Tag Archives: boardgames

Games

A good old-fashioned dungeon romp

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Strangely enough, in all my years as a gaming geek, I’ve never done an actual table-top dungeon romp before. I’ve played pencil-and-paper role-playing games in the past, but due to my snooty attitude towards Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve always stayed away from it and preferred less hack-and-slash oriented games like RuneQuest, Shadowrun and Robotech (okay, maybe this last one is a bad example.) I’ve cleared dungeons in MMOs like World of Warcraft before, but that’s not quite the same thing. So when Sean offered the opportunity to participate in a session of Descent, I agreed despite some misgivings over how long it would be expected to require.

The bad news is that our session actually lasted longer than I expected, about five and a half hours in all. The good news is I had a blast the entire time and would gladly do it again! It’s all a bit embarrassing really because even more so than BattleLore, much of the appeal of Descent lies in being able to play with all the awesome miniatures and other props. As one of the players in our session, Chee Wee (sorry if I got the spelling of your name wrong) commented, there’s an open-mouthed kid in the candystore feeling when you see all that cool stuff laid out on the table.

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Games

Mr. Jack and recording boardgame plays

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My wife and I played a game of Mr. Jack to start off our weekly session at CarcaSean. It’s a two-player game in which one of the players takes on the role of the infamous Jack the Ripper while the other player takes on the role of the detective trying to catch the murderer. The board represents the Whitechapel district of London and is populated by eight characters, all of whom are connected to the case in some way and any one of whom can turn out to be Mr. Jack. Yes, this means it’s possible that the murderer could be Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Lestrade.

The cool twist about this game is that both players take turns to control the same eight characters. Typically, the detective tries to arrange the characters such that the use of the Witness / No Witness card eliminates as many suspects as possible while the other player tries to prevent this. Quite unintuitively, I quickly found that, as the player in the Mr. Jack role, it is far easier to keep all of the characters in sight than trying to keep them out of sight. I messed up early because of this and eliminated a lot of characters from suspicion on the very first turn. Still, I did manage to keep my wife from guessing who the murderer was until the very last turn. Overall, a light but fun game. It is astonishing however how a game with such a simple ruleset can involve so much thinking.

Our main course for the evening was still Agricola which we played with Sean, using the I deck, the first time for all of us. The thing about Agricola with me is that immediately after finishing a game, I feel like playing a second time because of a conviction that I should be able to do better the second time around. Both of us like it so much that we’ve seriously talked buying a copy. The main argument against that is that we’d end up just playing it against each other, and my instincts tell me that two-player Agricola just doesn’t have enough competition in it to be consistently interesting.

Finally, with some encouragement from Sean, I spent some time today recording my boardgame plays so far on BoardGameGeek. The exact dates of some of the earliest plays are somewhat suspect and I’ve probably left off some plays of the games that we own but it should be pretty accurate otherwise. You can see the list here. As Sean says, it’s not like it serves any purpose, but I guess making lists is just the geeky thing to do. On a side-note, this is the list of games that Sean owns. That’s a lot of games!

Games

I’m a terrible vampire hunter

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Our regular session at CarcaSean last Saturday was a pre-arranged game of Fury of Dracula. This was our first experience of a mostly cooperative game with one player assuming the role of the antagonist. In this game, most of the players take on the role of hunters who must track down and destroy Dracula who is controlled by a single player. The action takes place on a board that represents all of Europe. Dracula can win through a variety of ways including maturing enough young vampires or simply eluding the hunters long enough. The hunters are forced to destroy Dracula before he has earned enough points to win.

In retrospect, getting the most experienced and skilled player in our group to be Dracula was probably a bad idea. Our first game went disastrously for the hunters as we muddled around the coastlines of Europe being confused about why we hadn’t picked up Dracula’s trail when we were sure that we must have disembarked at a port. We simply forgot that a port location had been cleared out of the trail earlier. That first game went by so quickly that we decided to do another game.

This one went a little better in that we managed to actually have a confrontation with Dracula this time. However, he managed to play an Evasion card just as all of the hunters were close to surrounding him and we learned that even if we won every fight, we’d still have to successfully confront him multiple times to whittle down his blood supply. So either our Dracula was very, very good, or we were very, very bad vampire hunters.

My thoughts on this game is that while at first glance it seems that deductively working out Dracula’s hiding place is important, in practice, it comes to using event cards to locate him and perhaps judicious use of the Sense of Emergency ability to pin him down. The good thing about this is that a session doesn’t take very long at long, but it doesn’t strike me as having enough replayability to consider buying. It strikes me that many of these American games have a strong luck factor. It’s been a while since my wife and I had a chance to play a Euro game. I think we’re going to try to do that for our next session. I’ve been meaning to try out Mr. Jack which should be a game of almost purely logical deduction. We’ll see how that pans out.

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Games

Our most epic boardgaming experience yet

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We held our much anticipated Twilight Imperium 3 session at CarcaSean on Monday, which was a Public Holiday in Malaysia. This is pretty much Fantasy Flight Games’ flagship product and its raison d’être. Chances are it’s one of the most visually impressive games at any store, what with the huge size of the box and the number and quality of the components inside. Equally impressive is the expected playing time for a session, ranging from four to six hours for experienced players.

With that mind, our group tried our best to arrange things to have as smooth and as quick a session as possible, with the players reading up on the rules beforehand or watching this excellent series of tutorial videos, going with a preset map and using the Age of Empire variant rules. I’m happy to report that with a total of five players, our session lasted about five and a half hours, not too bad for a bunch of newbies.

I don’t really have the time to write an in-depth review but I enjoyed it more than I expected. The mechanics are pretty neat and all players are constantly engaged with the game. I wish we had more time to play because personally I felt that I had barely gotten to grips with what the game was about and had just started carving out a piece of the galaxy when it ended. My biggest complaint is that combat is tedious, especially since there’s so little player input involved once it starts. Pretty much the only meaningful decisions the participants can make is whether or not to announce a retreat after each round.

I’m not familiar with the earlier editions of the game, so I run the risk of seeming like a fool when I state that winning through Victory Points feels a bit too gamey and Euro-fied. Instinctively, I’d like that it should be more or less obvious which player has won a game by looking at the map at the end of a session, but as it stands but that’s not the case here. I suppose, as one of the players mentioned, the biggest hurdle to jump is to understand that Twilight Imperium 3 is not a wargame. I’d been forewarned but I still got caught up in building up stuff rather than chasing points.

Finally, it’s a bit disappointing that our game ended due to hitting the End Game card rather than one player getting 10 points. It’s just feels so artificially constrained. Anyway, the shop owner won by a fair margin due in no small part to the intimidation factor of having a War Sun on the map. Personally I’m very much keen to have another session of this but arranging it will be difficult and I doubt my wife would be very enthusiastic. This experience has probably cemented her preference for Euro-style games rather than epic American ones.

Check out this thread on QT3 for some interesting discussion and insights on this game.

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Games

The torture of playing Arkham Horror

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As previously mentioned on this blog, we’ve purchased Arkham Horror but had to wait until we got new tables to actually be able to play it. We finally got around to it last Sunday. We knew that it was going to be a long game so we planned on it taking the whole afternoon. For the first test game, my wife and I opted to take only one character each, chosen at random, but a hand-picked Great Old One, Nyarlathotep, that I’d been told would make for a shorter and slightly less challenging game. Four hours later, we gave up in disgust without completing the game although it was clear that we would eventually lose.

Being such good sports, we tried again in the evening, this time taking two characters each for a total of four characters. We did play this one to completion, though we had to leave the board as it was overnight and continue on Monday evening. Total playing time was around five hours and we lost, but only just barely, during the Final Battle. I’ve written a fairly extensive post on our experience over on QT3 so I don’t feel like repeating myself too much here. The subsequent comments from others are worth reading as well. Summary: my wife felt that it was like being tortured the whole time. In my case, it felt like a game in which things happen to my characters rather than my character actually doing things.

We’ll probably try again another time, and this time, we’ll have a better idea of how to play to beat the game, but probably not too soon! For my wife, it’s a novel experience as it’s the closest we’ve come so far to a more traditional RPG, but to me, the game mechanics feel too archaic and clunky. We probably can enjoy the game, but it just takes too long and is too arduous to play.

On a lighter note, here’s a photo of our session at CarcaSean last Saturday where we spent a little over two hours playing Agricola. Amusingly enough, there was another person there who wanted to play the same game and had friends coming but we eventually decided to join together for a four person game including the friendly shop owner Sean. As expected Sean ran away with the game but I don’t think I did too badly. Agricola is a wonderfully elegant design and that I’m tempted to buy just to experiment with possibilities but it plays quickly enough that it’s probably a better idea just to play it at the cafe.

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Games, Personal Life

Arkham Horror is here

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I thought it might be fun to take some photos of my opening the Arkham Horror box that we’ve just bought. Of course, since I just sat on the floor to open it, Spidey wandered over to curiously poke her nose in everything, which just makes it more fun. As you can see, the board is pretty big, certainly bigger than I expected it to me. There are also a lot of cards (nearly 400) and lots of tiny cardboard tokens and markers. We’re going to have to get a bigger table than we planned to to play this. I can’t even imagine what it’s like once you start adding the expansions with boards of their own.

We’re probably not going to actually start playing it anytime soon either. I’d like to get the cards into some protective plastic sleeves first because my hands tend to get sweaty, and we have to think about a way to store all those markers and tokens once we’ve punched them out of the cardboard sheets. We’re going to have to find a way to roll dice fairly without having them go all over the place too. We had a shot of making a dice tower of our own, but it ended rather badly. Unsurprisingly, cellophane tape isn’t sufficient to hold together a robust cardboard dice tower.

Incidentally we did manage to play a game of Battlestar Galactica at CarcaSean even if it started later than we planned and kept us out until much later than we usually like to stay. We were worried about Spidey being left alone in the room for too long. I wrote a simple after action report of our experence on QT3 that you can read here. Spoiler: my wife is a Cylon!

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Games

Playing with toy soldiers

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I’ve been swamped at work lately and didn’t have the time to put up these photos. I’ve always had a fascination with miniatures, especially Warhammer 40k, but I’m well aware of how expensive and time consuming getting into the hobby will be. This is why something like BattleLore is the next best thing. It’s a simplified wargame that you play with plastic miniatures on a game board. My wife and I tried it out at CarcaSean last Saturday (handily they already had the board and pieces out for a game of their own).

My first surprise was that the miniatures are really, really tiny. I mean, I’ve looked at photos of them on the net, but you have to hold them in the hand to realize how small they really are. I guess the size is necessary to fit the more than 200 figures into the box and to keep the game board at a reasonable size. After all, each hex needs to be able to hold four infantry figures.

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The second surprise is that contrary to my expectations about it being a complicated game, it’s actually quite easy to set up and the game flows smoothly once you understand the basics. Granted, we’ve only played the first two scenarios, so we haven’t gotten into the Lore stuff yet, but we’ve had a very enjoyable and the number of scenarios makes this a very promising long term prospect. With all the extra Lore and War Council added in, this will be a game with plenty of legs indeed.

We liked it so much in fact that we’ve decided to buy a copy of it. We’ve said as much to Sean. The only problem is how to store the huge thing. I don’t think stuffing the miniatures back into the box once it’s been opened would be practical so we’re going to have to get a big table to put everything on. We’ll probably get around to that by the middle to end of this month. As you can see, Sean hasn’t bothered to paint his figures and I doubt I’ll ever get around to it myself. I can just imagine the difficulty of trying to point the tip of the brush at just the right spots on the little things!

In the meantime, it seems that my long ordered copy of Arkham Horror has arrived, so we’ll be going on Saturday to pick it up. So many games, so little time!

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