2513: Blood Rage

My regular gaming friends and I tried an interesting new tabletop game this evening: Blood Rage. It’s a game themed around Norse mythology with a particular focus on Ragnarok, and there’s a lot to like about it.

Each player takes on the role of a particular faction. Each of these factions start out the same, but there are various means to upgrade them over the course of the game, mostly through the hand of cards you draft at the start of each of the game’s three phases. By specialising your clan in a particular way, you can take aim for big points at the end of the game, and the interesting thing is that martial dominance is not the only way to be successful at the game.

A big part of the mythology behind the game is the idea of attaining glory through various means. You don’t have to win a battle to attain glory — though it often helps — so long as the battle itself was suitably spectacular. It’s eminently possible to set up your hand of cards and your clan’s upgrades in such a manner as to benefit you more to lose battles than to win them — though there’s something of a tradeoff here in that losing battles may end up allowing an opponent uncontested access to a useful area of the board.

There’s clearly a lot of scope for building up your forces in various ways, and indeed attempting to get as powerful as possible is one way to victory. But there are a lot of interesting balancing factors in play, too, most notably the finite resource of “Rage” that you have to expend on your various actions in each phase. Once you run out of rage, you are unable to take any more actions in that phase — not even free ones — aside from responding to the “call to battle” that transpires when a player attempts to pillage a region for its upgrade token.

There are, however, various means of manipulating the game to your advantage. One particularly fun card I acquired early on adds no strength whatsoever to your forces in combat, but allows you to steal a rage point off the winning player if you lose the battle. Other cards allowed you to gain points when your units were destroyed, or when you reclaim them from “Valhalla” at the end of each phase. There’s also a significant point bonus for any units you have in an area destroyed during the Ragnarok phase at the end of each of the game’s three stages.

We didn’t finish a complete game this evening, but we got most of the way through one, and figured out enough to understand how it all works. It seems like a really cool game that I’m looking forward to trying again at some point — and it has some absolutely gorgeous miniatures included for both the various factions and the recruitable monsters you can add to your forces through the upgrade mechanics.

If you’re looking for a fun, interesting and pretty varied game with a lot of interaction between players — and rules that allow a good degree of depth without being overly complex — Blood Rage is well worth checking out. Hopefully we’ll have the chance to play it some more in the new year.

2394: The Witcher Adventure Game

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Gave The Witcher Adventure Game board game a try today with the assistance of Andie; she wasn’t a huge fan, but it’s not really her kind of game. She stuck it out to the end, though, so I was able to get a good sense of how the whole game works. And I liked the game quite a bit.

The Witcher Adventure Game eschews the “easy” route the game could have taken by not being a reskin of Descent; rather than being a dungeon crawler, it’s presented at a more “macro” level as Geralt the eponymous witcher, Triss the sorceress, Dandelion the bard and Yarpen the, um, dwarf explore the Continent from Novigrad to Rivia, taking on quests, battling monsters and dealing with Foul Fates that infest the regions.

At its core, The Witcher Adventure Game is about resource management. Most quests require that you have a certain combination of “proof” tokens to complete them, and these are acquired by collecting “lead” tokens of the same colour in varying quantities according to which character you are playing. Geralt, for example, being a combat-inclined character, has a much easier job acquiring combat proof tokens, needing only 3 leads to trade in for one, whereas Triss, conversely, is better at acquiring magic, Dandelion at diplomacy, and so forth.

The basic flow of the game, then, goes: get quest, acquire lead tokens, exchange lead tokens for proof tokens, go to quest location, complete quest. Repeat twice more to end the game, at which point whoever has the most victory points wins.

It is, naturally, a bit more complicated than that thanks to the various obstacles that get in your way. Many quests — particularly if you’re playing Geralt — involve combat, though you can still complete the quest even if you don’t “win” the combat. And each main quest card also carries a number of sidequests that are optional, but worth a number of extra points each. There’s also a “support” quest where you can recruit the assistance of one of your opponents; if they accept, they get 6 points in exchange for some of their resources, while you also get 3.

Progression through the game is largely driven by each character’s Development deck of cards. As one of the two actions you can take in a turn, you can draw two of these cards and keep one as an ability that you can then use from that point on when appropriate. In Geralt’s case, his Development cards include potions and Signs, the witchers’ take on magic spells. The early game, it seems, is about acquiring a good spread of these in order to be able to deal with difficult situations you might encounter later on.

The cards are nicely thematic. Not only do many of them have enjoyable flavour text on them, but they work how you might expect if you’ve played the video games. Geralt’s card for the Quen sign, for example — which, in the video games, envelops him in a magical shield for a short period — allows him to exchange dice rolls with the Sign symbol for defensive capabilities. Also, much like the first Witcher video game in particular, Geralt must brew his potions in advance to be able to use them, and must quaff them before starting combat rather than chugging away mid-battle. This makes for some interesting decisions to make, particularly if you know you’re going to be dealing with multiple threats.

The overall way the game mechanics work seems to fit nicely with the themes and feel of The Witcher as a whole, too. As a bard, Dandelion is able to enjoy a steady income of gold coins, for example, while Geralt often wanders around penniless, having to rely on other resources to get by. The Investigation cards you can draw as one of your actions often incorporate characters and groups from the video games and source novels, too; expect to be harassed by Nilfgaardians and manipulated by Dijkstra before the game is over.

After one game, it’s hard to judge the overall difficulty of the game, but the mechanics were certainly pretty straightforward to pick up and apply. The challenge of the game, I feel — particularly with more than two players — will be to determine how best to use your limited actions to maximise the amount of points you’re able to attain, and how to balance powering up your character with actually making progress towards the end of the game and that all-important final score.

I’m keen to give it a go with the full complement of four people; the varying abilities of the four characters look set to make things very interesting indeed, and if nothing else the game creates an enjoyable and engaging emergent narrative as you play through a combination of the choices you make and the flavour text on the cards.

There’s no bonking though, to my knowledge.

2373: Sheriff of Nottingham

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My brother bought me a board game for my birthday known as Sheriff of Nottingham, and it hit the table for the second time this evening. I was particularly keen to see my friends Tim and James compete against each other in it, because they’re both very good at arguing (they’re both lawyers) and both often get rather competitive — and Sheriff of Nottingham is a game very much designed for argumentative, competitive players.

The mechanics are pretty simple. By the end of the game, it’s your aim to score as many points as possible through a combination of the cash you have on hand and the value of the goods you managed to successfully bring to market. To achieve this, you play through five phases several times.

First up, you look at your hand of six cards, ditch up to five of them and draw replacements from either or both of the two face-up discard piles (which have a small initial stock on them) and the central blind draw pile.

Once you’ve done this, you put up to five cards in your “merchant bag”, a lovely little prop with a pop fastener, just big enough to hide the cards you choose.

Next up, each player declares to the Sheriff player (which rotates each turn) what they’re supposedly bringing to market in their bag. You can (and often probably should) lie about this, because contraband items are worth significantly more points, and there are also big end-game bonuses available for whoever has the most of each of the four “legal” goods, so it pays not to telegraph your intentions to your opponents too early.

Then comes the Sheriff’s time to play, since he hasn’t participated in the previous phases. At this point, he has the choice of whether to inspect each player’s bag or let them through. If he inspects the bag and discovers its contents are not what the player said they were, the offending goods get seized and discarded, and the guilty player must pay the Sheriff a fine. If, however, the inspects the bag and discovers the player was telling the truth, the Sheriff must pay the innocent player compensation for the value of all the legitimate goods in the bag. In order to determine the best course of action, the interaction at this point is completely freeform: the Sheriff can threaten players (within reason!) while players may offer the Sheriff bribes of money, goods or even favours to let them pass without incident.

Once all the merchant players have been inspected or let through, they lay down the cards they were able to keep — legitimate goods face-up, contraband face-down — and the Sheriff role passes to the next player. This then continues until everyone has been the Sheriff twice, at which point the winner is the person with the highest total points, which consist of the points on the cards they have on the table, plus the number of gold coins they have, plus bonuses for having the most or second most of each of the four legitimate types of goods. (There are no bonuses for having the most contraband, but some contraband counts as multiple legitimate goods when calculating these bonuses.)

It’s a really interesting game. It’s simple and quite quick to play, but the interaction element makes it rather fascinating — though at the same time also rather dependent on having a group who are capable of negotiating and dealing with one another rather than just not really knowing quite what to offer or threaten with.

It’s essentially a game about lying — either getting away with lying, or making other people believe that you’re lying when you’re actually telling the truth. After two games, I think we’re still learning the intricacies of appropriate strategies, but it’s been a lot of fun so far, and an eminently good fit for our gaming group as a whole.

2367: Return to the House on the Hill

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We played another round of the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill last night. I’ve grown to really like this game over time — its basic mechanics are simple and straightforward, yet the heavy degree of randomisation with every game means that the experience is subtly different each and every time you play.

I won’t give specific details as unlike many board games, it is absolutely possible to “spoil” Betrayal at House on the Hill. For the unfamiliar, the basic flow of gameplay is split into two distinct sections: a cooperative initial section where everyone explores the creepy old house independently, generating its layout as they explore, followed by the “Haunt”, at which point one or more players are revealed to be a traitor (or not revealed, in some cases!) and given their own objectives to complete that are kept secret from the remaining “good” players. Which of the Haunts you take on in a session is determined by the combination of the room you were in when the Haunt was triggered, and the item you picked up that triggered the Haunt. The combination of these factors is sufficiently random that across several games, I’m yet to play the same scenario twice.

And those scenarios are enjoyably different from one another. In some cases, the traitorous player remains as a figure on the board, moving around and able to use the abilities and items they accumulated during the initial exploration phase. In others, the traitor’s character is removed from the board for one reason or another — perhaps they were killed, perhaps they became an evil spirit, perhaps they were never really there in the first place — and the traitor player instead takes on the role of an “overseer”, controlling all the monsters in the house and making use of special abilities to thwart the attempts of the players to fulfil their objective. Said objective usually involves getting the fuck out of the house that is suddenly trying to kill them, but there are often other things that they need to do first.

The mechanic I particularly like is the use of RPG-style “ability checks” to complete various actions. The way these work is simple: you look at your character’s current value for the stat in question, then roll that number of dice. The dice in Betrayal at House on the Hill are special six-sided ones that only have faces with one or two spots on, as well as a few with nothing at all on. To succeed in your task, you have to roll equal to or over a given number. For example, for a Knowledge 6+ check, you roll the number of dice for your character’s Knowledge stat, and must score 6 or more to successfully complete the task. In some cases — usually items or events — there are variable results according to the score you achieve, with zero normally meaning something horrendous happens. A critical failure, if you will.

The game is strongly thematic, but not at the expense of mechanical elegance. The exploration mechanic works well and produces interesting randomised board layouts each and every time you play, and the various items, events and traps you stumble across in the process make things interesting by perhaps adding shortcuts or hazards to contend with as you explore or run away screaming from a murderous evil thing.

Best of all, it plays pretty quickly — a game takes about an hour or so, meaning our gaming group can absolutely fit a game of it in on a weeknight before people start flagging (or, more frequently, need to get to bed before going to work the following day). I’m hoping it hits the table a bit more often from now on.

2323: Gateway Games

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There’s a good piece in the latest newsletter from Glixel, the upcoming new website that my brother’s working on in collaboration with the folks at Rolling Stone. The article focuses on Blizzard’s approach to game design, and how they rarely do anything completely new, and instead take an established formula that is often regarded as impenetrably complex or difficult to get into (especially once a community has been established) and make it accessible to the masses.

This isn’t a matter of “dumbing down”, though. No, it’s rather intelligent game design: it strips out the complicated things that more “hardcore” games have in them as a means for players to show their skills, and instead focuses on the core experience, creating an “easy to learn, hard to master” kind of situation.

The most recent example of this is, of course, Overwatch, which takes the basic formula set in something like Team Fortress 2, strips out all the complicated bits that have been bolted on to that game over the years, and makes an enjoyably easy to get into but tactically rich multiplayer shooter that pretty much anyone can enjoy. But Blizzard’s past work fits this mould, too, with perhaps their most famous work being World of Warcraft, which successfully made massively multiplayer online RPGs — traditionally not particularly user-friendly experiences — accessible and enjoyable to the masses.

It’s not just Blizzard that does this, of course. There’s great value in producing solid “gateway games” to particular genres, as they provide a means for people to learn about potentially new favourite styles of game without getting bogged down in complicated rulesets and techniques. Hopping genres from multiplayer shooters to dungeon crawler RPGs, Experience Inc’s Demon Gaze provided an excellent jumping-on point for me to learn how these traditionally challenging, complex games worked, and built up my confidence to tackle the significantly more complicated, difficult and long Dungeon Travelers 2. Elsewhere, Codemasters’ GRID series strikes an excellent balance between arcade-style handling and the greater realism of more “sim”-like racing games such as Gran Turismo and the early Forza games. Cave’s Deathsmiles is a good introduction to bullet hell shooters. Dead or Alive 5 is a good game to learn about one-on-one fighting games, particularly with its excellent tutorials and practice modes.

Board games do this, too. Some of the most popular and well-respected board games out there are “gateway games” to more complex experiences. Ticket to Ride, for example, teaches players about dice-free mechanics, set collecting and strategic unit placement without overcomplicating things with unnecessary rules. The Settlers of Catan is a great introduction to “building” games where you have to manage resources in order to construct various things. And deckbuilding games like Ascension and Star Realms can lead naturally into more customisable card games such as Android: Netrunner, Magic: The Gathering and suchlike.

Some people never move beyond these gateway experiences, and that’s absolutely fine. To be perfectly honest, I think I’m most comfortable with the simpler end of the spectrum when it comes to board games in particular, and I’m definitely digging the simplicity of Overwatch, as recent posts have doubtless made clear. What’s important about these experiences, though, is that they’re inclusive, allowing more people to enjoy hobbies traditionally thought as complex and difficult to get into than ever before. And having more people to play with is pretty much always a very good thing indeed.

2308: An Open Letter to @wilw About Games as a Lifeline, “Male Tears” and Inexplicable Blocks

Hi Wil,

You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Apparently I’ve done something to offend you in the past, though, because you have me blocked on Twitter. I don’t know why and I don’t know when this happened because as far as I know, we’ve had no direct interaction on any occasion ever, but I will apologise for whatever it was anyway. I will also express my sincere disappointment that someone I used to look up to as a bastion of what modern nerd culture should aspire to feels somehow threatened or upset with something I’ve done in the past — threatened or upset enough to simply cut me off from the prospect of ever interacting with him.

I was an avid viewer of many of the Geek and Sundry videos when it first launched — particularly Tabletop, which introduced my friends and I to a number of board games that are still in our regular rotation. Tabletop was an excellent show that gave a good flavour of how the various games played — even if there were occasional bits of fuzzing over the rules in the name of keeping things snappy! — as well as providing a great opportunity for some of the most entertaining, fun people in geek culture to come together and have a good time. A good time that was infectious — so enjoyable was the atmosphere on Tabletop that it felt like the audience was right there with you all, sitting around the game table, rooting for your favourite player to win and commiserating with you when you inevitably came lost. (As the resident person in our tabletop gaming group who perpetually comes last in pretty much everything, I could relate to your position quite a bit.)

On a more serious note, nerd culture in general is something that I’ve talked a lot in the past about giving me a lifeline when I needed it. In the case of video games, they’ve provided a constant and much-needed centre of stability in a life that has often been chaotic and beyond my control and understanding; in the case of tabletop gaming, they provide one of the few means of face-to-face social interaction in which I feel completely comfortable, whether it’s with close friends or, as it was for me this Friday evening just gone, complete strangers. I think it’s the fact that interactions over a tabletop game are, for the most part, clearly structured: it’s why I gravitate towards games with clear rules, turn structures and player roles as well as those with strong themes that include flavour text I can read out dramatically to our group. Conversely, those games that require a certain degree of negotiation or freeform interaction are those I feel less comfortable with, since I’m sometimes not quite sure what I’m “supposed” to say.

But all that’s by the by; it’s just a bit of context of who I am. Needless to say, games of both the video and tabletop variety are extremely important to me; as you said in your keynote speech at PAX East in 2010, “some of the happiest days of our lives would not exist without games and gaming. Games are important. Games matter.” I agree entirely, and when I took a risk, flying from the UK to Boston, MA for that PAX East — my first time attending such an event, and only, I think, the second time I’d taken a solo trans-Atlantic flight — I found somewhere that I really felt like I belonged. My life was, at that point, a bit of a mess: my marriage was falling apart — my wife at the time would go on to leave me shortly after I returned from Boston — and I didn’t have a reliable source of income. Games gave me a sense of being grounded; somewhere to retreat to when I couldn’t face the terror that everyday life at the time confronted me with. Games gave me common ground with which I could interact with other people; games gave me something to talk about, something that I could call “mine”.

That time in my life was turbulent. I’ve had ups and downs since then, and as I type this I’m very much in a “down”. Over the years since 2010, I’ve come to recognise the importance of acknowledging one’s emotions, the causes of these emotions and the ways to deal with them. I’m not afraid to cry as I once was back in high school; as someone who sometimes has difficulty expressing exactly what he wants to say verbally, there are times when bursting into tears says more than words ever can; there are others when the act of opening those floodgates allows the repressed emotions to be released in a more controlled manner once you’ve calmed down a bit, letting you communicate what’s really bothering you after the storm has subsided. Crying is important. Crying matters.

Which is why this image you posted on Twitter bothers me so much:

For anyone reading this letter who doesn’t already know, the expression “male tears” is usually used by the more toxic side of online activism as a means of demonising men — usually straight, white men — when they wish to express themselves. It’s largely brought out during arguments between the more militant side of feminism and those — usually, but not exclusively, men — who are tired of all the sociopolitically charged fighting that takes place every day on the Internet, particularly those who fight back somewhat aggressively with foul language, threats and exhortations for people to kill themselves. The “joke”, such as it is, is that all this unpleasantness just bounces off the noble “progressive” types — referred to disparagingly by their critics as “Social Justice Warriors” or “SJWs” for short, an epithet which these people flip-flop between absolutely hating and trying desperately to reclaim in the same way black culture has largely reappropriated “nigga” for itself — and is just interpreted as straight, white men crying about something not going their way for once; the fact that “male tears” is written on a mug allows the “progressive” activist the opportunity to drink from it, suggesting that they relish the opportunity to feed on the tears of their enemies.

Pretty unpleasant however you look at it, and while the original intention may not have been to reinforce traditional ideals of what these same people call “toxic masculinity” — stereotypes such as “big boys don’t cry” and “be a man for once” — I can’t help but look at it that way. Speaking as a (straight, white) man who does cry, isn’t ashamed of the fact that he cries and, in fact, has cried quite a bit over the last few months due to his own life situation and the suffering of the person he loves most dearly in the world: to see the idea of “male tears” used so gleefully and indiscriminately as a means of oneupmanship, of proving one’s “progressiveness” feels grossly distasteful and insensitive. To have it proudly promoted by someone I once looked up to as almost an idol; someone I thought I could aspire to follow in the footsteps of; someone who proved that a person with my interests could find success and a place for themselves in the world? That just feels like a stab in the back, with a few good twists for good measure.

I don’t deserve to feel like that, and I’m pretty certain I’m not the only person who feels this way. Some may express their disappointment and upset with this more eloquently or more aggressively than others, but however they choose to register their discontent and however much or little I agree with their methods of expressing it, I understand it completely. As someone who, now 35 years of age, was often ostracised and ridiculed for his interests and hobbies in his youth, was subsequently delighted when geek culture started to become fashionable over the course of the last decade and most recently has noted with a growing sense of discomfort that the things he finds most relatable, most important to him are those that are getting relentlessly torn down in the name of being “progressive”? It hurts. A lot.

I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t hurt anyone. I just want to be left alone to enjoy the things I enjoy with friends who also enjoy those things, and likewise to leave those who are interested in different things to do what they enjoy. I don’t care about this perpetually raging culture war that has all but destroyed meaningful online discourse around video games in particular over the last five or six years, and put a serious strain on a number of friendships. I don’t believe in a “one size fits all” approach to inclusivity and diversity, which is what many “progressive” types seem to argue for; I instead subscribe to a “many sizes fit many” ethos, which makes for a more vibrant, interesting and cross-pollinating culture in the long-term. And yet somehow, at some point, I’ve been branded with a scarlet letter, thrown in the pit with all the other social rejects. I’ve also been called a paedophile, a pervert, a misogynist and plenty of other things besides. My crime? I like Japanese video games with pretty girls in, and frequently argue against the misrepresentation of these games as soft porn in the mainstream press by those who won’t take the time to engage with them.

Frankly, the whole situation makes me want to cry, but now I feel I shouldn’t, because it will just, apparently, give you some sort of satisfaction. And that, to be honest, seems like the very inverse of your own credo, your own Wheaton’s Law, of “Don’t be a dick!”

You almost certainly won’t read this, Wil, because having blocked me on Twitter I’m not sure there’s any way you’ll see it outside of someone you haven’t blocked directly sharing it with you, and I don’t see that happening. But I wanted to post it anyway; even if you don’t read it, hopefully it will bring some sense of comfort to those who feel the same way I do about all this; put some feelings into words; provide a sense of solidarity.

As you argued in your speech, this feeling of solidarity, of belonging, is extremely important. We should all strive to help each other feel like we belong doing the things we love with the people we love in the places we love. With photos like the one posted above, you deliberately block off people from feeling like they can engage with this part of culture they adore, and people they might well otherwise get on with. And whether or not you believe that “male tears” only applies to men who don’t know how to behave themselves politely and appropriately, know that it can — and will, and has — been interpreted in a way that just comes across as exclusive, combative and gatekeeping: the exact opposite of what you yourself argue we should aim for.

This whole situation needs to stop, as soon as possible. I hate it. Everyone else I know hates it. Can’t we all just get around a gaming table and settle this the old-fashioned way: with dice, cards and chits — maybe even some fancy miniatures?

Thank you for your time, and thanks for reading, whether you’re Wil Wheaton (unlikely) or some random passer-by who just wanted to see what I had to say.

Love & Peace
Pete

2294: Partners in Space Empires

Finally got the chance to try out the physical version of Star Realms today, and it turns out to be an excellent game that appeared to go down well with all four people who were playing it.

I was particularly interested to try out the physical version of Star Realms because it provides the opportunity to play in ways other than the head-to-head two-player default style that the computer and mobile versions offer. You need more than one deck to do so (one deck per 1-2 players) but since the game is not expensive in the first place, getting enough cards to play with up to 6 people is still eminently affordable, and probably cheaper than many other, bigger-scale games.

We played in two different ways: firstly as a “free-for-all” game in which anyone around the table could attack anyone else on their turn, including splitting their combat scores between multiple opponents if they saw fit. The climactic moment of this particular game came when my friend James scored a massive 34 points of damage on my friend Tom, taking him down to just 7 Authority remaining. Conveniently, the hand I had drawn for my next turn — I was after James — had exactly 7 damage worth of combat power in it, so Tom was swiftly dispatched, to our great satisfaction; Tom generally beats both James and me in most games, so it’s always a genuine delight to utterly destroy him.

Following that, we tried a team game in which two two-player teams face off against one another, each team starting with a single Authority pool of 75 instead of the usual 50. In the team game, both players on the team play simultaneously and have their own “in-play” area, hand, draw deck and discard pile, but can pool the Trade and Combat resources they accumulate by playing cards. This means that the game’s “ally” abilities (which tend to trigger when multiple cards of the same colour are on the table) can only happen within an individual team member’s in-play area, but players can pool their resources in order to more easily acquire expensive cards or deal significant amounts of damage to their opponents.

I particularly enjoyed the team game; the dynamic was very different to the free-for-all multiplayer and two-player head-to-head variants, and the cooperative aspect worked well. In many cooperative or team-based games, “alpha player” syndrome rears its head, with one player tending to dominate discussions to such a degree that teammates go along with whatever they say without any real input. In Star Realms, however, the fact that each player is building their own deck — and teammates are mutually agreeing on how to proceed — allows for them to feel like they’re taking independent actions, but also to feel as if they’re contributing to the overall effort. Discussion and collaboration is essential to success — and can lead to some spectacular combos of cards hitting the table — but at no point did I feel like one player was dominating the table talk, nor did I feel like the game was especially unbalanced when played in this way. In fact, there are many aspects of the game that actually feel more balanced when played in a team game — certain abilities appear much stronger and more useful than they do in the free-for-all or head-to-head game, and specialising your deck with particular colour cards becomes even more important than it already is.

Star Realms was a resounding success, then, which I’m pleased about. It’s a simple, quick and easy to set up game that has a nice blend of theme and mechanics. I’m looking forward to playing it some more in the near future.

2293: Scorched Earth

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Had the pleasure of playing a game of Netrunner this evening. I still don’t know the game all that well, but with each new game I’m learning new things about it — most notably what cards to expect to come up against, how to counter them and, most importantly, what not to do.

Tonight, the main lesson was the existence of a card on the Corporation side called Scorched Earth; this is an Operation (something that takes effect immediately when you play it) that, for the low, low price of just 3 Credits, allows the Corporation to immediately and unavoidably do 4 damage to the Runner if the Runner has a Tag on them. Given that the Corporation deck in which Scorched Earth appears has a number of security programs that automatically give the Runner a Tag, Scorched Earth appears to be a very real and constant danger, and the way to deal with it is to ensure that you don’t end a turn 1) with a Tag on you and 2) with less than 4 cards in your hand. As it stood, I did end the turn with 3 cards in my hand and a Tag on me, meaning that the 4 damage immediately and unavoidably killed me horribly. And after I was doing so well at stealing my opponents’ Agenda cards, too.

I really like Netrunner, even though I haven’t played a whole lot of it so far. It’s very strongly thematic, despite being a game in which you primarily focus on the mechanics of the cards you play. The lore is clearly very well thought out, as the various Corporation and Runner decks available are very consistent in their overall themes — one Corporation deck (Jinteki) is all about being sneaky and laying traps for unsuspecting Runners, while others focus on acquiring income, Tagging the Runner or all manner of other nasty things.

I don’t yet know the game well enough to feel confident about building my own deck, but the starter decks that the basic Core Set comes with are providing more than enough variety for me to be getting on with. Given that it’s pretty rare you’ll get through a whole deck in a single game — in fact, the Corporation loses if they get through their whole deck — I find that I’m still seeing new cards with each new game I play, which is nice, though not necessarily entirely conducive to developing effective strategies for the game. I am at least getting a feel for how the different factions play; tonight I played the Anarchs faction of Runners, who have a strong emphasis on playing Virus programs, which become more powerful and effective over time or through repeated use. This has, I think, so far been my favourite Runner faction to play, but I don’t think I’ve had the opportunity to try the Criminals yet, who, I believe, focus on acquiring money, which is very important. (I, in fact, struggled a bit for cashflow in this particular game until the neutral Armitage Consulting cards came out, allowing me to earn a little more per turn rather than a measly 1 Credit for 1 Click).

I’m interested to play more. I don’t know if I’ll ever be good enough to play at a tournament level or anything like that — probably not, to be honest — but I certainly enjoy the experience of playing it. It’s a game that is surprisingly straightforward to understand once you decipher the basic rules (and the non-standard, asymmetrical terminology it uses for different parts of the play area) and, more importantly, pretty quick to play, too. It’s easy to set up, highly portable and expandable, though I will likely hold off on acquiring new packs of cards for it until I have a better handle on the basic mechanics and the ways the different factions handle.

We’ll hopefully be playing a bit more tomorrow. Now I know to watch out for that damned Scorched Earth cards, I can hopefully survive a little longer without embarrassing deaths such as the one I suffered this evening!

2289: Star Realms: Space Cards

There are certain themes that, it seems, just lend themselves to adaptation into tabletop games, and space is one of them. It’s perhaps a side-effect of the overlap between sci-fi nerddom and board game geeks, but whatever the case, it works; there are some fantastic sci-fi games out there, including Eclipse, Race for the Galaxy and Space Alert, all of which are games I like very much.

Recently, I’ve discovered a new game called Star Realms which I find particularly appealing due to its simple mechanics and short play time. I initially discovered it through its mobile and PC versions, but have since picked up some physical packs to play it with friends, since it’s a very quick and expandable game that doesn’t require much setting up and only takes about 20-30 minutes to play, even with newbies.

Star Realms is a deckbuilding game. For the uninitiated, this means that it’s a game where you start with a small (fixed) deck of cards that provide you with some basic abilities, and over the course of the game you add to this deck to gradually make yourself more and more powerful, hopefully culling some of the less useful cards from your deck as you progress. It’s not the same as a collectible card game or CCG (in which you buy starter decks and booster packs of cards, then customise your deck to your liking before taking the whole thing into battle against another player), nor is it the same as a living card game or LCG (similar in execution to a CCG, only without the random chance element of collecting cards through booster packs) — it’s a game where you gradually build your deck as you play rather than before you start, and thus it’s a game where all players start on equal footing rather than those with rarer or more powerful cards having a distinct advantage.

In Star Realms, there are three resources to manage. Authority represents your overall “life”. You start with 50, and if you run out, you lose. You can, however, go over the initial maximum of 50 because it’s eminently possible to gain Authority as you play as well as lose it. Authority is a constant resource that you don’t dispose of when you discard a hand of cards.

Combat and Trade, meanwhile, are disposable resources, which means that they’re temporary and tied to the cards you play on any given turn. The basic mechanics of the game run thus: cards that you play with Trade on them add points to your Trade pool for the round, which can then be used to purchase cards from a selection of six available in the middle of the table. When purchased, these cards are added to your discard pile, so they’ll be shuffled into your deck whenever you reach the end of your current deck cycle. Meanwhile, Combat cards, likewise, add points to your Combat pool, which is used to directly deal damage to your opponent or destroy their bases. Outpost-class bases must be destroyed before you can damage your opponent; for those who have played Hearthstone, they’re a bit like cards with the Taunt ability.

Many cards then have various special abilities on them that trigger via various circumstances. Ally abilities, for example, trigger if you have two or more of the same “suit” on the table. Scrap abilities give you a one-shot powerful ability in exchange for permanently removing the card from the game. And in some cases, cards simply provide you with a helpful ability (such as drawing extra cards, or being able to scrap useless cards from your hand or discard pile to trim your deck) when you play them.

It’s a simple and elegant game that in execution is quite similar to Ascension, but the directly adversarial nature of it — you’re fighting each other, rather than trying to gain the most points — makes it a little more interesting to me, and almost gives it the feeling of a CCG like Magic: The Gathering or its ilk. This is entirely deliberate on the part of the game designers, of course, a couple of whom previously worked on Magic. By stripping out the collectible part of the game, however, Star Realms becomes accessible to everyone by putting everyone on an equal footing at the start of the game. It’s also expandable with additional decks and expansions that add interesting new cards to the game (such as Gambits, which give players super-special abilities they can trigger when they need to) but the base game is a lot of fun, and well worth a look for those who enjoy adversarial card games but perhaps balk at the idea of ponying up for booster packs for games such as Hearthstone and its ilk.

2282: What Kind of Gamer are You?

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An email thread between me and my friends earlier extended to well over a hundred messages, and only part of it consisted of us casting aspersions on each other’s sexuality or threatening to cave each other’s heads in with Ikea shelving. No; the most interesting part of it was the part where we decided to discuss what games we’d find mutually pleasing to play on our vaguely regular Tuesday night board gaming sessions.

The struggle we have, you see, is that our group is split kind of down the middle. Two of our number — Tom and Sam — very much enjoy strategic, competitive games that they can train to be good at and quite reliably destroy the rest of us at given any opportunity they have. Their favourite game is Agricola, a game which I respect enormously from a mechanical perspective, but absolutely positively cannot get my head around from a strategic perspective. I can make the most perfect farm in the world and still lose due to not having enough points on cards or bonus points or whatever, and it’s enormously frustrating.

Tom and Sam, meanwhile, have played a bunch of the game both in its tabletop and mobile app formats, and consequently know it rather well — what strategies work, what combinations of cards go well together, and a sensible sequence of actions to take. The rest of us, on the other hand, do not have this knowledge and tend to struggle our way through the game, usually fairly secure in the knowledge that we won’t be victorious.

My friend Tim and I are essentially the “opposite” to this. We enjoy cooperative games in which the entire group plays against the game itself — or perhaps plays against a single adversary player, as in games such as Descent and Advanced Heroquest. For the most part, we have nothing against competitive games, enjoying plenty in our own right, but our preference tends to be for cooperative, heavily thematic games that encourage a touch of role-playing. If we do play a competitive game, we enjoy those that have an element of randomness to them, such as deckbuilders or those where dice rolls are a central mechanic — games such as Thunderstone, Carcassonne and Catan are among our favourite competitive games.

The wild card in our group is James, who has garnered something of a reputation among our little ensemble as being “the backstabber” — largely due to his enthusiasm for the game City of Horror, in which attaining victory is mostly dependent on being as much of an asshole to the other players as possible while maintaining a facade of apparent cooperativeness in the early stages.

As our email discussion proceeded, James explained his approach in a bit more detail. For him, it’s less about outright backstabbing and more about pushing the boundaries of the game’s rules to see what is possible. For example, in our last game of Agricola, he decided to see if the game — which, for the most part, has little direct interaction between players save only one person being able to take each action space at a time — could be played in an outright adversarial manner. Deliberately taking aim at both Sam and Tom — whom, you’ll recall, are considerably better at the game than the rest of us — James decided to sacrifice any and all of his own scoring potential in the name of trying to make life as difficult as possible for Sam and Tom, hoping that either Tim or I would win. It was an entertaining exercise, for sure, though I still didn’t win.

These gaming archetypes conform to how we tend to play video games, too. Tim and I tend to favour either narrative-heavy single-player experiences or cooperative affairs such as Warhammer End Times: Vermintide, whereas Sam and Tom are big players of hefty, competitive games like Civilization V. James is somewhere in a middle, a little less keen (or able?) to break the boundaries of the rules in video games, though he noted specifically that the thing he enjoyed most about Grand Theft Auto Online, which we’re all playing semi-regularly at the moment, is being able to show up to each session dressed in an increasingly outlandish, freakish outfit to make us all laugh. Once again, making his own fun. (James, never quite able to shake off that “backstabber” reputation, is also the player most likely to shoot you in the face with a shotgun if you enter the same square mile of map that he occupies.)

Finding games that we all enjoy can be quite challenging at times, but it does happen sometimes. The aforementioned Grand Theft Auto Online is suiting our needs for video game multiplayer fun at present, for example, while this evening we ran two simultaneous learning games of Android: Netrunner for those among us who are less experienced to pick up the rules ahead of a planned “boys’ weekend” of gaming at the end of the month, during which we’re hoping to play a few games of Netrunner.

We left our email thread with the promise of coming up with a short(ish)list of games that we’d all be happy and excited about playing come a Tuesday evening, rather than our attempted “rota” system that we’re currently using. We haven’t quite perfected our list yet, but I’m confident we can find a selection that we’d all be happy to sit down for a game of.

Assuming James doesn’t break the game, of course.