review – Page 2 – Misery Farming

Forbidden Island: I sink we need to get out of here!

December 20, 2015December 21, 2015Lizzles4 Comments

Pairs well with: An ice cream float.
Traitor rating: n/a (co-op game!)

Having not played Forbidden Island in a while, the game was reintroduced to some of the Misery Farmers through a friend. He’d been looking for some board games to get his maybe-not-quite-double-digits-yet children into. More specifically, he’d been looking for some co-op games to get them.

“It’s great! I’ll trick them into family bonding. They’ll like me if I can turn us all into a team facing an enemy of some kind. Unity against a common enemy!” He said, maniacally.

uozaf84 — The previous key to Rich’s popularity

You see, a couple of months ago said friend had been a very popular guy. He’d reluctantly taken in a stray cat at the behest of his friends and children, and soon realised she was a little bit rounder in the belly than he’d remembered. Four kittens later and Rich was the most popular friend / dad in town.

“OH HEY! We’ve just popped by to see you and spend some time with you and play some games with you… where are the kittens?”

Having eventually given the kittens away, (something something cat allergies, something something ice-cold heart) Rich needed a little something extra to win over the friends and daughters. Such beginneth the purchasing of board games.

One of the first purchases (which, of course, we insisted on testing *cough* before the kids tried it) was Forbidden Island. As described by our friend Dr-Photographer, and several others before him, “Oh, hey, you’re playing Pandemic, but easy!”

There’s a sign there somewhere which says “DON’T GO HERE”

But don’t run away yet! If you’re like us, then you know that there’s little worse for a co-op game to be than easy. Co-ops need to balance their lack of competitive dickery with misery, misery and more misery. You need to have to strive for victory! And, dear readers, let us reassure you right now that Forbidden Island is not easy.

These had better be some damned good treasures

What does give Forbidden Island its advantage (or disadvantage, depending on who you are) over Pandemic is not that it’s easier, but that it’s simpler. You play some cunning explorers, and your goal is to acquire four glorious pieces of treasure and then flee the Forbidden Island. But, presumably, the reason that the island was so forbidden in the first place is because it’s rapidly sinking into the sea, or at least it has a tendency to do so when explorers try to take its treasure. Damn.

One of the mechanics that you might be familiar with is the ‘Waters Rise!’ card. These are like the outbreak cards in Pandemic, but you have an outbreak of water instead of an outbreak of, you know, diseases. The cards are hidden among all of the treasure and bonus cards that you’ll be collecting at the end of each turn, which you’ll need a certain amount of to be able to find treasures. (Just like you’ll need a certain amount of cards to research a cure in… what’s that game again? Pandemic.)

Also at the end of each turn you’ll need to draw cards which list places on the island, and the corresponding places that you pick will either start to flood or completely go underwater and get removed from the game. You need to particularly hope not to lose Fool’s Landing (nobody’s arguing against the idea that the explorers are fools) where you ultimately need to escape via helicopter, since losing that means you’ll lose the game. There are also only two tiles on each island where you can find each particular treasure, so if both of those are lost before you’ve actually collected the treasure from it then that’s also a big fat LOSE.

One more way to lose the game is, as you’d expect, drowning. If you’re on an island tile that gets completely lost then you can hurriedly swim to a nearby tile, no problem. If all of the adjacent tiles have already gone? Then I’m afraid that this is the end of your adventure, traveller.

The difference between an area and a flooded area is, as it turns out, just that everything turns blue.

It’s a little unclear in terms of the plot why everyone needs to survive for the team to win. Perhaps the adventurers have a very limited but strong sense of morality. The game is a beautiful tale of human greed, but not between the players. Should we travel to this forbidden island? Yeah, fuck the rules! Steal this treasure? Try and stop me! Let the sea swallow up this beautiful island? Why not. But leave one of your friends behind? NEVER!!

The whole game has a great rushed, panicked feeling about it, as it should. The further into the game you are, the quicker everything seems to move, as getting through more ‘Waters Rise’ cards means that the island starts to flood quicker and quicker. And for every island tile that gets removed from the game, the corresponding card gets removed as well, so you’ll suddenly find yourself having a very small deck and a very small island, practically drawing the entire deck every turn by the end of the game.

To make things seem even more desperate, a player only gets two actions per turn.* Which, by the way, is phrased unhelpfully as “Up to 3”. Up to, but not including. The amount of times that we forgot this as we were planning in our first game is … a number high enough to be embarrassed by.

IMG_0526_Fotor One of the actions you can do is to try to stop the island from going completely under before you’ve high-tailed it off with the treasures. The action is to flip a slightly soggy land-tile so that it becomes dry land again, and the action is called ‘Shore Up’, but it’s a little bit thematically unclear what you’re actually doing. We think there might be a lot of mopping involved. But the amount of mopping you get to do versus the rate at which the island is going under is pretty heavily tipped in favour of the sea. As such, this part of the game tends to feel a little bit like one of those cartoons where a poor cabin boy is using a tiny bucket to chuck the water over the ship and back out to sea, even when water is crashing in around him faster than he could ever bail it out.

The game is fun, and it’s not yet one that we’ve mastered. We’ve only won once on ‘novice’ level so far, and we’re not convinced that we’d have done so well if the difficulty was raised at all higher.

IMG_0538_Fotor — Er, we’re running out of island very fast, you guys!

Some of the roles that you get to pick seem to be a bit pants compared to some of the others. But perhaps that depends on how you play. Also, this might just be an excuse we’re all throwing out for why we’ve lost so often. (I’m sure if we’d been playing with [insert any other role here] then we’d have won that game… *cough*)

We’ve also been on a bit about how similar some of the mechanics are to certain other games, so does it have an advantage? Well, it doesn’t have a legacy version for you to drool over, and the simpler rules do mean that there’s a bit less of a feel for strategy than a lot of games can offer. But it’s not all bad! The theme is good and you can get into character just a little. And the simplicity is in some ways a good thing- not just so that the rules are a bit easier for kids to pick up but also because it means the game moves really quickly, and it can achieve the desperate panicked atmosphere that it’s aiming for.

The real winner is not the island, nor the treasure, and certainly not us. It’s board games.

Edit: *It has come to my attention, thanks to the ever-wise Mac in the comments, that there’s a discussion on BGG about the actions. Consensus on the small thread appears to be that they do mean three actions rather than two, but now we’re not sure what to believe. Have we just been extra-hardcore this entire time? The only thing that everyone can agree on is the confusing nature of the wording.

You may take up to 3 actions each turn (could be 0, 1, or 2).

CAN WE TAKE THREE ACTIONS OR NOT??

*flips island*

Scoville: Feelin’ Hot Hot Hot

December 13, 2015December 13, 2015Lizzles1 Comment

Pairs well with: Chilli pálinka. Or some fancy Mexican beers.

Traitor Rating: 6/10.
There are some definite mechanics for trying to get up in someone’s way, but it’s not all that easy, as was demonstrated in our game by a complete failure of Bob and Briony trying to gang up against Lizzy with her stupid smug face.

The farmers first spotted the game Scoville during the first Gavcon in 2014 and also Essen Spiel 2015, but only as a distant adorable-looking game that they never got around to playing. All they knew were rumours of it being great fun, and the fact that there were itty-bitty little chillies that could fit into some itty-bitty little chilli-shaped holes in the soil. It looked good.

Fast forward to the present, and Bob has had Scoville in her collection for a good few weeks.
She had kept this pretty secret, because while she loves this game on a theoretical level, she is absolutely awful at it. Every now and then she forgets and digs it out, before losing horribly and refusing to play it until the sting of defeat has worn off again. She knows that it’s a beautiful, clever, medium-weight game and that her refusal to play it is entirely due to personal failure. She also knew from the get-go that Lizzy would absolutely stomp this game and was keen to avoid the inevitable dickening.

In Scoville you’re a chilli farmer. You plant chillies, you breed chillies, and you make delicious, spicy chilli sauces out of your produce. Our first set of hats-off go to whoever sat in the board-game-office (is that where you sit to invent board games? With a white board, a lot of pens and a pot of tea? We imagine it’s something less fancy than the office you have in GameDev Tycoon) had the job of coming up with the great puntastic chilli-names. Chili Chili Bang Bang. Born to be Mild. Flux Capsaicinator…

Not gonna lie, one of the first couple of things that we noticed about the game were the colourful chillies and the little slots in the board that they fit into when you plant them. All good games have something to lure you over to that end of the room, and this particular bait looks pretty satisfying. Lizzy immediately pounced on the big bag o’ chillies to create a beautiful chilli rainbow.

Scoville matches a nice amount of strategy with a level of not being able to plan too far ahead because of other people getting in your damned way. The balance works pretty well. A round consists of several parts. Each farmer will plant a chilli, walk around to pick some chillies, and then either sell these chillies or fulfil a limited number of potential chilli recipes for delicious,

DSC_0832_Fotor — Disclaimer: not conventional chilli-placement

delicious victory points. There’s one randomised set of recipes for everyone to play towards all the way through the game, which are there straight from the beginning, and these big sauces will be your biggest sources of points at the end. That makes it a pretty decent game strategy-wise, since you know what you’re supposed to be working towards and you should be able to get an idea of how your game comes together.

In a neat twist, the chillies stay put after you’ve planted and harvested them. Finally, a game where the farmer thinks that maybe they can save themselves some future replanting by actually leaving some of the produce in the damned fields. Flashbacks straight away to Agricola, Catan, Farmville, and all those other games where the fields are regularly cleared and you’re left having to re-sow and re-harvest the same accursed vegetables over and over again.

There are a few contingent factors that will keep you on your toes though. Your adorable farmer-meeple has to physically wander around to collect the delicious chillies, but your lovely friends, no matter how good their intentions are, may end up getting just a little bit in your way.* There’s also an auctioning for turn order mechanic, so you have to think a lot about whether you want to be the first one to have a little wander and farm, or be the first one to sell some goods.

Your humble Misery-turned-chilli-Farmers played the game together for the first time this week, and they were keen, excited and … thirsty. Beers all round.

Briony’s fate had been forecast by her attempt at making a stir-fry earlier in the day and mistaking a rather spicy chilli powder for paprika. Just as the spices failed her once, they would continue to fail her for the rest of the evening. She is also pretty terrible at growing living plants, chillies included. It would appear that fate was against her from the word ‘go’.

Another pretty exciting USP of the game is that, as we mentioned above, you don’t just plant chillies- you breed them! You start off with a simple primary-coloured chilli and then a freakin’ massive grid to let you know which chilli colours make which other chilli colours when mixed together. Because of the complexity of how to make them, and how much mixing you need to do to breed them, some of the fancier chillies (black, white, and MEGA SHINY GLITTER CHILLI) won’t appear until a few turns on, and tend to be the ones you need to get the mega-points at selling time.

Some of the colour-mixing is fairly logical, following the colour-mixing lessons learned by splashing about with poster paint in primary school, some of it less so. For example cross-breeding a red and a yellow chilli gets you an orange chilli, but why does mixing brown and white chillies make a black chilli?

Nonetheless it’s reasonably intuitive to, perhaps, most people. Maybe not Briony.

Briony: I still can’t do anything
Lizzy: You love not doing anything
Bob: We still love you Bri

You also get smaller amounts of points for being the first, or one of the first, to plant a fancy chilli of various colours.

Half an hour into the game
Briony: You know what? I’m going to plant this second brown chilli thing.
Bob: Yeah you do that. You get… oh wow a whole three points!
Briony: *sobs*
Bob: I’m so sorry I’m teasing you but you make it so easy. By being, like, really bad at this game.
Briony: I just don’t know why I’m so bad at it… I’m getting another beer.

Fortunately, Briony’s sadness made up for the disgusting smugness that was constantly radiating from Lizzy’s side of the table. Lizzy is exactly the kind of person who wins at this kind of game. She’ll sit there, organising the chilli pile into a rainbow, whistling innocently and pretending like she just wants to have a nice time and potter around in the farm. We would be interested in another lovely farming game to test Lizzy’s green fingers, as we strongly suspect they don’t exist outside of board games.

Gettin’ real judgy there, Rudolph-jumper.

Bob: Stop pulling that innocent crap on us, we know you. WE KNOW THAT YOU’RE WINNING, STOP TRYING TO HIDE IT.

*a bit more beer and ten minutes later*

Bob: HOW DO YOU EVEN SIT SMUGLY
Briony: Do you want another drink?
Bob: YES.

DSC_0835_Fotor — Briony: Hey look it’s a metaphor for me playing this game

The evening continued slowly but surely as beer was sipped and chillies continued to get farmed. Bob eventually took up her role as drunken photographer, perhaps slowing the process a tad.

Lizzy: Bob! Bob! It’s your turn! Sell some shit!
Bob: No! I’m doing art!

“Look! I’m zooming!” Bob says excitedly, as she just edges the camera closer to the board.

Despite their distraction, all three of the farmers were big fans of the game. Good theme, good pieces, good balance of strategy and getting in each other’s way.

DSC_0854_Fotor — Fun game, intermittent sobbing notwithstanding.

Bob’s verdict: It’s so freaking cute but it makes me want to kill everyone
Briony’s verdict: It’s a shame that I suck at this game because it’s so good and the chillies are so dinks
Lizzy’s verdict: Well, let’s just say there was a really, really, smug look on her face.

The game is good. The score was 56, 59, 104. After all of Briony’s sadness, it would appear she wasn’t as horrifically terrible as previously thought. Or that Bob was just much, much worse than she hoped. Everyone should try this game, even if it’s just to get very excited over the adorable chillis, much in the same way people get overly excited about the pieces in Euphoria. Exciting pieces all round!

This week the winner is board games. But also, definitely, definitely Lizzy.

*This is how Lizzy talks when she’s winning a game. It’s a tone of voice that combines ultimate innocence and sweetness with just the right sprinkle of smugness, and is perfectly designed to get Bob’s heartrate soaring towards apoplexies of rage.

Codenames: From Essen With Love

November 29, 2015November 29, 2015Lizzles4 Comments

Pairs well with: Martinis. Shaken, not stirred. (Rumour has it they’re actually better stirred, but that’s just the kind of shit you’ve got to deal with as a spy.)

Traitor-rating: 2/10 for the ability to try to put off your opponents mid-game.

We three ~~kings~~* board game enthusiasts have had a lot to say about what some of the best games from Essen 2015 may have been. There have been a lot of candidates and a lot of enthusiasm. It’s almost as if we really, really love board games! Weird.

The excited froth of enthusiasm shall continue to spill forth as we move on to what really is one of the best, and surprisingly so, games of the year: Codenames. Don’t be put off by the box art which looks like it was designed in MS Word and features the thrilling byline of ‘TOP SECRET WORD GAME’,** this is some addictive shit. We hope you’ll forgive a bit of brief explanation, since the game is pretty simple to play and explain.

Lizzy gets fancy photography confused with just holding the camera in a funny place

In Codenames you (usually) play as two different teams of spies. One person per team is the spymaster, the rest of you are regular vanilla-spies sitting in the field awaiting instruction.

The ‘board’ consists of a 5 x 5 grid of cards, each with a different word on it. The two rival spymasters, presumably sitting nice and comfortably somewhere in Spy HQ playing with some gadgets and looking at a dozen different CCTV monitors, have access to an extra card which they share, but which the rest of the players aren’t allowed to see. That card shows the ‘board’ as a 5 x 5 grid with each card marked as red, blue, grey or the single black.

This little card means that the spymasters can know which of the words on the table are the codenames of red-team spies, blue-team spies, regular confused passers-by and THE ASSASSIN!

The actual game is a word association game, with the aim being to contact all of the spies on your own team before the other team does the same, and to not contact the assassin (for obvious, game-ending reasons). The spymasters will take turns giving exactly one word and one number, the word being one that they’re trying to associate with some on the table and the number indicating how many words they’re trying to link.

Simple!

One of the first things you come to notice as you play the game is that you really feel sorry for some of these spies. Agent Ghost? Cool. Agent Roulette? Pretty classy. Agent Ham? Umm, maybe not so much. Agent Ketchup? Are you sure you work here? Oh and I’ve got to say I’m a little embarrassed to be working with Agent Pants over here. There’s a reason we gave her that name.

And sometimes you’ve really got to question just what the secret service were thinking about. Agent Spy? I mean really. AGENT SPY? What do you think the point of a secret codename is? Maybe to avoid revealing your identity as a spy to everyone? Tsh. Some people just weren’t cut out for this business.

The plus side of Spy HQ’s batshit, overboard spy-naming policy is that you’ll never be short on variety between different games, even when each one is only about 15-20 minutes long. The box is jam-packed with different words, two sides to each, and you can get through a hell of a lot of games (trust us, we’d know) before you need to come across the same words that you’ve already used. Even if that weren’t the case, the way that the board is always different means that it’s unlikely any of your games will ever resemble each other. And other factors, like the impossible and bizarre ways that you and your friends’ brains work.

Bonus points for the game come from its flexibility. In our short time of owning it we’ve played it on beds, on floors, in hotel lobbies… even on walls. While ~~procrastinating our PhD research~~ doing important board game research for this blog we even spotted someone on /r/boardgames who threw together a makeshift copy for a family gathering. Pretty impressive.

Codenames is more fun than we ever thought a word association game could be, and at least part of that is thanks to the mad things you’ll try to connect, the connections that seem startlingly obvious to some and mad to others.

Lizzy: Water; Two.
Bob: Right. Ok. So, I’ll go for… ‘Well’
*Well is correct*
Bob: Good. Ok, so next I’ll go for Bridge..
*Bridge is incorrect*
Bob: WHAT. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BRIDGE IS INCORRECT?
Lizzy: *silence*
Bob: Bridge! Water goes under the bridge!
Lizzy: *awkward silence*
Bob: Seriously? ARGH.

*later*

Bob: Wait, so what the flip was the other word for water?
Lizzy: Palm.
Bob: P… pardon?
Lizzy: You know, Palm. Palm trees… are… er… sometimes near water. And Palm Springs is a place that sounds like it’s named after some, you know, springs.
Bob: … I think we should be on different teams.

Other times you find that special friend who just seems to share your brain.

Spymaster: Bond; Four.
Secret agent: Right, well. There’s Octopus, because of Octopussy, (correct answer), Moon, because of Moonraker (correct answer), Spy because James Bond is a spy, (correct answer) and… well, James Bond holds a gun in the palm of his hand, so… Palm! (correct!!)

Another great feature of the game, although one that only really works with a group of 4+ playing, is the constant (but friendly) mockery of the other team’s guesses. Not to mention trying to put them off!

Lizzy: Right guys. Beef; Three.
Opposing Team (pretending to talk to each other, but loudly so the other team can hear): OH! Yeah. She’s probably referring to the great Beef Revolution of ’93. Or she means ‘Beef Dice’. Isn’t that the sequel to Sushi Dice?

It’s really an unfair advantage that the blues get Pierce Brosnan on their team

LWH Codenames Tournament

As we briefly mentioned last week, one of our local conventions Little Wooden Houses ran a Codenames tournament at their latest shindig. Teams of 3 people competed for the coveted Tiny Trophy of Being Good at Games in an incredibly tense competition. Team Misery decided that despite wearing her ‘Captain Hangover’ hat, Bob should be spymaster as it’s very easy to get inside her head.***

Round One

The first match was against a team of raw recruits who’d never met. It’s easy to underestimate a team of nice (ha!) ladies but all early pleasantries were rapidly erased as Bob politely but firmly invited the opposing team to suck her dick when they took an early lead.**** Team Misery sucked it up and got their shit together to win convincingly and immediately take on the next challengers.

Round Two (or ‘Semi-final’… it was a pretty small tournament)

On round two, shit got serious. These were no fresh-faced n00bs, but experienced gamers and long-time friends. It would be easy for them to work together, and the stress was real. Ground rules were firmly laid (no speaking at all from the spymasters apart from clues (a rule which Bob finds supremely hard to follow), and taunting and smack-talk from team-members absolutely allowed). Adrenaline pumping and neurons firing, Bob flopped her enormous spymaster-schlong across the table with a steady ‘Culinary, six.’

Six correct card choices left the opposing team in the dust, and Team Misery advanced to the final round unbeaten.

The Final

The final match was played as best of three rounds, against a team which included a girlfriend-boyfriend pairing (Dr Boyfriend and Cthulhu-Joss) and Dr Charlie. Harsh.

A strong start in the first round got Team Misery off the ground, but they were nearly brought down by an incredible last-ditch hail-Mary clue from Charlie, whose team needed to get five correct answers in one turn to win.

‘Nazis, infinity.’

Um. What. Surely this could never work! But after the initial laughter, Joss and Al took to the board to give it their all.

‘Er. Did the Nazis ever go near some Czechs? Czech!’
*1/5 correct*
‘Well, they probably had ships. Ship?’
*2/5 correct*
‘They love to MARCH!’
*3/5 correct, panic from Team Misery*
‘Drill?’
*4/5 correct*

Team Misery watched in shock as all their dreams decayed in the face of insanity. If the opposing team got one more correct answer, they would win.

‘Aw nuts. Isn’t there a movie about Nazis where they’re all somewhere really cold? And they’re zombies? Dead Snow! Yeah. Maybe he means that! ICE!’
*INCORRECT*

Thank goodness for good guys. (That’s us, by the way.)

DSC_0713_Fotor — A very tense Dr Charlie and ‘Hangover-hat’ Bob

Round two was almost as close, but went to team Charlie, making it even-Stevens going into the final round.

Bob meditated while Lizzy and Briony made a break for stress-wees and tea.

It was a tough board for the team. ‘Hollywood’, ‘France’, and ‘New York’ were all needed, but ‘England’ was the assassin and ‘Beijing’ belonged to the opposing team, so a simple clue like ‘places’ was out.

‘Cannes, three’ managed to tie Hollywood, France, and Premiere together, but that was just the start. An incredibly close, tense game ensued, until both teams were down to their last two words.

Bob made a desperate bid to tie ‘New York’ and ‘Forest’ together with ‘Jungle, two’ (urban jungle, right?) but was thwarted by Lizzy’s insistence that ‘Jungle Jam’ was a thing (she meant a jungle gym. Like the climbing frame. Bob actually broke the rules when that went down as she was incapable of stopping a stress-pressured ‘Mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp’ from escaping).

To be fair, the team’s eventual demise might also be put down to a glorious moment in which Bob forgot which colour she was, and gave a clue for the wrong team’s spies. Some swearing followed.

A smooth final two from Team Charlie and it was all over. The tiny trophy of ‘Good at Games’ was wrested from the Misery Farm’s grasp, and Bob unclenched her butt-hole for the first time since the tournament started.

—

Codenames is a frickin’ excellent game. Good as both a light party game for the inexperienced, and as a brain-crusher for more experienced players. Incredibly stressful. Highly-recommended.

The real winner was the stupid other team. But also, board games.

* Too early for Christmas jokes? What? Christmas jokes are never appropriate? Psh.

** Codenames won Shut Up & Sit Down’s prestigious ‘Best Game, Worst Box’ award 2015.

*** It is mostly filled with air so there’s plenty of room.

**** Did we mention that we’re really, really competitive?

Misery Farm On The Road: Little Wooden Houses 2

November 22, 2015November 23, 2015Lizzles1 Comment

It’s been a long week here at The Misery Farm. Lizzy and Bob have been marking idiot undergraduate papers while Briony has been attempting the academic equivalent of fitting a gallon into a pint glass, i.e. condensing her Master’s thesis into a publishable paper.

Needless to say, they were all very happy to see the end of the week and to celebrate with happy hour cocktails (Bob and Briony) and going to bed at 9pm (Lizzy).

Saturday dawned bright and early. And hungover.

Somehow your farmers managed to pile into Bob’s shitmobile car and pootle all the way up to Oxford without any major death or destruction,* fully stocked with caffeinated beverages and terrible service-station sandwiches. What a treat lay ahead of them – a full day of board games ahoy!

DSC_0664_Fotor — Pictured: Meeples, not Little Wooden Houses. It’s the thought that counts.

What’s Little Wooden Houses?

Little Wooden Houses is the brainchild of Mac ‘Amazing’ Chapman, fellow board-game enthusiast and blogger. His dream was simple: to gather friends and acquaintances and pretty much anyone who fancied it, put them in a large room together, and play some board games.

It’s a formula which pretty much guarantees success.

Effectively, it’s just a day at a friend’s house with a bunch of people you like and a bunch of board games you like, but on a larger scale. Things that you like, but more of it! YEAH!

Unlike similar small and friend-run events we’d been to previously, like Gavcon, it’s a simple case of turn-up, bring-games, leave with the same games you arrived with. Simple stuff. Particularly good for those on a budget! We each gave a small contribution to M. Amazing for renting the hall and brought our own homemade sammidges, hangover snacks and maybe ordered a tiny bit of takeaway too.

The whole room’s a bit like a big wooden house, actually

Little Wooden Houses 2

This event, the second of its kind (but we weren’t at the first, so it can’t have been as good), was hosted in a little village hall near Oxford, where we’d previously had an incredibly successful day as the media in Watch The Skies. If only half as many nuclear bombs went off this time, it would be a success! It’s a bit further away from our homes than a couple of us would like, but it all worked out ok because Bob is an incredibly safe driver and we didn’t fear for our lives once in the entire journey.**

We started the day with HangoverBob opening her packet of Skips upside down and declaring it to be the end of the world. Fortunately, the team plodded nobley onwards, and got stuck knee deep into some games:

Elysium

Elysium is a good game with one strange weakness:

‘Have I played this before?’
‘Yeah, have I? I really really can’t tell…’
‘Nah it just looks like all other games ever.’

It really does as well. It’s ancient-Greek themed and the artwork is a bit 7 Wonders, maybe a bit Cyclades.

We came across it on Day 4 at Essen and Briony bought it there and then.

There are pillars, but hungover games-explainer Briony is quick to point out that the aim of the game is not to build a tower out of them. Sadness all around.

Otherwise, it offers a good level of chance and luck v strategy and tactical play. It’s simple to learn, plus there’s just enough opportunity for dickery to keep things interesting and victory points get handed out like Skittles. And we love skittles!

As a downside, there are a few design errors. You must knock your pillars over to collect cards, but the bases of the pillars are circular so they just roll around all over the table and onto the floor, repeatedly. The turn order tokens are nearly the perfect size to fit into a slot on your player board, but not quite. Argh!

We still all had a pretty good time. Bob and Briony survived their hangovers, and laughed at the worst jokes.

‘Can I have a circley thing?’
‘You certainly can!’
‘… I CIRCLEY can!’

Victory for Briony!

Tournament: Codenames

Ok, when we said that Little Wooden Houses was just bring-a-game, play-a-game, we were almost telling the truth. Little Wooden Houses also has a long standing tradition (as long-standing as a tradition can be when it’s only the second event) of having a mini tournament. The first event was home to a Blueprints tournament, and this time Codenames was the star of the show!

If you haven’t played Codenames yet, then you should. It’s a competitive word-association game played in teams, but even more fun than it sounds.

Your steadfast reviewers made up a team of 3 (obviously), and were determined to come in either first or last place (because those are the only two positions worth blogging about). It was decided that Bob should be spymaster because a) she’s strangely OK at it even when wearing her ‘Captain Hangover’ hat and b) Briony and Lizzy can get inside her mind with ease. To catch your prey, you must think like your prey. To think like Bob, just replace 98% of brain function with pop culture references and sarcasm.

We started strongly. A decisive victory against a team which had never met before, followed by a trickier match-up against long-time friends. The tension was absolutely insane, largely because we take winning board games far too seriously. The final match was an incredibly close best of 3. We fought bravely but… ultimately the tiny plastic cup of victory was wrestled from our grasp.

A full review of both the game and the little tournament will be out soon!

Between Two Cities

After the intense stress of a tournament, a soothing game of Between Two Cities was called for. It’s fun and simple and can fit absolutely loads of players thanks to its team-based mechanic which means that until the scoring phase you only really play with and against the players to your immediate right and left.

Takara Island

Next was Takara Island, a worker-placement-lite game recently re-released with art by the incredibly talented Naiiade. Dive into the deep seas, fight some monsters, and dig for magical treasure. It’s flawed by some unbalanced mechanics which aren’t clarified in the rulebook, possibly due to translation errors.

Two Rooms and a Boom

There are a lot of reasons to gather twenty-something friends in a single place to play games, but one of the strongest has to be Two Rooms and a Boom. A game that not only works with these larger numbers, but thrives with them.

It’s a combination of hidden roles and party game: red terrorists v. blue secret agents. Everyone is divided up into two rooms and allowed to get chatting. Every few minutes there’s a hostage swap where a few people can change (or be forced to change) rooms. The aim of the game is to get the (red) bomber and the (blue) president in the same room at the end of the game if you’re the terrorists, and to get the president the hell away from the bomber if you’re the blues. That’s right, even if the entire rest of the secret service explodes with the bomber, as happened in one of the games we played, the blue team still win if the president is alive. Is death worth victory? Almost certainly.

Despite the ostensible secrecy of the roles, it quickly becomes clear who’s on which team.

“Lizzy, wait, are you on the red team?”
“No.”
…
*Lizzy bursts into nervous laughter and has to run away*

It gets interesting when more roles are added. The engineer to fix the bomb. The doctor to diagnose the president. The Shy Guys, the fools. The first lady and the mistress, both of whom are competing to be in the room with the president at the end of the game (but not in the same room as each other). Moby Dick is there, as is Ahab.

Ultimately, despite the number of roles, it’s not a difficult game. Bob was the bomb and she quite successfully exploded. Good work, everyone!

The end of the day

Little Wooden Houses 2 ran on to the late, late hours of 11pm. Your noble journalists ducked out before then, but still had a wonderful day. The atmosphere was relaxing, friendly and rife with games.

Your competitive team of journalists had so much fun that they barely even cried at not winning the coveted Codenames tournament trophy.

But, as always, the real winner… is board games.

It’s fine. We didn’t want the Codenames trophy anyway.

*Despite what Lizzy might say about Bob’s driving.

**(shifty look from Lizzy, as if from someone under duress)

Steampunk Rally: A Rally Good Game!

November 8, 2015November 8, 2015LizzlesLeave a comment

Pairs well with: Gin on rough terrain (the rocks)
Traitor rating: 4/10 “I could race… or I could screw over Lizzy…” – (everyone)

Each member of the Misery Farm had several favourite games to come out of Essen 2015. When pressed, all you can get out of us tends to be a pretty diplomatic and squirmy answer, along the lines of “well I loved so many of the games, I couldn’t possibly choose!” or “can’t I just say that I love all of them?” or “I CAN’T FREAKING DECIDE, LEAVE ME ALONE ALREADY”. We’re told this is similar to how some human adults feel about their children.

But if we were pressed to decide on a top list of games then we could probably all agree that Steampunk Rally has a pretty damn high spot. It’s one of the games we all actively sought out after Bob enticed a group of us in with her description:

“Guys! We need to play Steampunk Rally next. It’s like the hipster Wacky Races, but you get to play as Marie Curie! Only she’s a ROBOT!”

Sold! Literally.

Now we’ve brought (several copies of) the game back to our humble homes the excitement hasn’t worn off.

To start off with, have we mentioned the characters? There are sixteen to choose from, all based on some of the coolest inventors that history has to offer. If you want a team of badass lady-racers (which you know very well your team of badass lady-journalists do), then you actually have a whole range of options! That’s right, A RANGE of female characters!

This evening we plummed for Bob as Ada Lovelace, Briony as Marie Curie and Lizzy as Hertha Ayrton. Briony had conveniently hosted a steampunk Hallowe’en party in her house a few days beforehand, and being the cool kids we are we grabbed a few spare steampunky goggles strewn around and got our race on!

Each player gets their little chosen inventor card plus an additional unique card which, together, make up the start of your brilliant machine, which you’ll add bits to as the race goes on via a little valve symbol that lets you know more bits of machine can go there. Being the snazzy and intelligent inventors that you are you can easily unscrew some bits here and there and rearrange your machine as you go along, so you don’t need to worry too much about the order of placement (take that Galaxy Trucker!).

The aim of the game is to win the race. You win the race by crossing the finishing line first.* Sounds simple and familiar so far, right? Racing 101. Oh! Also, you’re racing in a giant machine that’s constantly rearranging, powering up, and occasionally exploding – more on that later.

Brimming with overconfidence, having not actually played since the trial rounds at Essen, we opted to play on the super-fancy FUTURISTIC HOVERDROME. More danger, but we could handle it. Robot power! Plus the map is a bit randomised at the beginning, which is always a bonus.

An actual turn consists of a few different phases, which each person does at once 7-wonders-style (or does slowly and in turn order if you haven’t figured out the rules yet, or if you just want to show off your rad moves). The first of these involves taking a card from a selection and passing the rest on. Here’s where you’ll use some of these cards to add bits on to your machine! Propellers, rocket boosters, a forcefield… should we chuck a time machine on there? Yeah, why not!

But the machine you’re building isn’t just about cool gadgets and aesthetics, it’s a beautiful, smoothly-running *cough* mechanism that uses water, electricity and fire power (dice of different colours) to bolster your machine’s defence or SPEEED madly along the track.

Later in the round is the racing phase! Here you roll the dice you’ve generated that turn and see how much power (how many little winged-wheel symbols) you’ve managed to generate. The misery farmers were off to a flying start! Each of us racing ahead with some efficiently running robot monstrosities, producing the dice and throwing them madly into the machines.

Oh, remember that bit earlier where we glossed over the bit where your machines can explode?

Yeah. Here that comes.

The final phase of a round is a ‘damage phase’, where you calculate all the damage you’ve taken from the terrain you’ve just hastily and cockily rattled across.

“Oh, oh shit. I think I raced a bit too far ahead.”
“Oh crud, me too. Ohhhh no.”

The exploding machinery is probably the most unique mechanic of Steampunk Rally. For each damage you take which you haven’t defended yourself against, a part of your machine (of your choice) will explode and fall off. This can be a useful tactic at some points- sometimes it might just be worth losing some outdated bits of your machine for the chance to speed a bit further ahead. Maybe the force of the explosion is propelling you ahead a bit? Who knows!

But uh, what happens if you take more damage than you even have bits of machine? Back into last place you go.

Every single one of us had, despite being nominally-competent adult human beings, miscalculated the damage we’d take and exploded our machines completely. On the very first round.

…

“Guys. Guys. Can we just… maybe…”
“Pretend none of this happened?”
“Yeah!”
“Start over?”
“Yep.”
“PRACTICE ROUND OVER, GUYS. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.”

We definitely owed it to the great inventors that we were representing to pretend that that was a practice round and start over. Nobody wants that kind of a disgrace on their shoulders.

THE RACE BEGINS AGAIN!

Slightly more careful this time, the team of badass lady-racers (or just ‘badass racers’, if you will) had a much more successful second attempt at a race.

The theme is excellently done, as you can tell from our enthusiasm over the characters. Marie Curie has a brilliant robot body because of the radiation poisoning done to her flesh one, but this just makes her even more hard-core than she was already. Which is tough, because Marie Curie is pretty hard-core even in puny human form. Lovelace is also a robot, having downloaded her consciousness into a robot casing.

The depth of the machine parts is also great. You can build some pretty bizarre and beautiful machines!

“I’m becoming a weird spider-tree with legs! FEAR ME!”

“Argh! I keep wanting to attach a penny-farthing to my machine but there’s never room!”

“KAPOW! Oh no, my galvanised brakes!”
“Oh no, you’ve lost your galvanic brakes!”
“Galvanic! That’s what I said.”

Impressively, it also plays with up to eight players. But it does this while still being strategic, rather than a game of luck. You can fit the same amount of players as Camel Cup, for example, but actually involves some skill and planning.

Briony’s playing a giant-machine tactic. Unfortunately, she seems to have got a little bit carried away with building something beautiful and forgotten that she’s actually taking part in a race. Lizzy, going for a “try to win” strategy, keeps losing her galvanised galvanic brakes, but the lack of stopping power definitely seems to be playing in her favour, and she’s speeding to victory.

That's a damn impressive machine, Briony, but it doesn't appear to be going anywhere... — That’s a damn impressive machine, Briony, but it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere…

The way that the phases work together is good for a larger number of players, so you’re not spending too much time waiting for other people to make their moves. But there’s definitely something lost when everyone races together, and it has a bit less of an exciting or sociable feel to it when you don’t get to watch everyone else’s smoothly running machines creating the perfect amount of water for their steam machines and then trudging along, or completely misjudging their power, going too far and falling in a hole. We prefer doing that part of the game one at a time, so we get to watch each other’s’ triumphs and disasters as they unfold.

The game is a winner both on theme and gameplay. It’s a great game to get your friends excited, and although there are certainly games that are more in depth, more strategic, and more ridiculous, it plays a pretty good role in our board game collections.

Of course, as always, the real winner is board games. And Lizzy.

*You can also cross the finishing line at the same time (on the same turn) as someone else, but then it’s about how far over the line you get. It’s not literally a case of who moves their character over the line first winning, because that would be madness of a different kind.

T.I.M.E. Stories: Sherlock Holmes meets Groundhog Day

November 1, 2015October 30, 2015Bob Rimington2 Comments

Pairs well with: A nice cup of tea to help you think.
Traitor Rating: 1/10. It’s a co-op game, but accidents do happen…

What with it being Halloween and all, you might think that we at the Misery Farm would have prepared something special for you. After all, we are three alternative-type ladies and Halloween is basically Christmas for goths.

Well, we don’t. At least, not something especially spooky/Halloween-y. Sure the scenario we’ll be reviewing is set in an insane asylum and there are a few cases of [deleted] as well as terrifying [deleted] to be dealt with but it’s not, as such, a horror game. What this game is, is excellent. Bob cannot remember the last time she enjoyed a game so much on so many levels. The problem is trying to review it without giving away any spoilers, but we’ve done our best. This review is of the base game and introductory scenario, and all specific references and photos should be of game parts already explicitly mentioned or shown in the rulebook. If you spot a rogue plot point then let us know asap and we’ll shut it down.

We can’t tell you what this girl’s painting, or why that guy is wearing a plague mask but… yeah.

With all that said, on with the review!

TIME Stories is a co-operative exploration-slash-puzzle solving game. If you’ve played games like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (which, by the way, is possibly one of the greatest puzzle games of all time), Tragedy Looper, or even an old school ‘GO TO LOCATION’-type MUD game then you’ll be acquainted with the format. TIME Stories perfects the genre in board game form. It’s a tabletop RPG with combat elements, it’s a strategy game, it’s an item-collecting, clue-solving meta-gaming puzzler. Most importantly, it does all these things well. Now, before we get going you should know that this is a scenario-based game. Essentially you buy the base game (which comes with an introductory scenario) and all subsequent scenarios must be bought as expansions. This has led some people* to declare it a waste of money and clearly a scam. They are wrong. It is a beautiful game and well worth the cash. Just don’t play it with two people. You want it to be a team experience.

You play as a time detective. It’s probably got a fancier name than that but that’s basically what you are. You live in the future where time travel has totally been invented but people keep fucking around with it, creating time anomalies that threaten to break the space-time continuum and kill the whole wide universe! Luckily you’re part of a noble special-ops firm dedicated to going back in time and fixing the problems before they happen. Each game scenario is one of these time adventures.

Wallpaper-Terminator-robot-T-800-photo — ‘Sounds familiar!’

The problem is that while you can go back in time to a location, you do not necessarily know what the problem is going to be or how to solve it. You have to follow clues, question suspects, and basically behave like the nosiest PI ever hired.

There are a few other minor *cough* challenges. Firstly, your body does not go back in time with you. Instead, your consciousness inhabits a local ‘receptacle’ (unfortunate human) which you control like a hideous meat puppet. In the first scenario, Asylum, you are sent to investigate an old-timey mental asylum. Unfortunately the only bodies available to you are those of patients, and patients are not usually given free run of the sanatoriums where they have so thoughtfully been placed. Your consciousness also suffers from whatever debilitating mental condition has had them incarcerated in the first place, such as crippling [deleted] and hideous bouts of [deleted]. Sometimes you can turn these to your advantage, however, with careful use of [deleted] and doses of [deleted]. Choosing your receptacle wisely in a way that helps the team is part of the game for sure.

The second problem is that it takes a vast amount of energy to both send you back in time and keep you there. As such you only have a limited amount of time to complete your mission, otherwise you get transported back to the future (hey-oh!). Exploring, moving, taking actions, etc. all use up valuable time, and if you don’t solve the problem in your allotted time then you get in trouble with your superiors. Luckily they are quite willing to send you back again to have another crack at it. The aim of the game is to try and fix the temporal anomaly in the lowest-possible number of runs. The faster you do it, the more points you get and thus earn some [deleted].
Of course, if you finish the game quickly and efficiently you miss a lot of what it has to offer. This game has loads of branching paths. Not so many that it becomes heavy and messy but enough that to explore every aspect would definitely be a challenge within the time frame. Bob was sceptical at first, expecting that the format of ‘do and then re-do’ would simply turn into a game of ‘follow the leads as efficiently as possible, rinse, repeat’. This would suck, and probably result in a quarterbacking** problem. Luckily, TIME stories is actually very good and neatly side-steps this issue. Each run was completely different both in storyline and format.

The first run was a game of exploration. Talking to people, making mistakes, and collecting whatever clues we could. Two red herrings and a violent [deleted] later, we found ourselves back in the future, being reprimanded by our commander (confusingly also named Bob). The second run revealed a whole new, previously unsuspected line of clues. There are layers to this game, man. This time we went deeper, coming so close to the end and then… promptly causing a temporal anomaly. Whoops.

By this time nearly 4 real-time hours had passed, and we needed to stop. This was when TIME Stories traversed from ‘fun’ to ‘incredibly well thought-out and borderline-genius’ in Bob’s eyes. The creators know that you might not have time to play a 6-hour game in one sitting, but that you also won’t want to lose your place in your scenario. As a solution, the box comes with what is essentially a manual ‘save game’ set-up. You can carefully place your receptacles, clues, and various tokens and whatever in special little holsters in the box, ready for another go at a later date. The board even clips in so that everything is kept in stasis. Absolutely shitting brilliant.

Our final run had to be efficient, business-like, yet not forgetting to visit any necessary locations to gather important clues and items. We completed the game with not a single death on the team and in good time, which earned us a decent rank and… you’ll have to find out what else for yourself. But you should know that it’s so cool Bob almost died.

P1020966 — We highly recommend you keep notes!

We are very excited to play further scenarios. Unfortunately, currently only The Marcy Case (a period drama set in 1992) is available, but future instalments should be out soon. Additionally, there is something to be said for playing the same scenario twice with different friends, just to see if they uncover more of the game than you did, as well as all the myriad ways they might fuck it up.

So many ways to fuck up and die. — So many items, so many ways to fuck up and die.

* Including Misery Friends who shall remain unnamed but who are pictured in our previous post.

**For those not down the lingo, this is when someone (usually a more experienced player) basically takes charge in a co-op game and tells everyone else what to do. It’s pretty irritating.

Pictures this week are by Bob. Which is why they’re terrible.

Atmosfear: As nostalgic and spooky as a rave in a haunted house

September 13, 2015September 13, 2015Bob Rimington3 Comments

Pairs well with: It doesn’t matter, just make sure there’s lots of it.
Brutus rating: 2/10 daggers in the back. Very little of what you do matters to anyone else.

Here at the Misery Farm we review all kinds of games, classified as ‘board games’ in name only. Card games, coaster games, games where you roll a handful of sushi and ring a little bell. Most of these games are, however, alike in that they are good or at least appreciable (Terra Mystica being the exception because otherwise-intelligent people seem to like it). Atmosfear (aka Nightmare) is not a good game. It is a silly, cheesy, mindless game which you should play as soon as possible if you can get hold of it.

Bonus points if you can find the original, released in 1991 with a VHS tape. This game is almost as old as we are and comes rammed with nearly as much 90s nostalgia. Remember all those crap ‘family board games’ you played as a kid? Monopoly, Cluedo, Trivial Pursuit, Candyland, Snakes and Ladders? Games which involved zero strategy or forward-planning, only a reliance on the kindness of the dice-gods and the ability to react to prescribed actions written on cards. The kind that evoke rainy afternoons on a caravan holiday or evenings at your grannies’ house, not the cool one who basically force-fed you boiled sweets but the one whose TV only had two terrestrial channels so you had to find ‘something quiet’ to do while she knitted and listened to Gardeners’ Question Time. This is definitely one of those games. But spoooooooky.*

You can tell it’s spooky because you play in a dark room** as various undead characters (mummy, skeleton, witch, etc. They’ve really pushed the boat out in terms of originality) running around a graveyard (or is it hell? Spooky, ancient parchment-looking rules unclear). Really guys, you have no idea how hard they’ve tried to make this game creepy in an adorably-crap 90s way. Like, have any of our readers been to Boomtown music festival? Everyone there is chewing their tiny faces off and dancing to psy-trance and reggae, it’s great. Anyway they have this mini-stage called the Rave Yard where they play 90s dance hits and it’s decorated with cardboard cut-outs of grave stones and fake cobwebs and shit. Playing this game is like that, but not self-aware.

Why yes, yes your counters are indeed gravestones.

The aim of the game is to collect your 6 character-specific keys and then get to the middle of the board, where everybody has written their deepest fears on face-down cards (or scraps of paper). As long as you don’t draw your own deepest fear then you go through the gate (to where?) and win.

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that someone has written an essay instead of a deepest fear. This would be Bob’s friendly robot boyfriend, who is scared of ‘swimming in the sea and then suddenly, like, there’s a whale a couple of feet from me and I can just see its huge eye. Nothing should be that big, man, like I’d just immediately die. Fuck. That.’

Other complicating factors are Fate cards and Chance cards, which seem to be more or less the same thing. Most of these are straightforward crap-game fare (roll the dice***, react to an outcome which may be favourable or unfavourable; hoard this very scenario-specific card until a specific scenario arises, at which point forget that you have this card; roll a 6 or miss a turn, etc), while others are frankly weird. Bob got royally stitched by a card which asked that a player choose another player and, whenever that player made a decision, rub their hands together while looking all sly and questioning their decisions. When they inevitably ask ‘why are you acting like a villain from Scooby-Doo?’ you can steal all their hoarded Fate and Chance cards.

There is also an enormous stack of Time cards, which require players to perform actions at
certain points in the game. For example, Bob received on which required that exactly 50 minutes and 45 seconds into the game, she scream ‘STOP’ as loudly as possible. For every person she frightened she gained a turn and they missed a turn. The scariness of the suddenly-screaming gamer is somewhat lessened by the fact that other players had had the exact same card earlier in the game, so the audience had become somewhat desensitised. Bob managed to make at least two people flinch by working the scream into a long-term dramatic turn as someone with an intense tummy-ache brought on by too much gin. The copious amounts of pre-game gin consumed by the gaming party made this bit of play-acting quite convincing, though it’s possible (read: extremely likely) that folks were flinching more from a fear of sudden gin-spew than actual terror. Either way, result.

Is it spookier with the white balance off?

‘But how are you supposed to know exactly how far into this cobwebby nonsense you are!?’ we hear you cry. Well gentle readers, that’s where the VHS DVD video files downloaded off the Interwebs come into play. The game lasts exactly one hour, and the video shows a timer. But that’s not all. Oh no, there is a super-spooky, super-macabre game-master! He demands that you respond to him with ‘Yes my gatekeeper!’ or ‘No, my gatekeeper!’ (answer without the proper formalities and *gasp* miss a turn) and he wants to punish yoooooou! Honestly, it’s just better to take a gulp of whatever tethers you to this mortal plane and pretend for your sanity’s sake he’s not talking to you, and you keep going regardless of his poorly fashioned, overly gothic, and over-acted lines.

Home boy goes from this... — Home boy goes from this…

Basically it’s a dude in a hood who looks progressively more haggard and demonic**** as the game goes on. According to Briony this happens to most pub locals in her home town over the course of the evening, and so the horror is generally lost in the West Country. He makes all kinds of demands ranging, once again, from the predictable (youngest player roll your age or miss a turn!) to the downright weird (player whose turn it is next, crawl closer to the screen…. Obey me!), and calls the players maggots a lot. He has the power to send you to what is effectively the jail in Monopoly, but in this is called the Black Hole (or ‘Blag-hole’ according to the Gatekeeper, whose enunciation is rather poor).

As the game progresses stuff happens faster and faster to cover up the fact that the arbitrary snakes-and-ladders progression and punishment cycle actually gets pretty boring. The gatekeeper interrupts more often, releasing players from the ‘blag hole’ and handing out precious keys willy-nilly. At the start of the game these are rare and offer some specific bonuses, but by the end of the game are won and lost in seconds, removing any strategic elements this game had any hope of maintaining and causing chaos as players try to remember what they can and can’t do, as well as the few ways they might be able to screw other players over*****.

Atmosfear is ridiculous and mechanically atrocious, but it is great fun. Who could fail to enjoy a game where a creepy hooded dude yells at you to a soundtrack of whistling wind and cracking thunder? It’s like being trapped in a Goosebumps novel for an hour. Play it drunk with friends who are at least old enough to remember the 90s, though aren’t necessarily board game aficionados. Then never play it again. Alternatively, play it with Briony’s dad so she doesn’t have to, man is she sick of trying to play that game between eating too many mince pies and drinking too much wine.

The winner of tonight’s board game was the spooky witch. The real loser was board games, and the self-respect of any board gamer who genuinely wants to play that game.

* Briony’s dad is actually a big fan of playing it as a family bonding experience at Christmas, which explains a lot.

**Seriously you have no idea how many times this game emphasizes that it should be played in a super-scary slightly darkened room. Yes, this does make it difficult to see what the fuck you’re doing.

***Frustratingly, there are in fact two dice provided with this game but you only seem to roll one at a time? But the game constantly refers to the singular die with the technically-correct-but-unclear ‘dice’, so you’re never quite sure how many you’re supposed to be rolling.

****His skin gets greener and his eyes get redder.

*****Much like Monopoly, there is only really one way; if they land on your property grave.

Bob took the photos on her mobile in a darkened room (as per instructions) so they are terrible. We apologise.

Skulls and Roses: The lesser known 80s band

August 30, 2015August 30, 2015Lizzles1 Comment

Brutus Rating: 2 knives in the skull out of 10. There aren’t really a variety of options for easy dickery to your opponents beyond the regular subterfuge.
Pairs well with: Pint of ale from a tankard.

The ratio of complexity of gameplay to complexity of strategy can be a good basic indicator for how good a game is. A lot of really good fun can be found in a game if it has some fairly basic steps and mechanics, and is fairly easy to learn, while also leaving room for a relatively more detailed, complex and developed strategy. Less fun can be had, sometimes, for a game that has a lot of detail in the play but not so much wriggle-room for thought-out plans for victory.

This isn’t meant to be a perfect recipe for board games, of course. Sometimes you want to just sit the heck down and let the board game adventure and some luck take you wherever you’re headed. Preferably to victory. Other times you want to get really deep into the nitty and gritty mechanics of a game and work for your delicious glory that way.

But the play-complexity-to-strategy-complexity formula can still be replicated in a lot of games, including some of the smaller and quicker ones. A good small game is often one that you pick up quickly, has maybe a limited amount of possible ‘moves’, but still lets you develop some excellent strategies for exactly how to play. One of these games is the topic of our review today!*

Everyone present have a skull? Check. You're ready! — Everyone present have a skull? Check. You’re ready!

Skulls is a great game for everyone. After all, everyone has a skull. It’s also pretty damn simple, but you get to develop sneakier and better tactics the more you play.

You’re a member of a biker gang. That’s right, time to whip out the old leather or denim jacket and… I’m not sure, start making motorbike noises and talk about how you miss the feel of the wind in your hair? Presumably that’s what bikers do. You’re competing to become what the rules call the supreme leader. Apparently, biker gangs are run just like North Korea. You learn something new every day!

Each player in Skulls gets a bunch of circular beer mats with your biker insignia on one side (Which gang are you in today? Panthers? Eagles? Snakes? Weird cow-skulls?) and three of them will have a rose on the other side, the fourth will have a skull. They also get a nice square beer mat with a skull on one side and rose on the other.

Once you’re done with the formalities of pretending to mistake some of the ‘cards’ for actual beer mats and getting yelled at by the person who owns the game, then you’re ready to begin.

It’s a short game, and it’s a game of bluff. Everyone takes turn placing cards down in front of them (insignia side up, or the bluff part won’t be very effective) and definitely remembering whether you’ve put down a rose or a skull. Eventually one person will decide that instead of putting down a new card they’ll ‘bid’ on how many circular beer mats they can turn over without finding a skull. The trick is, whoever wins the bid (and therefore actually has to attempt to do so) will have to start with their own beer mats first, and starting from the top. Getting it right will lead you halfway to victory (counted by flipping over your square beer mat) and the penalty for getting it wrong is a good mocking and removal of one of your four cards, making it more difficult for you to play. (Particularly if you lost four times… having no cards makes it very difficult to play indeed)

It's actually unclear whether it says 'panthers' or 'punthers' — It’s actually unclear whether it says ‘panthers’ or ‘punthers’

So what you DON’T want to do is forget that you put down a skull and then knob yourself over by bidding as high as possible. Unless you’re trying to lure everyone else into a false sense of security with your incompetence so that you can sweep them all away in the next few rounds. The brilliance of this game is that shit like that can actually happen, and maybe even work!

It’s all about trying to trick everyone into thinking you’ve got a rose when you’ve got a skull, and into thinking you’ve got a skull when you’ve got a rose. And this isn’t just done by plain old conversation: “Hey you should definitely pick my card. I’ve just put loads of roses down. OR HAVE I?” because, you know, that would be silly. It’s also bluffing through your actions. Bidding really high to convince people that you do have roses, just to have the bid snatched away from you at the last second (just as you’d planned!) so that the winner of the bid will pick your card, convinced that you wouldn’t have done that if you’d had a rose, only to fall down crying when you flip it over to reveal your cunning bluff. TAKE THAT, RICH! YOU NEVER SAW IT COMING! WHO’S YOUR DADDY?

It’s also a very reactive game. Because it fits in that part of the collection for small games, ones that you can fit between other games or when you’re busy, and ones that you can play anywhere because it doesn’t have many pieces, you’ll find yourself just intending to play a quick round of it before you start up the Battlestar Galactica or the Eldritch Horror and then realise, an hour later, you’re all still in the kitchen desperately trying to stop Sophie from getting a fourth victory in maybe six games.

“AHA! Well, Will clearly has a rose because he tried to encourage us to pick his cards”

“AHA! Rich definitely has a skull because he was pretending to deliberate, and there’s no way he would have actually been deliberating about bidding higher than five at this stage because that would be MADNESS, so he must have been pretending to deliberate to trick us into thinking that it would be an option for him and to trick us into thinking he has a rose!”**

“Just… never trust Sophie, guys! She’s going to have a skull, she always has a skull! She…. NOOO!”

The spurt of victories from Sophie was quite the surprise. We actually started to wonder if she’d been playing the really really long game, faking incompetence in previous games just to finally show her colours as a ruthless bastard in Skulls and Roses.

All in all, the developed bluffery from Skulls and Roses makes for a great small game, and ranks it pretty well in the ratio of complexity of play to complexity of strategy. Sophie may have played us all for fools but, as always, the real winner is board games.

And Lily the dog.

This review doubles as an educational piece about how difficult it is to take photos of dark dogs in light rooms.

*You’d bloody hope so wouldn’t you, or else what have we been rambling on about for the last few paragraphs?

** Take our word for it, this paragraph definitely makes sense to Skulls and Roses aficionados.

Credit goes to our photographer friend for, of course, the photos. Huzzah!

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.

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Pairs well with: A nice cup of tea to help you think. Traitor Rating: 1/10. It’s a co-op game, but accidents do happen…

Tell your friends:

Pairs well with: It doesn’t matter, just make sure there’s lots of it. Brutus rating: 2/10 daggers in the back. Very little of what you do matters to anyone else.

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:

Pairs well with: A nice cup of tea to help you think.
Traitor Rating: 1/10. It’s a co-op game, but accidents do happen…

Pairs well with: It doesn’t matter, just make sure there’s lots of it.
Brutus rating: 2/10 daggers in the back. Very little of what you do matters to anyone else.

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.