Recent Gaming (spring 2025)

Lots of gaming lately. Here's some highlights:

My Amber Diceless Roleplay campaign continues to go strong. It's rolling on 5 years now, roughly twice a month, so we've recently crossed our 100th session with the same characters. Dworkin/Oberon's universe was destroyed, and the action now takes place in Corwin's universe and another universe that Fiona created, plus the occasional scene in the tiny islands of primal matter in the Abyss that were left when the old universe imploded. Those are basically the only place where Brand can exist without the "immune system" of the other universes trying to destroy him.

I just wrapped up my Feng Shui 2nd Edition campaign about a week ago. The players foiled a really major push by the Ascended to conquer 2 of the 3 Junctures they didn't already control. This caused a Critical Shift (the second one of the campaign) and after a truly epic battle we ended with the PCs stepping into a portal to a future they don't know.

For the same group (as played Feng Shui), I'm now prepping a Cyberpunk Red campaign. Scroll down to my last post, from earlier this week, to read about that. 

It was a bit of a toss-up among the group whether we wanted to do Cyberpunk or Pendragon, so in the next few months I'll be reading The Great Pendragon Campaign and the Book of Uther and doing bits and pieces of light GM-prep for that, so that when Cyberpunk wraps up, I'll have that in my pocket and ready to go. But, given that the last two campaigns for this group ran multiple years each, I'm not too worried about getting Pendragon ready in a hurry.

I'm also now playing in an RPG as well. A friend of mine is running Night's Black Agents, aka spies vs vampires. In NBA designs their own vampires and determines whether vampirism is supernatural or superscience or literally infernal demon hell-powers. Our campaign is taking place in the 1980s, so in the two sessions we've played thus far, we've had to sneak across the Berlin Wall three times now. Our characters have rescued a journalist, and the goons who were holding her captive had weird mysterious creepy stuff going on, but we haven't really connected that they (or their leader) is a vampire yet. There's one of them that makes us instantly nauseous when we get near them, but we haven't really figured out why. A different one jumped on top of our car and ripped the roof open trying to kill the journalist, but the roof-rider burst into flames when we shot the heck out of her. We're not at all certain what to expect, or what we're up against. Unraveling the mystery is pretty fun, and the uncertainty makes it easy to tap in to the fear and bewilderment our characters are experiencing. 

This weekend I got together with some friends and played the card game Innovation and the board game Thunder Road.

Innovation is really good, but kind of overwhelming the first time you play.I had really good early turns, or so I thought, as I was in the lead in points and achievements.  Unfortunately, in the mid-game I just could not manage to draw cards with any synergy at all. Well, really the problem was that I had a great hand, but I foolishly commented on it, so someone Melded a card that they could then use via Dogma to steal my hand. I didn't even know that was a possibility... but, duh, I should have, it's not like this is the first game to ever let you steal cards from another player. I just never recovered. Good game, but boy does it have a ton going on.  It's sort of a civilization-builder, where every card is an invention or cultural breakthrough. You start in the stone age, and end in the far-future. Every card in the game is unique, and they all have multiple unique ways to play them. So while I liked it a lot, I imagine its' not going to be good match for everyone.

Thunder Road is much simpler. Just good chaotic Mad-Max style shenanigans. Sort of like if Gaslands or Car Wars was a streamlined racing boardgame. We played with the Chop Shop expansion, which adds cool asymmetric super-powers to your cars via a drafting mechanic at the start of the game. I enjoyed it a great deal, and may end up buying the game and that expansion. Based on just one play, it seems like the core game without that expansion is very light beer-and-pretzels without much depth, but that expansion made every turn interesting and unpredictable. 

I continue to play the occasional solitaire-RPG or solo-skirmish miniatures game when I have insomnia. For the solo-RPG I've been mostly running D&D, with one PC (a Satyr Circle of Stars Druid) and a rotating cast of lower-level NPC sidekicks. When I started I had to lean a lot on the Solo Adventurer's Toolbox and its sequel. I'm a little more freeform of late, but that book is great for getting you started and comfortable with solitaire play.  

And every once in a while I boot up Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur's Gate 3, but I have to be careful with those because man can I ever lose an entire evening just rearranging my darned inventory. When that happens, I feel like I've wasted a resource (my life, my time) that I'll never get back... and yet, I love both those games so much.

Games I played this week.

An expanded version of my weekly gamelog on facebook.

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Played Red Seven, Five Tribes, and Shadow Hunters at the Ballard Board Game Meet-Up at Card Kingdom/Cafe Mox. The games were good, the group is very welcoming, and the venue is pretty amazing. Much better than staying home and watching TV.

Red Seven is good filler or warm-up material. Solid, but not particularly exciting. It's an interesting retooling of the old trick-taking mechanic, but the lightness of play and absence of a theme keeps it from truly moving me. A game I'm always willing to play, but not one I'd go out of my way to schedule.

Five Tribes is a really deep game, with lots of moving parts and a fairly daunting learning curve. I spent the whole game feeling like I was doing horribly because I could never identify moves that were actually splashy enough to be worth bidding the victory points to get first player status. I think I only bid 3 times, and took my turn at the back of the pack round after round. All game long, I thought for sure I was going to come in dead last. Then we totaled the final scores, and I was second place and just a couple points behind the leader. I had 143 points, the winner had 146 points, and fourth place was 112 if I remember correctly. So there really were very few turns where it was worth spending, that wasn’t just me being confused or overly cautious. We were all new to the game, though, so there's some hope that more experienced players would have weighed the value of their bids better and left my penny-pinching play-style in the dust.  I'd like to give this one another try, and see how my strategy develops over repeated plays.

Shadow Hunters is short enough to be party-game filler but intriguing enough to be something more. It's a perfect game for a large meet-up, as it can handle a large number of players easily and is short enough to let people join and quit as they please. It starts with a puzzle, and generally ends with a beat-down. It’s got some “aha!” moments, and excitement, but is very random and at times unfair. Luckily the game is usually short and speedy, so if you’re getting the short end of the randomness stick at least you don’t have to suffer very long. Overall, I enjoy it quite a bit. It's got a little in common with both Are You A Werewolf? and Betrayal At House On The Hill, but is faster and shorter than either. I dig it.

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I played an unpublished scenario of Shadows of Brimstone with Jeremy, Chris, and Sarah up at the Flying Frog Productions studios. Brimstone continues to be a great co-op experience, and has grown more challenging with the expansion previews from GenCon. We’ve been playtesting some amazing content that I'm not at liberty to discuss, other than to assure you that the game keeps getting better and better.

I wish I could fit more plays of SOBs into my schedule right now, but it requires a fair chunk of time and table space. In addition to the playtests, I have two other groups that I specifically schedule Brimstone games with. It's hard to get everyone's calendar's aligned with the days when my table is clear, though perhaps that speaks to my housekeeping just as much as it does the the requirements of the game. This was extra complicated by mass of boxes (over a hundred of them) that was occupying my living room for the past couple weeks. I had to cancel two gaming events this week to stay home culling boxes of old stuff I no longer need in my life. If I don't get a box or two done every single day, I'll never get through them all.

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Goofed off with some Rock Band 4 at a Halloween party. We traded instruments and parts in and out every few songs. Rock Band is more an activity than a game, but it's highly enjoyable... especially when there's enough players on-site to feel like an audience. Scott rick-rolled us all (but especially Jim) during one of his turns on the microphone.

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You'll notice no RPGs this week. That's something I have to rectify soon. Workplace exhaustion and the aforementioned boxes kept me from attending a couple of usual gaming nights, plus there were some non-game events on my calendar. Other cool things I did this week included seeing a friend's short film play in a movie theater, and participating in a long training and team-building session for the Dragonflight board of directors. I've kept myself busy. 

Recent Gaming 9-29 to 10-5

#WhatDidYouPlayMondays #GameLog for 9/29 - 10/5/2015

Card Games: Dark Gothic / Colonial Horror, and Guillotine
RPG / Story Game: Forget Me Not
Board Game: Shadows of Brimstone
Video Game: Sir, You Are Being Hunted!

On Friday I played Dark Gothic with the cards mixed in from the Colonial Horror stand-alone expansion, as well as the smaller Smuggler's Den, Curse of the Werewolf, Dryad of Harper's Wood, and Forgotten Island expansions. I played this with Mark Walters and Laura Mortensen. It was a tense game that ended in defeat for all of us, as our second Villain was The Necromancer. He has two powers that make Minions move to the Shadows, and we kept drawing new Minions to replace the old ones. My deck was really working well and I had multiple turns where I had the cards in hand to defeat the Necromancer but couldn't because his Fight ability would cost us the game. Our bad luck in top-decking only Minions for two full rounds around the table eventually doomed the town of Shadowbrook.

Guillotine is more or less light filler, but it's always an enjoyable way to cap off an evening when the brain power or energy is starting to run low. Long enough to wind down properly, short and light enough to not wear out it's welcome as you do so. We play with the house rule that starting hands are only 3 cards, instead of 5. I first invoked that house rule at least a decade ago when doing demos at the game store I used to run, with the intention of making it easier on new players and speeding up the demos. What I found was that it actually enhanced the game greatly, and I've used that rule every since. With a full hand of 5 cards, there's often a card or two that you never feel the need to use all game long because you've got better options (so they just sit there dead in your hand). 3 cards to start opens up the need to occasionally play one of the weaker cards, and makes it feel more challenging. In the process it provides a little more variety to play experience, which is a good thing when you've had the game in your collection for 10 or 15 years. This time, Mark won, and Laura and I were tied for second place just behind him. 

On Monday I got together with Mark, Laura, Erik and Devon at Card Kingdom, and we played a fun RPG / Story Game called Forget Me Not. It was a riot. Our plot was over-the-top and our characters masticated all over the scenery. The Sheriff was crazy, the local avant-garde artist was murderous and possibly even crazier then the Sheriff, and eventually most of the town was driven just as batty as them by ergot poisoning at the bake sale (or the need for revenge). Very goofy and hectic. Pretty far from the tone of the source material (it reads as basically an unlicensed Twin Peaks RPG), but so damn much fun! I really love the way the randomized pregens and randomized subplots gives the game a solid structure, but mixes it up from one play to the next. Hugely enjoyable. 

On Thursday I went up to Flying Frog Productions' studio to help with playtesting and proof-reading of top-secret Shadows of Brimstone expansions. That's all I'm allowed to say about that at the moment, other than "OMG you guys, there is so much cool stuff coming up for Shadows of Brimstone! Trust me, you're gonna love it!"

Speaking of which, on Saturday and Sunday I spent a little time each night assembling miniatures for my own personal copy of Shadows of Brimstone. These were GenCon preview figures, stuff that will eventually show up in Wave(s) 1.5 or 2 of the Kickstarter. I built the Serpentmen of Jargono and the Masters of the Void deluxe enemy sets, and the Scourge Rats enemy set. The Serpentmen come with a Shaman who has magic trinkets and a deck of spells, and despite the name they are not purely restricted to Jargono (they can and do show up in the mines). The Masters of the Void has some sorcerers that I like to call the KKKultists of KKKthulhu. Tentacles protruding from creepy hoods. They also have a spell deck. The two spellcasting Enemy types each has a very different feel to their magic (and the "AI" that determines how they act each turn), and they really shake up the game quite nicely. Masters of the Void also comes with some other (non-spellcaster) figures that have mechanics that kind of invert which characters are likely to be effective in the fight. The high-initiative xp-gobblers in the party will have a hard time hurting Void Hounds, and the slower PCs will be able to claim a larger-than-normal share of the glory. Scourge Rats aren't nearly as "sexy" as either of those two sets, but they're mechanically simpler and seemed like a good choice to balance out the extra complexity I'd just added with the deluxe spellcasters. I've got several more sets to break out and assemble in the near future, but decided that I could play a session or two with just these three expansions (plus the two core sets and Caverns of Cynder) before I needed to add in more.

That decision left me with an hour or two open at the end of each of those nights to play a video game to unwind. I chose Sir, You Are Being Hunted! which I picked up inexpensively as part of a Humble Indie Bundle this week. It's sort of like a first-person shooter, except it's more about stealth than combat. That, or I'm just really bad at the combat parts. You're on a random archipelago that feels very British, and (as the name implies) you're being hunted by prim and proper robots. I am _so_ terrible at this game, but it's fun enough I'm sure I'll give it another go sometime soon.

Not bad for a single week.

In the first 7 days of June 2015, I played the following games:

• Dark Gothic (semi-cooperative deck-building card game) x4 game sessions
• Shadows of Brimstone (cooperative miniatures board game)
• Pandemic: The Cure (cooperative dice game) x2 game sessions
• War of the Worlds (home-brewed RPG scenario)
• Ultimate Werewolf (8+ player bluffing/deduction party game) x7 game sessions
• Shadowrun Crossfire (cooperative deck-building card game) x6 game sessions
• Forbidden Desert (cooperative board game) x3 game sessions
• Dead of Winter (cooperative survival-horror board game) x2 game sessions
• Lego Avengers 1895 (home-brewed RPG scenario)

That's 27 plays total of 9 different games, with over 20 different people (ranging from as few as 2-3 in some of the games all the way up to 8-12 players per round of Ultimate Werewolf). Both RPGs were run by GMs I hadn't gamed with in four years or longer. Some of the games were pretty fast little things (Pandemic: The Cure can be pretty zippy), but there were several multi-hour games on that list (Brimstone, Dead of Winter, both RPGs). It's been a pretty great week in regards to restocking the fun after a recent gaming deficit. I actually had the opportunity to spend a little more time gaming than I did this week: I ended up cancelling an RPG session I was going to run on Wednesday because a player had a rough day at work and needed to call the night early. On top of all that, I spent 4 hours at an art museum this week, and took multiple long walks that added up to at least 10 miles.

I needed it, though. The past few weeks have been really stressful and exhausting (more about that some other time, perhaps). I really appreciated the chance to kick back and game my brains out for a few days.

Myth: Great Game, Horrid Rulebook

Our copy of Myth arrived last week. It was a Kickstarter we backed last year, and should be available on retail soon-ish. Myth a big cooperative dungeoncrawl game with lots of bells and whistles (and cards and minis). It's in the same genre as HeroQuest or MageKnight Dungeons or the more recent Galaxy Defenders, but I feel it's a vastly superior game to any of those. (Though, to be fair, the only thing I have against Galaxy Defenders is its plodding and fiddly set-up before play.)

Here's a quick run-down of the things I really like about Myth:

• Fully Cooperative: There's no GM. Everybody's a player, and we're all working together. There's no need for someone to run the monsters, or set up the dungeon, or be otherwise adversarial to the rest of the group. Everybody has the same amount of plot-knowledge, and the same goal.
• Flexible: Play duration is in your control, and game play starts almost immediately. Set-up of each board is quick, fun, and collaborative. You can decide on the fly just how long a game you want to play. Somebody having to leave early doesn't anticlimactically ruin your entire session, and you should be able to easily bargain with them "how about we just finish this tile we're on and then we call it end of Act?"
• Engaging: The turn structure is unique, and very clever. Things are happening all the time, and everyone is constantly involved in the action. You're never sitting around waiting for someone else to act. No one can dominate the game, because there's built-in mechanisms to keep everyone contributing at roughly the same activity level. Stealing the spotlight in consecutive turns is punished in a dramatic but enjoyable way. It's genius. The only place this "all hands on deck" turn structure breaks down at all is when a PC dies - but odds are good that a PC death will be followed quickly by either resurrection or a TPK, so I'm cautiously optimistic the downtime even in those circumstances will be short. Honestly, I'd love to see this turn-structure converted for use in an RPG in place of traditional Initiative systems.
• Elegant: The dice mechanics are robust and quick. An area-of-effect blast on half a dozen minions, or a mass attack against a hero surrounded by minions, can both be handled in seconds with a single die roll each, but still feature meaningful depth and variety of results. It's a game that can handle 4 or 5 PCs facing off against dozens of badguys at once without ever hitting a speed bump.
• Toys: There's so much in the box. Not only are the fancy physical components numerous (40 miniatures, a stack of beautiful map tiles, a bunch of decks, etc), but there's multiple game modes and a lot of quest-cards that create interesting scenarios to play out. The game feels like it has depth and replayability aplenty, with lots of eye-candy to keep you entertained along the way.

It's an excellent game. I've played it four times now, and I'm really diggin' it. Can't wait to break it out again.

Yo Momma Is A Crawla

All those praises having been said, the rulebook is wretchedly awful. It's beautiful to look at, but really hard to read. It jumps from topic to topic and back again without warning (but at least it has a better-than-average index). There are several topics, however, that never get addressed in the rules. They skulk silently between the pages waiting to ambush you.

For example:

• Poison and Stun: These two status effects are caused by various cards (poison shows up a lot more than stun), but are never actually defined in the rules. Luckily, the rules do have a "Damage Over Time" status and a "Prone" status that can fairly intuitively be used for Poison and Stun respectively.  An easy fix once you're aware of the problem, but an ugly surprise if the first time it crops up is in the middle of a play session.
• Combo and Optional: These two keywords appear on a number of player cards, but really aren't defined anywhere in the rules. The Archer character and the Brigand character both rely on those two keywords, and the consensus on the forums is that they mean completely different things in the two decks. To feel that I understood it at all, I had to read the rulebook cover-to-cover, then read two FAQ threads (one on BGG, the other at the publisher's forums),  then watch a couple gameplay videos, then re-read relevant parts of the rulebook.
• Stretch Goals: There are plenty of cards, and charts in the rulebook, that reference things that aren't included in the base set. It's often not immediately obvious what expansion-product you'd have to buy to fill in these holes and complete the chains. That's no problem if you bought the "Captain level" Kickstarter pledge which includes nearly 1 of everything for a very reasonable price... but folks buying this piecemeal at retail are probably going to experience some frustration and confusion.
• Action, Reaction, and Interrupt: These are pretty simple concepts in most games, and people can usually intuit what they mean. Not in Myth. As it turns out, "reaction" and "interrupt" are horrible names for what these cards do, and using those terms actually makes the game harder to teach. The rules themselves are straightforward, but the nomenclature is misleading.

There's a huge number of other minor complaints, but those are good examples. It's all stuff you'll eventually figure out, and since it's a cooperative game no one's getting an unfair advantage out of the confusion... but damn is it annoying to have critical terms and mechanics go undefined in the rules, and to have such inconsistent templating and phrasing on the cards.

All of this could/should have been caught with a just a single blind playtest before they went to print, or by any editing pass, and it blows my mind that such obvious holes and murkiness slipped through the cracks. It's like all the time that should have been used for editing and playtesting just went into art assets and layout... but at least it looks sweeet.

1,000 Blank Pink Sheep

A few weeks ago my wife and I taught 1,000 Blank White Cards to some friends of ours (Mark and Laura). We played two games in rapid succession. Here's a bunch of our cards:

1kBWC - Teabagging Sheep, a set on Flickr.

Marine to Bug Ratio

A bit of a follow-up to my post a few weeks ago on the Space Hulk: Death Angel cooperative card game. Upon getting the rules right*, the game has indeed proven to be a little more difficult than our first impression had it. However, we still haven't found it to be nearly as tough as some reviews made it out to be. Since I've been over the rules repeatedly to make sure we aren't still doing something wrong, I can probably rule out user error. In the process of double-checking everything, I think I figured out why some folks are so much trouble winning the game.

Death Angel is MUCH harder for 3 players than for 2 or 4. If the majority of your plays have been with 3 or 6 players, you're bound to walk away thinking the game is pretty nasty. The one time I played it 3-player, we got our shiny armored butts handed to us.

The source of the difference is the 3-player version of the Void Lock location. It's a distinction that's really easy to miss if you always sit down with the same number of players. Each Void Lock card has two triangles on the bottom that set how large of clusters the genestealers arrive for the duration of the game.

The 2- and 4- player Void Lock has a triangle with a "3" and a triangle with a "1". By contrast, the 3-player Void Lock has a triangle with a "5" and a triangle with a "3". Having exactly 3 players gives you 150% as many marines as you'd have in a 2- or 4-player game. However, when the red-and-yellow triangle is activated, you get 166% as many genestealers, and when the white triangle is activated, you get 300% as many.

Why the designers chose to make 3-player so much harder is unclear to me. Not only is the percentage increase huge on the white triangle, but the clusters of "5" on the other make it a double-whammy. If there's 5 or more genestealers in one swarm, that's generally an auto-kill on the nearest space marine. There's a few defensive cards that can let you squeak by it, but more often than not, they'll start killing marines before you can set up the sort of maneuver required to clean out a big cluster like that. Seems like a recipe for frustration and game loss.

Better numbers for the triangles on three-player would probably be "4" and "2" (133% and 200% of the numbers on 2-player). Your overall Marines-to-Bugs ratio would then be very similar to that of the 2-player game. Time to break out the sharpie.

P.S.: I just learned that FFG is releasing two micro-expansions for Death Angel via print-on-demand. Lightning-fast and much-needed support for an awesome game yearning to be expanded upon. I'll definitely be picking those up soon.



*: About the mistaken rule. That's my bad, I'd somehow missed it when reading, despite the rulebook being well-written and generally quite clear. What I'd missed was that each Terrain card can only be activated once per round. Since some terrain (such as the very common Doors) can eliminate genestealers with every activation, this was a huge advantage. It also made at least one of the mission objective cards ridiculously easy, as nearly every marine would try to activate the control panel in that final location. As mentioned previously, as soon as we figured out what we were doing wrong, our win ratio dropped noticeably. Still not as steep as it drops when you add a 3rd player...

Huge Space Hulk, Tiny Rule

My wife and I have been playing a lot of Space Hulk: Death Angel in the past week or two. It's an awesome version of the classic Space Hulk board game / miniatures game, but in a portable semi-cardgame edition. (It's clearly a card game, but doesn't feel or play like one.) Best of all, it's cooperative. My wife and I play the Space Marines together, and the game itself controls the vile genestealers. Good times.

I was going to write a detailed review, but in the middle of writing it, I noticed a rule we were doing wrong. So, now I need to play a few more games with that rule correct before I can weigh in with my final thoughts. Normally, I'd just blame FFG, their rulebooks are always so poorly written. But in this case, the rulebook is actually really good and simple, I just somehow missed a critical sentence. A tiny little innocuous sentence, which no doubt completely skewed game balance. My bad.

Booster Packs full of Gamma Rays

UPDATE:  I've been directed to a video that gives more information about the game and it's randomized components, so after my original post I'm adding my thoughts on the new info.

Within the past week or two Wizards of the Coast released a new edition of the classic RPG Gamma World. I played a lot of Gamma World back in the day, and would be happy to try out a new edition, at least in theory. As it turns out though, there's one fact about the new edition that leaves me really cold. In general, when people grouse and complain about how expensive gaming is, I just roll my eyes. When they claim an RPG company is just in it for the money, and doesn't care about doing what's best for the game, or doing what makes the gamers happy, I tend to stand up for and defend the publishers. But in this particular case, I'm on the hater's bandwagon. Clearly, somebody at Wizards put profits  above functionality.

They replaced the mutation charts with a deck of cards.

Actually, at first glance, I really like the notion of cards. I've been a fan  of using card decks instead of charts and rulebooks for a long time.  It saves you time looking things up in the books, because you can keep your most commonly used cards at your fingertips all the time.  For a mechanic like mutations, or other special powers that help individualize PCs, using cards instead of charts can help with "niche preservation" (if you've already drawn that card, no one else can draw the exact same special power). Another reason I like the idea of mutation cards is because they let me tailor the "charts" on the fly. If there's a mutation I think is unbalanced, or too goofy, I could theoretically cull it from the deck. If there's one that I'd like to make more common, I could add an extra copy (assuming I'm not too hung up on the "niche preservation" mentioned previously). In short, I could really like this. When FFG used cards for the latest edition of Warhammer FRP, I really found it awesome.

The problem with the cards in Gamma World is that Wizards put them in random booster packs, selling an RPG like a CCG. By offering the cards in random boosters, most of what I like about cards goes away.  I'm almost certainly going to end up with multiples, so niche preservation goes out the window, unless I'm willing to waste some percentage of my investment.  I may buy a booster that's full of cards I already have and wouldn't want to put multiple copies of in the deck.  I may want to include an extra copy of some particular card, but can't reliably get one (cheaply, any way). Just bad all around, in my opinion.

If they were complete sets, decks of 50 non-random cards available for $10 or even $15, I'd happily embrace this game. Instead, it's boosters of 8 random cards for $4. Too pricey for my blood. 50 cents per line-item that could be on a chart in a rulebook sounds a little overpriced in and of itself, but knowing that past your second or third pack you'll be looking at a lot of random repeats just sours me to the whole idea. (As an aside, it's 8 cards for $4, whereas Magic: The Gathering by the same publisher, is 15 cards for $4.29, so even by their own precedents this is nearly double the average cost per card.)

Worse yet, the packs aren't just mutation cards, there's also technology cards. While I could perhaps warm up to random mutation card boosters (though it would have to be at a cheaper price to compensate for the frustrating duplicate cards), I don't imagine myself, as GM, being happy with restricting the weaponry of my NPCs (or the treasure to be gained, or the macguffin central to the plot) to whatever happened to be in the handful of boosters I might be willing to buy. So, rather than run a high risk of making a purchase I'm not going to be happy with, I'll just be steering clear of this new Gamma World entirely.

If they weren't random, I'd probably buy quite a few of them. Paizo Publishing does a "Game Mastery" series of card decks with just pictures of fantasy equipment and magic items. I buy a copy of nearly every deck they put out, because they come in set decks at reasonable prices, and you can look up the card list online first to see if any given set has cards you'll be likely to use. If Gamma World followed that business model, I'd certainly pick up the main game and at least the first two expansion decks, but I'm not willing to drop money on boosters.  For the record, random packaging is what eventually drove me to stop buying prepainted miniatures, too.

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UPDATE:  I've been directed to a video that gives more information. I'm a little less up in arms about it now, but I still think it's a weird decision to make, and can't help but feel it was a business decision first, and a game innovation second. So while I'm less upset about it, I don't think it would be a good match for me.

Video link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fccpiG09YbU&feature=related

In particular, the stuff I don't like:

• The idea that your mutations change every day is a little weird to me. I imagine I could warm up to that, but my initial reaction was not positive.
• The fact that players build their own technology decks bothers me. For one thing, this could lead to weird imbalances if one player buys more boosters than the others, or just has better luck. Even assuming a play group that shares a single card pool, though, I dread the metagame issues that come up from players making their own treasure decks. It seems like suspension of disbelief is likely to suffer as well if I describe you're fighting mutant chickens armed with clubs, and after the battle 1 PC finds a death ray and the others all find nanotech. 
• At the end of the video, they specifically address play balance, and say that the various mutation cards are not balanced against each other, some are just better than others. If that's the case, then why would a player put that in the deck they build for themselves? Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems like a really bad idea, for largely the same reasons I just mentioned about metagaming the Technology decks.
• On a related note, I am also a little worried by the statement that you'd draw a new Cryptic Alliance card each session to find out which secret society you are working for this week. Suspension of disbelief gets tricky when a mechanic forces weekly randomization of setting/flavor/fluff/conceptual information. Who the PCs are working for seems like it should be dictated by the needs of the scenario or the actions of the characters, not by a weekly random card flip.

What I do like:

• The commons (5 out of 8 cards in each booster) are not random, but preset so if you buy four consecutive boosters straight out of a fresh display they won't have any duplicate commons. However, having managed a game store for years, I suspect this won't in practice work as well as it does in theory. All it takes is one customer selecting a couple random packs out of the middle of the display pack to disrupt that for everyone that shops after them. A customer might do so out of ignorance, a desire to get duplicates of a particular common, or a desire to grab the pack that "feels lucky". That last one is something I'd see all the time when I ran the store.
• The general formula that each adventure adds new components and rules as well, like the Cryptic Alliance cards being added in Famine in Far-Go. I was apprehensive about a similar approach in Warhammer FRP, but eventually decided I kinda liked the "potpouri" "cornucopia" "hotdish" "mixed bag" method that gives you a lot of little expansions in each Warhammer product. I could live with that in Gamma World, if the rest of the concept weren't scaring me off.
• They rewrote the end of the world to blame it on the LHC. That amuses me. The reality implosion also justifies the weirdness of the Gamma World setting, and could plausibly explain the wonkier of the new setting/mechanics stuff such as mutations changing every session. I'm still not at all happy with randomized boosters or the metagame issues that come from players building their own decks, but they at least make some effort to justify some of this weirdness in the setting.

The Isle Of Dr. FlawedMath

A couple weeks ago my wife and I picked up a cooperative card game called "The Isle of Dr. Necreaux". The concept behind the game is a good one - it simulates a team of spies infiltrating an evil scientist's island lair, and escaping before the bomb goes off. But the more I play it, the more I feel like there's a mathematical flaw at the core of the game.

What it comes down to is this: You'll like the game if you're not particularly fond of, nor frightened by, math, and you're okay with games with really wordy text-dense cards.

If you really like math, you're going to enjoy your first several plays of the game, and then tire of the fact that what is presented as multiple strategic paths is actually just one solution and an array of sub-optimal choices that deceptively look mildly appealing at first blush. The more you analyze the game, the less it holds up to the scrutiny.

It's not a bad game. It's actually a fun game, but it's got elements that are sloppy and annoying. You look at it, and think "this could have been so good, if they'd just spent another month in blind playtesting followed by a month in development followed by one more thorough editing pass." Gaming companies function on small margins, though, so I understand why that didn't happen. But it makes me sad.

My main gripe has to do with the Speed mechanic which lies pretty close to the core of the game.

The vast majority of the cards in the game assume you'll be traveling with a Speed rating somewhere in the range of 2 to 7. There's several traps that are triggered if you roll less than your speed rating on a d6, and others that trigger if you roll more than your speed on a d6. There's a few character cards that let you roll two dice for these sorts of things and use the better die, or let you add or subtract +/-1 to/from your effective speed for such things. Throughout the game is the implication that every turn you should be adjusting your speed a little bit to take into account these various cards. It implies you should move slower when the party is injured or low on resources, and make a bigger run when you're relatively unhurt. At least half the cards in the deck provide some sort of interesting tactical decision if your speed could only be between, say, 1 and 8, with an average of 5 or 6 being ideal.

Problem is, the game expressly states that there is no upper limit to how fast you can move. It's extremely clear about this - you can set a speed of 20 (or 5,000) if you'd like. Your speed determines how many bad cards you flip over in a turn, so at first blush it seems like a large number is suicidal. After playing about 4 or 5 games without a single win, my wife and I just on a lark tried a turn at speed 20. It went off without a hitch. So we did it again. We've played another half-dozen games since then, and found that as long as we move at speed 20 or higher as often as possible, we always win.

We either sit at speed zero for the rest bonuses, or jump ahead at a breakneck speed of 20 or more. It's come down to essentially a binary decision, rest or run as fast as we can. Which means those cards that care about your speed rating don't have any decision-making weight or randomness they initially seemed to have. All the cards that involve "if you roll less than your Speed rating, bla bla bla..." trigger automatically, and the ones that say "if you roll greater than your Speed" never trigger at all. There's no reason to ever want to move at a speed low enough that you'd ever agonize over, be surprised by, or even contemplate such cards. They just happen, beyond your control, and you can mostly laugh off the results.

The game has several cards that hose you if you move to fast - but they hose you equally if you're traveling at speed 8 or speed 80. Having a higher speed means you're more likely to draw these cards, and more of them in a turn, so it can get a little dangerous. In general, though, you can always survive any one card, and the retreat rules make it relatively simple to back off if a turn starts to go against you. In the default 2-player game you're trying to get through 65 cards in 11 turns, so Speed 6 sounds good. But you'll want to rest a few times, so you go speed 0 one turn and speed 12 the next. That just opens the doors to speed 20, or 30, or 50, any of which is vastly superior to a bunch of turns at speed 6. The benefits of setting an arbitrarily large Speed number significantly outweigh any minor benefit of potentially missing a trap or two by going much slower on some turns. It seems like such an inescapable conclusion, I've hunted through the rulebook and BoardGameGeek forums trying to find something we could possibly be doing wrong. Everything I've read in the rules or forums supports my conclusions.

Which would all be just fine, except for the fact that some of the character cards seem predicated on helping you only if you move in tiny little baby steps. The Security Expert, the Infiltrator, the Rocketeer, the Rogue, etc, all give boosts that would only be helpful if speeds 2 to 7 were viable, and those speeds just aren't.

Worse yet, the game presents this Speed-based risk management as one of it's core concepts. In theory, it should really resonate with people who like to number-crunch and analyze, or at least play the odds intelligently. But speaking as one of those people, I find I'm taunted by the fact that there's a better game with more meaningful decisions lurking beneath the surface if only there were some sort of speed limit and/or a smaller deck to go through. As it is, going infinitely fast is the way to win, and the deck is big enough you can't really hope to win if you don't do that on at least one turn. It just feels like they missed an opportunity in game design here. It's like they're aware of what makes the game fun, but didn't realize that the dominant strategy specifically downplays the fun aspects.

Anyhow, the game has a couple other flaws. It's fun, but the whole time you feel like something's amiss:

• The pulpy retro-futuristic vaguely Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon theme is kinda neat, but if you went by the description on-line or on the back of the box you probably thought you were buying more of a vaguely James Bond themed product. It's grown on me, but it was a big shock when I opened the box.
  
• The cards are insufferably wordy. Look back up at this post (and most of my other posts on this blog). You'll see that I'm a man who likes words, and I'm not the least bit terse or laconic. I'm certainly not phobic about words. I don't find text distasteful as a general rule. But these cards are too damn wordy for me. They need to implement a few more keywords. Example: There's 4 cards called "Brain Spiker", "Entropocyte", "Psychic Leech" and "Tangler". Each has 9 lines of text in tiny little print. Of those 9 lines, 8 lines are identical on all four cards (except for the repeated instances of the name of the card you're looking at). The one line that's different can be found in the middle of the text, making it hard to locate or parse. That's a huge pain in the visual cortex.
• The rules are sloppy and contradictory. Example: You win by ending your turn with the "Escape Shuttle" card in play. The rules twice mention that the turn must be completed in order for you to win. But the card can (and indeed must) be put into play as soon as it's drawn, and the card says "You may end the game at any time". So you really don't have to end the turn, you can just end the game as soon as you play it. I think. There's a few other places where the cards disagree with the rules, and not in a fun "M:tG" way. Instead, it just seems like sloppy editing. There's no timing rules, and several instances where they'd be very helpful in clearing things up.
• In this game, ninja's operate better on a team then alone. Everyone knows the opposite is true. If you're watching a movie and there's one Ninja after the main character, he's a badass. If there's a dozen ninja standing in the main character's way, they're just mooks and it will take 3 seconds to drop the whole bunch. In this game, however, a ninja on his own is ineffectual, and a ninja on a team is a powerhouse.
• The sliding wall that splits up the party is actually good for you. If you are not willing (for whatever reason) to take turns at Speed 20, then your only hope to win is for the party to be split up into separate groups by the sliding wall. If you think you can handle 20 cards together, you can handle twice that easily if you split up. The sliding wall is the single-most beneficial card to the party, yet it's labeled a "trap" in big letters. Makes me scratch my head.
  

So, lots of little things to complain about, but overall it's still fun if you can manage to look past those flaws. Fun can make up for inelegant design, but only for so long. It's a game in desperate need of a revised edition.

Tekeli-Li: fun, but muddled and sloppy

A couple weekends ago I played a card game called Tekeli-Li. It's a Cthulhu-themed card game. Or, at least, it's trying to be. And that's the problem for me, it's the Cthulhu theme, but applied really lightly, and without much skill. Had it been the same mechanics with no theme at all, I may have been happier. Had the scoring mechanics been less clunky, or had anything to do with what the cards represented, I'd have been a lot happier. As it was, it was fun, but it left scratching my head.

It's a trick-taking game, which means you already know roughly what the play style is like. I'll start with a brief analysis of the remaining mechanics. Most of the cards are worth zero points. A handful, however, are negative points. They range from (IIRC) -10 to -240. So you don't want to take any tricks. There's a few cards that do weird things, like cancel each other out, or make you round differently.

Oh right, rounding: at the end of each hand, you divide the negative points you took by 100, and round towards zero. You then get a number of tokens equal to the absolute value of that number. Tokens are bad, the winner is the person with the fewest tokens after a certain number of hands.

Why negative scoring? Why then take absolute value? Why divide by 100? Why have inconsistent rounding? They could have just printed the cards with 1/10th the value, and it would have affected nothing, but that's at least a mistake common to many games. The negative value is, I think, so that it feels like sanity in Call of Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian games - except you wouldn't then expect to start from 0 sanity, would you? And then this whole rounding thing - you round up towards zero, which is the same as rounding down after you take the absolute value, so it's good for you. Unless you have a particular card, which makes you instead round up, which is down, which is bad for you. Which is way more complicated than it needs to be, given that the card in question would be functionally identical if it were just -100 points. You'd get the exact same result in 9 hands out of 10, without having to change the way you round when you get a particular card.

It feels like a lot of superfluous and needless math, even if it's not terribly difficult. It's mainly just a hurdle to be jumped in trying to teach the game. If you went with positive points, with no rounding or absolute value nonsense, the game would be far easier to pick up and explain. Not to mention easier to spot-check people's totals if you thought someone had made a mistake or was cheating. I suppose I can accept, however, the idea that the unwarranted complexity is intentionally designed to make it all a tiny bit confusing, so it feels like a descent into madness.

Perhaps, then, it's intended to push the flavor and theme. Too bad the theme was applied so sloppily to rest of the game.

• The negative point cards depict various eldritch horrors, from Deep Ones up to Azathoth. That much makes sense. If I have a face-to-face with gnarly hotep, I expect to lose something from the exchange.
• The zero point cards are ordinary people. Construction workers, doctors, even little girls. Sure, you need these folks in any good Mythos tale, but they're not terribly exciting.
• Perhaps that's just right, given that they are zero points. But here's where the first bit of the flavor starts to fail. Tekeli-Li is the sound made by the horrible things in Antarctica in both Lovecraft and Poe. The characters depicted on the zero-point cards aren't wearing cold-weather gear, and don't have jobs that correspond to the characters in those stories. Neither are the monsters restricted to the denizens of the Mountains of Madness. If it was all Shoggoths and Old Ones, with human explorers and professors, the name of the game would make sense. Instead, it feels like the name was chosen because "it has something-or-other to do with Cthulhu". They're making a game ostensibly for Lovecraft fans, but show very little knowledge of the actual Lovecraft tales.
• Minor gripe: The cards are arranged into suits: red/fire, blue/water, black/earth, and white/air, with corresponding imagery in the margins. Any real student of Lovecraft will tell you that August Derleth's elemental associations for the various Great Old Ones was spurious, contradictory, and definitely not in H.P.'s original concepts. Why make that a major part of the game?
• The cards with special abilities are equally weird. The most common of these is doctors. If you play a doctor, it cancels the previous doctor. I guess that's getting a second opinion? Why should Azathoth be captured by 1 doctor, but not by 2? I can't quite grok what the card plays are supposed to represent.
• The Necronomicon appears on two cards. In Lovecraft's stories, it's a book that gets referenced a lot, but doesn't do much other than reveal horrible truths that you'd rather not know. So, I'd expect it to cost you some sanity just like the monsters, but perhaps less. Instead, if you have 1 copy of the Necronomicon in your score pile, it's zero points - as dangerous as a little girl or a construction worker. If you have both copies of Necronomicon, however, it's worth positive (good) points. We kept joking that the book of ultimate evil has a really uplifting surprise ending, which will make you feel all better if you just stick with it through the dense second half.
• But the strangest of the cards with special rules is the telephone. That's right, the telephone. It's the card that makes you round away from zero (so, down, but up when you're taking the absolute value, and so overall it's bad for you). I can think of one Lovecraft tale where the protagonist was worried about people eavesdropping on the "party line" that was the only phone line in Dunwich - so maybe that's it. Someone please explain to me why the telephone is as harmful as 10 Deep Ones, more ominous than the Necronomicon, and more random than Nyarlathotep.

It's like someone with a very casual and fleeting knowledge of the Cthulhu Mythos (someone who'd read one or two Derleth stories, and maybe once played in a Call of Cthulhu one-shot) took the card game Hearts, obfuscated the scoring system with arbitrary mathematical functions that serve no purpose, stapled a Squid onto it, and said "I bet the fan boys will spend $14.95 on this!"

For the record: I could be talked into playing it again, but I certainly wouldn't spend money on it. It's a game that could use a major overhaul and revised second edition. Which is a shame, given the great artwork on the cards. The visuals of the game are the best part, slick and very professional.

GwenCon recap

GwenCon was this weekend - it's a small gaming convention in the home of Gwendolyn Kestrel and Andy Collins. It's an amazingly packed weekend, always a lot of fun. Gwen and Andy are great hosts, and go to a lot of trouble to open their homes to several dozen visitors for this yearly event. We only went to 2 of the 3 days, but it was exhausting. Here's a list of all the games I played:

Friday:

• TransAmerica - an elegant and casual boardgame about being sneaky rail-barons
• Apples to Apples - the classic party game
  Apples to Apples again - a second game of it
• Tekeli-Li - a Cthulhu-themed trick-taking cardgame. Read more here.
• Fordyce Hall - a Cthulhu by Gaslight RPG scenario where the PCs were the servants of a nobleman, sent ahead to prepare the old family estate he'd just inherited. Read more here.
  
• (Are You A) Werewolf - the party game / deductive logic exercise / mob-rule simulator
  Werewolf again - there was a whole second village to hang

Saturday:

• Pandemic - which I've written about plenty of times before, nothing new here other than getting to play it with Sparky and Logan for the first time.
  
• LiveAction RoboRally - the game of robots, lasers, and conveyor belts... on a board so big, we got to play our robots from the first-person perspective.
  
• 9/11/1984 - a cross-publisher superhero one-shot where we were saving the Twin Towers from Ra's al Ghul and Prince Namor. 18th-level PCs, and my first time playing 4th Ed. Read more here.
  
• Lego Batman - In the second prop-heavy superhero-themed d20-based RPG of the day, were playing popular villains from DC comics - except, we weren't villains. Instead, the villain was Batman. Read more here.
  

I've got plenty more to say about at least the 13 hours of RPGs I played this weekend, and the cardgame I'd never tried before, so expect a few related posts later this week.

Hah-hah, take that, Dominion!

Stumbled on this, and it made me giggle. Man, I am such a bitter geek...

First I liked it, then I loved it, now I hate it...

...and that was off of just two consecutive plays. (Admittedly, not much to base a review on, but I think the analysis below is probably accurate anyway.) Okay, "I hate it" is probably a lot stronger than is accurate. "I'm no longer interested" is probably more accurate.

The game is called Dominion.

I'd heard a bit of a buzz about it. Half the (large) group played it at board game night two months ago, and they were all raving and insisted on playing it again and again.

This past weekend, we go over for boardgames, and someone brought it. I played once, and thought it was a pretty fun. It felt like the fun of deck-building and side-boarding in Magic had been distilled down into a little game of it's own. Trying to figure out the combos was neat.

Then we played a second game. The player who owned the game took off the kid gloves. His turns tended to involve playing 3 or more Laboratories, then buying a Province. We were completely blindsided when his deck went off the first time. The rest of us flailed about uselessly, trying to find combos of our own, or just ways to stop him. Though I lost terribly, I was hooked. I wanted to play more.

Instead, however, other folks arrived on-site, and we ended up playing something else that could handle more players. That was okay, as I was sure I was going to buy Dominion and play it again soon. I'd go pick the game up at Gary's sometime in the next week or two, I told myself.

As the night went on, and we played other games, I kept thinking back on Dominion. Specifically, I was thinking about his combo deck that had won. It wasn't a complex combo. It had at it's heart, just one-card. Laboratory into Laboratory into Laboratory into Laboratory into Gold, every turn thereafter the same except ending with Province instead of Gold. I thought about the other cards I'd seen in my two games of it, and realized that nothing in the 16 action cards (that I was aware of - out of 25 cards total in the game, of which 10 chosen randomly show up in any single game) would actually shut it down.

That's when I realized that for any given set of 10 action cards, the game was solvable. They caught the fun of Magic's metagame, but not a healthy fun season of the game. They caught the exasperation of combo winter, or the Mirrodin affinity era, when there was just one or two decks worth playing and games ended 20-0 on the third turn. Dominion's not quite that bad, but it's along those lines.

So that no one misunderstands me, I'll clarify that I'm not saying that Laboratory is the best card in the game. There's actually several one-card combos, and at least as many two-card combos, most of which are every bit as good as the Lab. I'm also not complaining that the game is essentially just multi-player solitaire. The combo potential appeals to me.

The problem is that the combos are too simple, and in many of the possible 10-deck set ups, there'll be one combo that's just undeniably better than the others. I thought with 10 different random stacks in each play, the game would keep up it's variety, and there'd be the fun of finding the combos. But the truth is, many of the best combos are self-evident. While it would take some actual plays to find the exact perfect balance for true mastery of the game, the analysis that was making my first two plays of it so much fun could actually be completely wrapped up and finished in 20 minutes of observing the card list. The distinctions between a Village, Laboratory, Market, Festival, etc, are just numeric - they can be mathematically ranked and valued without much effort. One will prove better than another, and will always (or nearly so) prove a better choice. The player who figures that out first will win.

Now, that would be okay if we were talking about Tournament Magic, playing for money (or bragging rights) against a large group of mostly strangers. In that environment, there's nothing wrong with keeping the "tech" of your analysis to yourself. Why tell this complete stranger how to be a better player if it means a higher chance of him walking away with the plane ticket and prize cards you came to the Tourney to win?

Since I'd be playing it with my wife and various friends instead, that's not really an option. I could keep the analysis to myself, and thus win nearly every game - which would only be fun for a short time, and only for me. Should someone else do a better analysis, but keep it "secret" while whupping me in game after game, I'd quickly grow resentful.

Alternately, I could share the analysis with my wife (and anone else I play against more than once) - but if so, the game becomes purely random. Not the good kind of purely random, either.

You see, most of the potential combo engine cards cost 5 copper. When the game starts, you have your own deck of 7 copper cards and 3 estate cards. The estates are useless (except as victory points), and your first two hands will be either one of 4 copper and one of 3 copper, or one of 5 copper and one of 2 copper. Of those, the second arrangement is far better - it let's you buy one of the really good combo pieces on the first or second turn, which sets you up virtually guaranteed to do so again on the third or fourth turn. If one player gets the 5/2 split and the others don't, he's almost certainly going to win.

The game lasts half an hour or so, but is decided by the random deal of your initial hand of 5 cards and a single strategic decision made in the first minute of the game (a decision that is mathematically solvable in the majority of plays). I suspect there'll be plenty of times where by turn 4 the winner is evident, but another 16 turns have to pass before it's official. That just doesn't sound like lasting fun to me.

A quick check of the geek reveals I'm not alone in this opinion - but anyone who passes judgment on the game at boardgame geek gets treated pretty harshly, and is told they judged it too soon, whether that's after 3 plays or 30. My dropping it after 2 plays (both of which I enjoyed) would raise some eyebrows there.

The Magic Decision

In my inbox:

Each year every DCI Judge needs to renew and actively judge events (based on level). Failure to do either can result in your judge membership expiring soon

It's been about 9 or 10 months since I last judged or played in a tournament. It's been 6 to 8 months since I last bought a Magic card. I haven't actually played Magic since I moved to Seattle (which is silly, considering that the HQ of judging and the game itself is like 20 minute drive away). I need to make a decision.

Here's the options I see before me:

1. Dive back into it. Recommit to judging before my Level 2 expires. Find a place I want to play and/or judge, and go do some casual games from time to time. Start buying cards again so I can get up to speed on what the formats are like and how the rules have changed.
   
2. Get out. Set up an ebay account and start selling all my cards. Score some money, and free up shelf space.
   
3. Follow plan #2, then regret it later, and feel like an idiot.

It's the existence of course #3 that makes this tough.