4th June 2021

It's Friday evening and we're logged into Tabletopia.
This evening we will be playing the first part of Pandemic Legacy: season 0. Time to battle the Soviets to save the world during the height of the 60's cold war.

Caveat: we've only played this game digitally online.
Caveat No. 2: This is a legacy game and we only played the prologue, so I'm not going to blog about it at length.

What's in a game?
Season 0 is a prequel to the other Pandemic Legacy games, none of which I've played.
If you've ever played a Pandemic style game before, then a lot of this will be familiar to you.

• Game board: Depicts a number of interconnected cities and population centres across the globe. Unlike the traditional Pandemic board, all locations here are divided into Allied, Neutral or Soviet. Locations may also contain surveillance symbols.
  The Board also has spaces for the threat deck and the player deck as well as a threat level track.
• Threat deck: All the Locations from the board will appear on cards in this deck and it's used to manage the influence of the Soviet agent network.
  Threat cards each also have a incident printed on the bottom which can adversely affect the players, more on this below.
• Location cards: These cards form the majority of the player deck. Location cards have a region and a allied, neutral, Soviet affiliation as well as a location.
• Event cards: These are also added to the player deck, event cards can be used in any player's turn and do not cost action points. Event cards always confer some kind of benefit.
  Escalation cards: These are shuffled into to the player deck, when a escaltion card is revealed, it means bad news for the players.
• Alias cards: These give each player an individual role to play.
• Agent figures: These are placed on the board to represent Soviet agents.
• Safehouse models: Can be constructed by the players.
• Team models: Teams can be assembled by the players, they have 1 of 3 types of 'cover' they use, Allied, Neutral and Soviet.
• Incident markers: Used to track incidents, which are explained below.

The game has plethora of other components including passports, the physical game even includes stickers to place in passports to create aliases.
There's also a lot of components to deal with the legacy element of the game.

How's it play?
Setup
The setup for Pandemic Legacy: season 0 will differ for each scenario as they have their won objectives, but will include the following:

• Aliases: Each player creates their alias as required.
• Player deck: Create the player deck and deal 4 cards to each player, then add escalation cards to the deck as required. This deck will contain a mixture of location, event and escalation cards.
• Threat deck: Shuffle the threat deck and deal 3 cards, place 3 agents in the locations revealed by the threat cards. Reveal 3 more cards and add 2 agents to those locations and finally, reveal 3 more cards and add 1 agent to those.

On to play
Players of other Pandemic games will recognise most of the play mechanics. There are some other elements, but mostly during their turn, the active player will have 4 actions points to spend and their turn goes as follows:

• Check Surveillance: This is unique to Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, if a player's character is in a city with a surveillance symbol at the start of their turn, then it affects their cover, which can be blown, which in turn will have ramifications.
• Spend action points: The active player will have 4 actions points to spend on the following actions.
  Move: The active player may move their character to a linked adjacent location for an action point.
  Use location card: They may reveal a allied location card to move to that location, or discard a neutral card to move to its location, this cannot be done with Soviet city. Finally, if the active player has a location card that matches their current location, then it can be discarded to move to any location, including Soviet locations.
  Neutralise agent: For an action point, the active player may remove a Soviet agent figure from their current location.
  Share cards: The active player may give a card to or take a card from another player in the same location as them, provided the card's location also matches their location.
  Build safehouse: The active player can discard the location card for their current location to build a safehouse, a safehouse is required for a couple of other actions.
  Identify target city: When at a safehouse, the active player can discard 3 location cards with regions that match the current region to identify a target city, this is required to complete objectives.
  Create team: There are allied, neutral and Soviet teams, these represent their cover and which respective affiliated locations they can be active in.
  To create a team, the active player must be at a safehouse, to create a allied team they must discard 5 allied cards, for a neutral team 5 neutral cards and for a Soviet team, 5 Soviet cards.
  Move team: The active player may move a team to an adjacent location.
  Acquire target: An active team may acquire a target in their location as per the mission's requirements and may meet objectives.
• Mop up: Active teams automatically remove all Soviet agents from their current location.
• Draw 2 player cards: If location or event cards are drawn, then it's all good. However, if a escalation card is drawn, several actions occur, the threat level is increased, a new threat location is introduced and discarded threat cards are shuffled back on the top threat deck.
• Draw threat cards: The number of threat cards drawn is dependant on the threat level.
  When a threat card is drawn, add a Soviet agent to it's location, if there are already 3 agents on the location, then do not add another agent, instead an incident will occur.
  Incident: Draw a card from the bottom of the threat deck and carry out the incident printed on it.

Play then progresses to the player to the left and continues until the endgame is triggered.

Endgame
Each mission will have it's own unique objectives to complete, when they are all either completed or failed, the mission immediately ends.
Missions will also immediately end if the following criteria is met:
Cards cannot be drawn from the player deck.
There are no more agent figures that can be used.
There are no more incident markers that can be used. 
If the mission ends and there are any incomplete objectives, they are marked as failed.
Then players will be rated as succeeding, adequate or failing, this will have an affect on later missions.
Incidents that occurred during a mission will impact the board for later missions as well.

There are 12 missions played over a period of 12 months, making it a busy year. There will also be numerous other actions will occur with regard to further missions, this being a legacy game.

Overall
I'll start by saying that I know some people gush over legacy games, but I've not really played much of any legacy games and I'm pretty ambivalent towards them.
I understand the appeal of an evolving game where player decisions have an impact on further games over time. At the same time, I'm so sure about a game where you have to play it 12 or 20 times to get the most out of it.
Anyway; since I've not played the legacy components of Season 0, I'm not really going to blog about them, instead I can write my thoughts about the general mechanics of the game.

​If you've played a Pandemic style game, then a lot of this will be familiar. It has the same, recognisable gameplay elements of racing against time and having to make difficult meaningful decisions to balance completing objectives with firefighting the spread of in this particular incarnation, Soviet agents.
Like all cooperative games I've played, mitigating bad luck is a key component to succeeding.

Reskinning Pandemic's mechanics for Season 0 could have been lazy and bad, but actually, they work and fit the theme pretty well, the changes introduce interesting concepts, although some of the changes only apply to long term play.
The addition of teams is an inspired change, instead of running around and doing actions myself, I could instruct teams of agents to do it, provided they had the correct aliases of course. Not only did it give players and extra decision to manage, it made me feel more of a spymaster than a spy, which I found quite appealing, it gave the impression that more was going on at any one time, it made the game feel bigger and that's good.
These changes differentiate Season 0 from Pandemic, but is it enough of a change to justify owning both? For me, as an owner of the original Pandemic; I'd say no. Would I play someone else's copy? Probably.
I have to say it would cool to have seen the agent mechanics employed in a standard spy-themed Pandemic game.
If you're a big player of legacy games and can commit to them, it's definitely worth a look. If you're also a fan of Pandemic, it might also be for you.

3rd November 2020

It's a Tuesday and I'm not at the Woking Gaming Club, I am however in Woking, in Simon's converted home-office for what would be the last time I play a game with a friend in person before lockdown 2 began.
It was an unusual setup, two us were in Simon's office and Colin was dialling in via Zoom, able to view the game through Simon's phone which was clamped above the table.

​Tonight we played Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, the little sibling of Gloomhaven. Like Gloomhaven, it's a cooperative RPG with a legacy element.

Caveat: This blog post may differ a little from the ones I normally write. When we played the game, a number of the components were not used, instead they were replaced with an app, it also allowed Colin to remotely log into the app and see the same information we did. Additionally, both other players were very familiar with the game.

What's in a game?
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion comes with a lot of components and a lot of cards.

• Player board: The game has 4 player boards, one for each of the different character classes. One side has a backstory for the character and other has a illustration and some information on hit points as well as allocated spaces for item cards, discarded, lost and active cards. The artwork here is good and the board high quality and made of thick card.
• Character decks. Each character has their own deck and there are a lot of cards. Only 10 are ever used in a single scenario, but as a character levels up, they will gain access to a wider selection of cards and more powerful cards too, which can be used to construct the 10 card deck. Each card has 2 actions on it, a top half action and a bottom half action (More on this below.), as well as being  numbered from 1-99.
• Combat decks: Each character also has their own combat deck, which are used to modify attack scores during combat. Generally these range from +2 to -2, there are also x2 cards and a 🚫card (Which basically cancels the attack.). As a character levels up, they will have the opportunity to acquire perks​ that remove negative cards and add positive cards to the deck, thus improving their combat effectiveness. Curse and blessing cards can also be temporarily added to a deck for a single scenario.
• Item cards: Characters can buy item cards, these are single use (Per scenario.), once per turn or continuous use cards. These can represent potions, equipment and magic items. There are limits to the number of item cards a character can have equipped in a scenario.
• Objective cards: At the start of each scenario, each player is given 2 objective cards, they pick 1 and discards the other. If the objective is met during the course of play, it contributes towards acquiring perks.
• City cards: In between scenarios, characters may have a random encounter as determined by these cards. They provide the players with an A or B choice that may aid or hinder the characters in the next scenario.
• Map books: There are two coil-bound books that lie completely flat when opened. They contain all of the maps for the scenarios and can be combined for larger maps. Maps can depict starting points. spawning points, objectives, obstacles and dangerous areas.
• Map tokens: There tokens are placed on to the maps and used to represent details on the maps, such as traps, treasures, damaged areas etc.
• Character models: Each character has a model and an upgraded model (For when they reach level 5.).
• Enemy standees: Monsters and enemies are represented by card standee tokens. There are also white and yellow stands the standees go into, yellow stands are used to represent elite enemies.

Those were pretty much all the components that were used. There are enemy combat decks which are constructed for each scenario that determine how combat goes for enemies as well as how and when any special. There are also tokens used to track health for both characters and enemies. Most of this was handled by the app.

What art there is on the components is good and the components are of a high quality.

How's it play?
The game follows the paradigm of an RPG; there are a series of linked scenarios that form a campaign. As characters progress from scenario to scenario, they accumulate experience points and become stronger. Characters are persistent and they and their progress carry over between scenarios.
There are also legacy elements here, decisions that players make during the game will have some sort of effect later on.

Setup
The setup is fairly quick and simple, mostly because the game uses map books instead of tiles.

• The map book(s) are opened at the relevant pages. Any relevant tokens are placed on to the map.
• Players construct decks for their characters and choose what items to equip. They also alter (If needed.) their combat decks, shuffle it and put it face down.
• Enemies are placed into standees and placed on their starting spots.
• Enemy decks are constructed. The game is designed to scale in difficulty according to how many characters will be participating.

On to playing
In each round, the players will choose 2 cards from their deck to play. Enemy behaviour is dictated by the game.

• Choose cards: Each character can perform 2 actions per round - 1 per card played. They can perform 1 top action and 1 bottom action per round, not 2 top or 2 bottoms actions.
• Determine initiative: All action cards are numbered from 1-99. Players can choose from 1 of the 2 numbers on their chosen cards as their initiative. The lower the number, the faster the character acts. Thus players have some choice of when they act. Enemy initiative is determined by the game.
• Carry out actions: All characters and enemies act in initiative order. When a player acts, the character can do both of their actions in any order the player chooses (Regardless of what card was used for initiative.), moreover players don't have to stick to the actions they wanted to use when they initially chose to the cards they played. That is, if circumstances have changed, players have some flexibility in how they respond. Most actions typically involve attacking either in melee or at range and movement. Each class has its own unique abilities such as healing, pushing enemies away or pulling them in, inflicting conditions such as stunning, poisoning etc. Some actions will fill a room with 1 of 6 types of elemental energy and some actions get bonuses if they consume particular elemental energy. Every card also has a basic default move or attack action they can perform. Finally some particularly powerful cards are lost when used (See below for an explanation.). After the actions are completed, the cards are discarded. Enemy actions are dictated by the game.
• Use item cards: Generally, items, equipment or potions can be used at any time as a free action.
• Rest: When it comes to choosing what cards to play, when a character runs out of action cards (Or only has 1 card left.) then they will need to rest. There are 2 types of rest; short and long rests. For a short rest, the player takes their discard pile back into their hand, shuffles tthem and randomly selects a card which is lost. If a player takes a long rest, they retrieve their discarded cards and choose a card to discard: Additionally they regain 2 hit points, however they also have to skip a turn. Cards that are lost, are permanently removed from play for the remainder of that scenario (They cannot be retrieved during a rest.).
• Combat: A card or action will list its damage and range (If applicable.), this is modified by drawing a card from the relevant combat deck. Mostly this will alter the damage by +2 to -2, occasionally it will be doubled or cancelled. As the campaign progresses, cards will be added to combat decks, these include cards which may inflict conditions or generate elemental energy.

I could go into a lot more detail about how combat and actions work as they are a wide variety different conditions and special moves available. But that's the gist of it.

Endgame
A scenario will end when its win/lose conditions are met.

If the players win the scenario they gain experience points, characters gain experience points according to the scenario. Additionally; certain action cards grant characters experience points when played, these are added up as well.
When a character acquires enough experience points, they will level up and gain whatever benefits it confers.

During the game, enemies that are defeated will drop treasure. If characters collect these treasures, they gain gold after the scenario ends.
Gold can then be spent to acquire more or better item cards.

Next, there is an encounter as determined by a randomly drawn city card.

After this, players are given the choice of what scenario to attempt next. This may involve adding a sticker to the map or some other legacy type action.

Overall
There's a lot to think about here.
There's a lot of components to the game too and it might be a bit fiddly. But it seems to me that most of this occurs during setup. I can't imagined how much setup the full Gloomhaven requires without the map books?

The character-gameplay is actually pretty straightforward, simple to learn and goes smoothly enough.
Enemy behaviour may be a bit trickier and it probably pays to have some one who is familiar with the rules (As we did.) when playing.

The action card mechanic was pretty well implemented, it not only gives players options and a bit of flexibility, but meaningful decisions to make.

The rest mechanic is also a good addition, it forces players to act, be decisive and deters them from trying to play overly safe and spend too many turns resting to regain hit points.
Since a character deck only has 10 cards, it means that a plaery will empty their deck in 5 rounds. Then they have to decide to discard 1 card and miss a turn, or discard one at random and continue, which can be a hard decision.
Now you have 9 cards and only 4 turns before facing the same dilemma. Additionally, some cards are discarded when use and so on.
All of this serves to create sense of urgency, a need to complete the scenario before player decks become too depleted. Players will want to minimise the time they waste carrying out long rests.

Combat is a bit of a mixed bag.
There are a good number of special moves, conditions and effects that play a role in combat. The four different characters can feel different in combat because of it.

I dislike the cancel result on the combat deck that waste an attack, I imagine that if a player has set up a powerful move using a card that gets discarded - only to have that entire attack negated, it must feel gutting.
​
I'm not sure how I feel about using individual decks as a randomizer for combat, I can see the appeal of having a customisable individual randomizer for each player, but it seems like having components for the sake of having components. It works well enough, but I'm sure a similar effect could achieved with a single bunch of dice that are collated for individual rolls.

Gloomhaven/Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion are 2 games that are sort of chasing a board game holy grail. These are games that are trying to an give RPG style gameplay and experience, but without a GM.
It's a tricky goal; too simple and it becomes bland and repetitive, too complex and the game gets bogged down in rules, rules exceptions and components.
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion seems to straddle that line fairly well.

Although as I mentioned above, we did use an app to facilitate play. It did have the advantage of allowing a player to join in a board game where he played over zoom!
Maybe this is the way to go, where an app does the GM heavy lifting, I've seen at least one game that requires an app, no doubt there will be more games that do that.

But this raises the question of legacy, an older game can (And probably will.) be rendered obsolete if the companion app becomes unavailable.

Overall though; I was happy enough to play it and will be continuing with the campaign I joined.

21st September 2019.

It's Saturday evening round at Matakishi's and that can only mean games night!

​So here we have 'Machi Koro Legacy​'. As the title suggests, this is a legacy version of the very good Machi Koro game.

Spoilers!!!
Don't read any further ahead if you want to play Machi Koro Legacy!

What's a legacy game?
Glad you asked. A legacy game's unique feature is that it is actually a series of play-throughs of the same game. After each game concludes, something changes, is added or removed from the game and that change carries over to the next play-through of the game. Thus you have (In theory.) a game that constantly changes and evolves according to player input.

Machi Koro Legacy is played over 10 games. We played games 1-5 in one night and in total all 10 games were played over 3 evenings.
I'm going to blog about all of the games in this post. Since at the time of writing, these blog posts are about a month behind the actual plays.

If​ you don't know anything about Machi Koro, you can read my blog about it here.
Have you read it?  Good! Now you know all about Machi Koro.

The Basics
The original Machi Koro has 2 expansions, 'The Harbour' and 'Millionaire's Row'.
Generally we play Machi Koro with The Harbour.
​As you would expect, the core mechanics of Machi Koro remain unchanged for the 'legacy' version.
If you didn't actually bother reading my blog about the main game: Here's a quick recap.

• The objective of the game is to purchase all the landmarks first. This is done with money.
• Money is accumulated by building up your city and profiting from this.
• In game terms, building up your city is done by purchasing 'establishment' cards from the available choice of cards in the main game area, called the 'market'. These cards are all numbered from 1-12.
• At the start of the active player's turn, they roll 1 or 2 six sided dice. Every card in the active player's city that has a matching number will then probably earn them money.
• Now the player can spend any money they have.
• There's bit more to it, but that's enough to be getting on with.

The legacy game
I can't really blog about the game in my normal format because the components and rules change throughout the game. So I'll just go through it as best as I can. I'm not going to extensively talk about the original, I'll try to just talk about any differences between 'original' and 'legacy' versions.​

Personal game board
This is immediately different. In legacy, each player is given a game board that has the following:

• Space for your settlement's name: Thus the tiny village of Townopolis was born.
• 4 tick boxes. 2 of these tick boxes are immediately ticked. These determine how many cards a player will will start the game with. In original, players start with the same 2 cards, a Wheat Field and a Bakery. But in legacy, each player is given a number of cards (Called Town Square cards.) from which they choose their starting cards. Initially players start with 2 cards, but as the boxes are ticked, they will start with 3 then 4 Town Square cards.
• A row of 3 spots for cards, with '5', '15' & '25' beneath them. These spaces are for landmark cards, which are put out at the start of a game. As each game is completed, the card on the '5' space is discarded and the other 2 landmark cards slide 1 space to the left into the cheaper spaces. A new landmark is then placed into the '25' space. There's also a 'communal' landmark card that is placed in the main playing area, this landmark is changed for every game. To win a game, players must buy all 4 landmarks. This is a bit different from original,.
• Triangular grid: On the right side of the board is a triangular grid. Players may spend actions 'filling' a triangle instead of buying cards. Filling in a triangle normally takes 2 or 3 actions. Triangles that are 'filled in' earn the player another new thing to the game - diamonds. What are diamonds (See below.)?

Diamonds
Diamonds are a new currency introduced in Legacy. Players can start a game with diamonds or acquire them during play. Some landmarks and cards can use diamonds for a benefit. But the main use of diamonds is to spend them to re-roll dice rolls.

Double sided establishment cards
These are an entirely new type of game introduced in Legacy.
When a game is concluded, a new type of card is added to the market from the next game onward. These cards are 'double sided'. One side tends to be blue/green and the other red or occasionally purple. The player who just won the concluding game gets to choose which side is used, these cards have tick boxes which can ticked to indicate which side was initially chosen.
During later games, it is possible that a stack of double sided cards can be flipped over to their other side. If this occurs, then it also affects all copies of that card in players' areas! (See below for how 'flipping' can occur.)

Traveller die
Another new introduction to legacy is the 'traveller die', a blank six sided die. What's the point of a blank die you may ask? Well, it doesn't stay blank for long. As games are completed, stickers are added to die. The traveller die is now rolled along with the normal dice. The following stickers are added to the traveller die: Turtle, yokai and moon princess
There 3 travellers each have their own little figure that moves along cards as dictated by the rules for the traveller die.

• Turtle: 2 turtle stickers are added to the traveller die. The turtle travels along the player's establishment cards. When the turtle result comes up on the traveller die, the turtle will move along player cards a number of times equal to the result on the normal dice roll. When the turtle stops on a card, it's owner is given money equal to the card's cost. The turtle always starts the game on a card belonging to the player who has won the least number of games.
• Yokai: When the yokai appears, 2 more stickers are added to the traveller die. Generally the yokai is 'mischievous', but in the end becomes a 'nice guy'. The yokai always starts on the fishing boat card stack in the market area and moves along card stacks in the market area. When a yokai result comes up, the yokai moves along a number of card stacks in the market area equal to the dice roll. When the yokai stops on a 'double sided' card, then that card is flipped to its other side. Additionally, any card the Yokai is currently standing, cannot be bought by any player. Eventually the yokai learns the error of his ways and becomes 'nice'. This means that when he stops on a card he no longer flips or blocks it and players are given money from the bank if they have that type of card in their personal play area.
• Moon Princess: When the moon princess appears, 2 final stickers are added to the last 2 blank spaces on the traveller die. The moon princess starts the game on the wheat field card stack in the market area. Like the yokai, the moon princess moves along card stacks in the market area. When the moon princess is standing on a card stack, then the active player can buy a card from that stack for free.

The sea
Another new addition to legacy that appears later in the game is 'the sea'. This is depicted by placing 3 cards in a column in the market area along side the establishment cards. Then, each player receives a boat figurine in their colour and a 12 sided die is introduced into the game. What does this all do? Well, read on:

• Sea travel: The 3 cards used to depict the sea have 10 locations on them, each location is also numbered from 3 to 11.
• If players want to travel the sea, they put their boat at the bottom and travel upwards, starting at 3 and ending at 11. It uses their action for their turn to do so. There are 2 modes of transport available to them. Sailing and rowing.
• Sailing: In order to sail further, the active player must roll the 12 sided die and get a result higher than the number on the next spot that they are headed to. Thus it is possible to fail sailing. Failure can also see the ship go backwards.
• Rowing: To move forward by rowing, the active player simple spends money equal to the number on next spot they are headed for. It costs, but there's no chance of failure.
• Some of the later spots give the players who reach them bonuses such as a free card from the main playing area, cash, an extra go, Etc.
• In the game that the sea appears, the communal landmark requires a player reach the final spot on the sea before they can buy the communal landmark.

Islands
When the sea has been introduced, islands are next. Islands work in the following way.

• 5 island cards are placed face-down in a row in the playing area.
• Each island corresponds to spots 6-10 on the sea track.
• When a player's boat reaches a relevant spot they can look at the corresponding face-down card. They do not reveal it to other players and put it back still face-down.
• Once the player has looked at a face-down island card, they can decline from taking it or choose to take it. If they do take it, then they return back to the start of the sea track.
• If a player takes an island card, it cannot be used immediately. It can be used from the start of the next game onward. It is permanently added to a player selection of cards.
• When a player starts a game with a island card in their possession, they can use it as a town square card, therefore it counts against their town square card limit.
• Even though an island card counts as a town square card, it is not considered a normal card. It cannot be activated by a dice roll, nor does the turtle travel on to it.
• Island cards work by allowing the active player to spend diamonds to acquire cards of a particular type as a free action before they roll the dice. The type of card they can buy is dictated by the island card. Thus a player can get 2 establishment a turn or a establishment and a landmark etc.

The moon
During one of the latter games, the players will acquire rockets for their ships and in the 10th and final game, they will travel to the moon in an endeavour to return the moon princess home.

• The moon card is added to the top of the sea track to form a new track - I guess the moon track?
• Journeying to the moon is identical to journeying in the sea (If only it was so in real life!) except the moon card adds an extra 3 spots to journey along
• None of these spots can be reached with a roll of the 12 sided die. Players must spend money to reach the moon (Space programs are expensive!).
• The final communal landmark require a player reach the moon in order to buy it.

Right that's about it for what's in the game and rules. I've missed out some bits about some cards being removed from play and so on, but that I think is most of it.

The 11th game
Once the 10th game has concluded. The remaining cards can be used to make up a new game of Machi Koro. Having a functioning game afterwards is a nice touch.

So that's it. As I explained earlier, this is the only legacy style game I've played. And to be honest, in regards to Machi Koro, I don't think it adds much to the experience of playing it.

Sure, it adds some interesting ideas to the mix and it was nice seeing new cards. But it also adds a whole lot of unnecessary stuff too. Additionally, the changes that occur throughout the games feel very small, the choice that the winner makes after every game feels inconsequential.

I don't regret playing Machi Koro Legacy at all; it provided us with 10 games and 3 evenings of entertainment. But during those games I never felt that I was playing something superior to the original.