13th May 2022

Friday the 13th! And I'm in Farnborough with work colleagues for some gaming fun.

​Viva la resistance! Will you overthrow the tyrannical oppressive government or welcome your new overlords? Let the cards decide.

Resistance is a hidden role card game that is also the predecessor of Arthurian themed The Resistance: Avalon and as such is mechanically almost identical to that game. In fact ​The Resistance or at least the basic version of it is actually a simpler game than The Resistance: Avalon.

Reading my blog about The Resistance: Avalon will tell you everything you need to know about The Resistance. A full write-up here would be pointless.

There's only 1 notable difference: The basic version of The Resistance only has 2 role cards, resistance fighter and spy. Otherwise the games play identically.

At the start, each player is given a secret role as a resistance fighter or spy. The key thing here is that the spies know who each other are and are trying to sabotage the missions while the resistance fighters are trying to uncover the spies.
The mission leader chooses a team and all players vote on whether to approve or reject that team. When a team is finally chosen, they all go on the mission. This involves the team voting on whether a mission succeeds or not. Resistance fighters must choose  to succeed at missions but spies can choose to either succeed or fail.
​
All of these decisions and voting are done in secret and resistance fighter will need to watch the voting, who votes in what and the outcomes of the voting. Spies will need to be patient, revealing their hand too early will flush them out.
If by then of the fifth mission, the spies have not sabotaged 3 missions, then the resistance wins. If 3 missions are sabotaged

Overall
There's not too much to add here, everything I said about The Resistance: Avalon also applies here, but that was sometime ago and I can't remember exactly what I said. So I'll summarise here.

Mechanically, The Resistance is pretty solid with a easily understood set of rules that give opportunities for lying, deception and deduction. There's nothing to fault there.

The quality of the game though, comes almost entirely from the participants.
Players who love to bluff and mess with other players will revel here and be in their element. Whilst those who aren't fans of this type of game are likely to find it slightly uncomfortable, won't enjoy it and thus probably won't play it as well.

So if you're fan of hidden role games and are playing with like-minded people, The Resistance is definitely worth trying. 

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.

24th November 2019

Sunday at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking continues.

The next game was 'Codenames'.
I have it on good authority that spies, above all other things, really like having  codenames.
So it's a good thing that the game 'Codenames' is all about spies.
Actually, it's a team based card game about words, but I digress...

Whats in a game?
blah

• Word cards: Word cards are double sided and as the name suggests have a single word written on each side. There are 200 cards, so 400 words available.
• Key cards: Key cards are square cards used to identify which word cards belong to each faction (More on this below.). There are 40 cards and they can be used in any of 4 orientations, giving 160 combinations.
• 8 blue agent tiles: For the... blue team
• 8 red agent tiles:  Yes, for the red team.
• Double agent tile: A double sided double agent, blue on one side and red on the other.
• 7 innocent bystander tiles: These are white.
• Assassin tile: Black as the assassin's heart!
• Hourglass: An optional timer, used if player's feel the need to hurry the game or stress the players!

The word cards are standard cards without artwork. All the tiles are made of thick card and are well illustrated.

How's it play?
Codenames requires a bit of setup.

• All players must be split into 2 teams (Red and blue.) and each team should assign one player to be their 'spymaster'. Give the red & blue agent tile stacks to their respective spymasters.
• The word cards should be shuffled, then 25 cards should be drawn. Place these cards in the playing area in a 5x5 grid.
• Shuffle the key cards. 1 key card should be drawn only by the 2 spymasters. The key card will show the location of the blue and red agents, as well as innocent bystanders and 'the assassin'. Finally, the key card dictates which team goes first.
• Give the double agent tile to the starting team's spymaster, who should flip the tile to their colour and add it to their stack of tiles. Thus the starting team has 9 tiles instead of 8.

Now we're ready to go.

• The objective of Codenames is for the each team to find the words in the 5x5 grid that represent agents of their own colour. However only the spymasters know these locations. The spymasters try to pass on the locations to their team through the use of cryptic clues.
• The clues that a spymaster may give depend on the word cards available to them and is limited to a single word and a number.

For example:

• The blue spymaster may know that the word cards 'cat', 'pigeon' & 'ant' are all blue agents, so the spymaster might say, "Animal, three.". 'Animal' because they are all animals and that words links them all and 'three' because there are 3 of them.
• Once they've been given a clue, the rest of the blue team must try and guess which words in the grid that the clue applies to. To choose a card, one of the players must touch that card.
• If a blue word is selected, the blue spymaster covers that word card with a blue agent tile. Because they selected correctly, the blue team can continue selecting cards, up to 3 times (Which was the number the  spymaster gave.).
• If the blue team selects an innocent bystander card, then it is covered with an innocent bystander tile and the blue team's turn immediately ends.
• If the blue team selects a red agent, then the red spymaster covers the card with a red agent tile and the blue team's turn immediately ends.
• If the blue team selects 'the assassin', that word is covered with the assassin tile and the blue team immediately lose the game!
• A team has to make at least 1 selection, they do not need to make any more and can pass at that point. Thus, the blue team may make up to 3 selections, but after the first selection, they can pass on the rest.
• Furthermore, on a following turn, if the blue team correctly selects all the cards on for the clue for that turn, then they can attempt to select a card that they passed on in a previous turn.
• Once a team has finished with its selection, play progresses to the next team.

Overall
When describing Codenames I've not really explained the dilemma and challenge facing the spymaster players.

The example I used had 'cat', 'pigeon' & 'ant' as all being blue. But in reality, it's more likely that not all of them would be the same colour, 'pigeon' might be red. Now the blue spymaster could simply say, "Animal, two.". But then they run the risk that the team might select 'pigeon' instead of the other choices and if they select the wrong word first, it stops their turn straightaway!

So the spymaster has to select clues that don't draw their teammates to the wrong answer. This can be downright tricky.
Now the spymaster could play it safe and select, "Meow, one." for 'cat' and use 1 word clues. The problem with playing it safe though, is that it probably won't win you the game unless you're already ahead.  So doing 2 or 3 word clues can be a good way of getting ahead.

The same principle applies to the other team members. When the spymaster gives you a clue for 3 words, managing to find all of them grants the team a good advantage. But getting wrong can prove a bad thing.

It's a good implementation of a 'risk/reward' mechanic. A successful risk pays off and a unsuccessful risk penalises.

There's only one small drawback to Codenames and that is that it basically needs at least 4 players to play and ideally even numbers of players too.
The game goes up to 8 players, but I can't see a reason why team size should be limited to 4 (Other than it takes a longer to come to a consensus with bigger teams!).

Codenames is easy enough to learn to be a 'crossover' game and has a high replay value. It's probably a bit too long for a filler game, but makes an excellent party game. Particularly when with larger groups and/or family members.