ClockWise Studios

Official blog site for the ClockWise team

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Game Review - Monarch

Hey there folks. Looks like it's time for another game review! This week, I want to talk about a game called Monarch by Mary Flanagan. I picked this game up at Gen Con a couple months ago and it's gotten a lot of use. I'm a little ashamed to admit that the real reason I stopped at their booth is because I overheard someone mention that the game is going to be featured on the upcoming season of Tabletop. That said, I'm so glad I stopped in for a demo (and grabbing a couple Gen Con promo cards while I was there).

 The Story In Monarch, you and your friends play as sister princesses in a small European style fantasy kingdom. Your mother, the queen, has just passed away and now you and your sisters must compete to become the next ruler of the land. 

Of course, because you are all family and care deeply for your kingdom, you can't simply declare war on each other. Instead, you must gain influence in the court. Whoever collects enough influence the fastest is crowned Queen.

If you take one look at this game, you can probably figure out what sold me on the game. The artwork is gorgeous and completely unique, at least as far as I've seen. Kate Adams did an amazing job with the scratchboard artwork.  She managed to illustrate a world with just enough magic in it to feel engaging, but not so much that it feels overpowering. There is definitely a feel of magic to some of the gowns and creatures you'll be recruiting into your court. At the same time, the relatively subdued colors and unique style make it feel different, almost in a believable or historic way. This would be a great game to play with friends who might be a little put off by too much fantasy influence. That said, the artwork alone is worth the cost of admission. 

So what do you do? well, throughout the game, you will be recruiting people, animals, and items to your court and gaining influence. In order to recruit people into your court, you need money. In order to get money, you must tax the villagers. In order to tax, you must feed them. This translates very simply into mechanics. On your turn, you can either harvest food from farms on the board (a board which everyone shares), or everyone can tax the villages (also shared) by feeding them some of the food you've collected. Each turn has you doing one of these things, taxing or harvesting. Then, if you have some money, you can spend it to recruit to your court. 

Pretty simple. A game only takes maybe 30 minutes, since the game ends once someone has 7 cards in their court. 

Most of the strategy here comes from how you want to spend your money. Different court cards interact with each other in different ways, and they all fall in to one of 4 categories: Might, Culture, Bounty, or Wisdom. Generally, you will be trying to collect cards of your chosen category while trying to keep other players from building up anything. Unfortunately, you don't have many ways to do that. There a a couple cards worth negative points that you can force upon your rivals, however these don't seem to do much in the grand scheme of the game. And other than that and the shared board (which affects very little as far as score), there isn't much to do to interfere with opponents, or stop someone from gaining a lot of momentum. You essentially all have access to the same set of resources and you will just buy cards that come up that match your specialization.  Also, because the game ends when one player gets 7 cards, that player almost always wins just because they had more things scoring them points.

Despite these complaints, I don't think these problems are going to be obvious to someone who doesn't play a lot of games. Ultimately, your choices feel fun and the artwork really keeps you engaged.

The Good

The artwork is amazing! If you didn't click the link earlier, please please go check out their preview gallery.

The shared resources is an interesting mechanic. Each player can spend money or food to build up the board, but doing so gives their opponents and advantage.

The game is simple, yet satisfying. Monarch is extremely approachable and plays pretty quickly. It's a great game to play just to relax with some friends. And it should appeal to just about everyone.

The Bad

There is very little player interaction. Other than the shared resource mechanic, you can't do much about what your rivals are doing. This can be frustrated when you combine it with the fact that it's pretty easy for one player to take an early lead. And since everyone essentially has the same resources, there is really no good way to come back.

 As I said earlier, the art alone is worth the price of admission. If that's not enough for you, I would suggest it for anyone with a group looking for something simple and agreeable.

Hope this was helpful for you

- Billy

[clockwisestudios-blog]

The Necromancers’ Alphabet - Day 1: A is for Abandon

A is for Abandon

When you take up the bells, the cloak, the staff, etc,

You will be shunned.

Later you will be hunted.

It isn't fair.

But very little about Necromancy is fair.

"It's worth it, though."

You will repeat this to yourself so many times it will become instinctive knowledge. Like a prayer. Or the Alphabet.

-

The Necromancers’ alphabet is a kind of short, kind of dark story by Billy Rouse. We originally intended to publish this story as a not-for-children picture book, but recent circumstances have made the “picture” part of that rather difficult. Instead, we will be posting the story letter by letter right here and on our website, thinkingclockwise.com, for the next 26 days.

We hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to give us comments and feedback.

[clockwisestudios-blog]

Quick Pitch - Spiral Bound Game Boards

I was browsing around Kickstarter the other day when I came across an idea I hadn’t really seen done before courtesy of Near and Far (sequel to Above and Below). And that idea is… Game Board Notebooks.

The idea here is that instead of having a single cardboard game board, you could have an entire spiral bound notebook where each open page is an entirely new board.

Why was this idea so exciting to me? Well, we are at a stage with our projects where we are going back and forth with manufacturers trying to optimize the quality of our board game while staying under a reasonable retail price. And something that kind of surprised us - you can print an entire book for pretty close to the cost of a game board. There’s a reason paperback novels go for $8-$10 in a bookstore.

This means that we could essentially include 10 completely unique game boards in Six Sided Summoner for the cost of one. Taking this idea one step further: We could print a notebook on normal notebook paper with 100 blank boards that the players could help create. Imagine the freedom and versatility of creating a role playing encounter, but in your favorite board games. As a designer, there is a lot of freedom here. Ask anyone who has seriously considered publishing a game and they’ll all tell you that a big part of going to print is trimming the fat out of your project. Cutting down on the number of cards or player boards to get the cost down to that $40 retail price.

The only downside? The boards are printed on paper. High quality paper, the kind of thing you would see in an art book, but it’s still flimsy and doesn’t quite hold up to the same kind of punishment. As a player, I’m not sure my games really see enough use to make 10 game boards worth that quality drop. But as a designer, I feel compelled to explore the creative space.

What do you think? Is not having a sturdy board worth a lot of potential replayability?

Let us know your thoughts.

[clockwisestudios-blog]

Game Review - Above and Below

Hey there everybody! Last weekend, I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of Above and Below by Ryan Laukat, and I really wanna talk about it… so… how ‘bout a game review!

The Story

The thing that really got me excited about Above and Below (aside from the fantastically charming Ghilbli-reminiscent artwork) is that this game features storytelling very very heavily. Narrative in tabletop games, especially non-role playing games, fascinates me. And above and below has some of the best world building in a board game that I’ve ever seen.

In Above and Below, each player is trying to build a town. Simple enough. You do this by training new villagers, building new structures for your town, and exploring.

Something that helped win me over is that each of the villagers that you can recruit and each of the many types of building you can construct has their own distinct artwork. There is a lot of personality here that helps make the village you create really feel like your village. Also, it’s a little touch, but even the way each of the building cards connect to each other really helps build some atmosphere.

Let me emphasize this, at the end of Above and Below, you haven’t just collected cards. You have built a town. If there’s a downside here, it’s that it can be very easy to just want to build the things you think are cool instead of actually trying to win.

But what really steals the show is the exploration mechanic. During your turn, rather than recruiting, working, or building, you can send a party of adventurers into the frightening world of Below to see what they can find. Whenever a player decides to explore, another player reads a randomly selected scenario from the encounter book. There are close to 200 different scenarios to run into. I have played this game 10 times in the last week and I haven’t seen the same scenario twice. They aren’t terribly long, just a short paragraph followed by a couple the player can make to resolve the scenario, but they are extremely compelling.

In a way, this sort of hurts the game. More often than not, my friends and I wanted to go exploring just to see what we could find.

From a design perspective, the best thing here is that these aren’t just isolated one off scenarios. They all exist in a cohesive world. Above and Below is a board game with well thought out lore. After the first couple times you run into the subterranean glogos with their aggressive spear-like scales and glowing red eyes, you’ll know what I mean.

Without further ado, let’s break it down:

The Good

Stellar Artwork - The game has a very charming and distinct style. It’s clear that a lot of thought and care was put into the art design.

Amazing Narrative - There is sooo much writing here. And it is all well done and engaging.

Solid Gameplay - None of the pros would matter if the game wasn’t actually good. Luckily, there is a lot of depth here. I always felt like I have plenty of options on my turn and I had a chance to develop a focused strategy over the course of the game.

The Bad

Exploring is….too fun? - This sounds strange but it might be true. Pretty much everyone I played with would rather spend their turn having a little adventure than actually trying to win, because exploring doesn’t always feel particularly productive. The rewards often seem random/unpredictable so you might expend a lot of villagers thinking you’ll get a big reward and it turns out to be something useless to you.

There is a lot going on -  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing once you know what you’re doing. The problem is that it takes a lot of playing to really feel like you have a good grasp on the mechanics. The game is not particularly complicated by any means. But there are always a lot of options in front of you and it can be very difficult to tell how well you are doing over the course of the game. By the time you think you have latched onto a strategy, 5 of the game’s 7 rounds are over and you are left scrambling.

Where the heck is the Cave Cat?! - This game comes with 2 Cave Cats that can only be recruited by exploring, and I haven’t found them yet! Come on Red Raven Games!

 At the end of the day, this game is easily worth more than the $36 it’s going for on Amazon. It’s a solid game with great art and can be a great way to work some fun storytelling and roleplaying into a game session. I’ve even convinced a couple friends to try D&D after making up some fun voices and backstories for our villagers. If anything I’ve said here interests you, definitely go pick this up. You will not regret it. That goes double if you are a designer. I would absolutely have paid the $60 for the Kickstarter edition just to support the kind of creative narrative ideas that Above and Below plays with. I cannot wait to see what they do with the sequel...