‘The Giant Brain’ is a games company based in Edinburgh, Scotland and is dedicated to making entertaining, interesting and accessible games. Our products include the ‘Revenge of the B-Movie!’ line of card games, and the forthcoming role-playing game ‘Reel Adventures’.
If you have any queries regarding anything on the site, please head over here and I’ll do my best to get back to you quickly.
Happy gaming
Iain McAllister
Over the last couple of months I have been running a monthly meetup for some friends at the lovely Cumberland Bar in Edinburgh. The event has been such a success that I am now attempting to grow it through Twitter, Boardgamegeek etc. and I thought it was about time to post a little about it on the site, in the hope of getting other people to do something similar in their towns.
So why did I decide to do this rather than just have friends round to the flat? Well the reasons are two fold. Firstly every time I mentioned to one group of friends that I had recently been playing boardgames with another, there was puppy dog eyes and much lamenting of not being there. The pub can take a lot more people than my tiny flat! Secondly I am an advocate the benefits of gaming, and enthusiastic about it as a hobby. By playing in public I hope to grow interest in the hobby and will be looking to advertise the meetup to the public in the future.
I hope to post more advice on how to go about setting up such meetups as this one grows but for now I would say you should consider the following. Keep in mind this advice is in regards to a regular meetup rather than a convention sized event:
1) Grow slowly: Don’t be afraid to start it off with just friends to see what works for you.
2) Take games you want to play: don’t be a martyr and just organise, make sure you get a game yourself. Also if you are enthusiastic about those games you will be a better teacher and advocate for them.
3) Know the games you are taking: as you expand and invite people outside of your friends you may have to teach some games. It will help if you know people are coming along who can teach games as well.
4) Make sure your venue is appropriate for your audience: tables, lighting, facilities, location these are all important to everyone’s enjoyment of the meetup. For instance I expect to be expanding this to the public next time, in may, and so I checked with the pub that children are welcome in case we get any families. A little forward planning will help everything run smoothly.
That is all I have for now, but I’ll post more as I move the meetup into the public realm. Hope to see some of you on sunday.
Happy Gaming
Iain
PS: I’ll post new info. on Nobel Intentions soon, hopefully I’ll get in a couple of sessions soon.
So I’ve been trying to get my finger out with regards to development and design of games recently and I am starting to get a routine together that is allowing me to make time for this site again. To that end I am putting up a new page today called the Lab. This will be a place for me to describe the games I am working on and also put up free copies of those projects for you folks to Print & Play. I am hoping it will allow me to get some playtests going of forthcoming projects as well, as at times I find it tricky to find local groups to do that with.
So pop over to the lab and you will find the first game I am putting up for free called Kapow! It is in very early alpha, to the point where I haven’t even played it yet, though I hope to get it to the table tonight. If you do get a chance to play anything and feel like giving feedback just get in touch.
Game on.
Iain
One of the games I picked up for myself over Christmas was the new Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering, game ‘King of Tokyo’. This is a fantastic filler game with a beautiful graphic design and an elegant game mechanic.
In the Box
The cover art itself tells you all you need to know about the game, giant monsters battling out over Tokyo. Inside you get 8 large dice that feel nice and chunky, a deck of cards for the powers your monsters will gain and the things they will destroy to gain victory, a bunch of small green cubes to track a game resource called energy and a bunch of counters to track some of the powers.
However one of the best things about this game is the detail they have gone to, above and beyond what they needed to. Tokyo could have been easily not represented at all or only have been a card or two. Instead you get a lovely square board to put your monsters on and instead of flat counters you get a monster stand with a great illustration on thick cardboard of your chosen monster as well as a great little board to keep track of your health and victory points. Great stuff.
On the Table
The game itself is a blast to play and incredibly easy to pick up. Each player chooses a monster to represent them, doesn’t matter which one as they are all the same mechanics wise and sets about doing one of two things to win: be the first to 20 victory points or be the last monster standing.
Each player takes it in turn to throw the dice provided with the game, and then re-roll them once or twice if they want to. You can generate attack symbols to hurt all the monsters inside/ outside tokyo depending on where you are, health to regenerate, but only outside of tokyo, energy to buy cards with or combinations of numbers to generate victory points. Although the central mechanic is very random you always feel like you are making an important choice with what to keep and what to chuck which I really like.
If you choose to attack, and you are outside Tokyo, the monsters inside have the choice to yield, allowing them to escape the pressure of being King of the Hill. Upon entering Tokyo you get a victory point and if you are still there at the start of your turn you gain 2. This makes Tokyo a great way to gain points but a dangerous one and the decision about when to leave always feels interesting and tactical.
Alongside rolling the dice each turn you can spend energy to buy one of the three face up cards from the deck. These could be powers like ‘Tentacles’ or ‘It has a child!’ or things you destroy to generate victory points. The powers can really change the game and have the same excellent illustrations that the rest of the game has, really adding to the flavour and theme.
Conclusion
King of Tokyo is one of my favourite games at the moment and it gets to my table regularly. Its quick play time means that when a player is eliminated it doesn’t feel like a drag to watch the rest of the game especially when it is so colourful and each roll of the dice can turn the game around. This is a really great game, with a lot of love put into it and a great design, both art and game wise. Do yourself a favour and get yourself a copy.
Iain
Happy New Year everyone and I hope Santa was good to you.
I managed to get a few days off over Christmas and hosted the family for the usual food, booze and entertainments. It was lovely to see my brother as he is off in sunny Norway these days and I don’t get to spend time with him as often as I would like.
I picked up a few things in preperation for christmas, as well as getting a couple of new games under the tree:
Dixit (Bought)
Bought and played over christmas, and it seemed to go down well. A beautifully illustrated game of guessing how people round the table will interpret different words and sentences. A very elegant design accompanied by a fairy tale look. Wonderful.
King of Tokyo (Bought)
I am planning some more regular reviews, possibly with accompanying pictures, and this will be my first as it is my current favourite amongst my collection. For now let me give you a quick overview: you are a big monster, you want to be King of Tokyo, the end. That was easy. A push your luck dice mechanic accompanied by a wonderful design aesthetic makes this one of my go to games at the moment.
Nightfall: Martial Law (Present)
A present under the tree from the in-laws, and one I hope to get to the table soon. For those of you unfamiliar with this sub-genre of our hobby, Nightfall is one of the better Deck-building games out there with a distinctly ‘World of Darkness’ feel to it. Martial Law adds a bunch of new options, and I really would like to get some more of the tasty looking promo cards out there. Once I give it a spin I’ll do a longer review.
Summoner Wars (Present)
I have been itching to add a good two player game to my collection and this could be it. Basically you play as a powerful summoner in a given faction, using defeated enemies to summon new units and take out the opposing summoner. I have only played once but the two factions we played with felt very different making me think it will take a little while to get my head round this one. The Master Set is what I received from my brother, and it is a fine looking product with space for other faction decks should you want to collect them. I’m looking forward to trying out the deck building aspect of the game.
Blood Bowl Team Manager (Bought)
Only gotten this to the table twice so far but it has been a blast to play. FFG have done a good job of capturing the feel of the Blood Bowl board game whilst creating a unique experience all of its own. Not too sure how tactically deep it is as yet but it is a hell of a lot of fun. More indepth review of this one on the way as well.
Hope Santa was good to everyone, and hopefully next year I’ll have a few new games released to help you out with presents under the tree.
Happy gaming
Iain
Hello everyone,
Hope you are all well and enjoying the wealth of new games coming out from Essen and Gencon. Some very tasty looking things on the horizon and I’ll post about them should I pick any up. The last couple of months have seen me journey to Norway, Ireland then back to Scotland and play a bunch of games that I can recommend to readers of this site.
7 wonders
One of the hits of last year, I finally picked up a copy in Norway. Really good fun, beautifully presented game with enough to think about during play to keep you constantly on your toes. Not the deepest game in the world, but a good family game which I am looking forward to playing more over Christmas.
Mansions of Madness
Probably the best game that FFG has produced in sometime. You all play investigators arriving at a spooky mansion, but the reason you are there can change with each scenario. There are 5 scenarios, each with 3 possible outcomes so every time you play the game, even if you have played that scenario before, you can never be entirely sure how things will play out.
The game seems well balanced allowing the Keeper, the person running the scenario, to really lay into the investigators without fear of it being imbalanced. If you are a fan of the horror genre and fancy a quick playing boardgame that justifies the large number of components it comes with, I suggest checking it out.
Dreadfleet
I picked myself up a copy of the latest boxed game from GW and I am really happy with my purchase. The system relies heavily on the random but is a lot of fun and comes with some beautiful miniatures and a really lovely sea mat. I may look into picking up some other naval games just to use it.
Other Games..
I am still running old school Dungeons & Dragons and really enjoying it. I am going to work on some articles about what my group have gotten from the experience, it has been an interesting game to run.
In development news at the moment, I am planning to release a PDF version of Revenge of the B-Movie and am looking forward to getting some more playtests of Nobel Intentions in, though that might not be for another month or so as my work takes up a lot of my time in November/ December.
I hope you are all well, and wish you happy gaming.
Iain
Still no new test of Nobel Intentions I’m afraid, but I have been fiddling around with some other ideas and playing some interesting games.
Old School D&D
I picked up a copy of ‘Swords & Wizardry’ complete at Games Expo and my weekly gaming group have been enjoying delving into some old school dungeons. We have been running in a way that allows for quite a lot of player input. For instance the first time the players came across elves I asked ‘What are elves like?” and their responses are fed back in to the gameworld.
The dungeons I am running are also totally randomly generated, using the AD&D GMs guide no less, which means there is a level of discovery in play for me as well as the players. I am finding this hugely enjoyable the characters are now setting out into the wilderness bound for some city adventures!
Survive
A fantastic reprint of an older game, survive is great fun forcing your hand to screw over other players as you try and race your own meeples away from an ever shrinking Atlantis. It hasn’t gone over with my entire group, but I think enough of them like it that it will be seeing its way to the table.
Death Angel
The recent expansions to this fantastic cooperative game, have seen it hit the table a couple of times over the last month. FFG are doing POD expansions for some of their range, allowing them to do smaller expansions, that are pretty reasonably priced.
The expansions in this case give you 2 new teams and a bunch of new mission possibilities. We made it through the first time, but got eaten to bits the second time through. I don’t think I have written a review of this yet, too lazy to check at the moment. I’ll try and chuck one up soon as I personally think it is the best coop game out there at the moment and that it should be in every gamers collection.
Smallworld
My wife and I sat down to a two player game of Smallworld when the flat was being torn apart by electricians. We have a nice new kitchen! Anyway, where was I. Ah yes, Smallworld. Excellent game for which I have every expansion, and one my wife doesn’t mind playing with me. We had good fun trying out some of the new combinations the expanded game provides, and am hoping to get a larger game in sometime soon. If anyone has played the Underground version of the game let me know if it is worth picking up.
and the other projects
Whilst I await a chance to get Nobel Intentions another shot I am working on a card game called ‘Eyes in the Dark’ about being chased by large monsters, toying with Police Procedural games and trying to find the time to lay out Reel Adventures. Hoping to get it all laid out for the end of October.
Happy gaming
Iain
Well I haven’t had the chance to get a playtest of the new version of Nobel Intentions yet, but I have been playing some new games. Last night I played the intro scenario of Incursion, a Space Hulk type game with an evil-science-Nazis vs. Giant Robot Americans theme.
In the Box
Although Grindhouse games do a miniatures range for the game, you get everything you need to play in the box. Mine was a limited edition one so it came with 3 minis, 1 for a nazi character and 2 of her sturmzombie minions. Nice sculpting and I look forward to painting them.
The rest of the box consists of a nice thick 2 sided board, a rulebook, rules summary sheet, cards and a bunch of punch out counters. Everything was nice quality but the tokens could have done with being a little easier to get out of their sheets.
The rulebook itself I found to be poorly laid out, with some flipping back and forth to reference rules. That said my opponent and I were set up and playing within about 20 mins so that is not bad. I understand their may be some translation issues with the game as well, as I believe Grindhouse are based in Sweden. All in all its not hard to understand, but some better layout would just make things flow a bit better.
Their are two factions in the game the American Lucky Seventh, who are essentially dudes in big armour with big guns, and the German SWD who are evil nazi scientists, think Hellboy and you wont be far wrong. You get loads of plastic stands, and nice thick cardboard standees to represent your troops. We did notice some printing errors on some of the American tokens, they would say troop 1 on the front, but 2 on the back, but this is a minor niggle.
Play
To get going you choose a scenario, in this case a simple ‘Get the Americans across the board safely’ mission. You then get a number of points to buy troops, but in the case of the intro scenario there is no choice what to pick with the troops in the basic set: there is an expansion available called Snafu. So I had 2 guys in big suits of armour and my opponent started with 2 sturmzombies. That may not sound like a lot of zombies but they have a special rule where more of them appear each turn, it soon becomes a LOT of zombies! To keep track of the troops and their abilities their are faction cards that summarise all the relevant information.
At the start of each turn, the maintenance phase, you get a number of command points (CP) based on the size of the forces for the scenario. These CP are used to bid for who goes first, give more actions to your troops and also cancel battle cards. Battle cards are also drawn during the maintenance phase, and they can be one off events or permanent effects, which are mostly played on troops.
Once the maintenance phase is out of the way, you get to the action. When a player takes their turn they activate each of their troops in turn spending the Action Points(AP) that the model has. AP is used to move, shoot, hand to hand etc. In addition troops can have CP spent on them to perform extra actions. Combat is a very simple matter of rolling a number of d6 and comparing each one to a number on the target. Each dice that equals or exceeds the target number scores a hit and each model can only take a certain number of hits.
One last rule thing which I found very interesting. If a troop with a ranged weapon ends its turn without being able to make Line of Sight to an enemy it automatically enters reactive fire. This made for some very interesting play as you balance shooting the last zombie you can see so you can shoot the rest you know are coming, with moving forward to try and complete the scenario. Very nice rule.
Conclusion
We found the game to move fast and play well. There are some interesting tactical choices to make without bogging the game down in them and the ability to alter the troop selection for each mission will give the game a high level of replayability. The fact that the game is complete out of the box is absolutely fantastic, though I think I will be picking up some of the miniatures as I rather like them.
Thoroughly recommended.
Happy gaming
Iain
One of the problems I have had in the previous versions of Nobel Intentions stems from the grid that is made during the game. The table starts blank, or with one card in play, and the inventions are then built up from that position. As the inventions are completed they are removed from the table and the grid collpases. Bad if I want positional play to have a meaning.
So, back to the drawing board, sort of. I am keeping the idea of the grid but now it is built at the start. Each player will be dealt cards to form the grid and then play those cards out face down. The play of the game will come from turning those cards over, thus activating their in grid abilites that will help the player move their research tokens about. The cards will also have an ‘invented’ ability that will activate when players complete an invention with some of the cards face down, thus giving a risk/reward mechanic to making inventions quickly.
The main play will come from moving ‘research tokens’ around with some Othello-esque mechanics for stealing each others inventions. I should get to playtest this version this week and I am hoping it will solve the issues I have been having with this particular games development.
Happy Gaming
Iain
I picked up Ascending Empires at UK games expo recently after reading lots of positive press on the geek, ignoring the board issues reported which I’ll come back to.
Opening the Box
I was immediately impressed by the game on opening the box. Instructions on top as to how to put everything together, two sticker sheets only one of which is used, and plenty of bags to hold all the components in. The bottom of the box will neatly hold all the planet discs and has plenty of space for the individual player tokens needed to play the game.
Components
The wooden discs that come with the game are of good quality though I did find one that was a little wonky. I can’t see this really affecting gameplay in any significant way. I have read a couple of reports of people having issues with different patterning on the discs, but I didn’t find anything standing out in play, I was too busy considering my next move!
There are a bunch of wooden tokens representing cities, colonies and research stations and though it is fairly intuitive which one is which, there is nothing in the rulebook explaining that. A small thing, but an odd omission.
4 player mats are well laid out with a good summary of the main actions a player can take, the tech trees and the victory points you gain from different situations at the end of the game. These mats are made from thick cardboard and feel solid.
Now the board. There have been many reporting problems putting the board together so I took my time putting it together. The central tile shows where to put the 4 edge pieces but annoyingly not the corners. If you look at the patterns on the tiles, you can tell where the corners should go but it seems odd to not have the alpha, beta, delta and gamma symbols somewhere on the corner pieces. The pieces didn’t seem to quite fit together on one corner so I did have to do some sanding. The board in play looks really good, and I have no problems with it now I know which way round everything goes.
Play
Setup involves sorting out the planets into 4 different piles, the number of each of the four planet types present in each quadrant being determined by the number of players. These 4 piles are then shuffled face down and place in the holes in the board. Each player starts out with a homeworld on the board, a couple of starships in orbit and 6 troops in their supply. Troops are your basic currency in the game and you will find yourself using them to establish colonies, cities and research station over the course of the game.
One thing we really loved is how little downtime there is in the game. Each turn every player takes a single action. That action could be Move, allowing them to launch ships from a planet, land on a planet or flick, yes flick, your way round the board. The flicking we found to be great fun, and allowed for amusing mistakes as we all get used to it but also applause and congratulations at pulling off some excellent shots. After a move action you check for attacks against planets and ships in range of your vessels, using the neat little range ruler provided. The combat system is simple, effective and quick to resolve. It is also non-random which is nice.
Other options on your turn including building an item, colony, city or research station on a planet, developing tech or recruiting troops to planets you occupy. Technology comes in four different colours with four levels each, and research stations are the only ways to develop those technologies. Troops and ships are recruited from your supply, but you can add more to your supply by building cities or by reaching certain levels of tech.
Now onto how you win! At the start of the game you set aside a number of Victory Point (VP) tokens depending on the number of players. Over the course of the game you gain victory points for attacking opposing ships, planets and for being the first to develop each level of tech. The technologies you develop over the course of the game allow for other ways to gain VPs as well, as well as giving you more movement, higher recruitment rates and the awesome Battleship!
When the last victory point is taken from the pile, each player gets one more turn and then the game ends. Players get victory points at the end for occupying planets, or asteroids if there are less than 4 players, building colonies, cities and having cities in 3 or 4 different quadrants of the board. The player with the most VPs at the end of the game wins!
Conclusion
Ascending Empires is a fun, quick to learn empire building game, with a fantastic movement mechanic that allows for highs and lows without the randomness of dice. The low downtime between turns is a godsend, and we found very little analysis paralysis happening.
The rulebook is a little unclear in places and I have put together a FAQ gathering all the questions together that have been asked on these forums. There is also one rule missing all together about what happens when a ship flips on its side but stays on the board. This has been answered by the designer but considering flicking is a major component of the game, the fact this rule has been missed out kind of annoyed me.
I’m looking forward to playing the game more, and I think it will definitely find its way to the table on a regular occasion.
Well Games Expo was as good fun as ever and it was great to meet some B-Movie fans and general indie games enthusiasts over the course of the con.
For the majority of the con I was on the Indie games booth but I also managed to get in a game of Reel Adventures. It was called ‘On her Majesty’s shrunken service’ and was a James Bond style story where one of the protagonists was only a few inches tall. It was a really fun game and I’ll try to write it up soon.
Of course no con is complete without a few purchases and I picked up Survive: Escape from Atlantis, Ascending Empires and some old school gaming in the form of Swords and Wizadry and Vornheim. Vornheim especially is worth a look, a beautifully produced handbook for running city adventures. The one other product I saw that I really want is Operation:Fallen Reich. An exquisite production with a crazy board game attached to it that is used for character creation. May see about picking this up later in the year.
It was really nice to be back at Games Expo this year and to meet Eero and Mark from Arkenstone. Also good to catch up with Andrew and Matt, whose imprints you can find links to under our Spotlight tab.
The expo reignited my enthusiasm for roleplaying which had been waning a bit recently, and I am hoping to back next year with a few new products including Action Movie, Reel Adventures and Nobel Intentions, which I think I fixed on the way back up from Birmingham.
All the best
Iain