Strategy – Page 2 – Misery Farming

Misery Farm on the Road: Essen Spiel 2015 Day 2 First Reports

October 9, 2015October 10, 2015Briony1 Comment

Essen Spiel still pairs well with German beer. Who knew. We’ll keep you updated tomorrow.

A summary of Briony's first day. — A summary of Briony’s first day.

Following on from yesterday’s report this post will bring you some coverage of the games played on day two. Each of the Misery Farmer’s have been frankly all over the place today, and a wide range of games have been played, enjoyed and pondered. Briony however has had an excellent day full of fried potato spiral’s and mega-complex games that she is just itching to talk about.

The first game Briony played was actually Liguria on recommendation from Lizzy and others the day before. It turns out painstakingly painting your home city’s Cathedral by travelling from port to port, although seems boring, is actually great. She promptly bought the game and would like to assure all readers that it definitely more fun than it sounds.

Day 2, Game 1: Sheriff of Nottingham

In traditional Essen fashioned they played this game because.. well because it was the only table available in the nearby vicinity. Fortunately for the team the game turned out to be a rather fun game about deception and calling your fellow players out.

This is definitely what a medieval crack den would look like.

Each person plays a character based in medieval England, overseen by the gruesome Sheriff of Nottingham. A player is dealt a hand of cards which may be green legal goods (apples, chicken, bread, boring things), or red illegal cards (which are not as illegal as they seem. Apparently medieval England really disliked pepper and silk). Each turn a player will select a number of good to put in their ‘swag bag’ which they intend to travel with. The player must declare what is in the bag to the Sheriff, with the intent of getting as many cards through his checks as possible.

The sheriff decides based on your declaration whether he believes you or not, and may challenge to look in your bag. If you lied you can bribe him, but he may decide to take or ignore it. The aim of the game is to lie. Lie all the time, and then tell the truth to backfire on the Sheriff. If the sheriff is wrong about your lie, he must pay you in compensation, if you get away with it you rack up the monies.

The moral of the story is that Sina is terrible at identifying lies, and lost on the most spectacular hands (5 whole apples!).

Day 2, game 2: Andromeda

‘It’s sci-fi themed and it has a free table. We are going here.’

Andromeda, predictably, was strongly generically alien themed. This much was obvious from 50 meters away due to the life-sized plastic alien model, but fortunately for the game it played better than the stall get-up indicated. Each player owns a race of aliens and must explore an ancient abandoned spaceship found floating in the galaxy. The ship has several compartments which must be explored.

Who knew massive dice dependency could be a good thing.

The main mechanic is rolling a handful of dice with different tasks represented. Interestingly, re-rolls weren’t allowed, and the first player ‘made up’ selections of dice to offer the other players in turn. They could choose to accept them, or to pass them on. If the hand of dice was significantly bad and every player passed, the first player who made it automatically has to accept it. This made making particular hands an intriguing mechanic.

Day 2, game 3: Potion Explosion

So far, this game has been the busiest to approach. All of Essen want’s to play this, and their stock has more or less run out at the end of day two. Luckily two members of the Misery Farm cohort and partners have already bought this, and as Briony is currently writing this a game is being played in the background.

Potion explosion is basically a physical version of bejewelled, played with marbles. Each player has a potion with multiple colour requirements, and they have to select marbles of those colours from the centre magical trough. Once you fill the potion with the correct marbles you can use it’s effects i.e. take two specific marbles, steal another players stock etc. If, when you pull a colour out it causes two colours of the same colour to roll together (know as the ‘explosion’ part), you get to take those marbles too. The idea is to select a marble that gets you the most in your hand to create more potions.

Its fun, fast paced, and colour based. A perfect game to play between epic saga games or simply if you like marbles. Either or, really. The person with the most completed potion’s worth the most points wins.

Day 2, game 4: Burano

This is single handedly one of the most complex board games ever conceived. Team Briony and co. only played 1/4 of the game due to the waiting list being fully booked, and it still partly made their brains melt. The combination of mechanics and strategies are extensive, and are coupled with new mechanics that they had not encountered before such as the resource pyramid (where only certain resources are available at certain times).

The game is based on the island of Burano, in Venice. There is a city in the centre island that has coloured houses (in reality these are the most satisfying coloured cubes ever seen). You each play a family who must fish, make lace (as was the tradition at the time.. mainly for the ladies.. stupid history..), and build more houses on the island. Once enough houses are built players may build roofs to connect houses, making spaces above them to become available.

That’s right kids, it’s a 3D build em up worker placement game. It’s as rare and magical as unicorn to find a fully functioning, beautifully designed one of these, which most importantly actually works.

Despite the complexity the game is awesome. It’s definitely for the experienced gamer, and there is more or less no way to have a good first season due to the how much the player needs to know to kick things off. In fact it’s complex enough not to go into much detail about it, but fear not, Briony is probably going to sell all of her worldly goods to acquire this game and then write about it in the future.

7 Wonders: For when 6 wonders aren’t quite enough but 8 seems excessive.

August 23, 2015August 23, 2015Lizzles4 Comments

Brutus rating: 4/10 knives in the back
Pairs well with: A suitable drink to match your wonder (we recommend buying some of that classic terrible cheap liquor that all tourists buy as souvenirs while wandering around in a hot country. ‘But honey, it’s made with guava – that’s so traditional!’)

In Briony’s house, the copy of 7 Wonders was deemed too big to carry around with ease. To address this her angry spiky-haired boyfriend Pat spent a week engineering the perfect compact version, presented in a lovely Christmas gift box. The juxtaposition of the Colossus of Rhodes and the Christmas tree works beautifully. To give you some indication of exactly how much more compact it is, here is a fair trade banana for scale.

Onto the actual game?

Have you ever wanted to control your own Civilization? Order your serfs well paid labourers to build cool stuff that will ensure your name is never forgotten for as long as humanity walks the earth? Cry war when someone upsets you? Wait for your turn patiently while your fellow assholes can’t pick a single card in a three-hour time frame? Good. Although this may sound mightily like Civilization (of which a couple of board games actually do exist) it’s actually 7 Wonders. At least, this week it’s 7 wonders. Can’t speak for future weeks, it’s not like we have a schedule for these things.

7 Wonders was actually Briony’s ‘gateway drug’ to the board gaming world. She rocked up to a friend’s house one night expecting pizza, but instead got a lot of cards. At the time her friends explained the rules slowly, as if to a small confused child who couldn’t possibly understand the word ‘wonder’. They concluded ‘We’re all really good at the game because we play it a lot, so don’t worry about getting a low score. You’ll get better next time!’

Unfortunately for them Briony has accrued some 400 hours playing Civilization. She promptly wiped the floor with all of them, and has only been beaten once since. 7 Wonders has remained one of her favourite games to this day.

To begin, each player is assigned a great world wonder. One of seven, hence the name, but you probably figured that bit out (It’s not doing the “Five Tribes” trick where there aren’t actually five players and you don’t actually get to play the five tribes, confusingly.) Again, if you’ve played Civilization (the non-board-game version) you’ll already recognise the wonders; maybe you might even recognise them anyway. They differ both in starting resources and the benefits they offer. During the game you can, but are by no means obligated to, build parts of your wonder (they usually have 3 stages), and thus reap some tasty ancient treats.

The game works in three eras. Each player begins with a hand of cards. You look at the cards. You eye them up, rate them out of ten, or ask for their number – whichever is the most effective way of determining a good card for you. Once everybody has selected which card they would like to build, you pass your remaining hand of cards to the player clockwise. Everyone then simultaneously places their chosen card face up and everyone has a lovely time.

Simple. Now, do it again. In fact, keep doing this until you only have two cards left in your hand, then discard one and build the other. Now it the ending of the era, but it’s not particularly like the great works of writing and art suggest. It’s mainly about war, really. Each player has a mandatory fight with the player either side of them. Losing a war means losing points, winning war means winning points. Huzzah!

Well done everyone, we survived an era. Best keep going.

With the start of the second era a new deck of cards is brought out. These cards build on the resources you gathered in the previous era, and will either start racking up victory points or generating larger amounts of resources. The same mechanism as before happens (start with hand, play a card, pass it on, repeat), only this time you pass the cards anti-clockwise. Bet you didn’t see that one coming! Era ends, have some war, next era begins.

This mechanic where everyone picks cards at the same time means that the game is fairly simple, fast, and can sit up to seven players without significantly racking up the play time to the point where you want to claw your eyes out, or go to bed, or have a life, but you can’t because you started playing a nine-hour game. None of that in 7 Wonders. Even better, it manages to do this while still keeping a lot of delicious strategy and giving everyone some good time to think about what to do.

The third and final era is where it gets particularly interesting as all the big cards come out. This is the only era where purple, or ‘victory’, cards emerge, and they have the power to significantly enhance your score if used wisely. During this era it also becomes fairly apparent which major strategy a player has gone for. And by apparent we mean ‘huh, Pete the twinkly-eyed hippie has 739 blue cards. I guess he’s collecting blue’. This is partly where this week’s Brutus rating comes in- there game does still give you a bit of wriggle room for player interaction, mostly in choosing which card you want (and therefore which card you don’t want the player to the side of you to have). If Pete is collecting blue cards then this gives you at least some reason to nab all the ones he needs before he can lay his grubby little paws on them (disclaimer: Pete actually has hands and they aren’t that grubby. Sorry Pete).

It also earns an extra dagger because after each era you have to have a war with the players to your left and right either side, the poor buggers, and if you want those extra victory points you’re going to have to softly jab someone at least a little.

Unless you’re Rhodes, and then you fully jab everyone. Unapologetically.

Of course the problem with this, and with the fighting mechanic, is that you get a bit dicked over depending on where you decided to sit at the table. Lizzy may be a charming barrel of wit and great to sit next to sometimes (we said “may”) but this kind of game could result in everyone scrabbling to get away from her so they don’t have to put up with her meddling in their affairs for most of the game.

Like all things over the great expanse of the centuries, the game will eventually come to an end. Victory is tallied up and your Civilization scores points for various card-related and wonder-related things.

One thing we should mention is the trickiness with how to score science: no-one really knows. It is literally the only complex thing about the entire game. Usually there is some 7 Wonders veteran in the corner who is called upon to interpret and talk with the science cards, and then relays that information back to the rest of the group like some sort of lesser prophet. Fortunately for the rest of us mortals some genius made a thing that does it for you http://neilsutcliffe.com/7wonders/ If you can figure out how to make it work, the ‘science!’ strategy is a reliably high scorer, though easily ruined if your neighbours are paying attention to what you’re building.

The game is fast in general, which makes it perfect to play several times in one evening or to get new people into gaming. As was the case with Briony, it can make a pretty good gateway board game, as long as you take the time to explain each component and keep the card-choosing phase pretty quick. Bob actually hated (or thought she hated) this game for years, not having Briony’s Civ experience and finding game frustrating and exhausting as a board game noob. Turns out, she just had really dawdly friends who didn’t make the trading rules clear. In addition, make sure to stop and take in the art work on the cards, if that’s your cup of tea. They’re often beautifully painted scenes or buildings and they add a lot to the game design.

The real winner is history. But also Briony. She’s just really good at Seven Wonders, man.

This week the credit for the photos also goes to her. Good work, Bri!

Just assume that it says “Briony Wins”. Convenient blurring, Briony.

Kingdom Builder: (Queendom Builder?)

August 2, 2015August 2, 2015Lizzles2 Comments

Brutus Rating: 2/10 daggers in the back
Pairs well with: A different type of beer for each terrain you build on

Do you remember that thrill you first had, when you were young(er) and excitable and new to the world of board gaming, and you first discovered that the maps of some games are randomised at the start? Like ‘Woah, this randomised Catan map has all of the brick next to each other, how exciting! Oh and in this one all of the fields are lined up next to mountains, how sweet!’ And then there was Small World, where the lands are the same but the history is different and the races that try to populate it all have different randomized attributes. “Today we’re going to fight with FLYING skeletons? What madness is this?”

No? Just us? It takes us back to childhood memories of those ancient strategy computer games with randomised set-ups. Can we pretend that this fixation makes us endearing rather than sad and odd? Excellent.

Well, if by chance you ARE excited by that kind of thing, then Kingdom Builder is a game for you! There are several different boards to choose from and you select four at random at the start, each constituting a quarter of your future Kingdom. Even more excitingly, each different potential Kingdom-quarter comes with a different bonus action token, meaning the moves you’ll be able to make in the game will be different. EVEN MORE EXCITINGLY THAN THAT (is it even possible to be more excited?) the way to earn points and win the game is ALSO randomised at the start, through a decently-sized collection of cards.

The dark and blurry fishermen — The fishermen in our kingdom were particularly dark and blurry*

In Kingdom Builder you play a mighty kingdom-builder (OK, so it’s not the most roleplaying-heavy game in the world). The aforementioned randomised selection of cards (of which you get three!) determines what kind of people you’re building a kingdom for, thus also telling you what kind of things they’re looking for in a kingdom, thus also telling you how to get points (‘gold’) and some delicious, delicious victory.

If you’re building a town for miners then you’ll probably want some settlements near the mountains, which is where they tend to get their mining did. So a ‘miners’ card will (quite logically) get you one point per settlement next to a mountain.

At the time of writing and photographing we closed our eyes and picked fishermen, knights and merchants. A pretty pleasing group to live with, we all have high hopes for our future realms; got ourselves some food, some income and a solid line of defence. There have been worse fundaments for civilisations.

So the aim of our game will be to build our tiny little houses near water for our fishermen, connecting different settlements for our merchants and … all in a horizontal line, for the knights.

…

No, we don’t know why they asked for that. It doesn’t seem like it’d be easily defensible. Do they… do they want to do some jousting, and they want the longest possible run up, spanning the entire kingdom? That can’t be it, because they don’t mind if there are canyons in the way, or how broken up the horizontal line is. Do they just have weirder fixations than even the misery farmers? Who knows! Ideas and answers on a postcard, please.

Play for this game is fairly quick and fairly simple. There are some snazzy terrain rules which will determine where you can lay your houses, of which you’ll lay a base of three per turn, as well as a few kinds of bonus tokens which will let you take extra actions. These, again, are randomised thanks to the boards that you chose at the start. Many of them are kind of samey (Build more on grass! Yay! Build more on desert! Yay…) but there are one or two which can be pretty game-altering. The horses of this kingdom, for example, are so strong that an entire tiny wooden house can hitch a ride across a couple of hexagons and settle down elsewhere. Literally game-changing.

Speaking of those little wooden houses, we should spare a little spot of criticism for the production of some of them. A few of the roofs seem to have collapsed in. Knew we shouldn’t have trusted those bloody fishermen with building the kingdom for us!

The snazzy terrain rules are that you draw a card with a picture of a terrain on it, and that’s where you are destined to build this turn, for three of your settlements at least. It’s unclear why your kingdom is being restricted in this way. Are the people demanding it? It’s difficult to see why a kingdom of fishermen would demand that you build only on the desert for three bloody turns in a row. Besides, what power should they have over you? You’re building a kingdom for them! Go to hell, fishermen! Perhaps instead you only have the materials to build on a certain type of terrain? But then what extra materials would you possibly need to build on the grass that you wouldn’t need to build on the flowers? Ok, let’s just call it some weird superstitious reason and leave it at that. You’re a superstitious kingdom-builder. Done. Let’s not question it any further.

The game is all about making the best you can out of the randomised selection of things that the game throws at you. Mostly in the form of some very annoying terrain restrictions. It’s all randomised in a way that doesn’t seem to leave you too reliant on luck, at least not if you play it right. Sure, having to build your settlements in the sodding canyons for three turns in a row can dick you over a bit but there are measures you can take to avoid it ruining your kingdom too much. Oh you didn’t take those measures and now you’re stuck building in the corner? Well that’s just your own fault.

If you’re not careful you can really feel yourself just getting carried away. A turn itself seems so insignificant, “oh I’ll just waste this one turn building on this bit of desert but I’ll be fine next time”, but then after several turns you can look back and find yourself having just squeezed out a sad turd of a civilization and you’re out of control and maybe you’re not up for this kingdom ruling business after all! Aah! Woe!

This happened in the game we were just playing. Those of you already familiar with Kingdom Builder might look at the photos of the board and think “That can’t be the same game they were describing in the post! There are hardly any horizontal lines at all! If they had Knights they’d be doing terribly!” You’d be right. We were just doing really terribly. We’re rightly ashamed.

Aside from all that, Kingdom Builder is a pretty good game. It’s fairly simple and all of that randomisation we’ve been banging on about for most of this review equates to some pretty damn good replayability. Possibly our favourite game to come out of Essen 2013. Huzzah!

The photographer won again, but whatever. The real winners are the fishermen.

*Lizzy: Can we get some nice photos of some of the bits that make up the game this time? Please? For journalism?
Dr Photographer-Friend: No! Screw you! I’m going to spend most of this time taking photos of this apple and this weird dog toy you’ve been using as a door stop instead. Stop trying to strangle my artistic vision!

Still, credit goes to him again for our photos.

Terra Mystica: Terrain Stereotypica

June 28, 2015June 28, 2015Briony3 Comments

Brutus scale: 3/10
Pairs well with: A selection of ales representing terrain types. E.g. dark stout for Swamp, pale ale for Grasslands, red IPA for desert, etc.

Contents: Mystery, Dirt and Sulky Opponents.

Terra Mystica roughly translates to English as ‘mystical earth’. What’s so mystical about it you ask? Well, for one, the fact that the laws of geography and biology don’t exist is pretty thrilling. And by thrilling we mean no-one cares. It’s another terrain-based board game with different ecologies represented by different tile designs in the style of Small World or Kingdom Builder. Also similar to Small World is that you play as a race/civilisation. Your choices are scantily-clad female races (such as witches), brutish large men races (such as giants), and sneaky stereotyped races (like the dark and plotting alchemists). Many of the available races fall in between these categories, but one thing’s for sure: it will feel like your flippant choice of race has way too much impact on the game.

I am Woman, my breasts are barely covered.

Each race will have some varying starting resources, and will have a selection of different abilities that come into play throughout the game. This makes playing through as a particular race for the first time really fucking difficult, as three hours into a game you’ll spontaneously realise you should have built something in turn one, but didn’t. There is no way to save it. You’ll just have to suck it up and keep building single houses every turn until the game ends. You are a terrible leader of your people and they know it, and they resent you for it.

‘Sire, what shall we do to make our empire grander? More trade perhaps? Build a mighty cathedral maybe?’

‘No my poor peon, we shall build a small wooden house on a single tile. Forever.’

‘But sire, all of our people have houses, surely we should build something better –‘

‘- Houses! Forever!’

The mechanics of the game are mainly centred on job selection. This will provide you with some sort of resource, and/or an ability that you can tailor your turn to. Each race receives a board with around 5,097 wooden pieces on it, of which you play the wrongly-shaped piece often. In reality there are about 20 pieces, but still, that’s a lot of shapes under your control. Each of these pieces represents a different type of building, or worker, each with build costs that ramp up the better the building you want to construct. Once you’ve selected a job an action phase occurs. This is where the real meaning of the game title is revealed: your race can only settle on a particular type of terrain tile. In order for your city to expand you need to terraform different terrains into your own in order to build on top them. It’s like Civilization or Tigris and Euphrates only worse and a more frustrating drain on your resources.

Imagine you are a small band of settlers looking for the ideal place to begin your great dynasty. You’ve travelled all over the land to find the most fertile, most beautiful, most defensible place. But Gary decides that actually, maybe if we settled on some scorching, inhospitable lava plains, that might be better. Gary is pretty stubborn leader so we’ve had to go along with it. Typical fucking Gary.

Who knew there were so many different types of dirt. — You could have picked any of these, Gary.

The list of things you can do in your turn isn’t particularly well-structured either – you can more or less keep doing all of the things you want until you run out of resources (admittedly in some games this is a great thing, but you grow weary of the freedom rapidly). This makes competition with the other players minimal as no one can tactically end turns, or force extra resource spending. However one mechanic that is pretty good is ‘power’. Power is a physical resource in this game, which is purple and stored in some big dishes on your personal board. You can collect/receive it during turns or actions, which means that you transfer a little purple power pellet from one dish into the main dish. When you spend that power, you move the power pellet from the main dish to the beginning dish. In order to generate more power you have to move all of the purple pellets from the beginning dish to the main dish again in a little cycle. It’s a pretty neat cycle which requires forward planning, and allows unlimited but very tightly-constrained regeneration.

Unfortunately it’s only worth doing if you go heavily into a power farming strategy, or your race is particularly good at keeping power generated. For instance, Briony quite enjoys playing as the alchemists as their race ability, once the stronghold (a particularly important bit of wood) is built, generates a lot of power straight up. This means that you don’t have to compete for resources or jobs as you can mostly pay for everything with power, and you don’t have to keep putting a lot of effort into getting the power cycled around the dishes. She also enjoys this race as she’s spent almost every game playing as them, so she’s nailed the routine of what to do for the most effect. Then again she is the sort of person that can spend hours playing the first 100 turns of civilization over and over as one particular race to optimise strategy and timing. Bob simply cannot do this – she claims to enjoy fun.

As the game goes on your settlements begin to expand. Buildings are worth points, and once you’ve accrued enough your settlement becomes a city. This comes with a nice one-off bonus and also allows you to build a stronghold, unlocking a race ability. Along one side of the board there are a series of bonus tiles that offer a selection of lovely things e.g. extra victory points, some resources, a nice compliment about your hair. These are turned over once per round, and will state a requirement such as ‘Gain a buttload of power if you build five perfectly-domed city halls out of lava this turn’. This allows you to plan out your buildings to occur in rounds where you can get the most victory points from them. You can also imagine a giant stroking the bonus card seductively, clad in a leotard and heels for maximum gameshow effect. Whatever floats your boat.

In addition to this there is also an elemental temple track. In this there are four tracks representing each element. In order to go up in these tracks you must have a priest meeple (which can be gained by building certain buildings) or fulfill a job has that rewards you with that resource for free. Priests are sacrifically burned in the ‘totally-not a cult we promise, guys’ temple to push you up the track and also correspond to the bonus round tiles. For instance ‘if you are at least at level 4 in the Earth track gain a free visit from the Emperors of Xenu’*. We’re not particularly sure why this mechanic exists really. It’s adding an extra component to a game that already has a shit tonne of components, and to use would really take a lot of investment. Bob tried it once and even with a very cult-loving race it wasn’t really so much ‘viable’ as ‘fucking irritating’. We also aren’t really sure why they represent the elements… possibly because the earth is made from the basic four elements? Who knows, all we know is that that is bad science and the expansion will probably have a Helium and a Potassium track.

Once the game ends you get some final victory points that add to the ones generated throughout by your buildings or bonus’s. Points are awarded for the biggest city, how far up each track a player is, and some other excuses to have some points. It’s actually quite a nice way to end because it changes the scoring up, makes you feel good for getting more, and that you did better than you had originally thought. Overall the game has some really good mechanics – its downfall is that it has too many of them. This makes picking an effective strategy difficult and requiring a lot of experience with each race. We can’t help but feel that is doesn’t need quite that much stuff. There is a lot of it. Pieces, tiles, bonuses, tracks, races, resources, power, jobs, workers, buildings, giants in leotards – like the contents of a student’s bedroom floor (Nerds have ‘interesting’ university experiences).

Exhibit A - 'stuff'. — Exhibit A – ‘stuff’.

That being said, the two player version of the game is surprisingly good as a lot of the extra guffin is taken out. As a result of fewer players, the game progresses much faster, and you tend to get a grip on your race more quickly. Certainly playing it two player a few times would be the ideal way to understand the game, technique, and races before diving into a monster 6 person epic. Don’t be too put off from playing this game kids, there are a lot of positive reviews of itout there. We just feel like it was so close to being a truly classically epic game, but it got a bit too ahead of itself. Less is more, Terra Mystica, you don’t have to keep putting on extra frilly bits to please your target audience.

*We respectfully request that the Church of Scientology, hallowed be your celebrities, please not sue us for these jokes. We haven’t got any money for you.

Twilight Imperium: Friendly Space Race

May 10, 2015May 10, 2015Bob Rimington4 Comments

By Bob and Lizzy

Brutus rating: 9 zingy lightsabers in the back out of 10
Pairs Well With: Slurm! Romulan Ale! Anything pumped with sugar and caffeine

Look at this magnificent shit. You know you’re in for some intense game-time when the box art is this expensive and epic.

The story of the Misery Farm and Twilight Imperium begins with Bob and Christmas. Bob spends every Christmas with her family and a number of close family friends (as South Africans the lot of them are constitutionally incapable of negotiating ‘small, quiet’ events). There’s lots of food, wine, dogs, excited children and merriment.

It’s hell.

Initial plans were to go from family home to Reading for new year’s eve with the friendly robot boyfriend (FRB) before looping back round to the blessed isolation and wonderful silence of home in Southampton. Then the kids got an honest-to-god noisemaker as a Christmas present. The electronic kind, which plays loud, tinny jingles and farty sounds at the push of a button. Far from being a form of passive-aggressive punishment inflicted by child-free friends on their parents it turned out that their mum (!) had actually bought this thing (!!) herself (!!!) as a gift for her own kids (!!!!).

Naturally, Bob wanted to leave as soon as humanly possible. Unfortunately there wouldn’t be room for her at the FRB’s house until the late in December, and he had planned an all-day Twilight Imperium 3 game on that day. But there would be a constant supply of tea and biscuits if she was interested. Sold!

She had no idea what she had gotten herself into.

First port of call if you need a game overview is of course the blog Shut Up and Sit Down. If you are living under a rock and are somehow reading this without having heard of them, then know that they are nice young men who combine informative game reviews with a quirky and funny presentation style (so pretty much the opposite of us). Their review of the game as fun, complicated but not arduous, and epic in both scale and style was encouraging, and Bob proceeded to download the rules with a view to getting a rough idea of the components, win conditions, and what a turn generally looks like (the holy trinity of basic game understanding).

Here she hit a snag. Having only recently become the kind of special, habitual nerd who can visualise a game to any sort of degree just from reading the rules, these presented something of a challenge. It wasn’t the length of the rules which intimidated her, nor their complexity, poor structure, or incredible, gasping dryness. It was more that better things to do than reading them seemed to repeatedly crop up. Taking a nap, for example. Eating all the Christmas jelly beans. Re-watching Star Trek, Frozen, and the Muppets Christmas Carol (with all the scary bits fast-forwarded so the kids wouldn’t have to hide behind the sofa). If she weren’t under strict instructions from supervisors to Chill the Fuck Out and Take a Holiday then some work might even possibly have gotten done. Maybe.

This wasn’t entirely unfair, in hindsight. TwImp heralds from an era of Fantasy Flight games (i.e. their entire history) when writing down the rules was considered an unfortunately necessary afterthought to game creation. The amount of text in the FAQs on their website exceeds that of the written rules by a factor of about fifty, and even the super handy-dandy cheat sheet on board game geek (second port of call for the game explorer) is twelve pages of tightly-packed and colour-coded terror. Bob refused to be deterred though, forging bravely ahead. It was either this or another day of confiscating her mum’s 11am gin and being forced to watch a ten-year old play Pokemon Platinum* on their shiny new 3DS**. To some long-term gaming buddies this mission to Read the Damn Rules seemed one step away in terms of desperate foolishness from considering a career in crippling heroin addiction. Eventually even Bob had to admit defeat at page 14, and instead downloaded the TI3 app***.

Game day rolled round with an inauspicious start. Bob arrived late and without all the necessary supplies of crisps, cigarettes and sugary beverages that would make a ten-hour game bearable. Luckily the FRB has excellent friends. Ones complete with mandatory nerdy graphic Tshirts and an exquisite layout of appropriate snacks including Gagh (gummy worms), Slurm (Mountain Dew), and a handy supply of delicious codeine and Marlborough Reds to alleviate the crampy terror brought on by driving. FRB did his part by making Bob two whole cups of tea without complaining more than 6 times.

Delicious caffeinated sugar water. — Delicious caffeinated sugar-water.

And it only took an hour to set up the game and go over the rules. Briefly: a central planet (Mechatol Rex), the seat of political power in the galaxy now mired in civil war and petty bureaucratic struggles. It is surrounded by planet and space hexes, which generate resources if you invade take them under your wing. You play as a race fighting for dominance according to certain objectives. First to ten victory points wins. You can usually get a point per turn, and a turn takes an hour. No joke.

Okay, so this game. This game, guys. It’s insane. No one playing it for the first time can
possibly have any idea what the hell is going on. Going over every single rule would be exhausting, and remembering them all on the first try is impossible. It’s entirely plausible that everyone was cheating the entire way through but the fact that we were playing with two extra expansions (and therefore a whole bunch of new and expanded rules) meant that no one noticed or really knew what was going on themselves.

Luckily it’s definitely the kind of game that can be played without a fully-fleshed strategy as long as you have a rough overview of what you might want to do on a turn, and there’s someone around the table willing and able to walk you through the fine points. Some things, like spending resources, invading planets, and building technologies and spaceships are very knowledge-dependent, unfortunately, and messing them up can really ruin your turn. Mercifully the sheer size and duration of the game makes it weirdly forgiving until the very last few rounds.

Some parts are refreshingly simple, such as the straightforward dice-rolling ‘pew pew’ of combat. On the other hand some elements, like playing a political action card in order to pass a law in the galactic senate, are almost like bizarre meta/minigames in themselves, as you try to bribe each other for votes while assassinating other players’ delegates. Sometimes, if another player is particularly annoying you with their piractical trading methods or pointed demilitarisation of strategic planets, you can even assassinate them twice*****.

Romulan ale, for when your girlfriend has passed a motion to have you executed by the senate. Again.

The potential for greatness is there (and beginners can do just as well as experienced players with a bit of strategic placement and luck), but it is absolutely exhausting on your first time round. After having your ass solidly kicked across the galaxy by the Winnarian traders you might even swear off it entirely.

But then find yourself thinking, at odd moments, how you could improve your strategy to finally conquer Mechatol Rex and really show those damn space-lions who’s boss.

As you play and get comfortable with the rules (which can take several long, long games) it all starts seriously picking up in terms of mad, bonkers, shooty fun. Despite its enormity the strategic elements are reasonably flexible. Alliances are made and broken based on objectives and the layout of the planet hexes (ah, that nebula of hugs sure looks protective. Wait, guys, why are you launching that dreadnought? Guys…?). You learn the particular skills and weaknesses of your race and start to posture with great big spiny hedgehog death stars war suns.

This. This is what posturing looks like.

See that weird little fish-looking guy in the background? Flagship. 'Pointing the wrong way' apparently. — See that weird little fish-looking guy in the background? Flagship. ‘Pointing the wrong way’ apparently.

Bob’s first race comprised spooky space ghosts who love wormholes and for some reason have a super-90s-wildstyle-graffiti-looking symbol/crest thing. They have the unique ability to build an enormous flagship which then acts as a wormhole itself, allowing fleets of warships to pop up all over the map (entertaining but not recommended for beginners). Incidentally the flagship looks an awful lot like a fish with antennae bits all over it. Bob assumed this was to streamline it so that it might effectively fly through the massive friction and air resistance of outer space, but it turned out that she did in fact have the ship flying backwards. Other races include incredibly combative swarms of cockroaches led by a shadowy matriarchy (who for some reason no-one trusts. Damn speciesists), clouds of fungal spores, lion-people with civilisations built on the backs of elephants slowly traversing their desert home-planets, cyborg remnants of the once-ruling race spreading their mindnet low-cost broadband internet through the galaxy.

All that remains of the galaxy after a number of mad alien races have tussled over it.

This game is fun, and mad, but very very long. Set aside a full day for it, and don’t play it without an experienced player to guide you through.

*Sidenote: Pokemon game names are really dumb and not-intuitively chronological. Dem crazy Japans amiright?

**Sidenote 2: This kid wouldn’t let Bob take a turn and had the bloody cheek to tell her that an Umbreon was a kind of Pokemon in a tone of voice usually saved for the hopelessly elderly and out-of-touch. Since being informed that we had in fact had Pokemon when we were kids it’s been non-stop Poketrivia quizzing of seemingly every Pokemon except the original 152. She calls them the Pokemon from ‘back in your day’.

*** More useful than the 12-page cheat sheet**** by a factor of about 300. It helps you keep track of what technology you’re building and are able to build, and keeps an eye on your various battle stats.

**** This is a ridiculous fucking thing anyway. It expects you to print out the pdf on legal paper and then fold and staple it into a booklet. What is this, 1963? It has the potential to be amazing but only if it were turned into a beautiful, easily-navigated hypertext doc. With a fucking contents page and some kind of fucking recognisable structure. One day. In the future.

*****Sorry Chris. That’s what you get for not letting me invade Mechatol Rex.

Photos courtesy of Nick Lanng and Chris MacLennan

Quantum: Space Dice!

March 8, 2015March 9, 2015Bob Rimington2 Comments

By Lizzy, Bob, and Briony

Number of dicks in ear: 6/10. Dick size will grow in inverse proportion to the size of the map.
Pairs well with: cheap vodka. (It’s what people drink in space.)

Lizzy loves a game where you know who you are. Where you really know what your motivations are and why you’re collecting <Generic Resource!>. Quantum is a game about space, and it does this quite well. It has a space background. You play as a kind of space conquistador, colonising the stars using cubes. Cubes are very important in Quantum, because cubes mean victory and the ownership benevolent leadership of galaxies.

“Which galaxies?” you cry!
Whichever galaxies you like!

Quantum3 — ‘Which map shall we use?’ ‘The one that looks like a swastika!’ ‘That is absolutely not what a swastika looks like, Bob’

The layout of the map is quite variable; there are several possible galaxies to choose from for each player number, and each has its own name. You can fight over the Outer Reaches, the Barren Empire, Terra Major, Terra Minor.

Even the planets themselves each have a name. Tau 18, Ursus Major 2, you get the idea. They even have lore and geography, if that’s your bag. It’s all very good sci-fi. Points for sci-fi.

Quantum4 — Here’s Bob posing for a photo and pretending to attack her own ships. That’s not how the game works. Silly Bob.

For further points, each of your dice are your loyal spaceships and the number on the die represents the kind of ship it is. Even better, there’s some kind of story to the mechanics behind each number! A lower number is a lot slower but better at combat because it’s a bigger ship. A 1-die, for example, is a battlestation, which is the best at fighting but can only move 1 square at a time. A 6-die is a scout, they can zip around like crazy but aren’t too hot behind the weapons. At this point in the game your in-house Bob or Bob-substitute can demonstrate agility by throwing dice around going ‘pew pew’. It’s helpful or something.

As well as the changing planetary layout, gameplay is also affected by cards, which affect the kind of play which your space-conquering race can undertake. After invading landing on a planet you can, as they say in the trade, ‘do a research’ and so learn to do fun stuff like shoot more effectively and fly across the entire galaxy to thrust your dick in your team-mate’s ear.

If you are the kind of person who hates dice combat you might hate this game. But even our friend ‘Dr Hates-Dice’ loves this game! And he hates dice, or any attempt at putting randomness in a game. Briony, of course, is sadly unable to roll dice or dice-shaped objects and so found this game something of a challenge. She also hates dice.

In the words of Lizzy it is a game of learning and fun, if you understand how basic maths works. Bob, for her part, is unable to count, making the ‘fun if you know how maths works’ description more of a threat than an incentive. She has, however, played games with Lizzy before and understands that when our dear Liz looks particularly gleeful after rolling a die and buying a research card that no one is safe and… oh god oh god we’re all going to die… why is no one stopping Lizzy… we all know what happens when we don’t stop Lizzy and… oh yep she’s won. And she has the cheek to ask why we don’t trust her in board games.

6D-31- 374 — We’re all gonna die when she gets that face on.

Nonetheless, this game doesn’t rub your face in your failure like a misbehaving puppy. If you do badly it’s because you’re bad at very basic counting, strategy, and rolling dice. This is in comparison with games like Terra Mystica where you feel like a failure from round 2 because you haven’t picked up on the very specific and delicate strategy required of your race. Quantum is particularly enjoyable if you bear your position as commander of the fleet in mind when communicating with the enemy. “The OrionRepublic welcomes the puny Kepler Imperium to our planet!” “The Orion Republic denies all knowledge of the weapons fire around Minim 2586. You must have been watching a training exercise.” Also humming ‘Duel of the Fates’ (literally the only good thing in ‘The Phantom Menace’) and the Star Trek theme tune are recommended during manoeuvring and battle.

6D-31- 393 — A lonely spaceship contemplates its fate at the edge of the galaxy.

All in all this is a pretty fun game. It’s still Lizzy’s favourite thing to have come out of Essen 2013, well over a year on. Good luck on your colonisation, loyal Space-Dice. May the solar wind be always at your back.

Bob does not take particularly well to losing. Shame it happens so often.

Image and photography credit to Dr. Photographer.

Cthulhu Wars: Indescribably Tentacular

March 2, 2015March 3, 2015Bob Rimington1 Comment

A Review by Bob, Lizzy

Number of dicks in ear: 8 inter-dimensional, squamous dicks/10.
Pairs well with: German beer, anti-psychotic medication.

Cthulhu1

You may notice that this game review is lacking in high quality Cthulhu Wars photos. That’s because none of us are insanely rich enough to own this game, so we’re relying on Lizzy’s camera from our time at Essen 2014. She hadn’t even realised that the lens was dusty at this point. Sheesh. Some photos have also been professionally recreated in a studio environment. See if you can tell the difference.

(Not actual game footage. Actors were used to recreate gameplay. Crocheted Cthulhu sold separately. Terms and conditions apply.)

Fun fact: If it weren’t for Sandy Petersen’s Call of Cthulhu role-playing game we wouldn’t be here today. I don’t mean that in an existential sense, just that this blog wouldn’t be here today.

Back in the mists of time of 2011 our friend Emma brought me, Lizzy, and a select few others together to roleplay some eldritch misery, unwittingly creating a gang of powerful lady-nerds.*

It was my first RP experience and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I've got some army guys and some robots. That's pretty sci-fi right guys? — I’ve got some army guys and some robots. That’s pretty sci-fi right?

Now I don’t have much interest in games beyond playing them. I’ve very little idea of which companies make good games and I’m regularly surprised when a game seemingly tailored to my interests appeared (looking at you, A Study in Emerald) so I had no idea that the cool-sounding Cthulhu game being exhibited at Essen 2014 was by the same guy who wrote the original role-play adventure. I wish I could say that the only time I embarrassed myself was when Petersen himself had to explain to me that he did not just jump on the Lovecraft bandwagon, but did to some extent start it. Unfortunately I also proceeded to get ridiculously excited and fan-girlish about the whole thing (to the extent that his wife told me to calm down), and to address him as ‘Sandy’ (to which he did not respond until I sheepishly reverted to ‘Mr. Petersen’).

In my defence it was a very exciting experience, especially when combined with the chocolate-

Cthulhu card game figurine v. blind bag Pony

covered-chocolate-ice-cream stall just around the corner. Petersen was there like a proud, balding Mormon Santa Claus showing off his game, and one of his sons (or possibly grandsons) had the dubious honour of patiently teaching the game to a parade of smelly nerd troupes** (I think we smelled lovely) in a course of fully-booked two hour slots over the four days of convention. By the power of sheer exuberance I even got to beta-test Petersen’s next game, Gods War, which was still in the sharpie-on-cardboard stage of development. Stay tuned for an extra sneak-peek review of that game at the end of this broadcast.

The game itself is impressive in scale, and bonkers in execution. It was funded through a Kickstarter campaign, and thanks to that can afford to take a stance of ‘Look mate, you’re either in this entirely, or you’re out.’ I can imagine the kind of board games nerds who get off on the fiddly tactile bits of games getting feverish over this baby. There is a $199 price tag for just the core game (expansions are $59 each), with no option for a less-expensive less-artisanal version. It includes 64 incredibly detailed miniatures of Old Gods, monsters, and cultists. If you look closely you can see everything from the relief outline of the death-masks on the tiny cultists’ faces, to the cleft in the King in Yellow’s butt. Even the marker by which you tally your power is a tiny, adorable tentacle. It must be said, though, that there is something a little bit odd about

monsters which are defined as being unknowable, unnameable, indescribable horrors (H.P. Lovecraft was terrible at detail) being cast in plastic to play with. Takes away some of the awe. We didn’t actually say this to Petersen though, as the whole thing was so clearly his beloved baby and I already felt silly.

The game takes place on a board illustrated with an approximate map of the world. This has lead some of our more soft-headed moon-faced friends to think that the game has completely left the realm of Lovecraftian epic fantasy and entered into Risk-style grognard territory. Now

I’m not going to lie, there are dice. A lot of dice. So many dice that you sometimes need two hands to cast them all as part of a mighty god-against-god battle (it’s awesome). And yes, there is strategy involved. But the game isn’t a simple struggle for physical space. Instead, it’s all about power. There are a number of ways to gain power (and yes, taking up more space is one of them), and gaining power will earn you more super-special doom points, by which you may win the game. The faction you play (Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Hastur/The King in Yellow) massively affects how you can most effectively gain and wield power, and is further specialised through your faction-unique spellbooks.

Tyrannids! They're monsters! They'll do! — Tyrannids! They’re monsters! They’ll do!

This is both great as it really absorbs you in the fantasy of the game, but also leads to the big, huge, massive, gaping flaw in the game. Namely, if you do not effectively figure out at least a starting strategy which integrates with your faction’s play style pretty fucking swiftly, then you are utterly screwed within the first two rounds of the game. The rules of the game and structure of a turn are hardly straightforward either, so you might need those two rounds to get a grip on what’s going on. This is something I usually hate in games (Terra Mystica! Why!?), and it does completely unbalance it. In our game, and in friends’, you end up with two players massively in the lead duking it out to be the first to flop their enormous eldritch cock across the board, and two players struggling to get out of their starting zones.

In fact we played this game with Emma (of previously-mentioned Cthulhu GM-ing glory) and she never stood a chance. We were merciless, and with good reason.

Way back when, during our time as Cthulhu role-players we were very attached to our characters: Smokey Peterson the jazz musician, Old (insane, phenomenally rich) Trewilliger, Prudence and her gin, coquettish Mabel and… Jeff. Oh, Jeff. The only real good guy in the team. He loved corn, kindness and photography. Jeff!

One day something happened to Jeff that we don’t like to talk about. It had wings.

Then, in Essen 2014, just as Cthulhu Wars was starting, Emma picked up one of her pieces and said “Hey… this is the one that took Jeff!”

And hell did Bob and I avenge our comrade. This also, unfortunately, proved that if one or two people want to gang up on you in the game then there’s not a lot you can do about it. Definitely a whole bouquet of dicks in ear.

Nonetheless, this game is shamelessly fun. It’s complex but not impossible, with lots of juicy details to get stuck into/drive you into hellish pits of insanity. The rule book comes with hints and tips toward getting the most out of your Elder God which apparently really helps to solve the balancing problem if you haven’t got a member of the Petersen family handy to keep you on track. Of course this is a moot point because I can’t afford it and this makes me sad.

PS: Lizzy won.

Extra bonus game review: Petersen’s new epic-style game Gods War!

… It’s the same fucking game.

*This was before she abandoned us to get married and live in the frozen north. Now she makes adorable nerdy crochet guys at justaddcrochet.co.uk

** Don’t get butt-hurt, we were smelly. It was hot in that convention hall, and full of fried foods and bodies.

Tell your friends:

Tell your friends:

Tell your friends:

Brutus scale: 3/10 Pairs well with: A selection of ales representing terrain types. E.g. dark stout for Swamp, pale ale for Grasslands, red IPA for desert, etc.

Tell your friends:

Brutus rating: 9 zingy lightsabers in the back out of 10 Pairs Well With: Slurm! Romulan Ale! Anything pumped with sugar and caffeine

Tell your friends:

Number of dicks in ear: 6/10. Dick size will grow in inverse proportion to the size of the map. Pairs well with: cheap vodka. (It’s what people drink in space.)

Tell your friends:

Number of dicks in ear: 8 inter-dimensional, squamous dicks/10. Pairs well with: German beer, anti-psychotic medication.

Extra bonus game review: Petersen’s new epic-style game Gods War!

Tell your friends:

Brutus scale: 3/10
Pairs well with: A selection of ales representing terrain types. E.g. dark stout for Swamp, pale ale for Grasslands, red IPA for desert, etc.

Brutus rating: 9 zingy lightsabers in the back out of 10
Pairs Well With: Slurm! Romulan Ale! Anything pumped with sugar and caffeine

Number of dicks in ear: 6/10. Dick size will grow in inverse proportion to the size of the map.
Pairs well with: cheap vodka. (It’s what people drink in space.)

Number of dicks in ear: 8 inter-dimensional, squamous dicks/10.
Pairs well with: German beer, anti-psychotic medication.