beginning tile and the escape tile, it also includes gem tiles, more on gem tiles later.
  The backs of each of these tiles feature 2 adventurer icons, also more on icons later.
  Gem depot: This is not a game tile per se and is used to store gems and track the amount which get used.
  Basic tiles: These are the most common type of tile; as well as a pair of icons they also feature an entrance (Stairs.) and exits. They are for the most part empty but some contain 'gem spaces'.
  The backs of these tiles also feature 2 adventurer icons
• Gems: Basic acrylic tokens in translucent green.
• Meeples: There are 5 of these suitably fedora-wearing meeples, one each in every player colour.
• Tokens: Circular card tokens, again in each player colour. These are used to quickly identify which meeple belongs to which player.
• Dice: Lots of dice! 25 to be exact and enough to give each player 5.
  These are not normal six-siders and all the numbers have been replaced with symbols which match the symbols found on tiles. The symbols are:
  Adventurer X2: A green man running away (Presumably from a giant boulder?) while carrying a whip!
  2 sides on each die has the adventurer icon.
  Key: A blue key icon.
  Torch: A red torch icon.
  Gold Mask: A grinning gold icon.
  Black Mask: A leering black mask, the black mask result on dice is bad news.
• Soundtrack: Yep! The game comes with a soundtrack, it serves as the game's countdown timers for the game's 3 rounds and it also plays atmospheric, moody ambient audio!

Escape: The Curse of the Temple has good quality components. The tiles all feel suitably thick and sturdy. The acrylic gem tokens are kind you see in a lot of games which use them to depict gems, they are a sparkly, pleasing shade of green though.
The bespoke dice and meeples are wooden which is always a nice touch.

There's not much art to speak of, the tiles show flagstones and that's about it. It's clear artwork that does not get in the way.

About half a dozen icons are used throughout the game, luckily they most relate to the dice and there's never a need to refer to the rules - which is a good thing since this is a real time game with a countdown.

How's it play?
Setup

• Tiles: Put aside the Start and Exit tiles, then shuffle all the remaining tiles into a face-down stack. Finally shuffle the Exit tile into the bottom 4 tiles in the stack.
• Start tile: Put the Start tile into the central playing area, since it has two doorways, reveal and place 2 tiles from the stack and place them adjacent to the starting tile with the stairs connected to the exit from the start tile.
• Gem depot: Depending on player count, place 7-16 gems on the gem depot tile. 
  Also place 2 gems adjacent to the gem depot tile, these 2 gems can be very important later on.
• Players: Give each player the token and meeples in their colour, then give each player 5 dice for their personal use.
  ​Each player should then place their meeple on to the starting tile.
• Soundtrack: Prepare the soundtrack.

On to play
In Escape: The Curse of the Temple players are collectively attempting to explore a lost temple to find the exit and escape before becoming trapped.
It's not so simple though; not only must they find the exit, they'll also need to activate the gem tiles and spaces to make their escape possible.
The game is played over 3 rounds and does not use a typical turn structure. Instead, turns are actually synchronous, in other words, players perform all their actions at the same time and in real time!
This involves all players rolling their dice and resolving their actions simultaneously. How is this all done? Read on.

• Soundtrack: Begin the soundtrack, the clock is now ticking.
• Roll the dice: When a player wants to undertake an action it is resolved by rolling dice, getting a required result will then complete that action. This usually means get at least 2 specific symbols on the dice.
  Rerolls: Players are free to reroll their dice as much as possible (And will have to do so nearly all the time!) to resolve an action. However, that brings me to...
  Black masks: Any time a die gets a black mask result, it becomes locked. A locked die cannot be rerolled or used for anything. When this happens (And it will happen.) the affected player should leave the die showing the black mask. Luckily, we come to gold masks...
  Gold mask: When a die comes up with the gold mask result, the player can use it to unlock up to 2 black mask locked dice. Very useful!
  Set aside: After making a roll, the player may set aside a dice on any face for later use. A player may also change their mind and reroll dice set aside in a later roll.
  A good example of setting aside would keeping a gold mask result in anticipation of getting a black mask later.
  Aid: If 2 or more meeples are on the same tile, they may help each other by contributing die results to the other player's action.
  A player can even use a gold mask of their own to unlock another player's locked dice.
• Actions: There are several actions each player can perform, which they can do in any order as required.
  Move: The player may attempt to move their meeple into an adjacent tile. The tile they are moving on to will show 2 icons that will need to be rolled. Typically this involves a green adventurer and 1 other icon - sometimes another green adventurer.
  After matching the icons, the player can move their meeple into the relevant tile.
  Explore: If the player wants to move their meeple through a doorway that does not yet have a tile, they must get a result with 2 green adventurers on their dice.
  Once this is completed, they flip a tile from the stack and place it adjacent to the doorway they want to go through.
  When adding new tiles to the playing area, the doorway with the stairs is always used to make the connection.
  ​Gems: Some of the basic tiles have space for a gem and number of the main tiles will have 3 gem spaces (For 1, 2 or 3 gems.).
  What's important about gems? Well, they need to be removed from the gem depot tile and put on the gems spaces on the tiles in order to allow the players to escape.
  How is this done? next to a single gem space will be a torch symbol and a 4. As an action, if a player gets 4 torches on the dice, they can move a gem from the depot tile to the space on their current tile.
  For the tiles with 3 gem spaces, 1, 2 or 3 gems can be shifted, however, only 1 of those spaces can be used on a tile. Furthermore, it gets harder to achieve  to move more gems. E.g., it takes 10 torch symbols to shift 3 gems, which is impossible for a single player and requires a group effort - probably with 3 players!
• Turn of fate: This action does not require rolling dice, it does however, require unanimous agreement from all players.
  When this action is triggered, it allows all players to reroll all locked dice. It's a powerful move that can free up a lot of dice but it comes at a cost. One of the 2 gems that were put adjacent to the gem depot tile must be added to the tile, thus making escape harder.
  Since 2 gems were put to the side, this can be done twice in a game.
• End of round: When a gong plays on the sound track, it marks the beginning of the end of the 1st round. All players must return to the starting tile before countdown expires and a door shutting sound plays.
  If a player gets back in time, nothing bad happens.
  If a player fails to get back in time, then they permanently lose 1 die for the rest of the game!
  2nd round: The second round now begins and is basically a repeat of the 1st round, players must again move, explore and shift gems until this time 2 gongs play and must return to the starting tile or suffer the same penalty.
  Even if the exit tile is discovered in the first 2 rounds, at no point can the players use it to escape in those rounds. Which brings me to the 3rd round and the endgame.

Endgame
When the 3rd and final round begins, all players must get to the exit tile and successfully perform the escape action.

• Escape: Obviously this action can only occur in the 3rd round and when the player is on the exit tile. They must then roll their dice to escape.
  The player must get a number of key results equal to the remaining number of gems on the gem depot tile, plus one! I.e., if the gem tile is empty, they still need at least 1 key. If there were 3 gems on the tile, they would need 4 keys.
  What makes this worse is that players cannot help each other in the final escape. Players can only use their own dice, which is why losing dice in the first 2 round can be really bad as can having too many gems remaining on the depot tile.
• Boon: When a player escapes they may give exactly 1 of their dice permanently to another player as assistance.

The soundtrack has a total countdown across all 3 rounds of 10 minutes.

If one or more players are still in the temple when the countdown has finished, then they collectively lose the game.
If all the players have escaped before the time runs out, then the players collectively win!

Overall
I'm going to start by saying that I'm a bit ambivalent towards real time games.
I've played some good ones and can see how they have their place in gaming but for me but broadly speaking, it's not why I like and play board games. I like to think out my decisions and choices at least a little bit.
Add to the mix a push-your-luck dice mechanic and you've a game of a lot of quick frantic rolling. You really don't want to roll those dice off the table!

Having said all of this, I think Escape: The Curse of the Temple is a solid game and there's a lot to like about it.

Firstly, rules and theme mesh together well. Chucking dice as quickly as you can to escape feels good.

The synchronous dice rolling is a clever little system.
Generally real time games are always trying to impress upon players that they're up against the clock, this can be a little jarring in a game where players are having to wait for another player's time to run our and get their turn. By having synchronous actions, it heightens the sense of urgency as everyone is in it together.

Being able to provide assistance another player on the same tile is equally clever. It's an elegant mechanic that also feels organic and makes sense.

This means it would seem like a good idea to have players explore the temple as a group, it would make shifting gems and unlocking dice easier...
But there's a couple of rules that throws a spanner into that strategy.

Firstly; exploring as group can slow down that exploration. Players can't escape if they don't shift enough gems or find draw exit tunnel from the stack.
Secondly; players will want to avoid creating single long corridors, they will need to return to the starting tile twice and the further away they are from it, the further it is to get back.

This will force players to split up or go in pairs or stick close by if they have the option, at least for the first 2 rounds.
This can change contextually when certain tile are revealed or have to be put in play in a certain way or a player get too many locked dice and so on.
Players will have to think quickly and decisively as well as adapt to emergent events.

Escape: The Curse of the Temple obviously has a quick playtime - 10 minutes! That feels a little strange because the setup and explanation time almost feels longer than a single game.
It's reasonably easy to learn, I can't imagine novice gamers struggling to learn the concepts here.
It also not a game to be taken too seriously and leans heavily on luck which is not unusual for cooperative games. Although, even accepting this, a bad run of rolls can sour the experience.
​But treat Escape: The Curse of the Temple as a cooperative, silly, fun, filler of a game and it will be a enjoyable time. So long as your luck is better than mine... much better!

26th May 2022

It's a Thursday evening and I'm in Aldershot with friends for some gaming goodness that's been a long time coming!

Is it tiny? Yeah pretty much. Is it in a dungeon? Definitely. Is it epic?... Well, you'll just have to see!
Tiny Epic dungeons is a cooperative tile laying (Or card laying really.) dungeon crawler with players taking on the roles of various heroes who will spend much of their time managing a goblin epidemic before being chased around by the big bad before hopefully defeating it.

What's in a game?

• ​Cards: Tiny Epic Dungeons uses a whole bunch of cards, most of them square shaped.
  In the corner of each card is a tin (sic) icon that indicates type of card it is.
  • ​Room cards: These square cards depict the game's titular dungeon. Each one is a room or a chamber and will have have various ways in and out.
    Typically these rooms contain a challenge or a trap to bother our heroes that they may choose to (Or be forced to!) attempt to overcome. Generally, success at these grants a benefit and a failure confers a penalty. Some will also introduce goblins into the mix.
    Entrance: This is the beginning card.
    Lair: This is where the heroes will find the boss.
  • Encounter cards: These are dungeon rooms that also contain minions. Minions are tougher than goblins.
  • Minion cards: These cards depict minions that characters will encounter. There are 8 of them and they include your standard fantasy monsters such as a troll, minotaur or giant spider, etc.
    Each card has a portrait of the pertinent monster and stats for armour, movement and 3 types of combat. There's also a damage track that runs along the edge of the card.
    Additionally, along the bottom it lists extra actions that can be triggered.
  • Goblin cards: There are 6 of these. Functionally they're almost identical to minions, except much weaker, having only 1 health each. Goblins are easy to kill but also spawn at a quicker rate, if too many are spawned at once... it spells bad news for the players.
  • Loot cards: Players can acquire treasure as they progress through their adventure and loot cards are magic items that confer bonuses on characters. Additionally, some items exist in sets which confer further bonuses if part or all of a set is collected by a single character.
  • Magic spells: Characters can potentially cast spells and these cards are spells that they can acquire.
• Oversized cards: Tiny Epic Dungeons also uses oversized cards or mats as the rules call them.
  • Torch mat: This card depicts a series of steps going downwards and acts a timer track. At the end of every turn the marker moves down a step, if it lands on a step with an icon, then that action is triggered. Generally these spawn goblins or trigger the extra actions of goblins and minions. If the marker reaches the bottom before they players find the boss lair, it's game over.
    This is a double sided card and it's flipped to the other side once the boss has been encountered. It is also downward heading set of stairs with icons on a timing track and again, if the marker reaches the bottom, the players lose.
    Finally along the top and bottom of both sides are spaces to position 4 goblin cards alongside the torch mat. Each goblin space is marked 1-4 and has a associated meeple.
  • Boss mat: These cards depict both the boss's stats and the boss' lair.
    The lair will contain a number of locations that characters may stand to fight the boss, some of which will benefit the characters and some of which will punish them.
    Bosses also have health track marked with one or more octogram symbols that relate to the altar tokens below and combat stats.
    Each boss card is also double sided and the flip side shows 3 rows of spaces for 2-4 heart tokens. More on these later.
  • Hero mats: Now we're talking. Each character in Tiny Epic Dungeons has their own mat which is essentially a character sheet. It shows their name, race and class such as dwarf fighter or wood elf rogue along with a illustration of the character.
    It also lists their health and focus, special moves (And some standard move too.) and numerical ratings for Speed and Armour.
    The final 3 stats; Strength, Agility and Intellect are rated by cubes. More this below.
    Finally along the edge of each hero mat, it has allotted spaces to place weapons, armour, spells and magic items.
• Miniature figures: There's an actual proper 3d plastic figure for each of the characters and they look like they're in the 25mm scale.
• Tokens: There are several types of tokens in the game, they all look they're made of wood.
  Heart & focus tokens: The focus tokens look like tiny lighting bolts that make their icon in game. Red hearts are for heroes and black hearts are for minions!
  Disarmed tokens: These cog shaped tokens also display keyholes and are used to represent neutralised traps. Curiously, they're the largest tokens in the game, noticeable so bigger than most other components.
  Altar tokens: These little black and white tokens have an octagram styled shape and relate to the bosses.
• Meeples: There are a whole bunch of little wooden meeples in Tiny Epic Dungeons.
  Goblin meeples: Should they be called geeples, gobples? Anyway, there are 4 of these and they are numbered, there's 1 for each that matches the icons on the goblin spaces on the torch mat.
  Minion meeples: Each of the game's minions has its own unique meeple.
  Boss meeple: A beeple? Even though there are 6 different bosses in the game, there's only 1 boss meeple which is a tiny (Sic.) omission, having said that and considering all the other components, it would be a bit mean spirited to be critical.
  It also looks styled after the eye of Sauron; which if you're going to only have 1 boss meeple is a pretty good choice.
• Dice: There are 4 dice in Tiny Epic Dungeons, 3 are black hero dice and 1 is a red enemy die.
  They are normal six-siders... well sort of anyway.
  Hero dice: The hero dice are numbered +1, +2 and 3-6. The +1, +2, 3 and 4 all also have focus icons, while the 6 also has a heart symbol.
  Enemy die: The enemy die is numbered 2-5, the 1 and 6 have been replaced with icons for a torch icon and a broken shield.

Tiny Epic Dungeons packs a lot into a small box.
The cards feel a little flimsy and the dice are plastic and feel a bit average but other than that, the components are all good quality.
The character figures are sizable and a pretty cool touch for a game of this proportion, while for the most part the tokens are small (Other than the disarm tokens.), they're still solid and well made.
But for me, the standout components are the meeples, not only are they nicely shaped wooden tokens, they also illustrated. It shows some thought and care has gone into the production.

The use of art is also good throughout the game, portraits of heroes, minions and bosses are all chunky and colourful, utilising a cartoony style that's used in a lot of modern fantasy games, it's a style I like 
Artwork used on the dungeons cards is also pretty good, there's a nice contrast between somewhat grey looking rooms and the colourful dressing and scenery that inhabit them and even the box lid features some evocative art.

This brings me to iconography. It's rare that I'm critical of a game's iconography and this is one of those occasions.
It's just that there's so much of it. A good proportion of it is instantly comprehensible, but a smaller proportion of it is not and a smaller proportion of a lot is still quite a lot!

I know that this is the result of game that is trying to emulate a D&D RPG style dungeon-crawl experience without a dungeon but even so: we played the game several times and I still did not recognised some icons. Between the fairly extensive rules and the extensive iconography, it gives the game a bit of steep learning curve.
Additionally; not only are so many icons, some of them are quite small, icons in the corner of the dungeons cards and the first time we tried to play I didn't notice them!

How's it play?
Setup

• Dungeon deck: Depending player count a mix of room and encounter cards are shuffled into 3 separate decks, Then they are placed into a single stack called the dungeon deck which will result in the early cards being room cards, the middle being a mix of room and encounter cards, while the lair will be close to the bottom of the deck.
• Other decks: Shuffle the goblin, minion, loot and magic cards into 4 face-down decks.
• Boss mat: Shuffle the boss mats and deal 1 face-down. This will be the dungeon's boss encounter.
  On the back are 3 rows of heart symbols that correspond to a 2-4 player count and have hearts equal to the number of players. E.g., the 3-player row will have 3 spaces.
• Torch mat: Put out the torch mat and out the torch token on the first place. Then put the 4 goblin meeples on their respective spots.
• Dungeon entrance: Put the dungeon entrance cards into the central playing area and put an altar token on the entrance, the others will come into play later. Then draw 4 cards from the dungeon deck and place them face-down, alongside the entrance card. This all forms the game's starting area.
• Hero mats: Either choose or randomly allocate a boss mat to each player. Each player should then take a heart and focus token and put them on to their relevant starting spots. Finally, the miniature for each hero should be placed on the entrance card.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

That's pretty much it for the setup.

On to play
In Tiny Epic Dungeons, the players must explore and reveal the dungeon, fighting goblins and acquiring loot and magic until they defeat enough minions in order get into the boss' lair and defeat them.
The dungeon in Tiny Epic Dungeons is always a 7x7 grid in size, with the entrance always being the exact centre of the dungeon.
When it comes to the active player's turn, they can broadly speaking: move, perform exactly 1 'heroic' action and any number of free actions.

• Move: During the active player's turn, they can move their character through a number of cards equal to their speed stat.
  Exploring: If a character's movement would take them on to a face-down card, then the active player flips the card, places it (Honouring all previous room connections.) and must move on to it, they then resolve the revealed the card.
  Encounter: After moving on to a card, it's encounter must be resolved. This might be a ambush by a goblin or minion, a trap or actually nothing! Additionally the card may provide a challenge for the character to overcome.
  If a goblin is encountered, flip a goblin card face-up and place it next to an available space adjacent to the torch mat. Then place that space's meeple on to the revealed card.
  If it's a minion, flip over and reveal a minion card. Put it's meeple on the revealed card and a black heart token on the minion card's health track.
  Expansion: Finally, the active player draws cards from the dungeon deck face-down and places them face-down next to exits from the revealed room. They must adhere to the 7x7 grid limit.
• Heroic actions: Characters may perform exactly 1 heroic action. This occurs after movement and movement cannot occurs after a heroic action. There are numerous different actions available.
  Skill check: A character may need or want to make a skill check. This may be because they want to overcome a challenge, cast a spell perform a search, need to avoid or disarm a trap or something else.
  Regardless of what has invoked the check, broadly speaking, they all function identically.
  All checks use 1 of a character's 3 stats; Strength, Agility and Intellect. Sometimes the nature of the check will determine which is used, other times, the player can choose. Checks also have an numerical value which is its difficulty.
  All stats are rated 1-3, this is how many hero dice the player will roll for the check. Thus a character with Strength 3 will roll 3 hero dice.
  Once the dice are rolled, the player keeps 1 die as their result which is compared to the difficulty of the challenge, if it meets or beats the number, the check is successful. However, there's a bit more to it than that.
  If any of the unused dice show a +1 or +2, then those results can be added to the die that was used, increasing its score.
  Furthermore, any used dice that show any resources are acquired by the player are the check is resolved.
  Combat: Combat is a little different to skill checks and is broken down into melee, ranged and magic, each type relates to 1 character stat.
  When the player rolls their hero dice, they also roll the enemy die at the same time.
  After making their combat roll, the player compares their result with their enemies armour value, every point that exceeds the armour value inflicts a point of damage on the enemy.
  Once the player's attack has been resolved, if the enemy is still standing, then they counterattack using the result of the red enemy die. This is a value that is added to the enemy's combat value and compared to the characters armour value and inflicts damage in the same way as a character attack. Additionally, there are 2 other results on the enemy die:
  The torch symbol deals no damage to the character and instead moves the torch token down 1 step on the torch mat.
  The broken shield result means that the character's armour value is ignored​ and the enemy deals their base damage to the character.
  Rest: As their heroic action, a character may rest. htlyIt may not seem heroic but it is useful as it replenishes some of their health and focus.
• Free actions: Characters may perform any number of free actions, additionally, free actions can be performed at any time, before or after both movement and heroic actions.
  Free actions tend to be support actions that don't have direct effects, some of which are listed below:
  Modify results: A character may expend focus points to alter the results of a skill check/combat roll.
  Research: The active character may spend focus points to acquire spell cards.
  Trigger/modify abilities: The active character may have abilities or loot items which confer benefits, typically these can be triggered by paying it's activation cost.
  Explore: This free action allows the player to reveal face-down cards adjacent to their character's current position. This is fairly costly though and to activate this action, the torch token must be moved 1 space down the torch mat track. More on the torch mat below.
• Turn end: Once a character has finished all their actions, it triggers the final action of the turn, which is to move the torch token down a space on the torch track. This can have no effect or may trigger one of the following 2 actions:
  Enemy actions: If this is triggered, all goblins and minions may move and/or attack the heroes.
  Spawn goblin: When this action is triggered, turn over a goblin card and place it on a relevant space adjacent to the torch track. For goblins spawned in this manner, their meeple is always placed on the entrance card.
• Next player: Play now progresses to the player on the left.

Other rules
There are also some other rules that need covering.

• Defeating enemies: When a goblin is defeated, it's card is put into a discard pile (And thus may be spawned again) and the meeple is returned to it's starting spot on the torch mat.
  It's slightly different for minions: Firstly, minions have a health track that must be depleted before it is defeated. When this occurs, it's black heart token is placed on the heart row on the face-down boss card. Unlike a goblin, when a minion is defeated, it is out of the game.
  Defeating enemies usually gives the players a reward in the form of a loot or magic card.
• Being defeated: If a character's health is dropped to 0, they are knocked unconscious. This means in the player's following turn, the hero must take the rest action and no other actions.
• Boss lair: Even if the lair is found, it cannot be entered until all the black hearts are placed on the back of the boss mat. I.e., all the minions are defeated. Once this is done, characters can get into the boss lair...

That's not quite it, once the lair is opened, the game goes into Act 2 and there's more for the boss.

• Reveal Boss: Flip over the boss mat, revealing the boss.
  Put the boss meeple on it's starting spot.
  Put the black heart tokens that were put on the back of the card on to the health track - it means that the boss will have multiple health tracks!
  Finally, put altar tokens on the cards that spawned minions.
• Torch mat: Flip the torch mat to it's other side and put the torch token at the top of the torch track, essentially resetting the track for the boss fight.
• Lair actions: Characters can move into spaces in the lair and fight the boss, this can inflict penalties or grant bonuses.
  However, at some point, they'll need to get the boss out into the dungeon.
• Damaging the boss: Attacks deal damage to the boss' health tracks like normal. However, the black heart tokens cannot move past the altar symbol(s) until all the alter tokens had been put on top of them. How's that done? Read on.
• NEW ACTION - taunt boss: Characters now have a new free action that allows them to spend focus to get the boss to chase them. When the boss moves on to a card containing an altar token, that token is put on to the relevant space on the boss mat, once all the tokens are there, the boss can take more damage.

Phew, there are some additional rules, such as about acquiring gear and magic etc - but that's more or less the gist of it.

Endgame
In the first act, if a 5th goblin comes into play before any of the 4 adjacent to the torch mat are defeated, then the players collectively lose.
If at any time the torch token reaches the end of the track on either side of the torch mat, then the players lose.
If the players get to act 2 and reduce all the boss's health tracks to 0, they collectively win!

Overall
So, Tiny Epic Dungeons has quite a lot rules, I feel it's not particularly complicated but there's certainly a lot going on and that means that there's a lot to remember in this fairly ambitious attempt to recreate the D&D style dungeon-crawling experience. The question is, does it succeed? Well... sort of.

The thing is, Tiny Epic Dungeons can't hide it's cooperative board game DNA. it utilises a commonplace cooperative mechanic of making the players choose between working towards their objectives (In this case exploring the dungeon, finding and defeating minions and finding the boss lair.) with managing an ongoing, constantly expanding threat (In this case preventing 5 goblins spawning in the game.). Players will be faced with choosing between the two. Furthermore, the constant ticking countdown of the torch track will encourage players not to dawdle and cooperate as much as possible.
Another challenge facing players is placement of dungeon tiles all current passageways must be honoured and the game has a strict 7x7 size. If player don't think a step ahead, there's a risk that a pathway may lead to a dead-end too early, leaving a portion of the 7x7 grid inaccessible.
Mechanically, these are all good, they put players in the position of having to make meaningful decisions. However, they do feel a little un-RPG-ish.

During this early stage of the game we did encounter a noteworthy quirk; one character could not leave the entrance for about a quarter of the game! At the start of their turn, there was always a goblin on the entrance card thanks to spawning from the torch track. Once they defeated the goblin, they could no longer move and by the time of their next turn, there was another goblin on the entrance!

One thing I like is how the game clearly differentiates between the early and late game. When the boss is revealed, everything changes and priorities shift somewhat. Exploration and goblin management become less important and dealing with the boss more so which thanks to the altar tokens requires more than just dealing damage to the big bad.

All of this should serve to make Tiny Epic Dungeons a good game but truth be told - it's all a little unremarkable.
​
Combat feels unexciting, particularly when dealing with goblins again and again, it felt repetitive and frustrating. They're not a threat because they're tough (They're not tough!), they're a threat because the rules say that you lose if you don't defeat them quick enough.
The dice mechanic used is pretty cool though. I like that the unused dice can give a benefit, e.g., not using a 6 as the result of a skill check because as it provides a point of health gives players a meaningful decision to make when choosing which die to use for a skill check.

The dungeon exploration experience it provides is pretty standard and OK but the lengthy rules and having to interpret fiddly icons mires the game in slowness and interfere with the pacing. Even after several play throughs, I look at the icons and think, 'Wait, what does that do?'.
After more play throughs I'm sure that the rules will provide no obstacle but I feel little compulsion to play it again, which is a bit of shame as it looks really nice.

While there's nothing wrong with Tiny Epic Dungeons and I can't find any fault with it, I also can't find a reason to like it.

19th May 2022

It's a Thursday and I'm enjoying an evening of gaming in Aldershot for the first time in actual years! Take that Covid-19!

Cho chooo! Switch & Signal is a cooperative board game about managing train schedules, that's right - you're playing the generously proportion controller and how do you control these schedules. With switches and signals of course!

What's in a game?

• Board: This is a double-sided board, one side features a chunk of western Europe and the other is the continental United States. Mechanically speaking, the European side is the 'easier' to play.
  Railways: Both maps feature a brightly coloured landscape dotted with various cities (In 4 colours.) and the port Marseilles which are connected by criss-crossing railway lines. At the edge of the network are 'deployment points' numbered 2-12
  Switches: Where the railway lines intersect, there are 3 or 4 small circles on the junction, depending on whether it's a T-junction or a cross-road. These circles represent switches and are used to control the flow of rail traffic throughout the game.
  Signals: Along most lines are red-light symbols, there are also red-light symbols at every entrance to every city. These are the game's titular signals and must be managed to keep trains moving along swiftly.
  There are 9 supply spaces to place the game's 3 sets of 3 differently coloured trains.
  There are also spaces to place the game's 2 deck of cards and a 'clock' space for time tokens.
  There are also 3 portraits of 3 different characters, each of these characters are 'helpers' and has a special ability that can be made use of once per game.
  Finally, on the European side of the board there are 8 little spaces in the port of Marseille where little cubes will be delivered to. On the U.S. side, they are split over two different opposite edges of the railway network.
• Trains: These are plastic models of trains and there are 3 each in black, brown and grey. In game terms, each type of train travels at a different speed.
  Each train also has a spot to place a little wooden cube.
• Dice: Switch & Signal comes with 5 six-sided dice including a pair of normal six-siders. These are used during deployment.
  The 3 other dice are coloured black, brown and grey, which correspond with the 3 types of coloured train. These are not numbered normally and each on has a unique distribution of numbers to represent the different movements of the different types of train.
• Switches: These smaller wooden black discs are used on the board and 2 are placed on the small circles on every junction to indicate which way a particular set of junction points are facing. They can be moved around to different circles on the junction change it's alignment.
• Signals: These larger wooden green discs represent green 'go' signals and are placed on the red-light spots on the board to let trains past.
• Cubes: These are the traditional little wooden cubes we all know and love. They represent goods that need delivering to their destination, there are 8 and there are 2 each in 4 colours which correspond to the 4 coloured cities on the board.
• Cards: Switch & Signal makes use of 2 types of card.
  Departure cards: These cards feature pictures of the 3 types of train.
  If trains appear the top half of the card, they will always be 'multicoloured', it shows whether 0, 1 or 2 trains will be deployed on to the board.
  If it's in the lower half, it indicates the type of train that will move this turn.
  Frequently trains will appear on both halves of the card.
  One departure card is the starting departure card and always deploys first.
  Action cards: There are 3 types of this kind of card that allow players to perform their actions. There are switch setting, signal setting and train movement cards.
• Tokens: There are 3 types of tokens in Switch & Signal, they are all the standard type of card token.
  Time tokens: These round tokens each feature a illustration of a old-school analogue clock face and as you may imagine, used to track time.
  Location tokens: There are 11 of these octagonal tokens, which are just numbered from 2-12. These are part of the optional rules to further randomise deployment
  Cover tokens: These rectangular tokens are marked with an 'x' and are used in conjunction with the characters on the board.

Quality-wise, all of Switch & Signal's components are made to the usual high standard we've come to expect from modern game and nothing feels particularly flimsy. The game makes good use of a wooden components, especially the dice that are nicely rounded and is something I always like.
​The notable components are the little plastic trains which each contain a space to put a wooden goods cube.

The art is good, the boards are colourful and uncluttered with some nice illustrations for various cities. The art on the cards is equally good.

The game's use of iconography is straightforward, easily understood and doesn't prove an obstacle.

On to Play
Setup
This set up is for the European beginning default game, the rules provide options to alter the game's challenge and the U.S. side has some different rules.

• Board: Put out the board and put all the trains on their allotted spaces as per their colours.
  ​Cubes: Put the cubes on to their pertinent city, thus each city will have 2 cubes in its colour.
• Time tokens: Put the 7 time tokens on their space. This number can be varied to make the game easier or more challenging.
• Switch & signals:
  Switches: Switch tokens must be put on all the junctions as shown in the rulebook. In later games, players can choose how to align these junctions.
  Signals: The game uses 8 signal tokens, they too must be placed on the map as shown in the rulebook. 1 is placed on a spot on each city and the remaining 3 are placed on spots on the railway tracks.
  Again, the starting spots can be altered in later games and the number of signal tokens can also be varied.
• Cover tokens: Place the 3 cover tokens adjacent to the 3 helpers.
• Departure cards: Shuffle the departure cards cards into face-down deck, discard 2 and place the remaining 16 their space on the board.
• Action cards: shuffle them into a face-down deck on their allotted space and deal 5 action cards to each player.
• First player: Determine a starting a player.

On to play
The objective in Switch & Signal is to collect all 8 cubes from the 4 cities using the trains and deliver them all to Marseille.
Switch & Signal functions much like a lot of cooperative games; that is the active player flips a card and resolves it's actions on the board. Then the active players takes their action(s).

• ​Departure card: The first departure card in the game is always the same and instructs players to deploy 1 train of each colour.
  After this card, the first thing the active player does at the start of their turn is flip over and resolve a departure card. This will have 2 phases.
  ​Deployment: At the top of card it will show 0, 1 or 2 multicoloured trains. If it shows 1 or 2 trains, then the active player must take many trains from the supply on the board, they can choose any of the 3 colours if they're available.
  Roll the dice: Then for each train, they must roll the deployment dice, this gives a result of 2-12 and the train must be put on the corresponding entry spot on the game board.
  If the active player cannot deploy a train for any reason, the players collectively lose 2 time tokens.
  Movement: The bottom have of the departure card will display 1, 2 or 3 trains, they may have a specific colour or may be multicoloured.
  The active player must resolve the movement of these trains in the order they are shown on the card. Thus if a card shows a brown train, then a black train, the active player must resolve movement for all brown trains on the board then all black trains on the board. The active player may choose the order in which trains of a single colour are moved.
  Additionally, if a multicoloured train is showing, then the active player must move all the trains of a single colour of their choosing. Again, the active player chooses the order in which all the trains in a specific colour are moved.
  Roll the die: When the active player moves a train, they roll the die of the matching colour and must​ move the train that many spaces along the rail track and going through the junctions as they have been set up.
  The dice do not have equal numbers and the numbers are distributed as follows.
  Grey: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2 & 3.
  Brown: 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, & 4.
  Black: 2, 3, 3, 4, 4 & 5.
  You will see that black trains for example; move much quicker than grey ones and will nearly always move the same or more spaces. It's very important to remember this distinction between trains.
  When trains move they cannot pass a red signal (A green disc must be on a red-light in order to pass it.), nor can they pass any other train. If this occurs, then the train stops at the signal or behind the other train and the active player must discard time tokens equal to the movement that was not completed. The only exception is when a train enters a city, in this case, the train will always stop, regardless of its speed at no penalty.
  Additionally: If a train went head on into another train or goes off the board through an entry point, it incurs a loss of time tokens and the train is placed back on the supply.
• Actions: Once the departure card has been resolved, the active player can take their actions, this is done by playing cards from their hand. They can play any number of cards from none to all.
  Cards have the following actions
  Switch setting: The player can play one of these cards to change the alignment of any one junction.
  Signal setting: This card allows the active player to move a signal token from any red-light to another, provided every city always has at least 1 token.
  ​Train movement: As you may have surmised, playing a train movement card allows the active player to move any single train - this is done by rolling its die.
  Wild action: By discarding any 2 action cards, the active player may carry out any one of the above 3 actions.
  Load train: When an unloaded train is in a city with an available cube, the active player may discard any action card to load the cube on to the train.
• Other rules:
  Helpers: Each of the 3 helpers can be used once per game and provide a once-only benefit. When a helper has completed their action, use a cover token to cover their ability.
  Delivery: When a train the port city (in this case Marseilles.), if it carrying a goods cube it's automatically unloaded and the cube is put on its relevant delivery spot. The train is returned to the supply.
  Time tokens: You'll have noticed that when things go wrong, the players will be asked to discard 1 or more time tokens.
  What happens when they run out? Then the players must discard a departure card and then replenish the supply of time tokens. Losing a departure card might not sound so bad but believe me.. it is!
• End of turn: Once the active player has used all the action cards they can or want to, they draw 5 move action cards with a maximum hand size of 10.
  Play then progresses to the player on their left.

Endgame
Play continues until one of the following conditions is met.
If the players run out of departure cards and they have to draw one, then they collectively lose.
If all 8 cubes are delivered, then the players immediately win.

Overall
If you play a lot of cooperative games, the basic mechanics will be familiar here:
Turn over a card and resolve it's action which will create obstacles for the players, then have them perform some actions and choose between progressing the objective or mitigating the problems caused by the drawing of cards.
Rinse and repeat.

Something about Switch & Signal feels a little different though. Maybe its because the departure cards are so contextual.
The trains being moved by the departure cards are both the cause of problems for players and also the means to victory. On more than one occasion, we wanted to move a train but didn't want to spend a card to do so, instead we left it to the 'game' and departure cards to do the job for us.
​It's pretty rare for players to want the 'bad things happen' card to actually do something in a cooperative game.

How trains are moved is vital. Not only do players have to move them into cities to pick up goods, they'll need to manage the different speeds they move at. Getting a fast train behind a slower one is a disaster, no two ways about it.
This is exacerbated by the random nature in which trains are deployed on to the board by the dice.

Players will also to manage the titular switches and signals. They'll look to create clear routes with full green lights to the port and funnel trains down that route in the correct order.
It's a real balancing act though, it's hard to get the junction points where you want them and there's are never enough green lights.

I have to say, that when it works, it feels extremely satisfying.
I've never been a train controller but Switch & Signal genuinely makes me feel a little like one as I think about how to prioritise trains and set up routes with minimum card expenditure.

This brings me to a final point about the game. I said earlier that being forced to discard a departure card is not good and I meant it!
Switch & Signal is a well balanced game and it seemed every victory, every loss came down to the wire, came down to the last departure card or two and losing one felt very risky.
I found it a lot of fun.

If you like train-themed games, Switch & Signal is worth a look, how many cooperative trains games are there?
​If you like cooperative games, you really should give this a try. It's blend of familiar and unique mechanics makes it easy to get into yet different to other cooperative games. 

26th April 2022

Tuesday is here and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club.
​
Does Hellapagos mean hell in the Galapagos islands, I didn't see any giant tortoises in the game?

Anyway; Hellapagos is a (Somewhat!) cooperative game about surviving the ordeals of being shipwrecked on what would in other circumstances be a tropical paradise, building rafts and escaping.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Hellapagos comes with a oblong board that depicts an idyllically and cheerfully colourful tropical beach scene with survivors scavenging and hunting.
  There are spaces for completed raft cards and the weather deck.
  Raft track: There's a track to monitor the 6 stages required to build a raft.
  Resource track: Running around the perimeter of the board is the track for food and water.
• Cards: The game makes use of a couple of types of cards.
  Wreckage cards: This deck of cards contains items that players might find when scavenging the wrecked remains of their boat. This might include bottled water, food or even weapons and more!
  Weather deck: This slim deck of cards is used to manage the very changeable weather and rainfall in Hellapagos. Each card will display a number of raindrops to represent the weather.
  Hurricane card: This card goes into the weather deck, when it appears, it's bad news!
  Status cards: Double-sided cards which displayed the poisoned status for people unfortunate to be poisoned and on the flip side show the dead status for really unfortunate players.
  Raft cards: When the players manage to build a raft, they get a raft card.
• Cardholder: A fantastically unnecessary but excellent little card holder for the wreckage deck.
• Wooden balls: Used to manage both hunting for fish and scavenging for wood. There are 6 of them, each one shows 1-3 fish and one is black.
• Bag: This looks like a hemp bag and is used to blindly draw the wooden balls.
• Tokens: There are distinctly shaped tokens for the game's 3 types of resources, a water drop for water, a fish token for food and errr, a disc for wood?

Only the cards are what I would consider average in build production, which is to say, they're fine. The tokens feel suitable chunky, as do the balls and bag (Sic) which are a nice touch. The standout component is the completely superfluous cardholder which displays like the wrecked hull of a half sunken ship.

Hellagapos makes use of excellent bright and colourful artwork throughout, especially on the cards. With thick black lines and lots of colour it has an almost ligne claire quality to it. Furthermore, there's also a lot of humorous subtext to the art. Like the pendulum that makes another player take a one action of their chosen by the card-player (Hypnotises them!) and so on.

There's minimal iconography in the game and what there is, such as water or fish icons ​are easy to comprehend. Actions on the survivor cards are all detailed by text instead.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board: Put out the game board.
  Resources: Put the food and water tokens on their starting positions on the resource track as determined by the player count.
  Raft track: Put the wood token on to the 0 spot on the raft track.
  Raft deck: Put out the raft deck adjacent to the board.
• Weather deck: Shuffle the weather deck and draw 5 cards into a face-down deck.
  Now shuffle the hurricane card into this deck.
  Place the deck (Now with 6 cards.) face-down on to the weather card space on the board.
  Put the remaining weather cards on top off the 6 cards.
  This means the hurricane card will appear somewhere in the last half of the weather deck.
• Wooden balls: Put all 6 wooden balls into the bag and give it a vigorous shake.
• Wreckage cards: Shuffle the wreckage cards into a face-down deck. Deal 3 or 4 to each player as per player count.
  Put the remaining cards into the cardholder.
• First Player: Determine a start player.

On to play
Hellapagos uses a normal turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progresses to the player to their left.
The game has 4 basic actions a player can perform but because it's a cooperative game, there can be a lot of discussion about moves and strategies among players and later, negotiation taking place.
A round represents 'a day' and plays as follows

• Weather: Any previous weather is discarded and the active player flips over a weather card which will set the rainfall for the day which depicted as raindrops. This might be 0 or all the way up to 3 raindrops.
  In the latter half of the game, the hurricane card may appear, more on this below.
• Actions: Now, starting with the first player, each person takes 1 of the actions below.
  • Catch fish: The active player blindly pulls a wooden ball from the bag, the number of fish displayed on the ball is how many fish they collected and the food token on the resource track is increased accordingly.
  • Collect water: For their action, the active play may choose to collect water. The amount collected will be dependent on the current weather card and thus will be between 0-3. Obviously collecting water when there are 0 raindrops on the weather card is a pointless, conversely, collecting water when there are 3 raindrops would allow them to move the water token up the resource track by 3.
  • Collect wood/build raft: When collecting wood, there is some risk attached.
    First, the active player should advance the wood token 1 space along the raft track.
    After this, the active player must decide if they want to risk collecting more wood. If they decide to collect more, they must announce how much they are collecting (Between 1-5.). Then they must blindly draw that many wooden balls from the bag.
    Black balled!: If any of the wooden balls that are pulled from the bag is the black ball, then the player is immediately poisoned and they do not collect any wood. More on poisoning below. If all the balls are white, they avoided the pesky snakes that inhabit the forest, collecting the full amount amount of wood that they announced and moving the wood token along the raft track and equal amount.
    Building rafts: Once the 6th piece of wood is collected (The wood token reaches 6 on the raft track.) then the active player has finished a raft! Place a raft card on the corresponding space on the board.
  • Search wreckage: The active player can spend their action to draw a wreckage card from the deck.
    There are 2 types of wreckage card; permanent and ongoing. Wreckage cards can generally be played by their controlling player at any time or in response to another player's action or card regardless of what type they are. Although their effect will occur after an announced action. (There are no 'interrupts' here!)
    Furthermore cards can be played face-up to try and intimidate or face-down to bluff as well as kept secret.
    Permanent: Some cards have ongoing effects, to make use of them, they must be played in front of the controlling player. Even though they are permanent
    Single use: These are one-and-done, players can keep these in their hand until they decide to use them.
    Wreckage cards have a broad number of functions, from helping the group to helping (Or harming!) an individual or even influencing voting. 
• Next player: Once the active player has taken their action, play progresses to their left.
• End of round/day: When a players have taken their actions, the following occurs:
  Consume water: Move the water token down the resource track by a number of spaces equal to the number of current players. If this would take the token to lower than 0, then the players have a problem. This means that 1 or more players will need to be eliminated from the game, the exact number will be equal to how much more water would be needed. E.g., if 7 players only have 4 water on the resource track, 3 players would have to be eliminated. This is done through voting (See below.), the game also provides various methods to eliminate players via wreckage cards.
  Consume food: This is mechanically identical to consuming water but for the food resource.
  Check victory conditions: Once water and food have been dealt with, players should check to see if they meet victory conditions.
  New first player: Once a round is over and the victory conditions have not been met, the player to the left of the first player becomes new first player for the subsequent round.
• Voting: This occurs when there isn't enough food or water and a player needs to be eliminated. The first player counts to 3 and all players simultaneously point at the player they want to eliminate. Whoever has the most fingers pointing at them is out!
  If an eliminated player has been hoarding a ration card that would provide the required resource, they can discard if after the vote to save themselves, although they may attract the irritation of other players by hording it in the first place. Alternatively, another player may choose to save them with a wreckage card.
• Poison: A player may become poisoned from searching for wood or eating or drinking bad rations. Regardless of the source, the effect is the same.
  Firstly, a poisoned character cannot participate in voting while they are sick, then in the following round, their only action can be to remove the poisoned status.
• Elimination: If a player is eliminated, then that's it, they're are out of the rest of the game. After this, their remaining wreck cards must be redistributed.
  All permanent cards they had in play - except a gun are discarded from play. The gun is returned to the eliminated player's hand.
  If a player was eliminated by voting, the cards they had in hand are distributed between their neighbours.
  If they were eliminated by another player, then that player gets all the wreckage cards.
• Hurricane: When the hurricane card appears, it marks the beginning of the end. The game will finish at the end of the current round, players must leave on any rafts they've built along with their water and food rations.

Endgame
There 3 ways Hellapagos can end.

• Check for victory: At the end of every round, the players must check if they meet the victory conditions.
  Victory condition: Once water and food have been consumed for the round, if the remaining water, food and rafts are at least equal to the current number of players, then they sail to safety.
  If all players got away, congratulations are in order, it is, in my opinion very difficult to achieve this.
  It's a likely occurrence that eliminating some players freed up resources to escape, if so, then the escapees can be considered the winners.
• Hurricane: When the hurricane card has appeared, players must leave the island at the end of the round if they can. They'll need the requisite water, food and rafts for this as per the victory conditions.
  It means players must be eliminated until their numbers are low enough to allow the remaining player to get away.
  Again, any survivors who get away can be considered winners.
  If players cannot leave the island on rafts for any reason... then see below:
• Total loss: If no players can leave on a raft after the hurricane hits, then everybody loses!
  If all the players manage to starve or die of thirst, goes without saying that it's a total loss.

Overall
There's a lot to unpack with Hellapagos and I'll start with the mechanics.
The write-up is a little long and belies the fact that in play, the game is pretty straight foward to understand and play.
More importantly; it's clear that the game's mathematics have been balanced so that it's very hard to get all players off the island. Which makes sense from a game-perspective, it forces players to consider different late-game strategies.

If say, a group of 6 players had 9 days to get off the island, they'd need the following.
Water: 6 per day +6 to leave -12, which is their starting water. So 48 water.
Food: 6 per day +6 to leave - 10, which is their starting food, so 50 food.
Rafts: At 6 wood per raft, they'll need 36 wood.
In other words 5.4 water per day, 5.5 food per day, 4 wood per day.
If the player split their labour evenly per task, that would mean:
2 players getting 2.7 water per day each.
2 players getting 2.75 food per day each.
2 players getting 2 wood per day each.

Getting both water and food at that rate is pretty hard. Each player would essentially have to get 3 or their chosen resource per day, every day. Since 3 is the top end result players could hope for, it's unlikely this will occur.
Getting 2 wood per day per player seems easy but each player has a 16% chance of being poisoned, this might not seem high but when it does occur, it means that they only get 1 wood and lose their next action. Catching up in a following round mean getting 5 wood, this is a lot more tricky.
Of course players may want to search the wreckage and rightfully so, there are some very useful cards to be found in there, including for example; cards that skip the consume food action among others. On the other hand, it's equally as likely that something which helps a player personally might be found...

Players may want to divide their labour differently as well; when lots of rain appears, it might be good to get more people gathering water and 'get 'ahead' on the water track.
A game like Hellapagos thrives on player social interaction, if people don't engage with it, it won't be a particularly interesting or memorable game.

Ultimately though, players will sooner or later come to a conclusion; there won't be enough resources for all the players to get off the island.

This changes the game in 2 ways.
Firstly, players will begin looking at who to vote off as food and water become scarcer. Players will try to emphasise their own usefulness and see who can be a good target for  elimination during voting.
This is where having a valuable item can keep a player alive. Some ongoing cards are very handy and eliminating the player who controls it, also eliminates the item. Not a coincidence in the rules I think.
Additionally, players may also look to horde rations on wreckage cards, waiting until voting has occurred, allowing others to be eliminated and only using it when they have been voted out. However, other players can look at this very negatively and it can draw their ire.
players are free to form alliances or betray one another, gang up on other players, openly or otherwise and so on.
Needless to say negotiation and voting can become very tense.

Secondly, people will start to realise that when player counts are sufficiently low, that eliminating players after collecting resources can leave the survivors with enough resources to escape the island.
The thing is though; it's likely that they'll be enough food and water to prevent any voting from going ahead. Players will have to resort to 'other methods' to removing opponents.
This is where the game gets brutal and the pistols start getting used.

Hellapagos mixes cooperative game play with a large dose of 'take that' actions. In the early-game it's all pleasant enough but once it progresses on, everything can change.

I, like many other people I imagine, am not a fan of games that have player elimination, luckily for Hellapagos, players won't generally spend too long just watching. It doesn't frequently occur early in the game and once the eliminations start, they don't stop until the game does!
I will also add; if game with lots of direct 'in-your-face' conflict and player elimination aren't your thing, it would prudent to give Hellapagos a miss.

but if this sort of thing is your jam, then with it's 12-player count! Hellapagos is a good game to try.

20th April 2022

It's a Wednesday and we're round Simon's for an evening of gaming.

Unlock! The Escape Game are a series of games drawing inspiration from escape room games and as you'll have gathered from the name, Star Wars: Unlock is a Star Wars themed Unlock! game.

Time to escape Star Wars!

Note: Unlock! games come with 3 scenarios and in the case of Star Wars: Unlock!, we played the Secret Mission on Jedha scenario, one of the harder scenarios and which involved being nasty Imperial spies running round a desert.

What's in a game?

• App: Star Wars: Unlock! is a app-drive game, meaning that a player will need to download the app to a smartphone or tablet.
• Cards: The game is primarily a card game and comes with several different types of colour coded cards. Cards are numbered in the top left corner and also display numbers/letters on their backs. Some cards will also display icons instructing players to discard specific cards. Along the bottom will be further instructions or flavour text.
  Each of the 3 scenarios has it's own deck.
  Starting cards: Each of the scenarios has its own starting cards that will kick off the scenario.
  Object cards: These cards are red and blue, they feature a number in the top left corner and depending on the colour a sort of jigsaw puzzle icon in the top right corner. Red and blue cards can be combined which each other, more on this below.
  Machine cards: Green cards are used to represent machines or vehicles and work in conjunction with the app
  Code cards: Like machine cards, these are used in conjunction with the app. These yellow cards are used in relation to clues, secret numbers and the like.
  Other cards: Grey is used to represent other cards and are used to represent locations or other objects, points of interest and results as required.
• Map: The Secret Mission of Jedha comes with a folded paper map of a desert region and is gridded with coordinates.

Star Wars: Unlock! is a card game with a map, quality wise it's exactly what you would expect of cards and a small paper map, which is to say; perfectly acceptable.

Art-wise, like all Star Wars licensed games I've seen, the quality is consistently high throughout. I don't know whether the art was created specifically for this game or was sourced from what must be a huge archive of art that has been produced and accumulated over the decades but regardless, it's all looks good and has a appropriately Star Wars feel to it

A few icons are used throughout the game, they're pretty clear and self-evident, I can't imagine they would prove an obstacle to players.

How's it play?
Setup

• The deck: Do not look at any cards in the deck and leave them all face-down. During play, players will search for the cards they need via the numbered backs.
• ​Starting cards: Select the starting cards as required and follow the instructions on them.
• App: Launch the app, the timer will begin counting down from 60 minutes.

On to play
Star Wars: Unlock! is all about discovery and deciphering clues which will eventually lead to the scenario's conclusion. Functionally, the game works a little like a gamebook where players would get to choose which numbered paragraph to read, except in this game it's done with numbered cards instead of paragraphs. There's also a bit more to Star Wars: Unlock! than most gamebooks though, especially in relation to how the app is utilised.
It's tricky to describe how the game plays, especially without some sort of spoiler but basically, the players collectively try to solve the puzzles presented to them.
What follows are descriptions for actions players can take.

• Choices: Location cards will frequently display an environment with numbers attached to points-of-interest. Players can simply take the cards with those numbers from the deck to gain further information about those points-of-interest.
• Combining: A red card can be combined with a blue card by adding their 2 numbers together to get a 3rd number, the card for this 3rd number can them be pulled from the deck. There will be times that multiple red and blue cards can be used create multiple 3rd numbers.
• Hidden Numbers: All the cards in Star Wars: Unlock! are illustrated and some of these illustrations may contain hidden numbers. If spotted by players can be pulled from the deck to provide them with something that was secret.
• Machines: When players acquire these cards, their number can be punched into the app which will in turn provide them with a puzzle or problem to solve.
• Codes: Sometimes a card will present the players with a dead-end such as a locked door. Players must find and enter the code into the app to proceed through the door - the app will tell them which card to draw next.
• Coordinates: The Secret of Jedha scenario comes with a map and this is more than just cosmetic. At some point the players will find themselves traipsing around a desert and where they go will be managed by entering the coordinates into the app.
• Penalties: When some cards are drawn, typically red herrings or the result of failing at something, they will require players to press the penalty button on the app, this will usually deduct 1 minute from the countdown timer.

​Endgame
There's no way to lose Star Wars: Unlock! per se, when the countdown reaches 0 it instead simply goes into 'negative time'.
After reaching a scenario's conclusion, the app will then rate the player's collective performance from 1-5.
Computer says you get only 1 Star!

Overall
Star Wars: Unlock! pulls some clever tricks with how it uses cards and how it combines them with the app to provide some engaging obstacles to overcome.
We're not geniuses by any stretch but nor are thick, so for the most part the scenario was well balanced, we were stumped for a while on a couple of occasions and referred to the app's hint system for a card once.  Otherwise the game was more or less straightforward.
The play time is fairly brisk in Star Wars: Unlock! with players facing with some unusual problems to solve while under the pressure of a ticking clock. 

The box states that 1-6 people can play but I'm sceptical about this. I just don't think that there's enough to do to occupy 4 people, let alone 6! By the the game's very nature, there tends to be a lot interconnectivity between cards and the clues they represent. This means that it's not particularly conducive for solving challenges to split cards between players and as a result, the cards will tend to be be hogged by some players while others are left twiddling their thumbs.
Playing with 3 people might be OK, 2 players and you're golden.

I'm also not a fan of app-driven games and licensed ones even less so: Eventually that game license will eventually and what happens to the apps distribution then?
Having said that, there's little replay value to the game, once all 3 scenarios are completed successfully, players will have no reason to return to the game.

​Putting those (Non game.) criticisms aside, if you like puzzles and problem-solving, then this may well appeal to you and if you also like Star Wars, then doubly so. Especially since it's also a fairly accessible crossover or gateway game the could attract fans who are non-gamers.