small world

I can't play the ipad version because I don't have one, but I have played Small World and find it a lot of fun. Somehow, it manages to be sufficiently fast, light, and random that I (as someone who is not a big fan of war/strategy) don't feel overwhelmed or bored, and yet still entertains my more wargamey friends.

... of course, if I'd known there was a "Look! Tits!" expansion, I might have raised more eyebrows. That never came near our table. And what's the point? You have a cute little wargame that (based on our small sample size) is reasonably girl-friendly - was this a misguided attempt at attracting more female players, or a reassurance to macho players that the game wasn't "for kids"? Sure, it's silly, I'm sure the game is just as much fun with these races on it, but that cover art is not an accident. What were they trying to achieve there?

It looks like they might have been races designed by (male) players as part of a contest...

The Adventurers

'Indiana Jones In A Box'



(Note - I haven't played this game myself. I hadn't even heard of it.)

Key to the Kingdom

... is really not a very good board game. If you're a boardgamegeek reader you already knew that.

I'd been wanting to play that forever. It LOOKS pretty, and the world-changing mechanic is cool. But the gameplay is badly broken. A lot of things that happen are random, the randomness can combine in extremely unfortunate ways, and it can go on far too long. I believe it can also become unwinnable! And a lot of the 'bad' things that can happen are just huge dull delays.

I enjoy a heaping helping of randomness in a game, because I find strategizing to be stressful. This was not the right helping, though. There came a point where it was blatantly obvious I was going to lose, but the game was still going to have to go on for a very long time...

yes, AGAIN

... back from another small gaming con, where I was mostly mingling (Ian Livingstone was there!) and playing a game of Betrayal At House On The Hill, a Cthulhu boardgame I've been wanting to try out for a while. (It's much better than Arkham Horror. Really. For one, it doesn't take ten hours to play.)

We did have most of the PCs dead by the end but we technically won, as the eight-year-old girl PC assembled the necessary huge heavy armor and shield and stumbled towards the dragon until she could poke it to death.

BSG Board Game

Saw this being played at a convention although I haven't yet played it myself, looked like fun if you can find the time. Slightly less overwhelming than Arkham Horror at least!

your campaign is bad and you should feel bad

So, apparently Risk (the boardgame) has acquired a bad reputation. People associate it with hardcore anorak geeks wearing horn-rimmed glasses and speaking incomprehensible gibberish. People associate it with Rimmer. Those of us who don't play but have seen others do so associate it with being really boring as a spectator sport. Obviously, it's far more interesting to those actually playing.

However, Hasbro apparently thinks it needs to spice up this impression to try and get some more sales in the economic downturn. Their decision? Attempt to convince you how MANLY it is to play Risk. You're not a geek! You're a MAN! MAN MAN MAN! It is about manning up and proving your dominance over other men! Make men kneel before you and - wait, that sounds gay, doesn't it? Of course, if only men are playing....

Lame, Hasbro. Really, really lame.

just seen on the news

Police search-raids on a hippie protest camp have found 'subversive materials' including a BOARD GAME.

While the actual news broadcast tried to focus on the spraycans and knives they'd picked up, the big bold lettering on the board game box stood out nice and clear, leading me to go look them up and find out what was so dangerous about them. You can't pay for that kind of advertising!

the beast of continuity

Remember back when I mentioned that board game?

let loose the blocks of war!

http://www.brikwars.com/rules/2005/cover.htm

... you mean we won? is that supposed to happen?

After one player spent a few nights playing the game solitaire (and having astaroth repeatedly destroy the world) and reading up on strategy, we tackled the game again, this time both knowing HOW to win and having a couple of fake player-characters who we used to farm items. More players does mean more monsters, but carefully choosing party skills to maximise getting all the cool loot early in the game meant that we could generally handle the monsters. This time, we won without too much trouble, and it took less than three hours.

I feel like we cheated, somehow. Other player says, "It's not cheating to go straight to where the items that make you win the game are and get the items that make you win the game, that's more appropriately called 'playing'."

ia! ia!

so, tonight we pulled out the shiny new Arkham Horror boardgame for the first time and tried to give it a go.

First, don't do this if you don't have at least four hours to kill. It's not like any of us were going anywhere, but I wasn't expecting a game to run as long as it did... I don't even KNOW how long we were playing, except that by the end of it I walked away from the table to get some food and some aspirin (headache) and refused to come back.

The game is MASSIVELY complicated. There are fifty zillion different pieces, some of which are completely unnecessary, all of which make it take ages just to set the game up. If you've never played a hardcore boardgame you seriously have no concept of how many pieces we're talking. This isn't Monopoly. I think there are over twenty different types of card deck to draw from, and hundreds of different tokens and doodads... The rules are tangled up enough that we were constantly discovering new things we were supposed to have done in the past and having to carefully walk through what order events occur in, over and over again. And most importantly, we had no idea how to actually win the game. That is, we had some vague concept of a few victory conditions but didn't have any idea how to achieve them. We spent HOURS at this game heading for our inexorable demise and made absolutely no progress towards winning. We were doing something that seemed reasonable, but actually wasn't.

Dying horribly until we all learned the strategies for success would be reasonable if the game didn't take so long. Also, the magic system doesn't really work for me... I would have been happier with more items that would definitely work but only work once, so that there would have been reasonable strategy in "Use it or save it?" instead of needing a degree in statistics:

If I roll 2d6 and at least one of them is 5 or 6 then I will be able to roll 5d6 and if at least two of them are 5 or 6 then I will survive. If I roll 2d6 and neither of them is 5 or 6 then I will have to roll 3d6 and if at least two of them are 5 or 6 then I will survive. What are my chances of surviving? I'm sure SOMEONE reading this journal can do that in their head easily. I look at it and just say "I'm doomed, aren't I?" Which, while it may be right, doesn't help when trying to weigh up multiple options and all of them equate in my mind to "... this is never going to work."

Anyway, now that we've read reviews and have some idea of what a successful strategy is, we'll try it again and maybe it will work better.