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

 

 

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

 

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.