Flying Frog Productions

On International TableTop Day last weekend, I ran a bunch of demos for Flying Frog Productions at Uncle's Games at the Crossroads Mall. I taught 14 people how to play A Touch of Evil: Dark Gothic that day, and Uncle's sold out of copies of the game I was running. It felt kinda good, resonating back to my time running a game store years back before we moved out to Seattle. I clicked well with the Flying Frog staff and volunteer team, and it sounds likely that Scott Hill from FFPwill call upon my services as a volunteer for future demos and events. So that's a pretty exciting development for me.

Yesterday at home, Sarah and I played another fun game session of Shadows of Brimstone (also by Flying Frog Productions). For those who are unfamiliar, Shadows of Brimstone is a big, RPG-like cowboys-vs-cthulhu dungeon-crawl dice-fest miniatures-based board game with really great character- and world- building, and lots of variety and replayability.  If that sounds like fun, you should go buy it now, because it really is the best of the dungeon-crawl genre. (Believe it or not, this is my really trimmed back, dialed-down-the-fanboy version of this post. The rough draft was painfully exuberant and about 5 times a long. Seriously, it's one of my all time favorite games.)

As I looked over my tally sheet where I record missions we'd won and lost, I realized that my wife and I have played about 30 sessions of Brimstone so far (maybe more as I realize today that there's at least two sessions we didn't write down on that log). Since most of our games have been with 4 players and lasted around 3 hours, it amounts to well over 350 "man-hours" of entertainment split between us and the various groups of friends we play it with. When we put up the money for a "Minecart" level pledge on the SoB kickstarter, it felt risky. My wife and I are not rich. We'd never spent that much on a single game before, let alone a game we hadn't even played yet. It was a big leap of faith, but luckily the game turned out to be great. I have _so_ gotten my money's worth already.

Shadows of Brimstone is already fun and engaging, and it's just gonna keep getting deeper and better as the expansions roll out later this year. I've talked to Jason and Scott at multiple conventions (I've pretty much been stalking them at their booths at PAX and ECCC ever since Brimstone was announced), and I'm very excited about everything they've told me is coming up. New characters, decks, monsters, missions, and whole other worlds. So many good treats in store for us! Here's a BGG thread I started about some of the cool stuff that they told me about at ECCC. I meant to cross-post it here at the time, and just got too busy to do so.

High Degree of Randomness

I've played Shadows of Brimstone 5 times now: twice at demos with the publishers, and three times at home.

I'm enjoying the game significantly. The randomness is high, but it provides a good variety of play experience. You never know what you're going to get.

We completed our mission at both of the demos with FFP really easily, so much so that I was mildly worried the game was too easy...

Since getting it home, we've lost three missions in a row. So, "too easy" is not such a concern now.

Cross-Posted at BGG 

If this is sounding familiar, it's probably because I adapted this from something I wrote on the forums at Board Game Geek. This version is longer, and includes some analysis I hadn't done there, but it also skips a bunch of TPK detail that here I could just replace with a link to a blog post from a couple days ago. This is the better version of the post, but if you've already read the BGG version recently, you may find this to be mostly redundant.

Two of our three losses were TPKs caused by chains of Threat cards. I gave a thorough example in a previous post. The other TPK wasn't quite as ridiculous as it was only a 2-player game, but similar in theme.

The third mission was lost by Darkness meter and the villain escaping. The corridors and exploration tokens pwned us. Despite thorough shuffling, we got 8 corridors in our first 10 map cards. (Each boxed set comes with 6, so a total of 12 of the 48 mine cards are corridors. 8 in a row wasn't even possible if playing from a single boxed set, and the odds of it with 2 boxed sets aren't exactly high.) This pushed us to the deep end of the track where Holding Back the Darkness is really hard. We continued on, but now the Exploration tokens conspired against us, and delivered all 7 of the tokens that don't have Clues before we could get the third (of 5) clued token. Game ended with villain escape despite us having handled all the fights really well and done everything "right". We wasted no time, but still lost on the timer.

These losses were of course all flukes, and won't be indicative of overall play experience across dozens of games... but it's still kind of awesome (or frustrating, if that's how you choose to look at it) to know that such losses are lurking in the cards. Even a well-equipped high-level party will still lose to the Darkness meter from time to time.

Despite the shocking upsets, I still feel that the randomness is a benefit. It's surprisingly fun to get curb-stomped by a cooperative game when you thought you'd won.

Contrasting with Myth:
We took a break from Myth because it was getting too repetitive, and just too easy. There were only two or three monster types that you'd see again and again, and our characters had earned titles and got good gear. Brimstone seems likely to avoid those problems because it has more encounter variety and built-in methods to upgrade the badguys and challenges as you level up. Also, there's more PCs to choose from in Brimstone (assuming you have both boxed sets), and each PC has more customization options out of the gate. If Brimstone starts to grow stale, swapping characters should actually freshen it up again.

In theory, Myth is finally actually shipping wave 2 to the US now, which may even it out until Shadows' second wave many months from now. If I can tear myself away from Brimstone long enough to find out, I'll post my observations here.

My expectation, though, is that the clarity of the rules and card phrasing in Brimstone will push it over the top in any comparison to Myth. There are parts of Myth I do like better (the action decks are fun but clunky, the monster AI is more varied, and the two-stage bosses are cool nod to videogaming), but Brimstone's far gentler learning curve, and dramatically fewer rules-holes is thus-far making it feel like the superior game. 

Little Annoyances:

Which is not to say that Shadows of Brimstone is without flaw entirely.

I do find it a little annoying to track XP during combat in Brimstone. I would have been happier if the xp per hit and per wound on the big guys had been more standardized and tracked with tokens or something that would have sped it up during the most complex of the combat rounds. It's not bad, but it could have been better. It's also not as bad as it had been, because in earlier drafts the XP per wound on large monsters was variable by monster type.

I also think that the high-Initiative characters are going to pull ahead in the XP long haul, and that might prove problematic. In yesterday's game the Saloon Girl asked me to give her my last dynamite so she could throw it before the monsters got to act, and it kinda sucked to be giving her a 100 xp worth of potential kills when she was already the only person to level up that session.  If your group includes anyone prone to jealousy or being a sore loser, I'd recommend rotating out characters frequently (so that you get a different party mix and can share the spotlight moments around the table from game to game), or splitting XP evenly (but that will increase the amount of math during fights, and as I mentioned above, I already find the XP tracking a little tedious). I haven't played enough, or leveled-up enough, to know if this problem self-corrects or not.

I do know that this problem is less pronounced than it was at the time of that first demo many months ago. At the time I complained to Jason Hill that I felt my character (the Gunslinger) was too good, because of the way Quickdraw interacted with Dual-Wielding and his high Initiative. Since that time, the Dual-Wield penalty has been rewritten to be more severe (it used to apply to only your off-hand shots, not all of them), the Quickdraw card gained a restriction that it can't be used when Dual-Wielding, and the XP numbers were tweaked in a way that rewards hits instead of wounds (so you can still get a decent amount of XP if you are shooting at a monster that only has 1 wound left).

On a related note, I don't quite understand why low-Initiative characters lose their activation if the last monster dies before they move. Restarting at the top of the round only makes it more likely that the high-Initiative PCs will get the scavenge rewards. This seems an unnecessary bit of insult-to-injury, even if they do get some manner of compensation during the Catch Your Breath step.

Things I Love

The combat system is solid, and the handfulls of dice are fun. The components are beautiful, and the tile system rocks. Variety of play experience is high, thanks to 18 missions, tons of cards, customized PCs, and lots of random events. As mentioned above, the game can turn difficult with a single bad roll or draw, which is a good thing in a cooperative game. The XP system solves the problem of being the party healer - you score a lot of experience patching up the other characters.

I really appreciate the Traveling and Frontier Town portion(s) of the game. While some folks are probably going to complain that the game inserts random rolls into everything, I find that the risk of events really spices up what would otherwise be another boring min-max shopping trip. I _hate_ those "stop and ponder the equipment list" moments in traditional RPGs, but in Brimstone shopping is actually fun.

House rule caveat: 

When we play, we don't let you buy things for other people. Doing so (there's no clear official rule against it, but the rules seem to vaguely imply you can't) would allow a 6-player posse to hit every location on the first day, and that's just not as much fun as pushing your luck on multi-day town stays. 

And really: Outlaws, Bandidos, Saloon Girls and Gunslingers probably shouldn't be trusting one another with their wallets.

The level-up system is kinda fun, too. You get one random (rolled on a chart) stat boost each level, and then you get to pick a cool power to go with it. This gives you control of the important parts of your character (choosing your new trick) but the random chart makes it harder to min-max. In most level-up systems, the players who've mastered the system (at least to the extent of having identified dump stats and exploitable interactions) have a huge advantage over casual players that haven't done as much analysis. In theory the random stat boost should even this out a bit. It won't perfectly balance things if one person is making poor choices while the other carefully weighs the options, but it should at least reduce the gap. I'm excited to see to what extent that holds true over the long haul, as we've had such bad luck that only 2 characters have leveled up in 5 games (though to be fair, that's also because I've played a different character in each game to get a taste of everything). Worst case scenario: the casual player gets unlucky rolls for stats with no synergy, and the min-maxer rolls exactly what they wanted. While that sounds bad, it's actually basically the default assumption/starting point of most other games.  Worst case is essentially breaking even, and it's still providing at least a small extra hurdle for the shameless min-maxer to have to work around. I feel like that's a step in the right direction.

TPK’d in Brimstone

We got our chaps-wearing butts handed to us when we played Shadows of Brimstone on Friday night. We had four PCs (gunslinger, preacher, lawman and an indian scout) so we our threat difficulty was Medium.

The first couple mine cards we drew were just corridors, so we were all getting a little antsy by the time the first room showed up, so we weren’t coordinating our movement very well. The preacher rushes ahead into the new room, leaving my gunslinger around a blind corner. I considered asking him not to do that, but I figured it was our first room and we were all at full health and equipment, so what could go wrong?

The exploration token called for an Attack, so that’s one Medium Threat. The room had an Advanced box on the mine card, calling for an extra Encounter card. Long story short… The Encounter card added a High Threat to the fight. The High Threat was itself "Draw Two Medium Threats", one of which was "Draw Two Low Threats". On round two we failed to Hold Back The Darkness, and the card added another Medium Threat to the fight. Thus our very first battle of the campaign was against 3 Elite (+2 damage) Night Terrors, plus 1 Slasher, 6 Void Spiders and 6 Hellbats. All appearing in a large room around the corner where my gunslinger special ability to get free shots at spawning monsters couldn’t draw line of sight.

TPK in the first room. Technically, they left us for dead, and wandered off to destroy half of the frontier town.  We fought to the bitter end, and when finally the Lawmen fell, there were only two monsters left (the Slasher and the last Night Terror) both of whom were badly wounded. Those of us who didn’t go down the first round scored a lot of XP, but not enough to level up. So we survived, but with a permanent wound or two, hardly any treasure, and very limited options for stocking up before our next mission. We’re off to a great start on the campaign.

I’d actually been a tiny-bit worried prior to this that the game might not be dangerous enough. The two demos we’d played with FFP had been mostly cakewalks (especially the more recent one). Fun cakewalks, to be sure, but not exactly close calls. Instead, I see now that the full game starts in the sweet spot where one wrong move (or unlucky card draw) can smash your face, but actual “gone forever” character death is rare. (They may have stacked the decks and/or exploration tokens at the demos, to specifically encourage the cakewalking. I don't know.) Given the way the Elite and Brutal system automatically scales up the monsters as you advance in character level, I think it’s going to sustain the tension into the later stages of the campaign. I’m very excited to play more again real soon.

Myth vs Galaxy Defenders vs Shadows of Brimstone part 8: Non-Combat Actions

This is the 8th, and probably final post in a series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. In this installment, I discuss the non-combat portions of three games that mostly about their battle systems. What is there to do in these games, other than kill monsters?

Non-Combat Actions

Myth provides a great variety of things for you to do in-between killing monsters. Nearly every session will involve at least one trap that needs to disarmed or circumvented. Many of the quest cards provide allies to rescue, timers to race, or special terrain to interact with. You probably average from 3 to 6 of these special rules or objectives in a typical session, and they really change your goals and play style when they’re active. The main boxed set includes a nice variety of such activities to liven up your sessions, and there's a lot more coming up in the expansions and stretch-goals. Admittedly, the non-combat-action rules are sketchy and under-developed, but they’re also quite flexible.  I particularly like that most non-combat checks don’t interfere with your fighting abilities at all. You don’t usually have to choose between kicking-ass or advancing the plot, as more often than not you can do both equally on your turn. Each character class has at least one unique card that helps them in non-combat activities.

Galaxy Defenders seems to offer a bit less than Myth in that area. There are missions, and most of them involve getting to a particular place and doing something special once there, so that's a step in the right direction. The first several missions in the rulebook are just 1 or 2 small rules or objectives that only come into play at the end of the hour-long session. Later missions are more involved, but are also balanced for larger groups of high-level well-equipped characters, and have longer expected run times. GD has interesting quests and events, it just takes several sessions and level-ups to unlock them.

Characters in Shadows have a large number of non-combat stats on their character class sheet: Agility, Cunning, Lore, Luck, Spirit, Strength, and Willpower. You don’t roll any of those in normal combat (sometimes Willpower is used for a Sanity check during a fight with the worst supernatural horrors), they exist mainly for use with the Encounter cards, which are little quests and events that happen as you travel through the maze. The demo I played was a pretty simple “learn the rules” treasure hunt, so we focused mostly on combat and didn’t see many of these Encounter cards. If that same ratio of fights to encounters exists in the main game, then SoB only has about the same number of non-violent activities as your typical GD mission… but I honestly doubt that’s the case. Given over half a dozen non-combat stats, it seems likely that they’ll come up quite often in normal play. I expect cave-ins, clue-gathering, and other exciting subplots and side-missions to crop up regularly. That said, each session is on a turn-clock (if a particular token advances 15 times the heroes lose), and the tunnel layout is pretty linear, so there may be practical limits to how many encounters and side-quests can actually happen.

And The Winner Is: Myth. Its lead in that area may shrink somewhat when I get more time with the other two games and learn their secrets, but at very least Myth has the most immediately-accessible things to do other than just simply kill for profit. (Killing things for fun and profit is the mainstay of all three games, though, so don't take that the wrong way.)

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Summary and Conclusion

In the previous posts, I awarded "wins" to each game in various categories.

1. Character Customization: Shadows of Brimstone
2. Set-Up Speed: Myth
3. Flexibility: Myth
4. Game-Length: Galaxy Defenders (was tie with Myth before this update)
5. Pacing: Myth
6. Setting: Subjective
7. Miniatures Versatility: Shadows of Brimstone
8. Maps/Tiles: Shadows of Brimstone
9. Rulebook: Galaxy Defenders
10. NPC AI: Myth or Galaxy Defenders
11. Non-Combat Activities: Myth (but Shadows of Brimstone looks interesting)

If those were all evenly weighted (and they're definitely not) the score would be something like Myth 5 to GD 3 to SoB 4, depending on how you handle ties. Of the three, Myth is currently my favorite, but the character advancement system in Shadows has exciting potential so that could change over time. All three games seem very solid to me, but each has it's flaws as well.

• Myth's rulebook is a ridiculous mess, and individual sessions may not have enough structure for some players.
• Galaxy Defenders has a very involved set-up process, and the game itself includes a little more clutter and book-keeping than the others.
• Shadows of Brimstone has slightly less interesting AI for the monsters, but otherwise seems quite solid. It also doesn't release for several months, and so it could have additional flaws that weren't evident in the demo I attended.

Myth cost about the same as GD via the Kickstarter, but it will include a lot more content once all the stretch-goal items arrive later this month. Myth and Shadows feature what seems like comparable amounts of content from my current perspective, but the full palate of stretch-goals kicked in at a much lower price tag on Myth. Overall, Myth feels like a better deal to me, though again the bad rulebook is a deal-breaker for some groups. It's kind of a shame. I may revisit this series when Shadows of Brimstone actually releases, when a more detailed comparison can be made concerning components I don't yet have in my hands.

Myth vs GD vs SoB part 7: NPC AI

This is the 7th of 8 posts comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. I've played all three, and in this post I will compare and contrast how the monsters move and act in each game.

NPC Movement and Artificial Intelligence

Myth's monsters behave in organic and interesting ways. The actual movement rules are relatively simple, but the clumsy rulebook makes them seem more complicated than they actually are. Each monster species has its’ own targeting priority, which is pretty neat because it means smarter monsters fight more intelligently and cooperate better than others, and cowardly monsters fall back to shoot at easy targets from a distance. The monster’s actual tactics are a little predictable, but there’s a nice variable turn-length mechanism that introduces an element of skill (and teamwork) into anticipating which heroic actions will be accomplished by the party before the monsters get to counter-attack. Overall, it’s a little clunkier than it needs to be at times, but it really does keep the game fast-paced, flavorful, and interesting. They give the very encouraging advice that if you do it wrong, don’t sweat it — it’s a cooperative game where you can easily scale the difficulty on the fly. If you’re having fun, a technically misplaced monster or two doesn’t matter. If the mistake bothers you, make up for it by spawning extra monsters when you're placing the next room.

GD has a similarly organic movement system, operated by card draws. It does a great job of differentiating between the monster types, so smarter/faster/vicious/stealthy monsters behave appropriately. It automates their tactics, and keeps the players guessing. You have to take opportunities as they present themselves, because you never know what’s going to happen next. It’s absolutely the best part of the game, and is actually a better version of what Myth was aiming for. (GD's take on it is smoother in play, and more crisply differentiates between the monster types.) Unfortunately, it’s permanently wed to the mostly-dreadful hexagonal area boards, which are an eyesore. If I can figure out a way to pry the heart of this game away from its hexagonal boards, I bet I’d play a lot more of it.

Shadows of Brimstone has the most conventional movement system of the three. It’s the very board-gamey, where the monster directives in the other two are more immersive and flavorful. Most monsters are very predictable in Shadows. They quite sportingly attempt to split their numbers (and attacks) evenly between the heroes. They arrive in a checkerboard pattern for the express mechanical purpose of keeping dynamite from being too powerful in the first turn of any encounter. Those are solid play-balance decisions, but they seem a little artificial once you’ve been exposed to Myth’s “it’s a cooperative game, so set your own difficulty and do what's fun” philosophy. That said, some folks find Myth to be too malleable and not challenging or structured enough. I’m predicting that those folks will prefer the balanced concrete systems present in Shadows.
I do have one minor setting / mechanical gripe about SoB, but it might just be a function of the specific demo I played. All the monsters we faced were melee swarms. In a game about Western gunfighters, it seems like cover should matter a little more, and some of the bad guys ought to be shooting back at you. That feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, and it may actually auto-correct itself when I see the final mix of NPCs. The monster stat cards had a box set aside for ranged attacks, but that box was empty on every creature we faced in the demo.

And The Winner Is: Either Myth or Galaxy Defenders, depending on whether you find the former's awful rulebook more or less of a hassle than the later's overly-busy mapboards.

Myth vs GD vs SoB part 6: Boards and Books

This is the 6th post in an 8-part series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. Last time I talked about their miniatures, so this time I'm going to discuss other physical components in the main boxed sets.

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Boards, Tiles, and Counters

Myth has some very nice Realm Tiles, ranging between 4x6 all the way up to 12x12 inches. They’re conveniently sized, durable, easy to read (though it would have been nice if the blue lines could have “popped” just a little more) and quite pretty. Some of the game mechanics are unobtrusively printed along the edge, to reduce rulebook look-up mid-game. That’s nice. You only use a few tiles at a time, so the play area is actually fairly small (just 1 foot square in Slaughterfield mode). When the plot takes you to the end of the table, it’s easy to slide the stuff you still need, and scoop the tiles you’re done with… or if you’re in Free-Questing mode, you can just choose to place the tiles in a way that doubles back so you never reach the edge of the table. Absolutely zero complaints or headaches in play. There are some 1x1, 2x2 and 2x3 terrain markers that get placed on the tiles in some scenarios, but never so many that it becomes a burden or confusing. In the stretch goals are fancy 3D plastic versions of many of those tokens to spice up your table top if you so desire.

The boards in Galaxy Defenders aren’t quite as nice, in my opinion. The boards are 9x15 inch tiles and you use 2 or 3 of them at once, so there’s a much larger minimum table-space needed. On top of the big boards, you place a ton of little terrain-modifying tiles (mostly 2x1). There was a positively annoying amount of them in second scenario in the book. You set up the whole board at the start of the game, so at least you never have to slide it around once you've built this complex layout. The tiles are overly busy, and have thick garish colorful outlines. I really like the area-movement rules, but unfortunately the extra outlines for it collectively contribute to the overwhelming visual clutter. Plus, hex-shaped spaces and areas means that all the buildings on the map have really strange architecture. All of which undermines the point of putting so much immersive detail into the maps in the first place. I think the boards for GD are probably its single weakest game-play feature, even if they are what makes the area-movement system so sweet. The hexagonal-based character sheet and equipment system is intriguing, but a little disorienting during your first play.

Shadows has very uniquely-shaped organic cavern tiles, most of which are just over 6 inches long if memory serves correctly.  I was initially a little apprehensive about how the weird shapes would interacted with movement and line of sight, but having now played the game, I see that they are really quite nice and functional. They pack in the visual detail, but remain quite clear and easy to mentally process. They interlock so you can slide them around easily without messing up the board position. That’s actually very important, because the card-driven random exploration system means you’re going to run right over to the table edge several times per session. I gather that Shadows will come with a lot of different tokens for things like wounds and sanity, but the copy used in this demo were just repurposed parts from A Touch Of Evil and Last Night On Earth, so I don't know much about them. The prototype of the Gunslinger's ammo template was pretty neat though, and I'm looking forward to the full-art version of it in the final game. It was like the cylinder of a revolver.

And The Winner Is: Shadows of Brimstone, surprisingly since some of the parts weren't in final art yet. What sold me was the mine tiles. They're not quite as open-ended as Myth's realm tiles, but they fulfill their designated role exceedingly well.  Most of the game takes place in a mineshaft or cavern, and the tiles do a very good job of reinforcing that concept. Next time I run a D&D game in a similar environment, I'm almost certainly going to break out the Brimstone mine tiles.

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Rulebook

As stated elsewhere, Myth’s actual rules are good, but the book is poorly organized and actually missing some vital information. This is Myth’s worst weakness, and it’s probably a fatal flaw for some folks. Learning the game from the rulebook is tiring and difficult, but learning it from someone else who’s already played is quick and easy. I've gone on about it at length in another blog post. About all I can add to that is a complaint that the font size is really tiny on some pages.


GD’s rulebook is really solid. The examples are clear. The index is functional, but would have been easier to read in two-column. You can learn the game pretty quickly from reading the book. It's not quite as pretty as Myth's rulebook, but much more useful and sane. The print is large, and the headers are in color so you can quickly scan for the subsection you're interested in.

I learned how to play Shadows at a demo. It was very simple to pick up from a quick face-to-face explanation, but that can mostly be said about the other two games as well. I have never seen the rules, so I can’t really speak about layout, organization, or clarity.

And The Winner Is: Galaxy Defenders has a much more functional rulebook than Myth, so it wins at least until Brimstone releases or Mercs/Megacon releases an updated PDF.

Myth vs GD vs SoB part 5: Setting and Miniatures

This is the fifth post in my 8-part series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. I've played a little bit of all three, and in this post I'll talk about their settings, art styles, and miniatures.

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Setting

Myth has a very clear product identity. The illustrations feel like a comic book. (Or a little “cartoony” if you must. In general it works really well for me, but I’m sure it’s not for everyone.) I like that the setting isn’t just cookie-cutter generic fantasy, and has subtle bits at world building. The NPC bosses are particularly crazy-looking and inspiring. The humanoid enemies are “grubbers” and “muckers” instead of generic goblins or orcs, which suggests flavor, but doesn’t exactly spell out what it means. It’s all hinted at, but never presented in detail. Maybe that’s because the game world is new, or maybe it’s intentionally vague to leave things open so you can decide for yourself what it all means in the same way that you are your own GM in Myth. The setting is mostly cohesive, but it does have a few oddities and anachronisms, such as very modern clerical collars on the NPC priests. Probably the least immersive part of the game is the monster lairs, which spawn creatures in a way that feels a bit like a video-game.

Galaxy Defenders really doesn’t have its own setting at all. There’s a bit of lip-service applied towards it in the book, but clearly their goal is to be a remix/mash-up. Characters, especially those from the kickstarter stretch-goals, are thinly-disguised versions of hollywood stars from all your favorite sci-fi movies at once. The event cards for weather are literally a still-frame of Rutger Hauer delivering the “tears in the rain” speech from blade-runner, and the poster for John Carpenter's The Fog, both run through photoshop filters. 

I've seen copyright law on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I am so torn by this. On one hand, it’s awesome, and I admire them for having the courage to do it. Who hasn’t wanted to play Aliens vs Predator vs MIB vs RoboCop vs Plan 9? On the other hand, it erodes suspension of disbelief just a little, and makes me a lot less interested in the unique characters and monsters that aren’t obviously lifted from a film. Everytime I place a generic “Xeno-Beta” instead of the obviously Giger-derived “Xeno-Morph”, I feel like I’m missing out on some of the fun.


Shadows of Brimstone has, for me, the most compelling setting. It’s the Old West, with supernatural elements and portals to other worlds. So, mostly it’s Deadlands. That’s okay, I like Deadlands. I’ll probably slip up and say “Ghost Rock” instead of “Darkstone” nearly every session. There are distinct differences between the settings. There’s no CSA, Hucksters, Whateleys, etc in Brimstone, but there are some very high-tech aliens and pulpy snakemen on some of the Other Worlds. Of the three games, SoB has the darkest and most realistic artwork. It also seems at this point to have the most developed and internally-consistent setting, despite being explicitly a game about dimension-hopping where in theory anything is possible.

And The Winner Is: This is totally all about your personal tastes, I can't tell you which you'll like best.

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Repurposing the Miniatures

With three different cooperative dungeon-crawls releasing this year, I'm not going to find time to play all of them as often as I might like. So I find myself wondering can I mix-and-match? Can I repurpose minis from one game to the other, or use parts of these games in my RPG gaming?

As I said, I like Myth’s art style, but I could see why some wouldn’t. In fact, one of my friends complained about it when I tried to show him the game. The figures are distinctive, and somewhat intangibly “friendly” even when depicting something terribly evil. They work for Myth, but they might feel out of place if you ported them into a game that takes itself more seriously. It's not Kingdom Death, after all. There's a handful of figures in the Myth box that will work as orcs or giant scorpions in D&D, but that's it.

GD has a lot of very recognizable Hollywood-inspired minis, and as I said I have mixed emotions about that. If I were a little more into painting and collecting, I’d probably get more of a kick out of it. Seriously, having a miniature Ellen Ripley makes me wish I was more of a minis painter. I don’t know how much use I’ll find for these minis in other gaming, but they’re at least a fun novelty to show off, if that's you're thing. It occurs to me that the Aracnos monsters from GD could probably be used in Myth if you created just a single monster stat card for them (so I may have to do that).

Brimstone is a godsend for an RPG gamer such as myself. That kickstarter is loaded with minis appropriate for Deadlands and other westerns, Call of Cthulhu, pulp-era, retro-sci-fi gaming, and even a few things for the Post-Apocalypse or more traditional Medieval Fantasy. Even if the game sucked (and I’m pleased to say it doesn’t), I’d still probably be happy with the quantity and quality of minis I'm going to be getting from this. I consider it a wise investment for RPG gaming, as last time I ran Deadlands, I had to use LEGO cowboys during the fight scenes, and it was a little silly.

And The Winner Is: Of the three, Shadows of Brimstone has the most versatile selection of miniatures.

Myth vs GD vs SoB part 4: Game-Length and Pacing

This is the fourth post in an 8-part series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. I've played all three, and in this post I'll examine how they compare on issues of game-length and pacing.

 Link to first post in series.

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Game-Length

If time is an issue, Myth can accommodate you. One of the main game play modes in Myth allows the players to control precisely how long the game will last. Convenient stopping points pop up about every twenty minutes when "free-questing", and you’ll never have to worry about leaving the board set up till next time. The other two game modes (Story quests and Slaughterfield) are much less flexible than this, but Stories are organized into discrete Acts of reasonably predictable game length. 3 hours will give you a very respectable play session, and if you know going in that you’ve got a tighter deadline you can free-quest instead.

GD’s average session length is shorter, but beyond your control. Often the exact number of turns the game will last is dictated by the scenario. Each scenario has a listed duration (usually around an hour). The scenarios I've played took longer than listed, but we were still learning the game and that probably slowed us down.  The short play-times don't count set-up time, which could be an issue.  If you run out of time, it would be a horrendous chore to record the board position to pick it up again later. If time is short and you can’t leave the table set-up until next time, GD could be prove problematic.

I’ve only played Shadows of Brimstone once, so I don’t really know how long it will take on average. Our demo was a very satisfying game experience in a couple hours. You can certainly tweak decks and tokens to speed things up, but it’ll be tricky to do so on the fly and would probably feel more like cheating than comparable decisions do in Myth. On the other hand, stopping points (pauses without monsters in play) occur every five minutes, easy. You could wrap up for the night at any of those pauses. It would complicate campaign play and require some note-taking if you didn't want to just start over at square one next time, but it's doable.

And The Winner Is:  Galaxy Defenders wins for now, though I'd originally called it a tie between GD and Myth. Shadows may well beat them both when it comes out, if the missions and campaign system is no more complicated than what I could see in the demo.

In theory, Myth features the most flexibility to wrap up early without headaches or hassles... except for when poor Lair placement or a multi-wave Quest suddenly bogs the game down. The biggest time-sink/pitfall is in Lair placement and/or failing to prioritize the destruction of a Lair.  If you ignore the Lairs entirely, they will s...l...o...w...l...y wear you down. Once you've learned that lesson it's easy to avoid, but it takes 2 or 3 hours to learn it in the first place.

Ultimately, game length matters most if the game runs out of steam or fails to engross you for its whole length, so perhaps we should talk about pacing...

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Pacing

Myth scores highly on the twin-axes of play speed and player interaction, which are usually at cross-purposes to one another in other (especially competitive) game designs. "Turns" are quite short, and you almost never have to wait for anyone. There’s a bit of a learning curve where your first couple Hero Cycles will seem longer since you’ve never read the cards before, but by the end of the first session you’ll be chugging along at top speed. Group attacks and area effects resolve remarkably fast. Heroes can mow down scores of minions with a single die roll (as minions always have a single hit-point). It feels very epic, and requires very little “memory” or tracking of variable NPC stats. The turn structure is a little complicated, but cards stay out as a marker of who's done what this turn, so you can always tell exactly where you are. There’s little risk of losing your place when the pizza guy knocks on your door.

GD is a little slower overall. The custom dice are a big help in that they really reduce the math and make each individual die roll much faster.  Separate attack and defense rolls though does mean an extra step or two to every action, so it roughly evens out. Monsters in GD rarely go down in a single hit, and you’ll find yourself tracking wounds and energy on all the miniatures. It’s not bad, but it does seem a little clunkier (and less epic) than Myth. You face fewer monsters over all, but each one requires multiple attacks.

Shadows seems to be comparable to GD. Each player’s turn is longer than in Myth. Attacking a single minion takes at least two die rolls, and you’ll often have to keep track of wounded monsters. One-hit-kills of the smaller monsters are more likely than in GD, but there’s not much chance of wiping the board in a single roll like can happen in Myth. I expect Shadows will have the most down-time and waiting of the three, and yet it’s still overall a quickly-moving game. I do have a little concern about losing your place in the turn if there’s an interruption or delay, and I suspect the game could benefit from some sort of turn tracker to keep that from being a problem. Luckily, it could be as simple as using a single large off-color d6 to count down initiative as we move through the turn sequence.

And The Winner Is: Myth seems specifically designed to minimize down-time and keep everyone involved at every moment. This makes for an exciting pace and constant action, except when a player needs to slip off for a potty break.

Myth vs GD vs SoB part 3: Flexibility and Customization

This is the third post in an 8-part series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. I've played all three, and here's how they compare on:

Flexibility and Customization

Customization of your overall game experience is where Myth really shines. Players decide game length, difficulty per tile, which quests to use, which of three game modes to play, whether or not they're ever going to fight their least favorite monster again, etc. How many and which monsters are in the room? Myth provides you with a range, not a precise answer, and you tweak that sliding scale depending on how much challenge you want, and what seems to fit the narrative. You are your own GM, and you get to adjust everything on the fly. If you’ve got a little creativity, Myth gives you a ton of tools and options to explore. Existing quests have a lot of variety, and it's pretty easy to add your own ideas to the deck if you've got the cards sleeved. (Speaking of which, I've made about 20 new quest cards that I'll be posting to this site sometime soon.) All this comes with a couple caveats: some folks find Myth too unstructured and nebulous, or feel that making the decisions Myth asks them to is tantamount to cheating. Myth's philosophy is pretty unique.

Galaxy Defenders really relies on detailed scenarios, and it’s hard to eyeball how they will play out before you try any specific scenario. It’s also much harder to make your own scenarios for GD than for Myth, and all that hidden information makes customizing an existing mission a little tricky unless you're really familiar with the particulars. Scenarios feed into each other in a specific (branching) order, with expectations of equipment and level-ups happening at a precisely controlled rate. It’s a very scripted experience. In classic RPG terms, I’d be willing to bet that Myth appeals more to people who like to GM, where Galaxy Defenders appeals more to those who prefer to be players in the RPG party. If you do want to add your own content to GD, the unique components (equipment and abilities are printed on thick hexagonal and trapezoidal tiles, not standard cards) makes it a little harder.

Shadows of Brimstone falls somewhere between them. You can easily choose to alter or ignore certain decks and Other Worlds to tailor your game, so it’s more immediately flexible than GD. You can just wander into the mines and face whatever you draw, but at the demo I played the designer heavily implied there were going to be additional more complicated missions in the final game. Accessories to the game include blank cards so you can insert your own ideas into the pot. However, there’s a lot of hidden information and decisions made by random card or token draw. By default, SoB just doesn't give you nearly the level of control that Myth’s free-questing and realm tile setup allows. All your customization has to happen between games, where as in Myth it can be done on the fly.  In SoB, the decks function as your GM, in Myth you are your own GM. Which means that if Myth seemed just a little too unstructured for you, SoB’s tighter dungeon-generation system will probably be very appealing.


And The Winner Is:  Either Myth or SoB, depending on your personal tastes. Both are more readily adaptable than GD, but that comes at a price. They rely on random card draws instead of GD's carefully scripted adventures. You get flexibility, but at the cost of sometimes have to deal with incompatible card draws. Myth has a built-in solution to that problem (the players are specifically empowered to disregard the cards if they want) but that could itself lead to analysis paralysis or just rub some player's sensibilities wrong.

Myth vs GD vs SoB part 2: Set-Up Time

This is the second post in a 8-part series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. I've played all three, and here's how they compare on:

Set-Up Time

All three games mentioned here take a little bit of time getting minis, board sections, and decks out of the box and set up to play. Many of the dungeon-crawls that went before them put all the set-up and prep work on one player, who was GMing or at least playing the villains, but these three new games upend that paradigm. You're all working together, and there's no secret map that only one player can access. Assuming someone at the table has read the rulebook, and you've all played a good demo that answered the major questions, how much time and effort does it really take to set up when playing for your second time?

The short set-up time is one of Myth's strong suits, especially when compared with the standard for these sorts of big-box dungeon-crawls. With Myth, you have the ability to start play almost instantly (as long as you already know the rules, which is far from guaranteed with Myth) via the “free questing” mode. Free-questing, which is my preferred play mode, starts with any single terrain tile and drawing any one quest card to go with it. You dive right in and are playing within seconds. The Slaughterfield game mode is also immediate action with no delays, starting a few seconds faster than free-questing.  Only Story Mode requires any set-up at all, and even then it's pretty fast and simple due to the nature of the game components and the very simple diagrams in the rulebook.


Galaxy Defenders takes a lot of set up, including custom-building the close encounter deck, building/stacking the event deck, and laying out complicated and precise arrangements of lots of little 2x1 terrain objects according to a map image that has to be carefully referenced before play can begin. This takes a lot more time and attention than even the most complicated story-mode scenario in Myth. GD's set up is actually kind of a burden. Getting something wrong in the board or deck set up can really mess up the scenario. The game works well, and all this prep allows the scenarios to offer quite a variety of play experiences, but you certainly need to budget set-up time into your plans for the night.

From what I can tell, Shadows of Brimstone will fall somewhere in between, but much closer to Myth than to Galaxy Defenders. The one game of it I've played had a lot less rigid scenario structure than GD. SoB uses card draws to build the map as you go (somewhat like Myth but with randomness instead of player choice) and you always start on the same entrance tile. That's all pretty speedy. Our mission had an end goal to reach, which was triggered by revealing exploration tokens (one of which is drawn with every new tile). This seemed quick and random, but it's unclear to me if individual sessions require any amount of customizing to the pool of exploration tokens, or if there are other missions that get more complicated. Character creation and leveling-up are both much more involved in SoB than their equivalents in Myth, and I suspect that will result in a slower start to the actual play of each session. Choosing new powers and spending in-game currency will take at least a couple minutes before you get to head into the mines to adventure.



And The Winner is: To whatever extent there can be a 'winner' of the "Set-Up Time" comparison, it's definitely Myth. The game is structured to have as few delays and as little down-time as is humanly possible.

Myth vs Galaxy Defenders vs Shadows of Brimstone Part 1

This weekend, I went down to Card Kingdom in Ballard to play demos of Flying Frog’s upcoming Shadows of Brimstone cooperative miniatures game and Dark Gothic deckbuilding game. It was a lot of fun, and made me feel a lot more confident about that big ol’ Minecart I bought.

This means I’ve now played three of 2013’s big Kickstarter cooperative miniatures dungeoncrawls: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Ares/ProjectGremlin, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog. It was a strong year for the genre.

That suggests to me a natural topic for a series of comparison/review posts. I'll be doing this in a series of posts each focusing on a different aspect of the three games, spread over several days, because otherwise it would be one giant wall of text... and for some reason I think you'll be happier reading several smaller walls of text. It's turned into an 8-part series.

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Character Differentiation and Advancement

Myth comes with 5 character classes in the box, and has another 3 characters arriving in the first wave of expansions in about a month. Each of the 5 classes plays very differently from the others. There’s a healer, a tank, and at least three different flavors of mechanically-distinct glass cannon. Character creation is super quick - any two Brigands (for example) start out with identical stats and equipment, with the only difference being which of two minis they use. As they gather items they’ll start to differ, but true variation between characters of the same class increments in very slowly, at roughly a rate of one meaningful alteration after every 3rd session of play. I haven’t played enough Myth yet to really have an informed opinion about this aspect of advancement, but at first glance it seems like progression is probably a little slower than ideal. It's probably okay if you really plan to play a single character in campaign mode for a very long time, but with 8 classes I'm tempted to swap out which character I play every so often. I may end up house-ruling the progression rate up  for my group after a few more sessions of play.

Galaxy Defenders has the same number (5) of classes in the core box, but the differences between the classes are somewhat less dramatic than in Myth. Stretch goals, if you got them, provided an alternate version of each class, and the differences between the main version and the alternate version are easily as pronounced as between any two GD classes. So you can have two Snipers that each start out mechanically unique. Character advancement is much faster in GD than in Myth, as well, so two characters with similar starting points will very quickly diverge. Leveling up is still done in small increments, so you’re not radically boosting your power all at once, but you’ll see some sort of minor improvement or specialization every time you play (and usually this happens in the middle of the action). It works well.

Shadows of Brimstone comes with 4 classes in each of the two versions of the core box set, and there are half a dozen more beyond those 8 if you got the various stretch goals. The four classes I've seen each plays distinctly differently from the others. Two characters of the same class also start out as unique and distinct individuals right out of the gate. Your class determines a bunch of stats, and at least one set special power for the character. Then you get to choose one of 3 optional starting abilities for that class. After that choice, each player is dealt one random “personal item” that helps define them further. In our demo, the saloon girl had a bowie knife and the gunfighter had a hand mirror, which absolutely defined how we approached these roles. This was an unqualified success, as you became immediately invested in your unique character. Since it was a single demo, I couldn’t see much of the campaign-level character advancement process. There’s an XP system and in-game money. PCs at our table earned between 225 and 475xp in our couple hours of play, and I'm told you need 500 xp to level up. Leveling involved some sort of “feat tree”, with each class eventually unlocking a total of 16 or 20 different powers if you played long enough. Character advancement seems pretty deep.

And The Winner Is: Shadows of Brimstone provides the most in-depth character customization by a long shot, and does it in a very flavorful way.

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Customer Service

I'll be following up with more side-by-side comparisons of various other elements of the games in my next few posts.

Until then, I wanted to take a quick moment to specifically call out the great customer service I got from Ares / Project Gremlin, the makers of Galaxy Defenders. When they shipped our game + stretch goals to us, 3 of the miniatures arrived broken. One was missing an arm, and two others had snapped off their bases. My wife sent a photo to the folks at Ares, and within a few days they'd mailed off replacements for the 3 broken figures... packed in a box with another dozen other figures and promo cards just to be cool. That was very generous of them. I figured we were just going to have to glue the minis -- and that would have been fine -- but they went above and beyond.

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.