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.

20th March 2022

It's a Sunday and we're logged into Board Game Arena for an evening of fun.

Hanabi is a cooperative game about lighting a series of larger and larger firework displays. The catch is that everyone must rely on other players to give them clues to do so. Get it wrong though and the show could end early. 
Who thought fireworks could be so stressful, well... other than pets!

What's in a game?

• Cards: Hanabi comes with a set of 50 cards, 10 in each of five colours; blue, green, red, yellow & white.
  ​The cards in each colour are numbered 1-5. However, the numbers are not evenly distributed. There are three 1s, two each of 2, 3 and 4, while finally, there's only one 5 in each colour.
• Clue tokens: There are 8 of these round card tokens which are also double-sided, with the white side representing unused clues and the other used.
• Storm tokens: These round card tokens show lightning one 1 side and there are 3 of them.

Quality wise, Hanabi's components are standard, which are all perfectly acceptable.

All the artwork on the cards are understandably themed after fireworks in their respective colours. For the most part it looks clear but I've found that in dimmer light, the colours can look a little weak. 

Hanabi makes minimal use of iconography, the cards are cleared numbered while icons are also used to designate different colours. 2 symbols are used on tokens.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Clue tokens: Put out the clue tokens with the unused side up.
• Lighting tokens: Also put out the lightning tokens but with the lighting side face-down.
• Cards: Shuffle the cards into a face-down deck.
  Deal cards to players up to their hand size as determined by player count. Players should not look at their cards, they can never look at their own hands.
• First player: Determine a first player.

On to play
The objective in Hanabi is to create a stack of face-up cards for each colour by playing them in numeric order, starting with the 1 and finishing with the 5.
All of this must be done without any player looking at their own cards. Players should hold their cards up with the backs facing them so that all others can see what cards they have.
Players then provide clues to each other and use these clues to deduct which cards to play.

Hanabi uses a standard turn structure with the active player taking a turn before play progresses to the left.
The active player must perform one of the following actions.

• Give clue: The active player may give another player a clue. This clue will provide exactly one piece of information about that player's cards while also allowing the active to point at the pertinent card(s) in the other player's hand.
  It could be, "You have two yellow cards," or it might be, "You have one five," and so on.
  When the active player gives a clue, they must flip one clue token to its used side. If all clue tokens are flipped, then no clues can be given.
• Play card: The active player chooses a card from their hand (Which they still can't look at.) and plays it, upon which it is revealed to them. This will result in 1 of 2 effects.
  Correct play: If the card played is the next number in its sequence, then it is a correct play and is put on top of its respective stack. E.g., if the active player puts down a red 3 and a red 2 has already been played, the red 3 goes on top of the red stack. If a colour has no cards in play, then a 1 in that colour will begin that stack.
  Completion bonus: if a stack has it's 5th and final card play, it is completed. As a bonus, if a used clue token is available, it can be flipped back to its unused side.
  Incorrect play: If the card played does not continue the sequence, it is a incorrect play. Thus if the value of a card played is equal or lower than its current stack, it is incorrect. Or if it skips a number, it's also a incorrect play.
  When a card is incorrectly played, 1 of the 3 storm tokens its flipped face-up.
  Regardless of whether the play was correct or not, the active draws card from the deck, taking their hand size back up to 5.
• Discard card: The active player may choose to discard a card, when this is done a used clue token must be flipped back to it's unused side, a card cannot be discarded if there are no used clues. With is no big deal really, as the active can just give a clue instead.
  The active player then draws a card from the deck, taking their hand size back up to 5.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of the following 3 criteria are met.
Win: If the 5th card of all 5 stacks are correctly played, the players immediately win the game. They have achieved a perfect score of 25.
Lose: If the 3rd and final storm token is flipped over, the players immediately lose, scoring a big fat 0!
Deck depletion: If play progresses until the last card is drawn from the deck, all players get one more turn.
After this, the game is scored and the players collectively gain a score equal to the value of the top card on each stack, thus the maximum score of a incomplete game is 24.

Overall
One of the things I like about Hanabi is that it's a small, fairly easy to learn cooperative game that provides a solid challenge, it has a reasonably quick playing time and would work well as a filler game.

What's interesting in my opinion are the mechanics for clues and also clue tokens as they are inextricably linked. The game does a good job of balancing the usefulness of clues with their scarcity.
When giving clues, players will want and need to give clues as efficiently as possible, it takes 2 clues to clearly define what a card (Both colour & number.) is and this uses a quarter of the available clues which is a lot! Frequently that means a clue might need to have a implicit meaning attached. E.g.; the clue, "You have one green," might implicitly mean 'Play that green card!'
Players receiving clues will need to interpret and deduct meaning from the information they have now ​been given, combining it with the information they see in other players' hands before deciding what to do. Sometimes they won't have all the information they want, sometimes they'll need to gamble on a decision.

Flipping clue tokens back to their unused side can be vital to doing well, usually this will involve discarding cards and it also allows players to draw cards and put new options into play. Blindly discarding cards can be tricky though, if a 5 is discarded, there goes the chance to get a perfect score. - Not that getting a perfect score is easy, it's not!
Consequently, it's sometimes a good idea to give players clues about what to get rid off. not keep.

It should also be noted that like many cooperative games, luck can play a big role in Hanabi. If those lower value cards don't until later in the game, players will end up discarding higher value cards to get to them.

Hanabi does have some minor drawbacks though. Having to constantly hold up cards so others can see them feels a like a little bit of a pain. The same is true of drawing new cards and remembering not to look at them.
When a player is given clues about their cards, it can be a chore to remember not only what the clues are but also the location of those cards in their hand. Otherwise that can lead to some pretty devastating plays!
Interestingly, the digital version of Hanabi remembers the clues for players.

I also found Hanabi to be slightly frustrating, although this may be due to the behaviour of other players. It's definitely stressful watching another player not get the hint when they've given a clue.

These are minor quibbles and Hanabi is a unusual and challenging cooperative game that forces players to think hard and logically, provides meaningful decisions and some solid fun: Some big gameplay delivered in a small package.
Hanabi is definitely worth trying.

15th March 2022

It's another Tuesday evening with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns and we're playing Regicide

Is Regicide a cooperative game about recruiting heroes from a local tavern to go fight epic battles and raid a castle against a series of bosses (Who happen to be regents!), or is it just a deck of cards?

Turns out it's both.

What's in a game?

• Cards: Regicide consists of a regular 54 card deck of playing cards with the 4 regular suits, and 2 jokers.
  That's it really.

Well... there's not much that can be said here. It's a game that can be played a deck of ordinary cards and that's what it look like.
The official Regicide deck is nicely illustrated with some stylised and quirky fantasy themed artwork but it's still recognisability a standard deck of card.

And the game's iconography, well they're clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades. You get the idea.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Castle Deck: Separate all the jack, queen and king cards from the deck.
  Take the kings and shuffle them into a face-down deck, then take the queens, shuffle them and put them on top of the kings. Finally shuffle the jacks and place them on the queens. You'll now have the castle deck, a 12 card deck starting with jacks and going down to kings.
• Tavern deck: Take the remaining cards and add in jokers according to the player count, then shuffle the cards into a face-down deck, this is the tavern deck.
• Players: Deal cards to each player from the tavern deck up to the maximum hand size as determined by player count.
• First player: Determine a first player.

On to play
In Regicide, players must coordinate actions in order to prevail, however, they cannot communicate with each other.
During their turn, the active player uses one or more cards in their hand to attack the current enemy before then using more cards to resist the enemy's counterattack.
Play then continues to the next turn and the player on the left.

• Enemy: Reveal the top card from the deck, this will be the current enemy. Obviously the players will face 4 jacks before facing 4 queens and then ultimately 4 kings.
  All enemy's have 2 stats, Attack and Health, the higher the suit, the higher the values of these stats.
  Attack values go from 10-20.
  Health varies from 20-40.
• Attack: The active player may attack the current enemy by playing a single card from their hand next to the enemy. The attack's strength is determined by the card's value and thus goes from 1-10, this is how much damage is done to the enemy's health. Additionally, each card will also have a special power depending on its suit that is triggered during the attack.
  Clubs: A club deals double damage to enemy's health.
  Diamonds: This allows players to re-fill their hands from the tavern deck according to the value of the diamond card that was played.
  Hearts: Playing a heart repopulates the tavern deck with cards from the discard pile.
  Spades: If a spade is played, it lowers the current enemy's attack score by its value.
  Other rules: Below are the other rules that apply during the attack.
  Immunity: The current enemy will be immune to the power that matches its suit. Thus the queen of clubs will not take double damage from any clubs that are played. Immunities can be removed by jokers; see below for more information.
  Animal companions: The aces are animal companions and have a value of 1. This might not seem good but animal companions may be played with another card.
  This has 2 effects. Firstly it increases the value of the other card by 1, secondly it also triggers the animal companion's suit power. Thus a 5 of clubs accompanied by a ace of spades would do 12 damage and lower the enemy's attack by 6.
  Combos: If a player has cards with matching values, then they can be played as a set and their values added together, provided that combined value does not exceed 10. The max value of a combo would be 5+5.
  A combo also triggers all the suit powers of the cards involved. So theoretically, the 2 of every suit could be played for a combined value of 8 that would do 16 damage, put 8 cards into the tavern deck, deal 8 cards to players and lower the enemy's attack by 8!
  Joker: A joker can only be played on its own and has a value of 0. When played, it removes the current enemy's immunity. It also immediately ends the current turn, skipping the enemy's counterattack. The active player may then choose who gets to be the next active player which can be very useful.
  Yield: Players may choose not to attack, not play a card and instead endure the enemy's counterattack. Why would a player do this? If a player does not have enough cards to both attack and defend, they're going to want to yield and defend instead.
  Vanquished enemies: When the current enemy has their health reduced to 0 or less, they are defeated.
  The defeated enemy card and all cards played against them should be put into the discard pile (This is the only time cards are placed into the discard pile.), the current turn ends a new enemy is drawn from the castle deck. Thus the active player immediately begins a new turn against this newly revealed enemy by playing a new attack card.
  This means once an enemy card is defeated, it can be used by the players. This is very useful since the enemy cards are considered to have a value of 10-20.
  However; if an enemy was defeated by their exact health (Reduced to exactly 0 and not lower.), then that enemy card is placed on top of the tavern deck, not in the discard pile.
  Getting an exact defeat on a enemy card is a really powerful move because it immediately puts a strong card in possession of the players.
• Defend: Now the enemy can counter attack! When this happens, the active player must discard one or more cards which must have a combined value that is at least equal to the value of the current enemy's attack. Thus a queen has an attack of 15, therefore the defending player must discard cards which have a combined value of at least 15.
  Don't forget that any spades that have been played will reduce the enemy's attack and if the attack value has been reduced, then the defending player doesn't have to discard any cards.
  If a player can't prevent all of an enemy's attack, it's not good news!
• Next player: Once the active player has dealt with the enemy's attack, play progresses to the player on the left.

Endgame
Play progress until 1 of 2 conditions are met.
If the players defeat the 12th and final enemy, then they collectively win.
If at any time a player cannot discard enough cards to cover an enemy's attack, then the players collectively and immediately lose.

Overall
On a basic level players are faced with 4 choices when attacking and how to use the 4 suits and their respective abilities when playing Regicide is vital. The advantages of each ability are contextual and players will need to learn recognise when to use which suit. Suffice to say, players will need to make use of all the suits appropriately.
Of course it's not as simple as I'm making it sound. As with all cooperative games, luck plays an important part here and players will frequently find themselves lacking the cards they want, the immunity rule can also well and truly throw a spanner in the works too.
This forces them to make tricky decisions or find other approaches to how they attack and or indeed manage defence.

It should also be said that Regicide is a very hard game, very hard! I heard someone state that players can expect to win about 1 in 6 times but I feel this is an underestimation of the game's difficulty. We've played it numerous times and never won, we barely ever made it to the kings! Not only is the game hard off the bat, it just gets harder and harder!
I would argue that the Regicide is too hard, which would be my one gripe with it. Although it's entirely possible that there's some strategy that we overlooked.

​​Regicide has a fairly quick playtime which is in part due to it's brutal difficulty curve and could be a good filler game, although bear in mind that it definitely tests the grey matter.

It's a fascinating game that condenses a fair chunk of cooperative gameplay into a deck of 54 cards and gets a lot out of it. The rules are as impressive as the game is ruthlessly hard.
Regicide is a game worth trying if only to experience how such a game plays, just so long as you don't mind losing.

4th March 2022

It's a Friday and I'm in Farnborough with some workmates for some evening games.

The first game of the night is essentially 3 Wise Monkeys: The Game, known as Team3, although I'm not certain any of us are particularly wise?

What's in a game?

• ​Blocks: Team3 comes with 2 sets of 5 chunky plastic blocks shaped like tetrominoes. These blocks are used to construct the shapes shown on blueprint cards.
• Cards: The game has a 2 sets of square cards:
  Role cards: There are 3 role cards in the game, The Architect, The Supervisor and The Builder. Each role is illustrated by one of the three wise monkeys.
  Blueprint cards: There are 70 blueprint cards and each one displays a shape configured from the tetrominoes. The blueprint cards are divided into 3 decks labelled with 1, 2 or 3 stars which represent easy, medium and hard difficulties.
  Finally, each blueprint has a that shows the cards orientation.
• Plastic standee: A little plastic stand to hold a blueprint card.

There's not much to say about what few components there are to the game.
The blocks are made of sturdy colourfulplastic and feel very tactile, handling and playing them feels quite satisfying. Otherwise, the cards are pretty standard quality.

The game's art is monochrome and only appears on the role cards. The 3 illustrations are slightly cartoony looking but also fairly good.

Other than the images on the blueprint cards, there's no other iconography in the game.

How's it play?
Team3 can be played cooperatively as a team if 3 or competitively as 2 teams of 3. The 2 play styles are practically identical, the only real difference being how the blocks are allocated.
For the purposes of this blog, I'm going to describe the competitive game and point out how the cooperative game is different.

Setup

• Teams: Divide the players into 2 teams of 3.
  Cooperative: There is only 1 team of 3 in cooperative.
  Roles: Choose or randomly assign a role to each player. The 2 people playing architects should sit next to each to each other.
• Blocks: Give 1 set of blocks each to the builders.
• Blueprints: Sort the blueprint cards into their relevant types and shuffled them into face-down decks.
• Draw card: For the competitive 2 team game, only the 1-star cards used.
  Draw a card and place it on standee, position it so that only the architect players can view the diagram.
  Cooperative: In the cooperative game, the team decide which difficulty of blueprint to yse.

No the teams are ready to go.

On to play
Both teams play simultaneously and have the objective of putting together their blocks in the shape/configuration shown on the card which was drawn. However, there are some complications to this...

• The Architect: The only player on a team that can see the blueprint card is the architect.
  The architect must describe the configuration to the supervisor but without using words or sounds! The architect can speak no evil and can only use gestures to explain what needs doing. The only time the architect can speak is to confirm their team has completed the shape.
• The Supervisor: Since the supervisor cannot be spoken to, they hear no evil. Using the information provided by the architect, the supervisor in turn, must tell the builder how to put the blocks together verbally.
• The Builder: The builder can see no evil and therefore must keep their eyes closed for the entirety of the game! The builder must actually put together the blocks by following the verbal instructions from the supervisor.
• Point: Whichever team puts their blocks together to match the blueprint first wins a point!

Endgame
The team that reaches 6 points first, wins. Although this limit is fairly arbitrary and players can choose whatever score limit they want.

Cooperative
In the cooperative game, the team gets 3 minutes to complete a blueprint, if they take longer, they fail.
3 minutes might seem a lot, but the 2 and 3 star difficulties get much more complex.

Overall
There's little strategy that can be adopted when playing Team3, that's not a criticism though, Team3 is sort of a hyped version of charades that's all about communication and interpretation between teammates. As with actual charades, players will probably very quickly adopt some standard gestures to represent certain things.
It's also worth adding that the game comes in 2 versions Green and Pink, which can be combined to support up to 4 teams of 3 players.

There's not much more to say about the Team3 really. It's a light party game that is easy to learn and will have a lot of crossover appeal, it's not something to be taken seriously. If you looking for deep gameplay, look elsewhere.
With the right people though, Team3 can be a fun diversion or a good filler game.

28th January 2022

It's Friday evening and we're round Simon's for a night of gaming.

The game of the night was Apollo.

Houston.... we've had a game here.
One small step for gaming and errr, umm... one cooperative game for gamers?

Anyway, enough of the bad jokes.

What's in a game?
​Apollo is an symmetrical cooperative game where 1 player take on the role of mission control and the other players take on the role of astronauts on the titular mission.

• Game boards: Apollo uses 2 game boards of differing difficulty. One each for the Gemini and Apollo missions. The Gemini board depicts a flight path orbiting the Earth while the Apollo board shows a flight plan to the Moon and back to Earth.
• Mission packs: There are mission packs for both the Gemini and Apollo missions which each come in a silvery pouch reminiscent of the pouches used to store astronaut food.
  Each mission pack contains a set of double-sided flight stage cards and some experiment cards. These determine some of the challenges that each mission will face.
• Player screen: This is used by the mission control player to hide stuff that the other player should not know about. Inside, is artwork that various mission control systems and displays.
  The screen comes with widgets that can be clipped to it and then flipped up by mission control to alert the other players that comms are down or something else is wrong.
• Mission control board: This board is used by mission control to track how much damage the flight has taken. This is done with 5 sliders that track the module's 5 different systems; flight control, power distribution, life support, communications and experiments.
  Each go from 8 to 0. When the slider is at 8, everything is hunky dory, when it's at the lower numbers, those systems start encountering problems and when it's a 0, it's quite literally a crisis!
  The mission control board also has a space to place the current experiment card.
• Crisis cards: There are 5 sets of five crisis cards, obviously each set relates to one of the 5 systems.
  When a system crisis occurs occurs, a pertinent card is drawn and resolved, either by mission control or the astronauts.
• Crisis puzzle boards: There are 4 of these square boards, each with a slightly different layout. Certain crisis cards may force the mission control player to complete one.
• Tetrominoes: Used in conjunction with the puzzle boards.
• Astronaut board: This board is designed to look like the controls panels on the flight module and is obviously used by the astronaut players, it essentially has 5 spaces to place dice that correspond to the 5 areas on the mission control board.
• Flight damage board: This square board is used to track damage that occurs to the module.
  It consists of 5 'gridded' rows which again correspond to the 5 systems. Each row has 3 spaces which each contain a 'X' symbol and 3 bonus spaces. Finally there's a 6th 'blank' row at the bottom.
• Dice: There are 12 normal six-siders that come with the game, 6 come in yellow and 6 in black.
• Tokens: Apollo makes use of 2 types of tokens.
  Comm tokens: These tokens display COMM on one side and some will display an icon/action on the other side.
  +/- tokens: These double sided tokens are green on one side and red on the other, they also display a '+' symbol and a '-' symbol. These can be spent to modify the results of dice rolls during the game.
• Pawn: There are 2 types of astronaut shaped pawn/meeple (Astreeple?) in Apollo.
  Black pawn: This the experiment meeple and is used by mission control to track the astronauts' experiments
  Red pawns: these 5 meeples can be used by the astronauts to track information.
• Standees: There are Gemini and Apollo standees used to track mission progress on their associated boards.
• First player token: This coaster sized token displays a picture of an astronaut walking on the moon.

Apollo's components are pretty good throughout and it's clear effort and thought has gone into creating some of them.

The boards, tokens and player screen are all constructed of suitability thick card. While the dice are not wooden, they use a old school LCD numeric font for the numbers which is pretty cool, as are the pouches to store the mission cards.

The astronaut board and particularly the player screen feature very well themed artwork that calls back to sixties computer tech. The art on the astronaut board displays various dials and buttons is perhaps a little sparse but is also clean and doesn't interfere with the game element. Most of the player screen is decorated with evocative artwork of of what I imagine is module controls, the inside has some game information but the rest is an illustration of what mission control might look like. Dig the cup of coffee!
The art that depicts the Earth and the Moon is perfectly fine, they look like what they're meant to.
Finally, the flight stage cards are double-sided and as each one is completed, it's flipped over to show an illustration of that actual stage, which is a nice touch.

The game features little in the way of dedicated iconography, all the information is presented clear terms and is easy to comprehend.

How's it play?
Setup
Since Apollo is a asymmetrical game, it has a asymmetrical setup.

• Player Screen: The mission control player must put up the screen in their playing area and clip on the alert widgets on to it.
  Mission control board: Behind the screen they should place the mission control board and set all the sliders to '8'.
  Crisis cards: The mission control player should then sort all the crisis cards into their respective stacks, then shuffle them into 5 face-down decks and place them close to their related systems.
  Dice: the mission control player should take 1 yellow and 1 black dice and place it behind the screen.
  Comms tokens: The mission control player place 2 'blank' comms tokens behind the screen, then shuffles the remaining tokens into face-down stacks.
• Mission pack: Select the mission pack which has been chosen and set out the flight stage cards sequentially in a row.
  Then shuffle the experiment cards into a face-up deck and place the 1st one on it's space on the mission control board.
• Astronaut players: The astronaut players should put the astronaut board, flight damage board and remaining dice in their playing area.
• First player: A first player should be determined among the astronaut players.

On to play
Apollo is played over a number of rounds, each round has its setup and then is played over a number of turns.​ To make matters worse, Apollo is played in real time and each round only lasts 4 minutes.

• Setup: The mission control player tells the astronaut players how many dice they can roll - this is dependant on the life support rating - the higher the better and only the mission control player knows what the actual rating is.
• Roll the dice: One of the astronauts rolls the dice allotted number of dice.
  Assign dice: Dice results 1-5 are placed into their pertinent rows, covering up the 'X' symbols. 6's are put into the bottom row. After this, the 6's can be reallocated to any of the other 5 rows.
  Resolve dice: Any 'X' symbols not covered inflict that much damage to their system. If the flight control row is displaying 2 'X' symbols, the flight control system slider on the mission control board would have to be moved down 2 points.
  Additionally, each die in any bonus spaces, earns the astronauts +/- tokens (These cannot be used to change the results on the damage board.).

That's it for the setup, then the game goes into the round.

• Mission control player: The mission control player has a number of actions they can perform.
  Track flight: The mission control player moves the standee along its flightpath at the end of every player turn and also tracks when it will encounter a flight stage.
  Additionally, when a flight stage is completed, mission control should flip the relevant card over, revealing the picture on the back.
  Track damage: Mission controls tracks all the damage the flight takes, furthermore they can flip up an alert to tell the players something is wrong somewhere. Mission control may also spend comms tokens to verbally provide the astronauts with more information about damaged systems.
  Comms: Some comms tokens will also have icons or action on the flipside which mission control can spend to aid the astronauts.
  Track experiments: Mission control also tracks the astronauts progress on whatever experiment they're on.
  Deal with a crisis: When a system rating drops to 0, mission control must complete a puzzle board to get it up and running again.

The round goes differently for the astronaut players. Starting with the first player, each astronaut player takes a turn going clockwise and a turn consists of exactly 1 action. An action involves moving one or more dice from the flight damage board on to the astronaut board and resolving them
What are these actions and how do they work?

• Allocating dice: Actions usually require several dice and differing actions will have different dice requirements, they might require only yellow or black dice, or even alternating colours, some might require identical or ascending numbers and so on. Some actions (Generally flight stages and experiments.) require a set number of dice to complete, most of these actions can be completed over a number of turns, in this case, they stay on the relevant space until the 
  Other actions scale, i.e. the action gets better the more dice are allocated to it.
• Flight control: This action allows the astronaut players to contribute dice to completing the flight stage goal.
• Power distribution: This action allows mission control to adjust the sliders on their mission control board, this is also a scaling action, so the more dice allocated to the action, the more adjustments mission control can make.
• Life support: Using this action allows the astronauts to gain +/- tokens.
• Experiments: This action allows the astronauts to contribute dice towards completing the current experiment.
• Communications: Performing this action allows mission control to acquire more comms tokens.
• Repair systems: Allocating dice to this action allows mission control to increase the rating of one of the systems.
• End of turn: Once the active player has had their action, mission control moves the standee 1 space along the flight path and the next astronaut player become the active player.
• End of round: The current round ends when 1 of 3 criteria is met.
  All dice have been allocated.
  4 minutes are up.
  The astronauts decide to end the round.
  Regardless of how the round ends, the following round begins with mission control announcing how many dice the astronauts may roll.

Play progresses with the players (Hopefully!) successfully completing the required number of flight stages and experiments

Endgame
During play, if the module passes a flight stage space on the board without completing its requisite task or the flight control rating is lower then 4, then the mission immediately fails.
If the module reaches splashdown without completing the required number of experiments, then the mission fails.

However, if all the flight stages and experiments are completed, then mission is a success and the players win the game.

Overall
The rules for Apollo sound quite clunky in writing but in actual play, they felt straightforward and once players begin performing actions, it becomes quite understandable.  I wouldn't call it a crossover game but I imagine that it would be easy to pick up.

Apollo is quite unusual, being an asymmetrical cooperative game and I think it fits its theme quite well too.
Having that slight disconnect between mission control and the astronauts somehow lends the game a greater sense of teamwork.
Astronauts having to rely on mission control to get information and mission control having to rely on the astronauts to get comms tokens and to be able to make changes to systems means players have to work together.
It's definitely a bit different to the typical cooperative game where players are cooperating but generally sort of off doing their own thing. Another noticeable and welcome difference is how there's no characters running round a global board trying to stop the spread of something here.

​During the game, players will be, broadly speaking, faced with 3 types of obstacle; successfully completing flight stages, successfully completing experiments and firefighting damage that occurs during the flight.
There's a real need to strike a balance between these 3 priorities and players will also have to approach this as efficiently as possible, the flight module moves along the board after every turn and is in essence another countdown timer. It means planning for the known variables of the flight stages, somewhat knowable experiments and also reacting and adapting to unpredictable damage inflicted on the command module and there will be damage!  There are 15 damage spaces on the flight damage board and only 10 dice to cover them, that means at least 5 damage to the systems every round.
Being a cooperative game, Apollo uses the luck or specifically the bad luck that arises from rolling those dice to challenge players.

The game also features a time limit in the form of a 4 minute timer: On paper this might not seem like much time but in play it's perhaps a little overgenerous.
4 minutes to assign 10 dice works out to be 240 seconds for 10 dice or 24 seconds per die, which we did not find much of an issue.

We played the Gemini mission board a couple of times and it didn't present too much challenge for us, there were a definite couple hiccups and dicey (sic) moments but otherwise it was pretty much plain sailing or more accurately, plain err.... orbiting? Mission control never had to reach for the puzzle boards.
However, we are a fairly experienced band of players and maybe for once, the luck went our way this time.
We didn't get round to playing the Apollo mission board which is probably where the meat of the game lies and certainly looks more challenging, so I'm reserving judgement on the game's difficulty.

I'm not certain about the game's replay-ability either, it wasn't boring but at the same time felt a little samey, players are ultimately just assigning dice to tasks, some of which may become quite familiar over multiple plays.

Easy to learn with a reasonable play time and providing some interesting decisions to make, I'd say that Apollo is a good game to play every once in awhile and if cooperative games are your cup of tea, then it's definitely worth checking out this fresh take on cooperative gameplay.

30th November 2022

It's a Tuesday night and we're at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club.

The main game of the evening was Atlantis Rising.
Atlantis; the mythical civilisation swallowed by the seas and lost to time, how did this happen? Clearly it was caused by a band of bumbling table-top gamers!

What's in a game?

• Board tiles: Atlantis Rising comes with 37 double-sided tiles that when placed together form the game board. It's no ordinary looking game board though and when placed together looks like a very unique 6-pronged asterisk or a '*'.
  Each of the 6 prongs or more accurately 6 peninsulas consists of 6 tile segments featuring a different terrain type and each tile within a peninsula will show a number of worker spaces, mostly 1 or 2 and an action that is associated with placing a worker in one of those spaces, 3 peninsulas also reference a number ranging from 3-6. The other side of the tiles depicts the terrain underwater, not a good thing I'd imagine.
  The hills, mountains and forests produce gold, ore and crystal respectively, 3 of the game's 4 resources. These 3 terrains also show dice values
  The 4th peninsula is The Forge and allows players to turn resources into Atlantium, the game's 4th resource.
  The plains allows players to acquire more workers.
  Finally, the library peninsula allows players to acquire knowledge cards.
  The centre tile allows players to gain mystic energy.
• Mystic Energy: Glass beads are used to represent mystic energy.
• Resources: Little wooden cubes are used to represent the game's 4 types of resource. Little Wooden cubes, now we're talking!
• Tokens: These are standard card tokens used in this case to represent courage and mystic barriers. These Atlanteans sure like their mysticism!
• Dice: These are 3 normal six-siders.
• Attack die: Not content with 3 dice, Atlantis Rising also comes with this attack die, it is not a normal six-sider and ranges from 1-4.
• Atlantean navy board: Player may put their workers here to join the navy, why? Well come on, to protect the motherland!
  Along 1 edge of this board is the Athenian attack track, it's value starts at 0 and potentially rises to 12. The Athenian meeple galley moves along this track over turns, making the Athenians more and more dangerous. Speaking of which...
• Athenian galley: This wooden ship meeple represents the Athenian Navy who really and I mean really hate the Atlanteans. Every turn they will attack in greater numbers and must be driven off.
• Cosmic gate blueprint cards: These cards are essentially objective cards that the players must meet to win the game.
  There are 4 decks of cards labelled A-D which have increasing levels of difficulty.
• Misfortune cards: Pretty explanatory really. These cards cause problems for the players and generally cause parts of Atlantis to sink, they represent the chief threat to their chances of success.
  Typically, misfortune cards sink 1 segment in 1 peninsula but some do far worse things.
• Knowledge cards: These cards always provide some sort of benefit to the players can be at almost any time.
• Player boards: These differently coloured boards all have a different roles which confer some a benefit or special ability on the controlling player.
• Meeples: These are classic wooden meeples, they come in colours that match the player boards.
  Grey meeples: These are ordinary citizens of Atlantis that can be temporarily be recruited for a single round at a time.

This that's pretty much it for components.

The quality of the components is as you'd expect from modern games universally good, the game makes extensive use of wooden tokens for meeples, resources and even the Athenian ship, which I like. The addition of glass tokens is also a nice touch and appreciated.

From the perspective of art direction, I'd call the art good but not exceptional, it is however, clear and functional when needed, the different terrains are always easily discernible.
I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on the board. It genuinely looks unique and eye-catching. It's not a gimmick either and makes sense in relation to the game's mechanics.

The game's iconography is straightforward and easy to understand.

How's it play?
Setup
The setup for Atlantis Rising is relatively simple.

• Atlantis: Create the game board.
• Cosmic gate: Sort the blueprint cards out by their 4 types and shuffle them into 4 face-down decks. 9 cards should be drawn from these decks, the mix of decks used will depend on the difficulty chosen by the players. The 10th and final card is always the power core.
  Thus players will have 10 blueprint cards to complete.
• Atlantean Navy: Set out the Atlantean Navy board and place the Athenian galley on its allotted starting spot.
• Players: Give each player a player board, the allotted amount of starting meeples and a mystic energy token.
• First player: Determine a starting player

Now we're ready to begin.

On to play
Each round in Atlantis Rising consists in a number of phases.

• Place workers: Starting with the 1st player and going to the left, each player places all their workers on to the peninsulas on the Atlantis board or the Atlantean Navy board.
  Some spots will have spaces for 2 workers who may be the same or different colours. Some spots require 2 workers of the same colour.
  When players put their workers on to the peninsulas - which they'll be doing a lot, it should be noted that the spaces which provide the most benefit will also be the ones closest to the sea and at most risk to flooding, why is this significant? read on.
  Finally, when all workers have been placed, who ever put the most on the Atlantean Navy board gains a courage token, more on courage tokens later.
• Misfortune: Once all workers have been placed, it's time for some misfortune!
  Beginning with the 1st player and going left, each player draws a misfortune card and immediately resolves it.
  Most of these cards will flood a single tile in a specific peninsula but some will cause worse problems. When a peninsula is hit by flooding, it's outermost unflooded tile becomes flooded, this is done by flipping it over to the flooded side, any workers on that tile are returned to their owners. If a peninsula is already full flooded, then the active player must flood two tiles elsewhere.
  When all players have resolved misfortune cards, the game progresses to the next phase.
• Resolution: Now, again beginning with the starting player and going left, each player resolves the workers they've placed on Atlantis. How this works will depend on where the workers have been placed. Workers that been placed on the Atlantean Navy board are resolved in the following phase.
  Resources: Acquiring gold, ore and crystal requires the active player to roll a die for each worker they have on a resource space, the result must be equal or higher than the die shown next to the respective space. The further along the peninsula the worker is placed, the lower the number they must roll and the easier it is to acquire the resource.
  It should be noted that some resources will naturally be harder to gain due to higher target numbers.
  Forge: This allows the active player to turn 1 ore into Atlantium for each worker placed. No roll is required and the further along the peninsula, the more Atlantium is acquired for that single ore.
  Library: Workers placed here allow the active player to gain knowledge cards. As with the other peninsulas, the number they can draw/keep depends how far each worker is along the peninsula.
  Recruit: Placing workers here allows the active player to increase their worker count. Unlike other peninsulas with multiple worker spaces, all the spaces here must be filled with workers from a single player.
  Basically the active player sends 2 workers into the bushes and a new worker emerges, you can draw your own conclusions.
  Except at the furthest point on the peninsula only 1 worker is needed and closer to the centre 3 are needed. So I don't know what's going on there!
  Centre space: Finally any number of workers can be placed on the centre space and each worker put here earns the owning player a mystic energy bead.
• Athenian attack: Once all players have resolved their worker actions, it's time for the Athenians to attack!
  How do those pesky Athenians attack? They generate a combat value which comes from 2 sources, firstly from the Athenian galley's position on the Atlantean Navy board which goes from 0-12  and is combined with a roll from the attack die, which gives a result from 1-4.
  Thus if the galley is on the 1+ spot, it will actually generate a value of 2-5, if the galley on the 5+ spot it will generate a value of 6-9.
  Once the combat value is generated, it must be compared to the the number of workers that all the players have collectively put on the Atlantean Navy board. If the number of workers exceeds the value, nothing happens. However, if the value exceeds the workers, then a number of tiles equal to the difference must be flooded. So if the players have put 2 workers on the navy board and the combat value is 4, 2 tiles must be flooded.
• Cosmic gate: The final phase allows each player to build one of the blueprint cards by spending the required resources, players must do this individually and cannot share resources to do it.
  Additionally, when a blueprint is completed, it immediately confers a one-off bonus or benefit.
• Round end: The Athenian galley is advanced 1 space along its track and the 1st player marker passes to the left. A new round begins with the new 1st player placing their workers.

That's it for how a round goes, there are some extra rules though.

• Knowledge cards: These can be used by the owning player at any time so long as it does not interrupt another action or event.
  Each player have a maximum of 4 knowledge cards in their hand at any time.
• Courage tokens: There are 2 ways to use a courage token and with both methods, the token is used along with a worker.
  A courage token can be played with a worker that is placed on a peninsula space. If, during the misfortune phase, that tile is flooded, the worker immediately completes the action before the flooding occurs and is returned to its owner while the courage token is discarded. If the tile is not flooded, then during the resolution phase, when the worker completes their action, the courage token is retained by the player, which is pretty sweet.
  The 2nd use for a courage token is playing it with a worker put on to the Atlantean Navy board. This worker counts as 2 workers when it comes to dealing with the Athenian galley. The courage tokens is discarded after this.
• Mystic barrier: When 1 of these tokens is placed on a peninsula, it will protect that peninsula from flooding once, after which is is discarded.
• Mystic energy: There are multiple uses for mystic energy.
  Resources: If the active player is making a roll to gain resources, each mystic energy spent adds 1 to the roll.
  Transmutation: The active player may spend 2 mystic energy to change any 1 resource for another.
  Cancel misfortune: When a tile is about to be flooded due to a misfortune card, 3 mystic energy can be spent to prevent this, it can be spent by a single player or collectively buy any number of players.
  Unflip flooded tile: 5 mystic energy can be spent to flip a tile back to its unflooded side. This can be spent collectively by any number of players.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of 2 conditions is met.
If all the tiles on the Atlantis map are flooded - including the centre tile, then the players collectively lose.
If the players manage to build all 10 cosmic gate blueprints, they immediately win.

Overall
Just to clarify, it was the the 1st edition we played, there is a 2nd edition which has some notable changes.

Despite its nifty, unorthodox board, Atlantis Rising's central premise will be familiar to players of cooperative games. That is; players will be faced with the choice of working towards completing objectives to win the game or firefighting whatever will cause them to lose, in the case of Atlantis Rising that's 2 sources, the misfortune deck and the Athenian attacks. What Atlantis Rising brings to the table though, is a push-you-luck element.

Luck is an inherent part of cooperative games and is used to mitigate players' abilities to out-strategize a game, but these push-you-luck elements add something quite different.
When picking an action, players will also have to decide how much they want the resource, card or whatever, playing it safe might not get you what you need or enough of what you need.
The same is true when dealing with the Athenians, it requires a lot of meeples to be fully safe from them, but the true number required is never known due to the attack die roll. Sometimes it might better to put a meeple or 2 less, it might be riskier, but it gives you 2 workers that could have a vital use elsewhere.
In both instances it's a solid use of risk/reward and it gave me the feeling that it's hard to win the game by playing cautiously and at some points players just have to take risks.

Having said that, I do have an issue with the whole Athenian attack mechanic. I really don't like how the players have to collectively commit more and more workers to fighting the Athenians off. It can mean players are making effort to acquire workers simply for this purpose and feels like quite a negative mechanic. I'm not alone in this thought as this was revised for the 2nd edition.

This also brings me to another element of the game; as it progress on and more tiles flood, players will get less and less choice where to place their workers. It feels counter to how games - especially worker placement games flow, typically a player's choices and options expand as a game goes on but Atlantis Rising does the opposite, I know that it's part of the game's challenge and players need to work to prevent this but still sort of feels off.

Other than these two criticisms, Atlantis Rising is a perfectly acceptable game that cooperative gamers will be comfortable with. ​Atlantis Rising doesn't stand out from the crowd but neither does it do anything wrong.
Personally, I like how it looks, especially watching Atlantis gradually sink!

24th October 2021

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

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

How's it play?
Setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6th October 2021

Time for some midweek gaming! It's a Wednesday and we're round Simon's.

Valor & Villainy: Minions of Mordak is the game of the evening; an open-world styled, fantasy-themed, RPG-inspired exploration game with one player assuming the role of big-bad Mordak and the others taking on the mantle of heroes.

What's in a game?
Valor & Villainy is fairly involved game that features a lot of components.

• Map tiles: Valor & Villainy uses a variety of map tiles, most of which are randomly placed. These tiles depict the landscape, they also detail encounters that the heroes will come across.
  Starting tiles: These 5 tiles depict; as you'd expect the game's starting area and will be the map's central tiles.
  Region tiles: These tiles are ranked from tier I to tier III on their backs. When the map is created, the lower tiered cards will be closer to the centre.
  Each tile also contains icons depicting what will be found on that tile, which can be minions, ambushes etc.
• Hero boards: There is one of these thick card boards for each of the game's heroes. They are double-sided and on the back, each character's backstory is displayed.
  The front contains a portrait, as well as health and action point tracks. There are also a number of recessed tracks and spots in each board, into which various smaller components can be dropped and represent the characters increase in skills and training. Character's have tracks for melee, ranged and magic actions.
  The board also lists each character's unique ability and at the bottom has spaces for gear and equipment.
• Standees: Each hero also has their own standee.
• Mordak board: The Mordak player also has their own board which is very similar to the hero boards with a health and action tracker and recessed tracks to represent Mordak's increase in ability.
  Mordak possesses 1 extra ability; corruption.
  Procession of horrors tile: This tile slides into place next to the Mordak board and over the course of the game, allows Mordak to accrue power, it also serves as a round counter.
• Mordak standee: Not to be outdone by the heroes, Mordak has his own standee.
• Spell cards: Spell cards come in 3 types as explained below
  Arcane spell cards: These blue spells focus on attacks and tricks.
  Divine spell cards: These yellow spells provide support and healing.
  Void spell cards: These purple spells are used by Mordak and typically for the big-bad, they bring mayhem and ruin.
• Treasure cards: Can be earned by players by defeating minions.
• Loot stash cards: There are used to track minions that have defeated and treasure that's been earned by the heroes and by the Mordak player to track heroes that have been defeated!
• Minion cards: These are different types of enemy that the heroes will fight, they come in 3 classes, Chump, Elite and Boss, each getting progressively tougher.
  Minion cards contain information such as movement, attacks, damage and health levels, each one is also double-sided and can be flipped to the other side to display different stats for a minion when they get wounded instead of outright killed. Some minions will get weaker when hurt, a few will get tougher.
  Like the heroes and Mordak, minions have actions and stats.
• Covers: Each type of minion has it's own cover, used to hide what card is at the top of each minion card.
• Dice: These six-siders come in 3 different colours and are not numbered from 1-6. Instead the colours represent different levels of ability: White is novice, yellow is adept and red is mastery, each colour has a different number distribution, with white having the lowest, ranging to red with the highest.
• Ability tokens: These come in 3 colours that directly relate to skill dice. Players acquire these tokens for their abilities which in turn determine what dice are rolled by that player.
• +1 tokens: Can be acquired by players through rolling well and used for one-off bonuses.
• Initiative token: This double-sided first player token has Charge on one side and Hold on the other.

Valor & Villainy also has various other tokens for specific circumstances and situations including woeful sheep tokens!
The components are all high quality, tiles and tokens are suitably thick and sturdy, as are the standees. The cards are all well made and the rounded plastic dice feel weighty enough but the standout components are the chunky recessed hero boards which feel solid and also fairly practical.

Artwork throughout the game is excellent. The landscapes on map tiles are well produced, clear but also colourful. Character illustrations are bold and slightly-cartoony, it's a style that gets used quite a lot in fantasy-themed games, but it looks good in Valor & Villains.

As you'd expect for a open world game like, Valor & Villainy uses a variety of icons and symbols, particularly on spell cards - which essentially are all different. For the most part, the iconography is intuitive and pretty straightforward to understand.

How's it play?
Setup

• The Map: The 5 starting tiles are put out face-up in same position for every game, then, a number of map tiles are randomly drawn from each tier, although certain tiles (The 3 shrines.) must be included, then tiles in each tier are shuffled, some are randomly drawn and placed face-down around the starting tiles, the tier I tiles go closest to the starting tiles and the tire III the furthest away.
  Once all the tiles are placed, there will be a 5x5 grid of tiles, although in games will a lower player count, they'll be slightly less tiles.
• Heroes: Give each player a hero board and associated standee, along with the requisite components to track health and action points, as well as a +1 token.
  Players' whose characters can cast spells should draw cards from the relevant deck.
• Mordak: The Mordak player should take the Mordak board and set it up in a similar manner to the hero boards.
  The procession of horrors tile should be placed next to the Mordak board and the Mordak standee put on it.
• Card decks: Shuffle the 3 magic decks into 3 face-down stacks, do the same with the treasure deck.
• Minion decks: Shuffle the 3 minion decks into 3 face-down stacks, because these cards are double-sided, the relevant cover should be placed on the top of each minion deck. This ensures the Mordak player draws minions blindly.
• Initiative: Give the initiative token to the starting player.

The game is now ready to begin

On to play
In Valor & Villainy, the hero players are trying to discover the 3 shrines hidden somewhere amongst the face-down tiles to weaken Mordak and the Mordak player will be trying to make it hard for the heroes to find them until he arrives on the map after the 6th round.
Heroes always act first with the starting player beginning, then going left. The Mordak player may then act after the hero players. The Mordak player essentially gets 2 turns to act, 1 for Mordak himself (Although Mordak doesn't have much to do in the early game.) and 1 for minions.
When players take their turns, they will have a number of actions points they can spend to move or act as they see fit, there are also some free actions that can be performed

• Initiative: Who has the initiative token is the first player, they may choose to act first or last, in which case they flip the token to the Hold side.
• Hero actions: Heroes may perform actions, these include the following:
  Scout: This is a free action. When a hero chooses to scout, they flip all adjacent face-down map tiles to their face-up side, this may reveal enemies, loot or trigger ambushes.
  Looting: If a player's character is in a region without enemies, they may loot any treasure as a free action. Treasre is not immediately acquired, instead it is placed on the pertinent loot card and divvied up at the end of the round.
  Movement: For an action point a hero may move to a adjacent tile that is already face-up. Characters may only orthogonally.
  Actions: All hero actions are performed using one of their 3 stats, generally this involves combat.
• Mordak actions: In the early game, there's little Mordak can do to directly confront the heroes, although he can make life hard for them.
• Minion actions: If there are any minion cards on the board, the Mordak player can use them to attack and harass the players. Minions move and attack in much the same way as players.
• Combat: Combat plays a big part of Valor & Villainy:
  Melee: Melee occurs when enemies are on the same tile:
  Ranged: A character who decides to attack at range can only target enemies in adjacent tiles.
  Magic: Characters may spend their spell cards to cast spells.
  Defeat: Combat will generally result in one of the involved parties being defeated.
  Minions: When a minion is defeated, it is out of the game and added to the players loot stash
  Hero: When a hero is defeated, they are out of the current round and the Mordak player adds their standee to their loot stash. The standee is returned after the level-up phase has been completed
• Level-up: Once all players have had their turns, the game proceeds to the level-up phase.
  Throughout the round, any loot players acquired or minions that were defeated are added to the hero loot stash. During the level-up phase, they earn the hero players experience points, the loot can then be divvied up between them as they decide and equipped.
  Similarly, the Mordak player will earn experience points for each hero that was defeated.
  Then players may spend XP to increase their skills by adding ability tokens to their boards, they may also spend XP to increase their action points.
• Next round: The Mordak player moves their standee one space along the procession of horrors and the standee of any defeated hero is placed in the centre starting tile, ready for the next round. The initiative token is passed to the player on the left.

There's a bunch of other, mostly situational rules in Valor & Villainy, I'm not going to go into in further detail, since they don't always apply.

Endgame
Once 6 round have been completed (Or all 3 shrines have been discovered.), the game goes into The Final Battle!
During the final battle, Mordak himself will appear on the map and directly engage the hero players in combat.

Mordak has a large amount of health; 70-100. If the hero players reduce Mordak's health to 0, they win the game.
Conversely, if the Mordak player manages to defeat 3 heroes during the final battle, then the Mordak player wins the game.

Overall
There's a lot of charm to Valor & Villainy's presentation, especially the bold, chunky artwork for characters and minions.
Mechanically, the game is actually quite straightforward, unremarkable even (At least it is for the hero players.), although it does contain a fair amount of exception driven and situational rules. Using cards for minions makes it a little fiddly to move them around and handle, it also looks a little dull and flat (sic) but conversely, it makes it easy to track minion health and combat initiative.

Valor & Villlainy has several quibbles in my opinion
One of the most significant is the game's one-vs-many mechanic, these types of mechanic rarely work well in my opinion. Obviously the game will have been balanced to try and take this into account, but few games can balance the difference between 1 human brain versus 4 human brain and the hero players will always have this to their advantage. It almost feels like the game is set up to advantage hero players over the Mordak player.

The game also has a weird tonal shift thanks to this one-vs-many mechanic. For most of the game, the Mordak player will be a thorn in the players' sides,  a source of constant minor irritation. Then, during the endgame, it becomes straight up, directly confrontational PvP as Mordak appears on the map. It feels weirdly more aggressive.

For the heroes, the game is mostly about managing encounters as they appear, recognising and prioritising threats, then dealing with them using the most efficient method, allowing them the maximum opportunity to explore the tiles.
For the Mordak player, it's about exploiting any opening or weakness that the heroes present, not only defeating heroes but stymieing and thwarting them whenever possible.

Valor & Villainy is a open-world RPG-esque experience where a varied band of heroes, explore, fight monsters, acquire treasure and level up. The ingredients of an RPG are all there, but it doesn't feel quite right and I think there're a couple of reasons why.

There's a lack of storytelling to the game and variety to the encounters, there's randomness when setting up a map and not all tiles will appear in any single game, but they're just encounters, they feel a little bland and there's no sense of travelling, journeying or adventuring.

The normal map (For 4+ players) will have 20 face-down map tiles to scout, to explore all of them will require turning over 3-4 map tiles per round. Scouting tiles is actually a bit of a balancing act and one of the challenges the hero players face. if the heroes scout too slowly, they risk not finding all the shrines, if they do it too quickly, they risk revealing more minions than they can handle at once.
This will require players to head off in different directions and in an RPG you should never split the party!

In relation to combat, it seems the most efficient way for the Mordak player to accumulate experience points is to relentlessly pick on one player until they are defeated, then choose another player to pick on. It feels particularly un-RPG-like where combat tends to distributed amongst all heroes.
Even then, when a hero is defeated, on the next turn, the hero will reappear in the centre tile like it's a videogame spawn point.

All of this adds up to make Valor & Villainy feel disconnected from RPGs.

But for me, by far the biggest problem the game has, is its run time. We played with 5 players in total and a game took somewhere between 2-3 hours to play out. If felt like each player took about 4-5 mins to complete their turn and don't forget that the Mordak player essentially gets 2 turns in a row, 1 for themselves and 1 for their minions which makes a round 25-30 minutes long and that's before adding in The Final Battle. It also meant players had about 20 minutes of downtime between turns.
It's too much, if Valor & Villainy was an exceptional or engaging game, it wouldn't be such an issue, but it's not. It's not a bad game either, it's just slightly bland and slightly average. 

There's nothing wrong with an average game, so long as it doesn't outstay it's welcome.
The effort Valor & Villainy requires to play doesn't quite justify the experience it provides.