28th May 2019
Tuesday gaming continues at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. I had told Matt how brutal and unforgiving Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth was. But he remained pretty skeptical about it and was intent on trying the game. We played it 3 times, 3 times... How did it go, it chewed us up and spat us out like so much cheap flavourless chewing gum. "Well, it's your funeral." Is what I should have said to Matt. In reality it was all the players' funerals. You can read my thoughts about it here & here.
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14th May 2019. Tuesday has rolled around again and that can only mean gaming night at 'The Sovereigns' First game of the night is Mysterium'. Mysterium is like a ghostly version of Cluedo. It's quite unusual in that it is both an asymmetrical and co-operative game. One player takes on the role of the ghost of a murder victim. All the remaining players assume the roles of psychics or mediums. The game takes place during a 'seance' in which the ghost will feed all the other characters with confusing and strange imagery, hoping they will figure out the murder The ghost player knows who their murderer is and is trying to communicate this to the other players. What's in a game? The ghost player sits behind a screen which contains information pertinent to them. The ghost player also keeps a deck of cards behind the screen. Each of the other players is given a character to play in the form of a character portrait printed on what can only be described as sort of 'pocket'. The art for the characters is good and makes them look suitability exotic for people that can communicate with the dead. Each player is also given a meeple. Markers are set out for the 3 different clue types. These represent the classic Cluedo cards for person, location and weapon. The game also has a vintage looking clock which serves as a turn counter. Before the game starts the ghost player determines who the murderer and suspects are. The in line with each respective clue marker they layout a number of cards (dependant upon difficulty). Thus next to the person marker, they would lay the murderer, suspects and innocent people. Next to the location marker, they would lay the murder site, suspected sites and unrelated sites - and the same for the murder weapon. And now you're pretty much ready to go. How does it Play? The ghost player is trying to provide the other players with the information on who the killer is, where the murder occurred and what was used to do it. But cannot talk to the other players at all. Every turn, the ghost player draws a number of cards from their deck. The ghost play can give them to the other players. These cards contains all manner of strange and weird imagery. When the ghost player gives other players these cards, they are trying to get them to pick the correct clue card. For example; if the killer was a fisherman, you might give them a card with picture of a boat or a fish or even the colour blue. So once the psychic players have received cards from the ghost player, they have to use them to try choose the right card. When they have selected what they feel is the right card, then they put their meeple on the card. Once all the players have done this. The ghost player will indicate if they are correct. If a psychic player is correct, then they take the clue card, put it into their pocket and move their meeple on to the next set of clues. If the player's guess was incorrect then they stay on the current set of clues. Play proceeds until all psychic players have 3 cards in their pockets, or time runs out, (In which they all lose.). If all the players manage to get their 3 clues in time, the play proceeds to the epilogue. During the epilogue, all the clues for all the characters are revealed. The psychic players now have one attempt to guess who the killer is from all the available clues. If they guess incorrectly, everybody loses. If they guess correctly, everybody wins. Overall
I've glossed over the rules somewhat, but the gist of it is there. Apparently, the game can involve using a secret voting mechanic when making choices. But all the players I spoke to prefer the idea of open discussion when making choices and I have to agree. The group discussions add a lot to the game in my opinion. This makes the game a much more relaxed and enjoyable experience. The art on the cards is a mixture of weird and wonderful imagery, highly detailed and allowing the ghost player a lot opportunities to use them as hints and clues. In fact the whole look of the game and it's art direction is moody and evocative. I like the clock as the game timer. I also like how the game manages to be both asymmetrical and co-operative. Quite often asymmetrical games can be a lonely experience, (As anybody who has played the prison guard in 'Escape from Colditz can attest.), but Mysterium changes that dynamic. I think this is an entertaining game and one to be played socially. It's also straightforward enough that anyone can join in a contribute. Finally, now everyone is on the same side and you can watch the ghost player try to keep a neutral expression when you are about to make a stupid choice! 16th April 2019
Welcome to Tuesday night gaming at 'The Sovereigns'. We kicked off with a return to 'The Lost Expedition' after last week's drubbing we were eager for a better result. - Which we got! Score! You can read my blog post about The Lost Expedition here. 9th April 2019
It's Tuesday and gaming continue at 'The Sovs'. The next game is 'The Lost Expedition'. A co-operative game about trekking through the jungle. Needless to say - as is common in this game - we met a sticky end. You can read my blog post about The Lost Expedition here. 26th March 2019 Another Tuesday comes round and another evening of pleasant gaming at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. We begin the night with Pandemic: The Cure. Pandemic is a popular board game that was released a while ago. It's a co-operative game in which the players travel the globe against the clock in the search for cures before the hideous diseases ravage the world. Pandemic: The Cure is another co-operative game. It replaces the game's movement and actions with dice and a push-your-luck mechanic. It also replaces the global board with an errr acrylic ring?!? The set up So the acrylic ring is placed in the centre of the play area. 2 pegs are placed in holes in the ring to represent the infection rate and number outbreaks. 6 'region' discs, numbered from 1 to 6 are placed around the ring. Each disc representing a different region of the world. The 4 diseases are represented by 4 sets of different coloured six sided dice. They are all put into a bag. When you need disease markers, you blindly draw the required number of dice from the bag and then you roll them and place on the relevant. This gives you both the type and location of disease markers. It's worth nothing that even though these are six sided dice, they are not regularly numbered from 1 to 6. For example one colour might be missing 3 and 4 and might have an extra 5 and 6. This means that certain types of diseases are more likely to appear in certain regions. This is something important to remember. Some event cards are laid out, during the game these can be bought to grant the action described on the card. Just like in the board game, each player assumes a different role like a dispatcher or a scientist. Each role has it's own set of custom dice, a card granting them a special ability or two and a meeple. Before the start of the game, each player places their meeple on to region disc 1. Gameplay
Player action. When a player takes their turn, the first thing they do is roll their dice. This will give them their choices. You 'spend' a die to perform it's action.
Those are the basic actions, each player will have actions unique to the role that they are playing, but there's no need to list them all here. Once a player has spent all their dice, there are some other actions they will perform. Give research. If you are on the same region disc as another player, you mave give them all the researched disease dice of one colour - and your research dice along with them! Cure disease. If a player has any disease dice (and research dice) on the role card. Then they can attempt to cure a disease once in their turn. To do this the player takes all the dice of one colour (of their choice if there are more than 1 colour available) and rolls them and adds them up. If they get 13 or more then the disease is cured, otherwise not. It's worth noting here that it will normally take at least 3 dice to get 13. Some colours of disease dice may not have higher numbers such as a 5 or 6, that means it will require even more dice to stand a chance of curing a disease. Spread infection. The final action of a player is to spread infection! The players draws dice from the dice bag, the amount that they draw is equal to the current infection rate. The player rolls these dice and then allocates them to respective region disc. That's it for what players can do. There are some other rules to note such as: When things go bad. There are a couple of things that can go wrong.
How you lose the game. There are 3 ways to lose this game.
The players win the game, if they manage to research all 4 diseases. That's it for the rules. Is it a good game? I like how Pandemic: The Cure manages to replicate some of the 'feel' of the original and also how it replicates the kind of decision making that will be familiar to players of Pandemic. I also like how they've managed to incorporate a push you luck mechanic. The game small and portable and has a small footprint on the table. But... But, there seems one glaring issue with this game. It seems a bit too easy. Whenever I've played Pandemic, there's always been a feeling of apprehension that you could lose the game! After a couple of initial losses, we've never lost the game since really. Tonight we played the game twice, once on moderate difficulty and the second time on the hardest difficulty. We won the game both times, I think the second victory seemed even easier. Maybe we were lucky, maybe we've gotten good at his type of game. I don't know. But I do know that Pandemic The cure is a good game that is a little disappointing. What, you want an actual blog post about the game?
Brutal. It really does describe the game. Brutal is the perfect word for it. Brutal! Oh okay then, here's a proper blog post about it. 12th March 2019. It was a dark and stormy night. Well actually it was a fairly average and nondescript gaming Tuesday at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth is a reskinned, tweaked and updated version of 'The Lost Expedition, you can read my blog The Lost Expedition here. Instead of crossing the insect and dangerous animal infested hell of a jungle, you are now crossing the mutated insect and mutated dangerous animal infested hell of The Cursed Earth. Lets not forget the flesh eating dinosaurs either! Even worse, you're on a race against time: Because of a Macguffin you must reach Ol' Stoneyface's loyal informer 'Max Normal' before a gang of perps do. They travelling along the expedition trail just like you and if the gang reach Max before the players. Well, they'll just murder him to death in a hail of machine-gun fire. 'Brraapp, budda budda budda'; I can hear the sound effects from here. Now that you've read my blog post on The Lost Expedition and you know what I'm talking about. How does The Cursed Earth differ? The expedition trail is different. Instead of a row of 9 essentially cosmetic cards to travel along. You create an location deck and the final destination card (along with 2 other cards) is shuffled to form the last 3 cards of the deck. At the start of the game 3 location cards are turned over and laid out in order. When the players (or the perps) are on the last card in the location row and need to move on, then the next location card is revealed. This is a significant addition because.
The encounter cards are mechanically the same. During each day and night each phase players must play 2 cards from their hand. During the day phase, the cards are placed in numerical order, during the night phase they are placed in the order that they are played. Where they differ is in what decisions these are different to the card in The Last Expedition and are not just reskinned. In addition to this there's a new type of option that becomes available to the characters. This option is 'violence'. Many of the obstacles encountered by Dredd & Co. can be solved by the application of violence. Spend 2 bullets or 3 health and the problem is solved in the good ol' 'Big Meg style'. There quite a few situations that can be solved in this fashion and it feels suitably appropriate.. You still have 3 characters in your party, Dredd, Anderson and Giant in this game. They have more health than their contemporaries in The Lost Expedition. The group is still issued with an inadequate supply of ration and bullets. Each one of the judges still has their own area expertise. Judge Dredd has Survival. Judge Giant has Diplomacy. judge Anderson, unsurprisingly has Psi. Interestingly, only Survival and Diplomacy can be gained from the encounter cards. Psi works differently, there appears to be way of gaining Psi expertise cards, (additionally, how Psi works differs in the different game modes). For the co-operative game mode: When the Psi symbol appears, there are 2 choices.
Finally; there's a new resource to manage (and a new way to die)! Radiation. As the characters journey across The Cursed Earth, they can accumulate radiation poisoning. If a character acquires more radiation tokens than health tokens, the it's bye bye to that character. As always, there some other rules to take into account. But that's the gist of it. In short Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth is a lot like The Lost Expedition, but harder. Brutally harder. 5th March 2019 It was gaming Tuesday at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. It was also a night of playing several small games instead of one long one. We kicked off with 'Cloud 9', a sweet (both literally and figuratively) little push your luck board game. The premise of the game is that all the players are passengers/pilots in hot air balloon. The higher you go, the more points you score. How is it played. The first thing to do is set up the board: The game board is long and thin, it depicts a column of clouds, dice and scores are depicted in every cloud cloud and the scoring track runs along the outside. Unusually it appears to made be of vinyl and smells suspiciously like being in old car! The game also has a nice looking little model to represent the wicker basket. The basket has 6 spaces to hold up to 6 meeples (Cloud 9 supports up to 6 players). When all the meeples required at placed into the basket, the basket is placed on to the lowest cloud on the board. The game's custom 'Cloud 9' dice are 6-sided dice. However 4 sides on each die shows 1 of the 4 different colours. The remaining 2 sides are blank. There are 4 Cloud 9 dice, these are placed into the playing area One player is assigned to be 'The Pilot' at the start of the game. Cards are then dealt out to all players. The remaining cards form a draw pile. There are 2 types of card:
The rules are basically quite simple:
How are the dice matched by the pilot's cards.
Talking of points, when a player earns 50+ points it triggers the end game. This means that the current trip continues until it ends (or crashes) and all final points from the trip are added: The player with the most points, wins! And that's it for rules. There are some rules for what happens if only the pilot is in the balloon when it rises, but it's not really necessary to talk about them here, you get the gist of the game. As a game it's simple to learn, it's a good introduction game for people who haven't played that many board games. But it has some depth too. You need to think about how many cards the pilot has before making a choice to stay or jump. you can even try to remember what they did in a previous turn. EG, if they could not match a dice roll that included red and their current dice roll includes red, have they managed to pick up a red card from the draw deck? Also; you need to remember if any wild cards have been played and by whom (there's 4 wild cards in the deck). Another thing to remember is that when you're the pilot, you cannot jump out (unless you're alone in the basket). This means that you have to roll the dice even if your hand is empty! Well each die has 1/3 chance of coming up blank... Finally, Cloud 9 has a curious element of co-operative play. It's actually hard to get to the higher clouds alone and you must work with other players to do it. Quite often after a couple of players have jumped, the remaining players will suddenly starting playing those wild cards to try and push it further - excluding the early jumpers from extra points. Cloud 9 is a nice push-your-luck game that is a good starter or finisher game that plays with up to 6 players. 19th February. Game Night at The Sovereigns. The first time I saw 'The Lost Expedition' I though 'Wow - a Tintin game'! It looks like a Tintin game. It's not a Tintin game, but it's still a good game. Inspired by actual real reality! The Lost Expedition tells the tale of 3 intrepid explorers searching for 'The Lost City of Z', which as the name hints... is lost deep in somewhere nasty, somewhere you (and I'm assuming you're reasonably sane) would never want to go. Additionally, each of the 3 explorers has an area of expertise, these are; Jungle, Navigation and camping. more on expertise later. The Lost Expedition is a co-operative card game for up to 5 players. At the game start, a series of 9 'expedition' cards at laid out in order from left to right. A meeple representing the actual expedition is placed on card 1. The game is collectively won by getting the meeple on to the last card. Each expedition member is given 4 health tokens and the expedition is also communally granted some food and ammo tokens. The basics of game play are: Each player is dealt 4 cards, these are 'adventure' cards. Adventure is the game's way to saying 'really horrible'. Each turn is broken up into a day phase and a night phase. During each phase, every player will (one card at a time) play 2 adventure cards from their hand. These form the 'path' that the expedition must follow for that phase. However, the order in which the adventure cards become the path differs between night and day.
So now we know that adventure cards have encounters on them, but what are encounters and how do we deal with them? Dealing with an encounter usually involves spending some sort of resource, you may or may not get something in return for spending it. For example; you may encounter a dangerous wild animal that gives you 2 red options (you must pick 1 of the available choices). These options might be:
The game is full of these choices where you have to look ahead and figure out what is the best approach. A lot of the time dealing with an encounter is a matter of diminishing returns (with regards to your resources). Which is what makes your decisions tough and therefore important, which is what makes the game good. Spending resources; below is a list of the resources you will need to spend over the game:
So when you complete a path, discard all adventures cards and switch from day to night. When you complete a night phase, you spend a food and change back to day and deal new adventure cards to all players. Repeat until you reach the end of the game. You lose if:
And there you have it. The lost expedition can also be played solo and competitively in 2 teams, neither of which I've tried. But in co-operative play it's a good game, where every decision can matter and your constantly having to make hard choices. God alone knows how hard it was for real explorers. I'm glad that The Lost Expedition is as close to it as I'll ever need to get. One last nod goes to Garen Ewing's outstanding illustrations. They lend the game a whole adventure story feel, which I really liked. Port Royal - 022nd game of Port Royal.
You can find my original blog here. Tuesday 8th January 2019; the first evening back at the 'Woking Board Game Club' at 'The Sovereigns' pub.
Several games were played during the evening, including much talked about Wingspan. However we played Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle. This is a co-operative deck builder in the vein of Dominion. You start with a deck of 10 cards and use your turns to buy more cards to make your deck stronger. The objective is to defeat various villainous characters such as Draco Malfoy before certain conditions are met and the game is lost. Mechanically the game is quite solid - if a little shallow. The game has 7 'chapters' of increasing difficulty (and also match the number number of books). We played level 2. Twice we collectively got our arses kicked, but on the 3rd try we romped to victory. I think we got better at the game, but also that luck (or bad luck in our cases) plays a big part too. But to be fair, that's generally always the case with co-operative games. I'm not a particular fan of Harry Potter, but of the game had a slight increase in complexity, I'd definitely be interested in it. |
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