The Giant Brain

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

Hello everyone,

If you are heading down to the wonderful UK Games Expo this coming weekend then be sure to drop by and say hi at Booth 17, the Indie Games booth. I’ll be there alongside Andrew Kenrick, Matt Machell and Eero Tuovinen, selling games, talking about games design and generally having a good time.

I will also be on a panel of other RPG designers, at 12am on the Saturday. Come along and ask any questions you like of myself and my fellow panellists and hopefully will be able to answer in a vaguely coherent fashion!

I’m running a game of Reel Adventures over the weekend, honestly I am going to release that this year, and I am hoping to get a playtest or two in as well. I’ll have the finished version of Action Movie with me and hopefully Nobel Intentions and Minions.

Hope to see some of you there.

All the best

Iain

Going to take a break, briefly, from talking about Nobel Intentions to mention a few other projects I am fiddling with. The last couple of playtests for Nobel Intentions have been ok, but it is still not there yet and I need to have a rethink about how the game works. Might end up sort of Othello-y, but more on that some other time.

I have been having quite a creative period of late and am currently working on the following:

Minions: A card game where you play the lowly minions in a dungeon trying to impress the boss. The idea is that the heroes are invading the dungeon and you have to try and be the most useful minion thus gaining a promotion. Had one playtest so far, that didn’t really work. I am having a problem at the moment with my designs where they fall apart a bit somewhere between the initial good idea, and actual execution. Nothing a little testing won’t fix.

Adventure: a working title. I really want to design a good adventure boardgame. Runebound doesn’t quite do it for me and Talisman doesn’t really interest me. This will be the first boardgame I have worked on so I am looking forward to the challenge. Also if anyone has any good ideas for the title, let me know. I like play on words!

Nobel Intentions: you know about this already.

I should have a couple of these with me at Games Expo in Birmingham where I will be on a stall with some of my fellow Collective Endeavour members.  I’ll post a news thing about that in the next couple of days.

Happy Gaming

Iain

‘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