Mechanical Gamer

The Mechanics of Board Gaming. All this belongs to @mech_gamer on the twitters. New content posted every Thursday. Until I run out of games. Contact @mech_gamer or click below if you want something reviewed.

[harkendarv]

Harkendarv are back with an even sillier numbering system.

In this new start to Harkendarv, Paul and John talk a little about TV, Computer Games and Board Games, as the mood takes us. Today the mood takes us to Cosmic Encounter, a rather fantastic bluffing and negotiation game, with some...

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Me and a old pal doing a podcast about games and whatnot...

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Mechanical Review: Castellan

If you enjoy the process of building something while playing a game, Castellan (Beau Beckett, SJGames) is going to tickle all sorts of brain-armpits for you. Starting from a blank canvas, corner stones, short walls and long walls fashion a beautiful plastic one-storey castle. It's tactile brilliance.

Building is a relatively simple affair of card management and devious cunning.

The Card Management

Beginning with four, the interesting thing about Castellan is that any number of cards can be played on a turn. Beware, though, because your hand is only replenished by one card from the deck. This means that your hand becomes a buffer of sorts; to maintain a level of choice requires restraint. Throw down four cards in your first turn and you will have a choice of one for a few turns. Oh, and you'll lose.

Your drawing deck is neatly divided into two piles. One pile will yield more walls, the other more corner stones, though both will be a mixture. A few of the cards also contain the coveted "Draw one extra card" symbol, great for when you've overspent in previous rounds.

So, in essence, it's a game of having the right thing at the right time. With a little patience, some strategic restraint and just a dash of luck, you can engineer the right thing perfectly around the right time. Which is when we get on to the devious cunning.

The Devious Cunning

Scratch a little against the shiny plastic veneer, and Castellan soon reveals a tense game of cat and mouse, the roles interchangable throughout. It only takes one game to realise that plonking down as many pieces as you're physically able is not a tactic that's going to take you to the pros. Firstly, you're left severely reduced options with one card per turn, and secondly, you leave far too many tempting open corners and walls ready for a crafty opponent to utilise.

That being said, manage to carve out a large slice early on and you can make it pay out big time. The mechanic that moves Castellan from a friendly Lego build-a-thon into a cutthroat tactical game is the scoring. You get one point for each corner tower in your claimed area, but the corner towers don't actually have to be... err... corners. So a 'corner tile can actually be placed in the middle of a court yard, and still score you points. This is vital for maximizing the scoring potential of your finite resources.

But it doesn't stop there. If you're opponent is stupid enough to allow you some serious room to breath in, cut that behemoth into sections and you can captilise on some serious overlapping point scoring. A less lazy reviewer would put a picture here to illustrate two towers scoring for the same wall section, but Lord help me I never claimed not to be lazy.

It's a game of manipulation - manipulating the cards, the evolving board, the mistakes your opponent makes and the scoring system. And it's... good, it's really good. Though, of course, if you want a theme, you are going to have to stretch your imagination muscles, because this one is an abstract through and through. But at least it's an abstract where you build something beautiful.

If the game has a flaw (and, oh wait, it does) it's that the card management can be made so much easier for the player who gets a few choice "draw an extra card" cards. By poor luck, it so happened that for one player these cards all came out at the end, two games in a row. I think a skilled player would be able to deal with this unfortunate turn of events, but for newbies, it does somewhat scupper your plans.

It's a minor thing though, and as a two player, it's surprisingly robust. With a second pack, you can up the player count to 4, but as I haven't done that, I won't comment. But, as far as I can tell, this game got very limited buzz last year upon release, so I thought I'd give it the smallest of small nudges right now. It's pretty good.

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Mechanical Review: One Night Ultimate Werewolf

Werewolf is a funny game. Like most people, it occupies a fond place in my heart, and I've played it a lot. Maybe the most of any game. But we all know its flaws: it's too long, there's little information in the early rounds, player elimination, it requires a moderator. Well, a Japanese chap fixed Werewolf, except in fixing it he actually created a completely different game. One Night (Ultimate) Werewolf is an entirely new breed. The roles might seem familiar, but the playing mechanics are not. Players are dealt a card each, with three unused roles laid in the centre of the table. Guided by an app, during the titular one night, the titular werewolves open their eyes. But they don't kill. Oh no. ONUW is an entirely non-violent affair, up until the single required lynching. The seer can then open her eyes, and look at another player's role card. So far, so Werewolf. But there are two more roles that break away from the mold. These both involve the switching of roles. The robber is the more interesting. When the robber wakes, he may take a card from an opponent, look at it, and then must swap it with his own. So, theoretically, he is the only person who knows for sure what his role is. Or, that is, until the Troublemaker opens her eyes. The Troublemaker is literally that; a causer of trouble. When she opens her eyes, she swaps two players' roles without looking at them. This doesn't really give her any information, but it muddies the water, and is in fact one of the most powerful roles for determining information. We'll talk a bit about why later. And then, in the basic game, that's it. Everybody opens their eyes, argues, and tries to point out the werewolf. Here are your first 3 games of ONUW: 1. Excitedly, the four players opens their eyes. The robber announces he switched with a villager. The villager agrees. The other two say they are villagers. You know one is lying. Giggling, you look for other clues. There are none. Someone complains there is "no information in this game". You vote on a peaceful village, even though it's impossible. A lone werewolf wins. 2. The four players open their eyes. One person announces they're the seer. Another immediately counters and says in fact they are the seer. Excitment! An argument ensues. The others ask the seers to confirm who they looked at. One correctly identifies a player. The other looks sheepish. Werewolf identified, game over. 3. The players warily open their eyes. For a moment, no one says anything. Someone stretches archly and announces they have information, but are not yet willing to divulge it. Someone mentions they were the trouble maker. Everyone eyes their own card with suspicion. Whatever the hell has happened, they're going to get to the bottom of it. Game on.

Some Strategy

Hinting that you may have been the robber is a good tactic for gauging reactions. The werewolves will be well aware that if they got switched they are no longer a werewolf. It's pretty hard to look normal when you think you were a werewolf who may not be a werewolf, but may still be a werewolf. Try forming a cogent argument for someone else to be the werewolf whilst dealing with that. Another good way to flush out a werewolf is to try and begin the voting phase and see who people are thinking of voting for. Someone who has no information will be easier to spot - they will have likely latched on to something someone has said, or have a specific reason for voting the way they are. The werewolves have a trickier job here - they have to vote for someone who, in all likelihood, has not really displayed any outward sign of being a werewolf. Their reasons are likely to be strained and frivolous yet unflinching. The thing is, you may be pretty sure that you've figured out some spiralling chain of logic that nails down the werewolf as the lady on your right. Maybe you have; such logic chains exist. The important thing at this point is: can you convince anyone else? And in that lays the main tension of the game. My most memorable victories have been as the werewolf and managing to convince 5 other people that the innocent villager was a tyrannical lycanthrope. In original werewolf, this is nearly impossible. You may be able to pretend you're the seer but the real seer will soon speak out. In ONW, the fact that some characters are not in the game at all really adds to your ability to bluff. After a few games, layers within layers appear. People pretend to be werewolves to sniff out other werewolves (this rarely goes well, but is hilarious). Counter claims of being the robber fly across the room. But, brilliantly, often... the truth is out there. It can be unpicked. There is the occasional dud game because someone messed up or there wasn't enough information and no one bluffed quickly enough, but largely, it's just a blast, playthrough after playthrough.

ONUW is a brilliant, brilliant game that rewards investment with the same group of people. It's almost one of these new-fangled Legacy games, except instead of ripping up cards or marking the board, it's the scar of each betrayal that marks the way you play. It could well be my small game of 2014.

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A reduction in frills

Hey, wow, haven't written a blog for a little while. Even my last post was a guest post. This is not a great effort on my part.

I thought the other day about why I'm not writing and I decided it was all the other stuff around posting that got me down - the taking pictures, or finding available pictures, the copying all my stuff onto boardgame geek, generating interest.

So, I'm stopping. I'm going to write on here as much as I possibly can, every week so help me, but that's it. They will rarely be accompanied by pictures, and I will not post them anywhere else.

Anyway, so there that is. Expect more content, but it will be less interesting. Exactly how life demands it in 2014.

First up - One Night Ultimate Werewolf! 

[mechanicalgamer]

Mechanical Guest Post: Hearthstone

Generally, when Blizzard go for something, they really go for it. With a track record that includes catapulting MMOs into popular culture with World of Warcraft, and dominating the RTS eSports scene with Starcraft II, they make a strong case for being the overlords of online gaming. However, their latest offering; Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, sees them somewhat dipping their toes in the digital CCG (Collectable Card Game) waters. Fuelled by a modestly sized dev team, and having been initially thought of as something of an experiment, Hearthstone emerged from a lengthy Beta programme in April with a shiny shiny iPad app in tow, and has since proved the experiment a roaring success.

The Mechanics

Hearthstone displays many of the standard traits of CCGs. A game consists of two players, each in control of a hero with a certain amount of health points. They take it in turns to draw and play cards from their individual constructed decks that will help them in various ways to defend their own hero’s health whilst depleting their opponent’s. Cards can be roughly divided into three categories. “Minion” cards place a creature on the board, with a certain amount of attack and health points. These minions can be then ordered to attack either your opponent's hero, or minions, once per turn. “Spell” cards trigger a one-off occurrence of a variety of actions (for example, dealing damage, restoring health, drawing cards). Finally “Weapon” cards enable your hero to attack for themselves (and as a consequence, take damage) a certain amount of times, with a certain amount of attack, as if they were a minion.

Each player begins the game with three cards, and then draws one card per turn from an individual deck of 30. There is no limit on how many cards can be played a turn, but each one costs a certain amount of mana, and you have a limited amount of mana to spend per turn that gradually increases as the game progresses. So in the first few turns, each player will be playing weak, low cost, cards, but as the game builds to a climax the minions, spells and weapons available to the players become more and more powerful.

The emphasis on accessibility in comparison to other CCGs is a stark design choice from Blizzard. The one mana increase per turn is simple and intuitive. Minions can attack anything on the opponent’s side of the board unless special abilities prevent them, and neither do you have to make any actions during your opponent’s turn. The solution to the unfair nature of a turn-based game is also delightfully elegant, with the second player getting an additional card called “The Coin” which they can play at zero cost at any time that grants them an extra mana crystal on that turn (therefore allowing them to play a slightly more powerful card than their opponent as a one-off). This is just one example in a game full of neat and refined mechanics that doesn’t look to reinvent the wheel, just to make it as round and smooth as humanly possible. It most definitely comes with that trademark Blizzard polish and sheen. 

Aggression and Control

On a basic level, each game plays out as a battle between efficiency and speed, or control and aggression. A key skill for a Hearthstone beginner is to try to determine as early as possible whether they have a better chance of winning by playing the aggressor or the controller. The aggressor will look to get a lot of low cost minions onto the board early that can deal high damage in an attempt to attack the opponent’s hero (referred to as “going for the face”) and finish the game off as quickly as possible. They are not concerned about their own hero taking damage as long as they can dish it out faster.

The controller, on the other hand, will be looking to stay alive long enough to gain a card advantage by making more efficient uses of their cards than their opponent. This is done by making favourable trades of cards by, for example, having one minion or spell kill two or more of your opponent’s minions. If the aggressor spends all their cards trying to win quickly, but fails, the controller is left in a commanding position to play their high cost cards to finish the game off at their own pace. However, there is of course no guaranteed way to win every game. Even if you play your aggressive cards perfectly, you will come across decks that can control you, and visa versa. But this is just another key skill for any beginner to learn; that you can’t win every game. An 100% win rate is not the goal. Losing is sometimes ok. All you’re trying to do is win more often.

Free to Play

Whilst free to play, or “freemium”, games have endured the wrath of the Internet in the past couple of years, it strikes me that there is very much a right and wrong way to implement it. Above all the pricing structure should not undermine the skills and knowledge required to succeed, and Hearthstone is a perfect example of this done right. Being a collectable card game, card packs are available to be bought for real money, but also by using in game gold which can be earned by completing quests that the game feeds to you every day. Thus you are entirely able to fund buying packs without spending any actual money.

The three game modes, Ranked, Arena and Adventure are affected by this in different ways. In Ranked battles are wrought with decks assembled from your collection, therefore those people who have access to more, and better, cards will always be at an advantage. However it has been proven many times that you are able to get to a very high rank for free if you have enough time and skill. It comes down to a question of time; money will only buy you commodities that are acquirable through time and effort.

In Arena mode you pay £1.50 or 100 gold and then assemble your deck from a series of randomly generated choices from all the cards in the entire game. You then face off against opponents whose decks were also drafted like this, and the more wins you get without losing three times, the more you are rewarded with gold and cards. It’s a wonderful, essential feature. The unbiased and indiscriminate nature of the luck of the draw, combined with the fact that you are playing in something that has an actual monetary value makes the thrill not at all dissimilar to poker... only with with more goblins.

Similarly, entry to Adventure mode can also be bought with gold or cash. You’re pitted against a series of computer controlled bosses with cards and powers that bend the rules of the regular game. It’s clear that the dev team’s resources has not been spent lavishly on the AI, but nevertheless they make you think in ways that the regular game does not, and add a very welcome puzzle type mode to the proceedings.

Presentation

It’s clear that everything about Hearthstone is in keeping with its digital-only existence. It’s very definitely a card game, but it also feels and plays like a computer game. You’re never making any actions that feel out of place or unnatural with a mouse or on a tablet, and the game has a beautiful balance between a traditional card game and a strategy videogame. You’re not just playing cards and seeing numbers go up and down here. You’re watching minion tokens rattle and charge, spells pop and fizzle, everything connects with hugely satisfying crashes, and win or lose the creciendo to each and every game is one (or occasionally both) hero’s faces shattering in a gigantic explosion. The minion’s and hero’s catchphrases and battle cries are deliciously catchy and well done, in a way that echoes classic Blizzard RTS sound libraries. The UI designers have done an astounding job, to the extent that I absolutely cannot imagine playing Hearthstone as an actual card game.

Winning and Losing

Only boasting around 400 cards so far, Hearthstone is still very much in the process of coming of age and it remains to be seen how much Blizzard put into growing the game and maintaining the balance and momentum. But I must concede to being completely smitten. I love Hearthstone. I don’t generally have a very addictive personality, but I am fully prepared to admit that Hearthstone has hooked me. I love playing minions on the board and crashing them into things. I love flicking through my collection of cards that don’t even really exist, and I still get a little excited every time I open a new pack. I love tinkering with my decks and trying out new combinations of cards. I love testing my skills and knowledge in the Arena and trying to carve out wins with a suboptimal deck. I even love watching other people play Hearthstone. I haven’t touched on Hearthstone’s impact on Twitch.tv and the esports scene here, but I’m already 700 words over the limit Mech gave me, so that might have to wait for another time.

 I always looked at World of Warcraft and thought, man, I could really get into that, but I’d better not because it would almost certainly take over my life. And so I didn’t. I thought I’d dodged the Blizzard bullet. I thought I’d outwitted them. I thought I’d won. But then I harmlessly tried this little card game one day and all of a sudden they’ve sucked me up and sunk their teeth in. I am forced to admit defeat, after all these years. But you know what? That’s ok. Because one of the things I’ve learned recently is that sometimes it’s ok to lose… as long as you win more often.

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What is with all these pesky zombies?

It's the staple of films, computer games and, of course, boardgames. They're everywhere, shambling, arms out-stretched, each plodding step taking you a little closer to your doom. They are the shuffling undead: the zombie.

I won't bore you with the history, you know it, or you can read it all over the internet. I won't bother talking about the 'rules': the running dead who aren't zombies, the intelligent dead who aren't zombies. All that matters is that they're everywhere and I wondered the question: why? 1. They (still) fly off the shelves. Let's get this one out of the way. While the number of people tired of the wobbling dead may be rising, the bottom line is that zombies, for now, sell games. And much though I love our holy father Kickstarter, if you want to sell games before you've made them, having a snarling zombie on the front (or better yet, zombie miniatures) ain't gonna hurt your chances any. 2. They're scare-in-a-bottle. Zombies are scary regardless of almost anything. It's one of the only go-to out-of-the-box scares out there. Vampires *can* be scary. Werewolves *can* be scary. But you have to work at it. Zombies are naturally scary because there's not much to them... they shamble, they bite, they claim you as their own. Even Shaun of the Dead is genuinely scary at times, and that's one of the funniest films ever made. 3. Everyone knows the deal Oh look, you got bitten. What happens? We all know. Better get an andidote, if such a thing exists in your particular zombie universe. 4. They're mechanics generators. Zombies are absolutely perfect for games. They do it all for you. You start with one, or a few, and they multiply. You know exactly how to make them work in your game. You could argue that with this simplicity you risk your game being a little bland, but you know what? You've sold 10,000 copies already. 5. They are straight forward. Carrying on from number 4, they are a perfect board game enemy in particular because they don't think. It's so simple to automate. It is much harder to have an enemy that actually thinks... that makes decisions. That requires complex mechanics. A zombie will head towards meat, and chomp on that meat. No personality. No exposition. Done. 6. They're great for tension. Everything from the number going up and up to the bites being so fatal, but not instantly... Zombies are dramatic tension machines. 7. They fit any theme. You can have medieval zombies, cave-man zombies, zombies in forests, zombies in cities, zombies in the future and zombies in a haunted mansion. Pretty much any zombies, any time, any place. 8. They can avoid player elimination A clever game designer might manage to engineer a way that when someone is bitten, they actually make the game harder for the players by switching over to the other team. I don't specifically know any games that do this, but they should, and if I ever make a zombie game then this will be integral. 9. They're cannon-fodder (and no one feels bad for them) Zombies are great because a single one isn't a threat - only a crowd. So you can have the satisfaction of offing a few early on, safe in the knowledge that the difficulty will ramp up. It's a great shortcut because it means you don't need different types of enemy - a weak one, a strong one, a boss. They're all the same, but it's the quantity that'll get ya. (Doesn't hurt that a great swarm looks awesome when modelled in plastic...) It's also important to note that, with rare exception, people don't often feel sorry for zombies. You're doing them a favour by mowing them down. This makes zombie games pretty straight-forward, morality-wise. Excellent zombie literature and film muddy this line a bit but that's not board games' concern. 10. They're a little bit awesome. Yes, at this point zombies have been overdone to the point of extreme saturation, but even now there's a little something about zombies that keeps them interesting. There is a purity to zombies, distilled death, that makes them unsettling, deadly and a little bit awesome.

[mechanicalgamer]

Mechanical Review: Organic Chit Chat

This was a little post I did for April Fools 2014. 

Organic Chit Chat is a game that has been around almost since the birth of civilization, making it many orders of magnitude older than Go or Chess. It's a game that on the surface seems to have almost no structured rules; like an iceberg, however, break through the fragile upper crust and the layers spread out like spider webbing. One rule, for instance, is to try not to mix metaphors as it makes it hard for people to understand you.

This is not the box it comes in. 

Organic Chit Chat is essentially a deck-building game, though instead of cards, you're building up collections of these things called 'words'. Using words you've collected, you can string together what experts call 'sentences'. Really determined players can actually chain these sentences for hours without once conveying anything worth knowing. If you get amazing at it, people sometimes decide you should be inexplicably powerful. But I'm getting ahead of myself: that's all at a much higher stage. Initially, I'd suggest playing Organic Chit Chat with some close friends, possibly as a filler between bigger games. Think of an object or concept in the known universe that either a) you want to know more about or b) you have an opinion on. Construct your words together to form a question (for the former) or a statement (for the latter). This is very much like a serve in Tennis. You can only hope you have a good opponent, though excellent players can basically do without. Once you get into the swing of it, it's very much like musicians jamming. You can toss ideas back and forth, adding to and manipulating previous sentences. In very rare circumstances, your opponent will listen to these ideas, and a synergy is created. These are rare and wonderful moments, very much the purpose of Organic Chit Chat, and some experts think this is probably what love amounts to.

These people are nailing it. The first expansion can be unlocked about 15 - 20 years after your first ever game. It's called the Alcohol expansion pack and it adds several new elements - surrealism, shame, incoherence. The interesting thing is that you can play this variant on your own; or, much worse, play the base game whilst those around you play the Alcohol expansion. I would never, ever recommend this. Ask pregnant ladies. It sucks. Overall, though, the game is solid. As you might imagine from a game that has been around so long, there is quite a steep learning curve to perform with the best. Luckily, practicing the game is easy - in fact, complete strangers often seem to want to play just to kill time waiting for a bus. Unfortunately these tend to be among the very worst players, tedious turn-hoggers intent on playing only the weather-themed or how-bad-is-public-transport-these-days booster packs. The really bad ones still use the class-war promo-cards that came out under Thatcher. I've obviously only scratched the surface here - like the best massively multiplayer experiences, a lot is left for you to figure out on your own. Try various nonsensical sentences when you should be ordering food. Be sexually explicit to your boss or parents. Answer questions with further questions. Some players have mentioned that the victory conditions of Organic Chit Chat are vague and unregulated, but to them I say "gargle nosedive hickory expectorate surf-and-turf cable basin."

These people are doing it wrong.

So, Organic Chit Chat is not up there with the best games. But if you've played through Carcassonne, Cosmic Encounter and Eclipse, watched all films out at the cinema as well as everything on Netflix, and there are still people hanging around gawking at you, why not give it a try? It's portable and requires almost no setup.

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Mechanical Gamer: Dungeon Heroes

Unfortunately, RPGs were a game-type I missed. My first board game was (yawn) Settlers of Catan in a brightly lit room with family members, not D&D in a darkened room with fellow oiks. And I'm sad about that, genuinely - I feel I missed out on something, something that for no tangible reason I feel I can't now go back and get into. All this is to say I've never been a dungeon crawler. Games like Dungeon Twister or Gamelyn Games' Dungeon Heroes being the closest I've ever got. But luckily for me, there are a lot of interesting things going on in both of these games, so let's talk about one of them now. The latter.

Compoverview Board, small, excellently foldable, very pretty. At one end is an 'entrance' and at the other, a mound of treasure. The frisson of arch-typicality is strong in this one. It's a lovely board. Meeples, of quality: awesome. I saw a BGG thread saying "such a shame, couldn't they have got miniatures?" I'm a polite person at heart, but said commenter is a blathering, stuttering, drooling moron. The meeples are beautiful and unique and a little sexy. Dice - for no purpose more malicious than recording life points. No luck in this game. (Wait, no luck? Is that right? Let's look at that in more detail later). Tiles: many. Good ones (weapons and wizard hats and life restoring chalices) and bad ones (Monsters and traps and poison gas clouds). Of course, if you are a Dungeon Lord at heart, swap round 'good' and 'bad' in that sentence.

I can see for tiles and tiles... So we've all played Stratego, right? For those at the back, Stratego is an old world Strategy war game of simplistic combat - each team has soldiers of varying quality, but they are placed upright like mahjong tiles so that only you can see your own units' strength. When two units meet each other, you compare unit strength, and the weaker is destroyed. There's more to it than that, but that's the gist. Dungeon Heroes begins with this premise but adds layers of interest, like a delicious dungeony onion. Firstly, the game is asymmetric, with one player controlling the titular heroes and one the Dungeon Lord, intent on preventing the player from collecting the 3 out of 4 treasures required to win the game.

Secondly, the Dungeon player begins with nothing, and draws tiles from a stack. So instead of laying out his strategy at the beginning, he has to adapt his plans based on what he draws. This helps the game be a bit different each time, and using a subset of the available tiles each game also helps (so, pedants, there is luck involved. But not a lot of it). The game really does have a varied feel, both between the two sides, and each play through. Asymmeticality So the asymmetry is the key. It's not tacked on. In some games, you may have different units for the two or more sides, and that can work very well. But Dungeon Heroes is one of those rare examples of the differences being completely integral. Every action and rule is unique for each player. And even within one side, there are phases and more beautiful asymmetry.

The Dungeon Heroes each have unique powers. Only one can attack and kill monsters. One can reveal tiles from afar. One can disarm traps. One can heal other players. So, sending your team into the dungeon in just the right way is critical. And there are some neat mini-combos you can do that will be needed to turn the tide in your favour. And the Dungeon Lord's game has an asymmetry down the middle too. Half way through the game, the Dungeon Lord's actions alter. He no longer lays down tiles on his turn once they have run out. Instead, he may reveal tiles already placed, ideally monster tiles, as they can then brutally move and attack. The whole thing is intricately set up. Initially, the Dungeon Lord is throwing down tiles and building the dungeon, and the heroes are tentatively tip toeing their way around the traps and monsters, cautiously peering under tiles looking for goodies. The game shifts at the midpoint as the Dungeon Lord changes gear from passively laying tiles to aggressively pursuing the Heroes. As the Dungeon Lord reveals tiles, he can move any revealed monsters, which have now been exchanged for the beautiful meeples. They can move and attack for one action if they are positioned well, and it's immensely powerful. The heroes want to find the treasure pretty sharpish after this phase of the game begins.

Tell me a story, Dungeon Lord Here's an interesting thing about Dungeon Heroes - it's like a story. What? Yeah, it's like a story. The Dungeon Lord is the story teller. The Heros, they're the reader. The Dungeon Lord knows the story he's telling - he's pages ahead, rattling away, setting up plot twists. And the heros, well, they're trying to read as quickly as possible, making sure they anticipate every turn, and ultimately finish the book as quickly as they can once it's been written. You see, the Heroes have got to find 3 of the 4 treasures. The Dungeon Lord knows where the treasures are - at least those that have come up. So what does he do? He surrounds them with traps and monsters and poison! If that's not writing a story, I don't know what is. But watch out - make your story too predictable, and the heroes will walk through it without springing any of your major events! Being unpredictable as the Dungeon Lord is essential, especially after a couple of games with the same person. But you also need to react to what the heroes are doing: put the weakest ones in danger, slow down the strong ones. It's a perfect storm of strategy and tactics. There is actually an awful lot of ways of approaching the problem and it's a really good game.

Personal Opinion This is a game that really keeps on giving. Simple to play (although the occasional rule is slightly more cumbersome than one would possibly like. I've had to explain the "move and attack is one action *sometimes*" rule many times more than any other), it has a wealth of interesting strategic and tactical options for both sides. I'm enjoying testing and learning from my opponent - so far, maybe 10 games in, it's been a god-damn arms race. I get ahead, then she does. She thinks of a tactic, and I think of a counter. It really has been that interesting. I strongly recommend anyone playing a lot of 2 player games picks up Dungeon Heroes.

[mechanicalgamer]

Mechanical Guest Post: Perigon

Good egg and friend Alistair ruminates on a game he may not have looked at twice given the choice...

Every once and a while a game comes along that surprises you.

OK, I may as well have titled this blog 'The Bleedin' Obvious'. The board game universe is full of charming, innovative and clever games where more than half the fun is the discovery process: games where you build and fly ramshackle spaceships around at breakneck speed, or point foam guns at each other, or where you find yourself making impassioned arguments that your grandmother is a murderous, bloodthirsty lycanthrope who should be executed immediately. These games are so fun to play in large part because of their outlandish themes, mechanics and colour.

Perigon is not one of those games. For me, Perigon was the kind of game that I was positive I wasn't going to like. But instead, this charming game surprised me into liking it, and caused me to rethink what it is I truly enjoy about gaming – and the mechanics thereof.

Wood you have bought it?

Hey wood-lookin!

It now makes me sad to admit this, but I'd never have bought Perigon from the looks of it. Despite the elegant geometric design and handsome, sturdy carved wood (I've certainly shelled out for chess sets with these qualities), it looked the kind of game I used to play in my dentist's waiting room.

You remember the kind.

The objective usually involves hopping wooden pegs or marbles around a board, trying (and in my case usually failing) to get rid of them all. My dentist had one on a board shaped like a molar. Every 9 months from age 6 to 10, I would stubbornly ignore the much cooler (semi-chewed) He-Man figures in the waiting room toy box and wage fruitless battle with the stupid wooden tooth. It mocked me. It wasn't fun, but I could never leave it unsolved. These were not pleasant memories.

Never again...

So, as it happens, I received Perigon as a Christmas gift from some very well meaning non-gaming friends who bought it because, as they knew, “I like board games.” I fought back childhood flashbacks and accepted it graciously, promising to bust it out and play it at my first opportunity.

Compoverview

I warmed to the game as soon as I opened it (which was several months later, sorry Matt!) The board is a genuinely lovely piece of wood that looks great on a table. In a little cloth bag came the accompanying painted wooden pegs; four grey (the 'granites'), four brown (the 'woods') and one red peg, known as the 'flag'.  

Set up to play

The best and most frustrating thing about nice wooden boards is that they have a personality of their own. This may not be true of all Perigon boards, but mine certainly over time developed a bend which causes it to wobble rebelliously on two of its corners. This is a bit of a shame (and pretty distracting during play), but easily fixed with a coaster.

Themeless design

The first four pages of the rule book are dedicated to explaining the intricate backstory which explains the enmity between the black and white painted pegs; their societies, motivations, foibles and the ultimate victory that will be decided between them through the titanic struggle waged across the board...

Just kidding! The game has a simple objective: Get the flag to touch the opposite end of the board, while preventing your opponent from doing the same. The flag is a communal piece - it can be moved freely by both players on their turn, provided they've moved their pieces (granites and woods) into position.

A courageous first move! (NB - The first player gets only one move on his first turn) 

After the first turn, each player has two moves with which to move his pegs around the board. The granite (grey) pegs can displace (shunt) wooden pieces, but can't displace other granites or force wooden pieces into occupied grooves. This means that to successfully control the board you need to support your pieces, while shoving others out of the way.

It was amazing how quickly I started to assign traits and personalities to my inanimate wooden cylinders. The granites were my dumb heavies, pushing other pieces around and holding important tactical spots. The woods were my scouts, zipping around the board, sometimes benefiting from a friendly shunt to get them into just the right position behind the enemy lines.

Momentum

The Flag can only be moved when it is touching the corner of a peg and only by 90 degree turns on the grid of grooves that make up the board. However, flag moves are 'free.' Once you have possession of the flag you can move it as far as you like along your pieces.

See what I did there?

This is another element of gameplay that added a surprising amount of drama, reversals and personality to the game. Occasionally you will wrestle control of the flag away from your opponent, immediately speeding it to a far corner of the board, away from the envious grasp of his pieces – only to have it torn from you moments later as you try to bring it forward.

Once you have control of the flag - and you've got it such that your opponent can't get it back in one turn - it's tempting to play an endless game of keep-away, flitting the flag back and forth out of your opponent's reach. But that's no way to win. Ultimately, through cunning, persistence, luck or a mix of all three, you're going to need to get the flag past your opponent and onto his back line. In the games I've played its hard to do this without surrendering the flag at least once. So planning and positioning are essential.

A winner is you!

And that's about it! There are some obscure but important rules regarding shunting pieces around the edges of the board and not creating circumstances where the flag becomes 'locked' (unable to be stolen by the opponent)- but on the whole this is a game that takes seconds to set up, minutes to explain and can be enjoyed for hours.*

*Provided you can get a few games in, of course. I love ponderous game of chess or go, but this is a game that – I think – benefits from a chess clock timer for players to avoid excessive plotting and re-plotting of moves. I don't think the game's too dissimilar from many perfect information games in this regard.

Final thoughts

I've been asking myself lately what it is I like about the games I gravitate towards– and how many other Perigons I might be missing out on. I've not come to any definite conclusions, but Perigon helped me realise that underneath the fun that comes from learning the ropes of a game, exploring the cleverness of its concept, or just having fun with an immersive theme - one of the core things I'm really looking for are those exhilarating moments: snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, or wailing as a friend exploits an opportunity you left open. Luckily, in Perigon these moments abound, and I can easily see myself playing this for years to come. I should get my dentist a copy…

[mechanicalgamer]

Guest Blog: Civilization Revolution (iPad)

Friend of the blog and clever fellow JD looks at the iPad adaption of Civilization:

The Civilization (or ‘Civ’, for short) series is the brainchild of Sid Meier. Sid Meier really gets games. Far more than I can articulate, in fact. He is the guy attributed to the famous games design quote, "a good game is a series of interesting choices". My aspiring game designer friend, and owner of this very site, made the same point to me recently; designing a game involves placing choices in front of players that have clear and comparable meanings. And here’s something else Sid Meier once said about games in an interview with Eurogamer:

"The reason why turn-based games work in so many cases [is] you feel like you have the freedom to take whatever time you want to think about consequences and possibilities. Your mind is doing all this cool stuff, and that's what we're trying to get to happen. We still remember that it's important to get the player's total brain engaged and not just the tips of their fingers."

In that article Christian Donlan writes that “Meier is wide-ranging but level-headed, genial but precise. There's a peculiar kind of clarity to the thinking of this undemonstrative character”. In an industry so full of hyperbole and teenage boy bravado and bombast, Meier is a shining beacon of cool intellect, and Civilization is almost certainly his brightest light.

A Brief History of Civ

The Civilization series has been going since 1991. It’s fair to say that Civilization Revolution is somewhat a stripped down version, especially compared to the latest iteration of the PC series, Civ V. However this is by no means an entirely bad thing. Civ has never been the most accessible game after all, and Civ Rev stands as an excellent introduction to the series if you’ve never played one before.

The sheer scope and ambition of the game is its most immediately striking feature. You must guide your civilization from its humble beginnings around 4000 BC, and build cities and military units to grow, prosper, survive, and possibly even ‘win’ (more on winning later). Along the way cities will grow, wars will be waged, wonders will be built, and nations will rise and quite possibly fall. It’s a, obviously massively simplified, simulation of, well, everything that’s ever happened to the civilised world really.

Bismark: Germany has their 2nd most famous leader representing them.. in the interests of tact.

The thing with turn-based strategy games is that really they're all just numbers, so you need to breathe life into those numbers so the player doesn't feel like they're playing a spreadsheet. Civ does this by basing some aspects of the game in real history. Each nation is a real civilisation lead by a famous monarch, despot or commander, but crucially the game doesn't restrict their fate to historical fact. This lends each game you play a very fun, unique narrative. Maybe in one game the Zulus are on their own on an island to the north, whilst the French are trying to invade Newcastle, your southerly coastal fishing city. Maybe the Greeks built the pyramids. Maybe Ghandi has discovered tanks and has ominously pointed them in the direction of Washington. It’s like history being rewritten and you're able, in part, to influence it. Which means that each game plays out with a lovely organic weirdness, as if in an alternate universe.

 Turn, turrrrn, turn turn tuuuuurrrrnnn

My main motivation for writing this blog is that, whilst playing Civ Rev, it struck me how much it's a board game at heart. In fact, the original game entitled 'Civilization' was a board game, and a board game based on the computer game series is now also available. So it's no surprise that in Civ Rev we find a board (the randomised world map) divided into terrain tiles. It is also turn based. There are units which you are able to move a certain number of tiles per turn. There’s even a worker placement mechanic existing in your cities. But it also takes advantage of its computerised form to add scale, AI opponents, and some complexities that even the highly detailed Civilisation: The Board Game doesn't take on.

Cities can be created by Settler units, and each game of Civ Rev begins with five nations with only one settler unit each spread over the world map. You can instruct cities to produce buildings or units over a certain number of turns - including settler units - which allows you to create more cities and expand your civilisation. Most units that you produce will be military units, which can, of course, battle other military units, and take over cities, allowing you to expand your civilisation at the same time as shrinking an opponent’s.

Depending on the size of the city, a certain number of workers can be assigned to work on the tiles directly adjacent to a central city tile. Tiles with workers placed on them provide certain resources to the city. The more food provided (for example, by grassland) each turn, the faster your city will grow in terms of population, and therefore the faster you will be granted more workers to do your bidding. The more resources provided (eg. by forests) the faster the city produces its buildings or units. And the more trade provided (eg. by rivers) the more gold or scientific research is generated. Gold is pretty simple, it allows you to rush the production of building and units. Scientific research allows you to research technologies and advance the knowledge of your civilization in order to gain access to more powerful units and more effective buildings. It's incredibly satisfying to set up a network of productive cities all bending to your will (i.e. world domination).

All of these city management options open up an explosion of choices. Where should I place my cities? What should I build? Do I try and grow the city population by assigning plenty of farmers? Or do I really need to research pottery so I can build a granary and increase the city growth that way? Do I build attacking or defensive units? Does this city really need a library to increase its scientific research output per turn? The game leaves everything up to you. In fact, it even places the type of victory you want to achieve in your hands.

Winning The World

In Civ Rev there are four ways to win. The Cultural Victory can be achieved by building enough wonders of the world and amassing enough famous cultural icons. An Economical Victory involves collecting a vast amount of gold and building a world bank. A Technological Victory involves researching the entire tech tree, and thus building a spaceship to fly to Alpha Centauri. And finally, you can win by military domination; capturing all of the other players' capital cities.

 I think computer games have really overestimated how often fog was a problem in war.

This vast array of choices can be daunting. I know the feeling; the last tricky decision you attempted to make was based around cereal, and suddenly here you are with a whole civilization to guide and no one to tell you how to do it. However, playing against the AI on the easiest difficulty leaves a lot of room for mistakes and mishaps. The AI is, in fact, easily the game’s biggest weakness. On the harder difficulty settings you can see some pretty suspect, and downright strange, behaviour such as enemy troops walking right past unguarded cities. Times of peace are very scarce, with a virtual guarantee that all of your opponents will declare war on you more than once over the course of the game. What’s more, diplomacy in Civ Rev is reduced to an option to buy peace from your foes with money or technology and… nothing else. This is not the deepest or most intelligent version of Civ. On the flipside it is probably the easiest to get to grips with, and you can certainly power through a whole game much faster than you can on a PC.

Ironically, the slow nature of the game may find you playing it at quite a fast pace (at least, if you’re as impatient as I am). Because it can take many turns to build most useful buildings and units, you want to get through turns as fast as possible in order to see the fruits of your labour. It feels wrong to describe a turn-based game as frantic, but... it just is. No matter how hard I try to slow down and take my time, the game’s focus on progression and improvement urges me forward with a desperation not to let my civilisation be left behind. The game aptly becomes an arms and knowledge race, and should you reach the moment where you realise you’re the first nation to discover tanks and start steamrolling your way through cities and nations, believe me it’s hugely satisfying.

Returning to Meier’s quote about the importance of totally engaging a player’s brain, Civilization succeeds dramatically in this regard. It’s scarily effective at transporting you away from whatever you’re doing and into a parallel universe that grants you the freedom to forge your own path, and whose fate is tantalisingly at your fingertips but never fully in your hands. The choices laid out in front of you along the way are beautifully designed and thoroughly fascinating. If you’re looking for the best Civ game, Revolution is certainly not it. But if you’re looking for a casual and accessible introduction to the series, and/or an immensely fun and consuming portable turn-based strategy game, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

[mechanicalgamer]

Mechanical Review: Gravwell

There's an acknowledged truth in board gaming that says ideas aren't worth anything. Hasbro wouldn't give me a cup of tea and the bus-fare home for my amazing new game idea about a gang of street toughs learning to respect themselves from a harsh-but-fair community support officer. Ideas are nothing, implementation is everything. Daniel Solis knows this, and if you don't follow him on twitter you really should if you have any interest in games design whatsoever. The man is a machine, spitting out ideas, each as interesting as the last, in a fireball of creativity that just has to be seen to be believed. He wrote a blog post on this very thing about a year ago. All that being said, Gravwell is a game based on an idea. It's high-concept board gaming. And the idea is this: what would happen if your movement was entirely based on where your opponents are in relation to you? And it's a great idea. Compoverview Board, medium. A fun, pretty board, spiralling out, looking a little like a roll and move game. The path could be straight, but then, theme! And fitting it in the box! The board is fine. Ships. One per player + two derelict vessels that bring to mind Firefly but I don't know why. Lovely, if fragile. Glue possibly required.

Fuel Cards. The cards have two numbers on them: speed, from 1 - 10, which tells you how far the card will move you, and initiative, which tells you when your movement will take place in the turn order. This is from 1 - 26, so to avoid confusion with the first number, they are presented alphabetically, with A being 1st and Z being 26th. Emergency Stop Cards. These are dual purpose; they remind everyone of their colour, and can be used once to cancel one of the fuel cards. Spiral When at all possible, I try not to flat out explain rules in these reviews - it's not really the point. But if you haven't played Gravwell this is going to take a little concentration. Most of the fuel cards move you a number of spaces in one direction. That direction is determined by your closest opponent or derelict ship. So, if I have an opponent two spaces behind me and a derelict ship one space in front of me, I'm going to be flung in the correct direction (out of the deadly spiral, towards the Warp gate).

If the opponent is one square away (behind me) and the derelict ship two in front, then bad luck. My boosters are going to fire, and I'm going to boldly go straight back towards the "singularity" or "starting square" to use board gaming parlance. Once I've collected my $200 for passing Go (this is a joke) then next turn I can head out again.

There are cards other than boost which can be used for other situations. Repel is as it sounds - rather than sling-shotting towards your nearest ship, you instead spring away. This can be useful when you are out in front, but they are limited and often weak. And finally there are the tractor beams, which pull every other ship (including derelicts) towards you a certain number of spaces. This is your brain on Gravwell Here is how your brain works during a first game of Gravwell: 1. This is odd. 2. This is random. 3. Oh, I can use big numbers safely when he is far in front of me. 4. Oh, I can mess up his plans if I swap my position. 5. I need to never be where my opponents think I'm going to be. 6. Ahhhh, the early letters and late letters are really useful for that. 7. I seeeeee, I can pull someone closer , they'll go past me, and fire the wrong way! Whheeeeeeee. 8. All the letters can be used well in the right situation. 9. So if he's played a boost, he's going to stream past me but if I play a low alphabet card then I'll go on the other side of him first but if he knows I know he's going to try that I need to do the opposite. Also I need to build up a resistance to iocane powder. 10. Is there ever an advantage to being in the lead? 11. Yes, there is, because the swing effect is broadly symmetrical. If you're in the lead, then your opponents have to play their big cards early to try and catch up, and you can save up for a big push later in the round. It's sort of about maintaining momentum. Literally! 12. Well, not literally, but almost. 13. I'm going to bed.

The Draft There is a semi-draft at the beginning of each turn to populate the players' hands of cards. This works by laying 3 cards face down for each person playing and one card face up on top to form 6, 9 or 12 equal piles of two, depending on player number. Obviously the top card is open information, and this is used to mitigate the random somewhat. Though trying to remember three other cards from three opponents' hands quickly becomes too much - you remember instead the As, Bs and Cs and the repels if you can. That gives you a rough idea of the kind of tricks they can play, although of course with half the hand hidden, you never know what they might be up to. The draft also serves as a minor catchup mechanic, as the player in last place gets to choose first. It's swiftly apparent that it's worth more to take what your in-the-lead opponent needs (usually a repel) than to pick yourself up a juicy boost card. Those are much more common, and you'll tend to pick them up anyway later. Talking of catch-up mechanics, is the game one giant catch-up mechanic disguised as a game? I don't think so. The more you play, the more layers of tactics and avenues of play open up to you. Broadly, there is catch-up going on, in the sense that if you are very far behind, there tends to be only one way you can go - forward, and quickly. But once you're stuck in the middle, there is as much chance of accidentally being propelled backwards as forwards. So, I guess it would be true to say that there are catchup mechanisms to get you into contention, but not to pole. That part is up to you. Maintaining the lead is the trick.

I guess, like almost every game that makes you hold cards in your hand and play them, card management comes into play. This is highlighted and streamlined by the Emergency Stop card, a get-out-of-jail-free that means that the boost or repel card you played this turn is discarded, unused. You can use it to keep yourself in an irksome place for your opponent, or you can use it to stop yourself firing 10 spaces towards the singularity, but either way, you only have one per round, and once it's gone, you are very, very vulnerable. Personal Opinion I've played 6 or 7 games of Gravwell now, and I've really enjoyed all of them but one. I'm not convinced there is a two player game in here, unless I'm very much mistaken. I keep getting the opportunity to play with more players, so I may do a follow up article just on the two player game once I have played it more. It seems an odd choice to only have one derelict; for ease of movement and an increase in dead-locked ties. Further investigation needed. So I like Gravwell - I think that's apparent. It's important with new players to play one game to "get" it and then another to really enjoy it. Players really will enjoy their second game more, even if they thought they'd figured it all out at the end of the first one. The early game is important, even if it doesn't seem so after the big swooping changes that happen throughout the game. I've mentioned I might do a follow-up on the two player - I think I may do a follow up in general. I'd like to see how much better I get at the game. I'd like to see if I can win convincingly and consistently against a newbie after 30 plays under my belt. I hope I can. There is definitely an interesting article on whether that is important for a game to be fun/worthwhile. So Gravwell is a game of ideas - ideas that it brings to the table, and ideas it gives you whilst playing. It's nice to know games can still do that. It's not a mechanic that many other games are probably going to ape - it doesn't suit many situations. But it's undoubtedly a good thing that this unique mechanic exists in the wild.

[mechanicalgamer]

Mechanical Review: Battlestar Galactica

A couple of weeks ago a wrote a post about the Traitor mechanic in games. It was pretty good. Feel free to catch up here.

Quite the ride, huh? I mentioned at the end that I would do a follow up at some point, talking about the bigger games and how well they deal with the problem of creating a game around the traitor mechanic.

My main point was that the traitor mechanic was a game onto itself - anything else the game consists of tends to be so much fluff. Enter Battlestar Galactica, a colossal game - as Penny Arcade have pointed out, even set-up is a bit of a task - that uses the traitor mechanic as only one of several pieces in an oblique puzzle. Let's begin!

Compoverview

One Board, big. The board has spinny wheely doo-hickeys built in to keep track of your resources as they dwindle - Population, Fuel, Food and Morale.

Player boards and stand-up card pieces. Each details a different major player from the first series. No one is assumed to be a Cylon based on their role in the show, but nicely Gaius takes 2 Cylon cards at the beginning of the game, increasing his chances somewhat. All the character abilities and weaknesses are nicely thematic.

Cards. Disaster cards, which happen at the end of each player's turn, skill cards, which give abilities and are used in skill checks, and other various cards for The President, for using the FTL drives, and the dreaded Cylon cards for determining traitors to the human race.

Ships and basestars: nice plastic ships and nice-ish cardboard pop-outs depicting raiders, Vipers, Raptors and the Cylon basestars. The components are generally pretty great.

Traitor!

I have to start here. It might not be the only device, but it is the main one. As in the TV show of the same name (you've heard of it?!) some of the players around the table may be Cylons, an evil band of robots that look exactly like humans in every way other than when they have sex their spines glow red. That was dramatic license? Fine, they are completely indistinguishable. In a smaller game there will be one Cylon, and in the larger, two. Critically, there are two rounds of Cylon cards dealt in the game, at the beginning and the mid-point, so you never know when you might begin hearing an odd re-imagining of "All along the Watchtower" through the walls.

There are two stage to being a Cylon traitor, a unrevealed and a revealed stage. Where BSG really shines is the number of devices that the Cylon player can use to hinder the human players without arousing (much) suspicion. Conversely though, and impressively, there are usually tell-tale signs that a player is not quite all he seems. So let's have a look at the ways an unrevealed Cylon can affect the game.

- Skill checks. Skill checks form the basis of the traitor mechanic. A skill check consists of a target number, say 13, and a few card types that can contribute to that number - maybe Engineering cards and Pilot cards. Each player can then add cards, facedown, to the skill check. Engineering and Pilot cards count towards the goal; any others away from it. As these cards are always added anonymously (save some card effects), this phase is ripe for treachery. Failure to pass a skill check results in bad affects, often to do with your precious supply levels.

- Lacklustre use of abilities. Every character has a few special abilities that can really help to turn the game to the human's advantage. Any player "forgetting" to use these powers should come under instant suspicion.

- Lacklustre use of skill cards... Skill cards can be used to pass skill checks but they also have practical abilities on them; things to make the ship run smoother or kill more Raiders. These are kept secret and a good Cylon player will never use them if he/she can help it.

- Admiral/president. Some of the players will have been given special abilities by being the Admiral or the President. An unrevealed Cylon who is given these roles would thank their mechanical lucky stars, particularly the Admiral. The Admiral chooses the location card each time the fleet jumps, and can take the ship mere inches in the right direction while causing all kinds of havoc with the supplies.

So this is all pretty impressive. Once you know how the game works, you will see all sorts of small ways to sow descent and paranoia into your fellow meat-boxes.

One final nugget about the traitor mechanic - the fact that there are two rounds of Cylon cards is a little stroke of genius. Not only is it thematically consistent (many Cylons don't know they're Cylons) but also, as my friend Steve often points out, it means that in the first round, there is an incentive to not do quite as well as you could, not knowing whether you will ultimately end up a Cylon. This muddies the water even more, making a real Cylon that much harder to spot.

Running the ship

So that's the really good out of the way. BSG, to my mind, has two problems. The first is a mechanics problem, and that to me makes it much more important. The traitor mechanic is excellently implemented, but this is to the detriment of the other aspects of the game, the main one being the day to day running of the ship.

It's... boring. That is, it feels very arbitrary, especially at the beginning of the game. There is an efficiency that you can develop - prioritising repair, politics or space combat - but none of it feels particularly urgent or engaging, and the space combat in particular is unsatisfying. Rolling one die 8 times to see how many fighters are destroyed is not scintillating combat. With the standard ships so weak, it feels a lot like rolling dice to brush ants off a sandwich.

The base-stars liven this up a bit, with tokens being used to record damage on these hulking machines, but there is another issue that is oft, correctly, targeted at this game. Because ships are added only when an assault card is drawn from the disaster deck, and they are always removed when the ship jumps, it is possible for there to be large swaths of the game when it seems like there is not that much to do.

This problem is heightened by the fact that this situation almost requires that the Cylon reveal themselves - because as a revealed Cylon, you are given more power to affect the disasters and even given a 'Super Disaster' which is usually pretty bad. But it's a shame that the Cylon might reveal themselves due to general inactivity.

I find this particularly annoying as it must have come up in playtesting. It couldn't really have been missed. It feels like someone at some point would have pointed out that this situation arises every now and then, and someone else decided it wasn't worth fixing. Possibly because it's thematic, which is a cruddy reason to have poor mechanics.

Personal Opinion

A few paragraphs ago I said that BSG had two problems. The second is it's playtime, which stands in my experiences at 2 hours at a minimum, which is a little much. It makes it inaccessible to new players, particular if they draw a Cylon card and spend the game wondering just what in hell they are supposed to be doing without revealing themselves.

All this being said, I've had some great experiences with BSG. Of the two problems, the first is uncommon and somewhat necessary to the experience, and the second is only small fry. The traitor mechanic - which is why the game was designed, and what is really important - is solid, probably the best I've seen. It's attached to a bit of a lumbering giant of a game, but thematically, it can't really be faulted.

Quick note: I've been reliably informed the expansions fix most all all of the issues I've mentioned above... I intend to research that at the earliest opportunity...

[mechanicalgamer]

Blog Post: A Mechanical Interview

The other night, I'd decided I'd had enough of the game I'm trying to design not working how I wanted it to. So I decided that I needed to write a long document about why it's not working, and what its strengths and weaknesses are. Because I have very limited concentration, I decided to write this in the form of an interview. Once I'd finished, I decided it was interesting enough to put up here.

That bar is quite low.

So, what's this game all about?

It's a semi-cooperative, survival based, zombie card game.

Can you tell me anymore about it?

Well, it involves missions, which largely involve drawing cards, which can have good things (food, guns, saws to cut off your gangrenous limbs) and bad things (bites, and other less contagious injuries). You are trying to get your team across town and onto a helicopter, though things may break down at that point as each helicopter out only has so much room.

What makes it special? What in particular were you trying to achieve?

The main feeling I was going for was one of uneasy cooperation. There are a few games like this, but mainly the effect was achieved by having a traitor, and that's not really what I was going for. I'm trying to find out the point where cooperation breaks down - and ultimately, that's got to be up to the players. I'm very interested in the game Cutthroat Caverns for this very reason.

I also wanted a roleplaying/physicality aspect to the game. This is why for 'guns', you use your own fingers, in classic playground style.

There are also roles for each of the characters to play... but this is one part I'm really struggling with. Like I mentioned in my article on the traitor mechanic, I don't want to define any of the characters as 'evil', I just want them to have something that either makes them act like a dick to other people or makes people act like a dick to them. For instance, the Glutton, who has to eat twice as much food as everyone else... or the selfish guy, who doesn't share items and food he finds.

So at the moment, what's going right?

As of right now, people who play the game seem to have fun. People use most of the available mechanics, and when things go wrong, it seems to make people genuinely laugh. And I'm afraid that's about it.

That's about it?

'fraid so.

Ok, so what's not working?

Not one element is actually really working in a perfect way. The missions are sort of pedestrian - you're just drawing cards. I haven't figured out a truly elegant system for recording wounds - I did have a system based on a green, amber, red cubes getting progressively worse over time (sorta like Pandemic) but it was slightly clunky. I now have a system that is only a little better.

The real time aspect isn't working either. I want everything to happen whenever people want it to happen, but it's such a huge task. Figuring out all the possible events, trying to make sure it's fair. The guns are great fun, but it involves people dying, and I haven't yet found a good way to avoid player elimination.

Finally, the balance is wrong. It's not quite hard enough, despite people seemingly getting bitten all the time. So in that way it's not particularly like a proper zombie survival situation. You don't see many films where the survivors are being bitten every 5 seconds, but always have a handy andidote.

Wow, that doesn't sound good.

I'm convinced there is a great game under here somewhere. I just have to excavate it.

OK, well the easiest way to do that is to concentrate on your aims. How do you want people to feel?

Uneasy. Like they are forced to collude with these bozos but you think any one of them may betray you at any time.

So how can you effect that feeling?

By making sure that up to a certain point, it's better to team up. Then after about half way, it's better to be alone. But these have to be marginal decisions. It should be Prisoner's dilemma-esque.

You mentioned Cutthroat Cavern earlier. How does that manage it?

Good question. I'm at the minor disadvantage of not having played CC, but from what I understand, the bad guys have a set strength depending on how many people are playing. This does not go down as people die (I.E a monster's strength would be 200 if 6 people started the game, regardless of how many have survived to face him). So, the more people you've lost the harder it is to defeat the enemies.

So the bad guys strength is reliant on the number of starting players? And that number does not go down as players get eliminated?

That's exactly right. It's a clever system.

Anything you can learn from it and put in your game?

That's a really tricky question. Not really without drastically changing how the game is played. The problem with my game is that the number of cards drawn is directly related to the number of players. So it's the proportion of bad cards in the deck that's important, not the number of cards drawn. So how do you make that worse when more players have died? I don't know.

So where do we go from here?

Well, there's a few things to do. Playtest, playtest, playtest, of course, but I have a great group of friends who help me out here, but I don't want to wear down their patience. There are a lot of jokes about how much I change it between iterations, but I have such a specific idea of what I want to happen each time, that when it doesn't, I have to tinker. I think there is a whole article to be had about playtesting and how much to change, but this is not it.

I think I just need to answer that central question: players being helpful versus players being wastes of food. Hmmm... I just had an idea that the more injured you are, the more food you need... interesting...

-Mech

[mechanicalgamer]

Blog post: Perfect Information in games

I've been thinking a lot about perfect information games. The thing about perfect information games is that they have a lot of built in problems, and it seems like half the battle is just in trying to iron out those problems. How do you prevent there being a perfect move each turn? How do you make it a game of skill and not a game of maths? How do you stop two perfectly balanced teams becoming deadlocked? How do you prevent take/takeback/takeback again? How do you prevent your game from being 'solved', at least the opening moves, if not the whole thing?

I guess Chess and Go are the prototypical perfect information games. I like Go, though I've never given Chess a chance. I know the rules, but not how to play. But I think even Grand masters admit that chess is broken - in fact I think it's mainly Grandmasters. The usual plebs like me can't know it's broken - it requires a specialist knowledge, and incredible skill, to get to the point where you're playing for a draw.

Go I like, but it's largely an appreciation than a physical desire to ever play it. It gets past the chess problem by being incredibly complex to model - no human (and as yet, no computer) mind could hold what it takes to 'break' Go. Though I hear they are getting close with computers. Actually, I just did some research on that, and it's pretty interesting, so no doubt I'll do another post on that at some point soon.

Some games, like Backgammon and, say, Snakes (Chutes) and Ladders, look like perfect information games but they of course are not. The number of pips the dice are going to display is information that is not added to the game until the dice are rolled, so at the beginning of the game, the information is far from perfect. Technically, a very skilled Backgammon player could lose to a much less skilled player, and though this is actually rarely the case, Backgammon is the better game for it.

Trying to design a perfect information game is a technical nightmare. Getting something fun that works once all the way through is probably about 10% of the battle. By definition, the more familiar the players are with the rules, the more they can predict what another player is going to do. The second game, and the 3rd, are crucial.

Another thing to remember is that, while adding more options, more 'things' a player can do, obfusicates those decision paths, it also just makes it harder to test. It's that game designer cliche - once your game is out in the wild, it's going to be playtested more in the first day than you ever did. That's if you're lucky and your game is popular. So, any balancing issues or deadlocking you tried to hide behind a complicated choice system are going to be unveiled in less than a week's play.

I'll come back to this topic later, maybe in the context of yet another game I'm trying to make myself.

-Mech

[mechanicalgamer]

Blog post: Traitor Mechanisms

I'm feeling a little saturated with traitor mechanics at the moment. Like Nosferatu - I played it at Essen, and it's a pretty decent game. Nice twists to the formula, like one revealed bad guy (RBG) trying his best to help out his partner. Also the fact that the RBG chooses his compatriot is interesting - that gives you some interesting information at the start. And the way you 'complete missions' (nights) is neat and maybe even a little better than the Resistance (which I guess is my standard when it comes to these things).

But I didn't pick it up. And I think the reason is a little more complicated than I'm bored of the traitor mechanic - I'm not. I played a game of Resistance the other night and it was one of the best I've played in a while (adding the new 'Merlin' promo that I got in Essen really added something).

Maybe there just isn't room in my collection for that many traitor games. I feel like the supporting devices aren't the important bit - the other game elements tends to be a background to the traitor mechanism. Who cares what you're doing - you could be pushing a cube in one direction, with the "traitor" pushing in the opposite direction, as long as there was a way to hide the way the players are pushing. I feel like Resistance fills that niche - there is no reason to have a different game attached to the traitor mechanic. The traitor mechanic IS the game.

I've been working on a game myself these last few weeks (hasn't every game reviewer?).

It's a co-op (yawn) cardgame (yawn) about zombies (triple yawn). And I've been thinking a lot about hidden roles and traitors. Even had an iteration of the game that had "The Fatalist", a guy who actually wanted to become a zombie. Pretty neat idea, huh? But I've been dragged away from it. I'm trying to think of a way to have roles that mean that people will work together but, if they absolutely have to, will resort to violence.

I think (very modestly) that it's a brilliant idea. But it's hard. It would be so easy to give some roles that say "you are BAD! Kill the others, escape in a helicopter and laugh as you glug the last remaining antidote." But that's way too restrictive. Much better is "you are the SCIENTIST. You must leave with at least one antidote in your possession. Human life is not important." NOW we're talking.. assuming the game is clever and makes it much easier to survive in a group. Now the scientist has a problem - antidotes are rare, and his companions are glugging them at the faintest whiff of a zombie bite. He needs to intervene - with force. But he still needs help to get out of there. What does he do?

Of course, there are problems here too. Why doesn't he politely say he is the scientist, and ask everybody nicely if they can spare an antidote? It's tricky. But it's more interesting than a straight traitor.

I'm not having a go at the Resistance, or Nosferatu, or any other Traitor game for that matter. You can have a heck of a lot of fun hiding your motivation and fooling your friends. But I think the Resistance works because of the simplicity of the surrounding game. If there was more to it, the traitor mechanic would not be so pure and the game, less fun. And that's been done, now. We need to think of something else.

I think there is another post to be had talking about the bigger traitor games - the BSGs, and the Shadows over Camelot. But I'm done for now.

-Mech

[mechanicalgamer]

Mechanical Review: Tash Kalar: Arena of Legends

Tash Kalar: Arena of Legends is a 2-4 player arena combat game by legendary game designer Vlaada Chvátil that a friend of mine picked up at Essen those few long weeks ago. I'd heard that it existed, but had heard little hype leading up to the convention and to be honest, have heard little since.

But I felt I should write a little something about this magnificently designed area-control game that is unlike any area-control game I've ever played. In fact it's unlike anything I've ever played before. Let's have a look at the components. Compoverview I've realised that with most games, once you've explained the components, you've explained the game, so with this in mind, welcome to my brand new section where I look over the components, telling you a little about each one in an effort to make you more familiar with the game. I call it the Compoverview! One board, small, double sided: a functional board made to look a little like a combat arena, with red and green summoning squares placed seemingly (but almost certainly not) at random. The two sides are deceptively similar, and represent the two types of game that can be played: the deathmatch and the 'High Form' where you take orders from a bizarrely educated and fussy crowd, sort of like Gladiator meets synchronized swimming.

Tokens for each of the four possible sides: these come in 3 strength levels: common, heroic and legendary. The stronger the piece in the arena, the harder they are for an opposition scoundrel to depose. Cards! ALL THE CARDS!: There are four decks for the four possible players - two of these are the same, the Empire, and two are unique, the Highlanders and the Slyvans. I like that two decks are the same, as it allows symmetrical as well as asymmetrical play. I mean, ideally they'd be a fifth too, to allow 1vs1vs1vs1 unique team deathmatch, but this is more than acceptable. There is also a flare deck, which is part of the catch up mechanic mentioned below, and a Legendary deck, which is full of huge and dangerous monsters. Each player gets two of these to compliment their deck. Scoreboard(s): Finally, there are two scoreboards, one for the High form game and one for the slugfest. And there is your compoverview! Area control? Is it an area control game? Not exactly. Certainly it's not an area 'majority' game. Is it  pattern recognition game? Undoubtedly. It's also a tactical placement game. It's a lovely mix of all these elements. So what does it involve? At its most basic, Tash Kalar involves placing your combat tiles - these are the common type, with a strength of 1 - at a cost of an action, in patterns that allow more powerful creatures to be 'summoned'. Cards in your hand tell you the creatures, and the patterns required to summon them. Summoning a creature also costs you one action, of which you have two on a turn.

On a turn you should be thinking about a few things. Firstly, you have your creatures to summon, so you may want to place some common soldiers to begin making the patterns that summon the more powerful creatures. You also have two Legendary creatures, who are extremely powerful and usually have a fiendishly difficult pattern to get them into play. Unlike your normal hand, these are drawn from a common deck and so are not reliant on a particular faction to play them. Secondly, and perhaps obviously, you are also looking at the kind of patterns your opponent may have on the board, and whether you can disrupt his plans somewhat. This sounds slightly like you need an encyclopedic knowledge of the factions and their patterns, but this isn't really true. Like Go, after a few games you begin to get a feel for the kind of patterns that usually show up - and you know instinctively that if there is a soldier out on his own in a corner, it's unlikely he's part of a master plan. This is one great aspect out of many that makes this game visceral as well as cerebral. The celebration of hearing a tut or greater expletive when you smash some clearly well positioned soldiers is satisfying in the extreme. While the 'theme' is thin (which is rare for Vlaada), it's still there and unlike some comments I've seen, I do feel it while playing, particularly the 'high form'. And thirdly (yes, I started a list up there, go check) you are thinking about the kind of things that can score you point. In the 'High' form of the game, this is usually controlling sections of the board (did I say it wasn't area majority? errrmmm...) or summoning creatures in particular places (the red and green squares, for instance). The crowd are screaming the kind of thing they want to see, and applaud (give you points) for doing so. In the Deathmatch form you get points for killing. Well, it is called Deathmatch. Or maybe it's called Duel. Look, whatever. Kill things.

But what of the other mechanics? Well, you can't really talk about Tash Kalar without talking about the catch-up mechanic.

Ketchup I have an uneasy relationship with catch up mechanics, from Evo to Mario Kart. It can feel like a last ditch attempt to balance an unbalanced game, an admission that the game has a run-away leader problem. Now, I can't speak with certainty about why Vlaada felt that Tash Kalar needed the Flares - neat little helper cards for when you are far behind - perhaps there was a run-away leader issue with the game. The point is it doesn't matter when the mechanism is installed this damn elegantly. Each player has a flare card, and if the opposition has a greater quantity (by some margin) of pieces on the board than you do, then if you choose, you can spend the Flare to get a couple of benefits, usually placing pieces or having extras actions. This works quite neatly, but it isn't why the mechanism is so good. The reason is that after a few games, you find you use Flares less and less. Here's why. In the 'low' form, the deathmatch, using a flare grants your opponent one additional victory point. In an 18 point game, with only 2 or 3 points scored a turn, this is a pretty big deal. Using a Flare has to secure you two points, or one point and severely hamper the enemy, to be worthwhile.

But in the 'High' form, it's even more interesting. In the High form, Flares do not cost you a point. That's it. There's no catch. But the point is, the High form isn't about killing and smashing and having loads more pieces on the board. It's about elegance and balance and every piece counting. You don't kill for the sake of killing - that scores you no points and only makes a Flare more likely from your opponent. You attack where you need to, keeping him in check, taking important squares, desperately trying to get a Legendary creature on the board. Personal Opinion This is just a great game. It's an abstract combat game, which sounds weird, but then it is a bit weird. And unique. In the world of boardgame landfill, Tash Kalar stands tall. I just can't believe this was made by the same person who made Mage Knight. Love it or hate it, Mage Knight is about 'stuff'. It's about moving parts. It's about decks of cards, of which you may use three or four in a 3 hour game. Tash Kalar is like a perfectly written program - there is not an unnecessary line of code in this thing. The rule-book can be condensed to a double side of A4, for goodness sake. I love the achievement of it. It's fast, it's medium weight, it's balanced and it's great. I don't know if I'm going to do a Game of the Year award, but if I do, Tash Kalar is going straight on the shortlist.

[mechanicalgamer]

Mechanical Review: Dungeon Roll

Dungeon Roll. It's an interesting concept. As absurd as it seems, I saw someone on BoardGameGeek describe this as Mage Knight boiled down into a 20 minute push your luck game,  and, incredibly, this almost struck a chord with me. There are times when playing Dungeon Roll that yes, I'll admit it - it felt like I was making the same sort of decision I might make while cavorting across the landscape of Vlaada Chvatil's fantasy world. But, feeling like you're making important decisions and actually making them are different things.

So what is Dungeon Roll? Kickstarted earlier in the year, Dungeon Roll is a dice game, though it does involve cards and tokens, that seeks to simulate progressing through a basic, video-game-esque dungeon, from level one, up (down?) to level ten. Each level of the Dungeon is populated by rolling dice, equal in number to the current level of the dungeon your heros have reached. Your heroes are rolled before entering the dungeon, and comprise of 6 different character types: champions, mages, clerics, thieves, fighters and scrolls. Scrolls are not heroes in and of themselves; they can be used to re-roll any number of enemy or hero dice and also, somewhat bizarrely, to quaff potions.

I'm going to come out at the start and say that I have an odd affection for Dungeon Roll. I find myself wanting to play it, even the solo variant, just to see what kind of scores I can get (highest so far, 31). In that respect it reminds me of an iPhone game that has a "just-one-more-go" feel.

I think the main problem came when I decided to write this mechanical review. An epiphany came when I decided that the easiest way to examine the layers of function under the dice was to look at each meaningful choice... and I was able to come up with just three. It's not a great sign. Let's get cracking. Here are the three decisions as I see them:

When to leave the dungeon

At some point, you will be faced with a situation in which you have three heroes left alive, two dragon dice in the den, and need to decide whether to go up to level 6 for one more delve. Here, there can be some meaningful decisions about which way to play it. For instance, you could have a character card action that could be used to wipe out at least a few of the monsters (more on this below). Or you could have a piece of treasure that will help - either a dragon bait (turns all monsters into dragon dice - better than it sounds, in some situations) or a town portal (allows you to leave mid-dungeon without losing all the victory points you acquired).

The trouble is, often these decisions are basic. As soon as you know what the dragon bait is capable of, or get your head around how best to utilise your characters ability, there is no ambiguity - it is either the correct move, or it isn't. It seems the open nature of the information in the game leads to trivial decisions. 

When to open a treasure chest

At times in your dungeon delve, you will be confronted by a chest, or perhaps multiple chests, and you will have to decide whether to open them. This is a more difficult decision than you may think. Chests use up heroes, although the thief (and the champion) can actually open multiple chests for the loss of only that hero. So do you waste a hero for the delicious treasure-y goodness within? Well, that's a choice. It's not a huge choice - after all, the treasure is usually very useful AND gives you experience points (i.e. victory points) so... well, you're usually going to open them. But not always. So I'm going to count it as a choice. Way to go, Dungeon Roll!

The treasures are all well balanced and interesting and in themselves yield further choices. Because of their inherent value (in victory points at the end of the game), using them can be tough. You have to balance whether using a treasure is likely to earn you 2 more experience points, to negate the loss of the treasure.

When to use your Dungeon hero superpower

On each delve, you have a dungeon hero which is specific to you, as the player. The Dungeon hero has a superpower (my word, not theirs) which can be used once in a delve, is usually pretty powerful and affects the gameplay largely to your advantage (remove one of each type of monster, for example, or turn all monsters into Dragon dice, for another).

These powers can definitely be saved and used at an optimal time, and often there are clever ways you can manipulate your special power to ensure a deeper delve. Of all the choices, this is the richest - you actually feel like you are in control of this aspect of the game. I could even believe a cynic would say that this was "the" choice in Dungeon Roll... the others rarely being game changing. I wouldn't say this was my opinion. Here's my opinion:

Opinion

This is a little difficult. Is the game fun? Yes. Does it have lots of meaningful decisions? No. I've read so many people on BGG trying to persuade me that it does, but I don't believe a one of them. Game changing decisions - that is, decisions that you truly feel determine your fate, are few and far between. Lots of Goblins attacking you? You're probably going to want to use your Fighter. Allowed to take a die back from the graveyard? You're probably going to want to go with a Champion, unless you need a varied team to fight a dragon.

I think the dragon symbolises all that annoys me. It gives the illusion of decisions (the Illusion of Decisions would be a pretty good treasure! You can have that, TMG). Because to fight a dragon, you need three different types of hero - and thus, you can't just rely on Champions to do all the work; you need some balance. But balancing boils down to such a simple thought process as to make it arbitrary, because every hero die essentially does the same thing. It doesn't matter which you go for, as long as your party is varied. It feels like it matters, but it doesn't. And that is Dungeon Roll's flaw.

I'll say again - I like the game! And people I have introduced it to seem to like it as well. That doesn't escape the fact it's about as tactical as Temple Run.