board game review

Shinobi WAT-AAH!: Everything changed when the fish nation attacked

Bob Rimington6 Comments 
By Bob, Lizzy, Briony

Dicks in ear: 7/10
Pairs well with: Sake, meditation, wisdom. All three at once, no cheating.

Note before playing: Everyone always asks if yelling WAT-AAH is part of the game, and, if so, when you shout it. While the parameters for shouting WAT-AAH do not appear in the rules, it is said the shouty samurai spirit has been inside you all along, and all that is needed is for you to free it when you feel the call. We enjoyed a house rule of shouting WAT-AAH whenever you put cards down. Or pick up cards. Or look at someone funny.

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This is a game about ninjas with magic powers. And that’s pretty cool, but much more cool is the fact that this game might even have magical powers of its own. We’re pretty sure it’s impossible not to enjoy playing it. Genuinely, we’ve not found a single person who disliked it, and we know people who dislike everything.

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Check out this little guy. Is he an upside-down dude in a hat? Or two tiny men in a plane cockpit?

It’s another Essen find, and a very fortuitous one at that. Essen is a wonderful and exciting four days of board games but it is, nonetheless, four very long days of board games. By Saturday Bob was flagging. She hadn’t slept well in her overheated German hotel room and had more or less twisted her gastrointestinal tract into origami with German ham hock stew and pilsner (from this and the Sanssouci post you might have guessed that she has something of a complicated relationship with Germany. You would be correct). Running through pouring rain to catch our tram to the convention centre did not improve the mood and by the time we Shinobi6arrived, damp and itchy-eyed with tiredness, Chris (friendly robot boyfriend) was detecting all the signs of a classic Bob-style rage-quit (pouting, tearfulness, The Grumps). Worse; we had arrived early in order to be first in line to play Hyperborea and hadn’t even managed to secure first play spot.  Nor, despite a mad dash, did we make it to Tragedy Looper before its first clientele of the day had casually picked up the instruction booklet and started reading (the boardgame convention equivalent of yelling ‘dibs!’).

Chris later confessed that when we spotted an available table with Shinobi WAT-AAH! laidshinobi 11 edit out on it that he was more or less praying that it would be good, or a full-scale tantrum was going to occur. Bob of course informed him that she is an adult woman and she does not throw tantrums,* to which we all obviously agree, but conceded that the appearance of the Shinobi table was still pretty well-timed.

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Explaining rules is the most fun Bob can have with her clothes on.

Mechanically it’s a fairly straightforward deck-building card game in which you’re a royal lord (or lady) trying to unite clans of epic fighting ninjas in order to trigger their epic ninja fighting skills so that you may defeat the final demon boss (WAT-AAH!) and place your royal rear upon the Imperial throne. The epic ninja fighting skills fuel conflict in the game as you fuck with other players’ cards, peek through the Jigoku (the discard pile – literally translates as ‘hell’), or copy other clans’ powers. We give it a rating of 7 dicks-in-ear for the irresistible opportunities to knobble each other with these powers. Although some of the clans’ powers are more friendly (pick up some cards, look at some cards, etc) you’ll almost certainly find yourself plotting some nasty moves and stealing an entire hand of cards from someone you sometimes consider to be a friend.

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Clans!

There are two modes to play in: Grasshopper and Grand Master. In Grasshopper mode you simply play turns until someone has laid four fully-formed clans (WAT-AAH!) on the table. You then tally up the scoring value of each clan on the table and the player with the highest number wins (not necessarily the person who ended the game). Grand Master mode begins the same but after the tally you retain the cards still in your hand (fully-formed clans already on the table get discarded) and receive a number of The Shuriken of Winning depending on your place in the running. You can spend your Shuriken of Winning on cards which will give you bonuses (WAT-AAH!) in the next round, or toward battling the final boss (which could be zombies or creepy old lady-demons or whatever).

You do this for three rounds and then the final showdown happens. The showdown is6D-31- 458 much more anti-climactic than it sounds, as it’s really just a scoring of a the number of shuriken you’ve already put toward fighting the final boss against the (hidden, mysterious) number that they want in order to give you the best possible number of points. There is no epic battle between ninjas and demons, sadly, but interestingly more Shuriken of Winning doesn’t always translate into more winning points.

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Beautiful art

It’s hardly the most complex or rich game in the world, but it is unashamedly fun. It’s the feudal Japanese card game equivalent of a pew-pew video game. Dicks fly everywhere and the art is about as fantastic as you’d expect from the guy who also did Seasons and that most scenic of games, Tokaido. It has a cartoonish feel that is both beautifully detailed and very bold and clean. This perfectly reflects the style of the game – simple, fun, yet with captivating little details. For example the wild cards which can be used to simply make up numbers in a clan are called Ronin – a feudal Japanese term for a samurai without a master or lord. Similarly, the powerful single cards which can be played as one-off additions to a clan are called Yokai –6D-31- 462 spirits or supernatural beings present in Japanese folklore. This is exciting if you’re incredibly nerdy and contributes to the immensely satisfying feeling of a well-balanced, well-designed game that just works.  The cards are also taller than you’d expect, which is aesthetically very pleasing. It’s a neat touch.

Price-wise it’s a bargain. For some reason it seems that the more board games cost the more polarising and more rarely-played they become. Everyone will play a round of Coloretto or Hanabi but you actively have to search out friends interested in a game that costs hundreds and takes 6 hours. Twenty quid might not get you meeples of every colour and shape or a giant, detailed board but it will get you a game where even friends whose opinion of pretty much everything is that it’s ‘bullshit’, will sit up halfway through a round and mention how much fun it is.

Lizzy won again. But the real winner is board games.

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The winner is always board games. And Lizzy.

* She does kind of throw tantrums a little bit. But only when she’s really tired. Or hungry.** Or drunk.

** Before Essen she gave Lizzy a bag of Cadbury’s éclairs, with strict instructions to feed them to her if (when) she got cranky. It was a good strategy.

Image credit and thanks to Dr Photographer

Quantum: Space Dice!

Bob 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.)

6D-31- 365 Quantum1 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!

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‘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.

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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.

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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.

Tons o'dice
Tons o’dice
Space Cards
Space Cards.

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.

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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.

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

Image and photography credit to Dr. Photographer.

Sanssouci: Aristocratic Meeples and Fancy Gardens

Bob Rimington1 Comment 
By Bob and Lizzy

Dicks in ears: 2/10
Pairs well with: Tiny glasses of sherry or gin, fine wines, BBC radio 3’s evening concert.

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 Here’s a weird little story for you. For a year I lived in Germany, in a hideous Soviet-style concrete block on the edge of a beautiful eighteenth-century baroque palace and gardens. Built as a summer house in the style of the palace of Versailles by Frederick the Great, the villa is a sprawling arrangement of Roman baths, fountains, and glorified sheds covered in filigree. As a further nod to the Frenchness that was sadly popular at the time, the palace’s name, Sanssouci, translates as ‘no worries’.

6D-31- 247Depressed, bored, and fat from a diet consisting predominantly of German pastries, I spent a lot of time strolling around the gardens so I’ll give you a run-down of the highlights. Firstly, the Chinese House. It’s a little bandstand thing covered in statues of the most Western-looking Chinese people you’ve ever seen in your life. Pretty much second only to the Brighton Pavilion in terms of shameless, state-preserved Orientalism. Secondly, Frederick the Great’s grave (and the surrounding graves, which belong to his dogs). Germans absolutely love Freddy, he’s the dude who introduced the exotic potato to the Mutterland (which for Germans is a Big Deal). Initially the locals ate the plant instead of the root and subsequently6D-31- 241 died, but they soon got over that little hiccup and came to develop the delicate stodge-based Prussian cuisine we all enjoy today. They leave potatoes on Fred’s grave instead of flowers. Finally, the mosquitoes. Now I am a fairly well-travelled lady, hell I grew up in Africa; the sight of inch-long blood-engorged mozzies will barely raise an eyebrow. But these things. These fucking things. See, Frederick the Great, in a hilarious Pythonesque twist of history, built his bloody palace on a bloody swamp. The local mosquitoes are tiny and utterly vicious, to the extent that I could barely walk after one particularly ill-advised spring day spent wearing a skirt in the park,* and spent many a summer evening McGuyvering flame throwers out of aerosol deodorants.

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ANYWAY, to make a short story unnecessarily long, the moment I saw a game called Sanssouci in a discount pile at this year’s Essen it precipitated such a flood of nostalgia that I knew I had to have it. The blurb, entirely in German and describing a garden-building tile-placement game, did not put me off. Would I like to compete to create beautiful flower beds, scented herbaceous borders, and cooling fountains for aristocrats to enjoy? Hell fucking yeah I would.

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The instructions were also in German, and it became a point of pride for me to be able to understand and play the game without looking up the translation. As a result the first game, played some time later with Lizzy over tiny 6D-31- 243aristocratic glasses of  sherry (naturally), was a little… bumpy. We muddled through fairly successfully in the end, thanks to the game’s copiousillustrated rules examples, and Lizzy’s understanding of how a game should work. (“Bob! Do you think maybe the different sets of coloured cards might be for different players? Wouldn’t that be a neat idea Bob?”) Later, I looked up an English translation and you’ll all be pleased to know I got it mostly almost right. Undergraduate degree totally not wasted.

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Ugh. The rabble.

The game is Tokaido-esque in its chilled-outness, if not nearly as pretty. It does have adorable aristocratic meeples with tiny aristocratic meeple hats, which is a point in its favour, and it’s almost as simple as Tokaido. Each player has an empty garden grid in front of them, and in a turn will play a card and pick a tile to place in their garden. One of their noble meeples may then go for a lovely little walk around the garden to score points. Gardens gain points for their size (longer walks for the aristocrats) as well as their layout (you have a full set of pavilions? Spectacular). If you are unable to play a garden feature tile you may play a gardener tile. These do not contribute to your garden, but may bridge two garden tiles. This means that an aristocrat can walk across a gardener tile to reach the inviting vineyard tile that lies beyond. One cannot stay on a gardener tile because, let’s face it, the land workers are plebs and not to be associated with.

We’ve decided to give the game a two-dicks-in-ear rating because you need to pick up your 6D-31- 221gardening tiles from a communal tile-pool. Particularly savvy estate-managers can get a feel for what others are trying to collect and nab the exact water-fountain they need right before they get the chance. Of course, it’s far more likely that most dickery will be accidental and you will unwittingly and unjustly incur Bob’s wrath for the rest of the game anyway, through no fault of your own. I just wanted to extend my vineyard, is that too much to ask?

This game has some good roleplaying potential, particularly to the extent that you enjoy6D-31- 232
pretending to be snobby aristocrats. One recommends pretending to talk to the other aristocrats as you walk you meeples through the garden and sip on your generous helpings of sherry. “Lady Snobbington! I didn’t expect to see you here by the shrubberies today. Have you seen the new bandstand? Splendid isn’t it. *shlurp*”

It’s a fun little game, with decent replayability thanks to its included expansions. I also found it quite absorbing, as the garden grids approximately match the Orangerie garden layout at Sanssouci. If you like your games particularly action-packed or combative then I’d give it a miss though. It’s more like a programme of rehabilitation for combat game addicts, who need to be supervised with the secateurs when they’re trimming the ornamental rose bushes in case they get twitchy.

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*This episode even caused horrible bullseye-shaped rashes to appear on my legs. The local German docs were less than sympathetic to my panicked enquiry regarding Lyme disease, and told me to stop being an idiot and wear trousers next time.