1652: A Grand Day Out

We took our visitors up to Oxford today, for several reasons — to have a look at some genuinely Old Stuff, to play a couple of Zero Escape-style "room escape" games, and to visit Oxford's answer to Toronto's board game cafe Snakes and Lattes, Thirsty Meeples.

It was a great day out, though the amount of walking reminded me that I don't do nearly enough just walking around these days.

The early part of the day consisted of the aforementioned "room escape" games courtesy of Ex(c)iting Game, a modest operation that offers two different interactive experiences in which you're given an hour to solve a particular task. In the first room, we were challenged to break into a computer to recover a piece of information about someone who was going to be assassinated; in the second, we were tasked with locating a USB stick containing sensitive information before it was auctioned off.

In both cases, the games were fairly low-rent, consisting of straightforward and simple props with a few fun gadgets. The two games were markedly distinct from one another, too; the Stop the Assassin game was much more gadget-heavy, seeing us cracking a safe, using a blacklight and eventually cracking the code that led us to the computer password; conversely, second game The Auction was much more focused on deducing the answers to various riddles in order to solve combination locks and get them open.

Both games also featured a number of red herrings that had little to do with the games themselves, and both were reasonably challenging, taking our group of four a decent amount of time to crack in both cases. We completed the first game with just six minutes to spare; the second game we solved a little more quickly, with around twenty minutes left on the clock.

The setup, although simple, was effective. The staffer — whom I felt rather sorry for, since she clearly spent an awful lot of time twiddling her thumbs between appointments — observed our efforts to solve each room via webcam, and subsequently offered real-time hints through the monitor that otherwise displayed our time limit. Rather than these hints being predefined, she was able to highlight particular things in the room or type messages to us to ensure we could normally be nudged back onto the right track. In the case of both games, we would have probably found the answers ourselves eventually, but the hints were timed nicely so it didn't feel like our intelligence was being insulted.

All in all, the game experience was fun. It would be neat to see the idea implemented with a somewhat bigger budget — perhaps some more special effects, more high-quality props and a little more effort to make the games more strongly thematic — but for today, it made an enjoyable and memorable day out.

We then took a bus into the city centre of Oxford, where we had a wander around a couple of the colleges, which was a fairly humbling experience when I think back on the places I stayed and studied when I was at university in Southampton. The dining hall in one of the colleges in particular was a real Hogwarts-style affair that impressed me and Andie almost as much as it did our visitors.

Following some wandering around — and a break for a drink in an incredibly old pub — we made it to Thirsty Meeples, where we had coffee, snacks and some gaming. We played the cooperative game Robinson Crusoe, which I've been curious to try for a while, and Boss Monster, which I've likewise heard of previously and have been keen to give a shot.

Robinson Crusoe is a very cool and strongly thematic cooperative game, though for those who enjoy the more Euro end of the spectrum, there's plenty of worker placement and resource management involving shifting little wooden discs and cubes around the place. There's also a number of different scenarios that I can see would likely change the way you play significantly — it'd be a game you could get a decent amount of replay value out of, due to the randomised elements. It was initially a little difficult to grasp, but after a turn or two all becomes clear and highly enjoyable — likely a game I'll try and score a copy of for myself in the near future.

Boss Monster, meanwhile, is a short and simple card game in which you play a 16-bit era video game boss and have to build a dungeon to fend off the never-ending hordes of incoming heroes. It's a simple, easy-to-understand game that I think will be a lot of fun with various groups — I ended up picking up a copy of it along with Avalon before we left.

We also gave Concept a go, which is, along the lines of Dixit, more of a fun group activity than a "game" per se. Like Dixit, it involves a certain amount of creativity — meaning Andie wasn't a huge fan of it, but she soldiered on regardless — but handles things very differently. Rather than attempting to describe pictures on cards, Concept challenges you to get, well, concepts across by placing markers on various icons. It's kind of Charades-ish, only you don't do any actions — you place markers to describe the main concept of the word, phrase, title, whatever it is, and its "subconcepts". You can then use smaller markers to elaborate on these a bit, but the only thing you can say during this whole process — which is surprisingly frustrating if your tablemates just won't grasp something that seems obvious to you — is "yes" if they get something along the right lines.

So all in all, then, we had a great day. I'm pretty tired now, though, so I have a feeling I'll sleep rather well this evening!

1629: Are Pee

I've long been an enthusiast of role-playing games — the pen-and-paper kind in this case, not just in the world of video games, though as regular readers will know they are also my favourite form of video game — but I've had one consistent problem over the years: I've barely had the chance to actually play any.

I've bought the Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks from Second Edition onwards and read them cover to cover; I used to have an extensive collection of Vampire: The Masquerade sourcebooks (which I kind of wish I still had); and, this week, toilet reading has been provided by the freely-downloadable Basic Rules for Dungeons and Dragons' Fifth Edition.

And yet, I've not played any of them, outside of a brief 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign back in my school days, another brief campaign early in my university career, and a memorably "freeform" campaign run by a friend using his own simplified, custom system that had an enormous amount of flexibility.

This is a real shame, since as a creative type who greatly enjoys the act of creating a story, role-playing games are an ideal fit for me, combining, as they do, collective group improvisation and storytelling with a set of structured rules for satisfying, gradual progression over time. The exact form of those rules varies from game to game — Vampire: The Masquerade is very different from Dungeons and Dragons, for example — but the core is the same: it's a group of people getting together, led by a chief storyteller, Dungeon Master, Game Master, whatever you want to call them, and having journeys through their imaginations together. What could be more fun than that?

I would really like the opportunity to get involved with a game of Dungeons and Dragons (or indeed any other role-playing game) at some point, but times I've attempted to raise the subject in the past with a friend whom I know plays a regular game seem to have fallen on deaf ears. (I'm not entirely surprised; campaigns that have been running for a while can be difficult to slot in new additions partway through, and certain groups prefer to limit their numbers to specific sizes to keep things manageable.) This leaves me with a somewhat more daunting prospect: planning and running my own game, and as someone who only has fairly limited experience of actually playing the game as a player character, the idea of putting together an epic, sprawling fantasy adventure for a group of players to potentially break with their own creativity is something that I'm not sure I'm up to just yet!

Or perhaps I am. The new 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons promises a "Starter Set" with an introductory adventure included, so when that becomes available I might just check it out. And even if I don't play it, it can join the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition and GURPS rulebooks on my shelf, providing occasional entertaining reading material when I fancy perusing it — I like reading rulebooks, don't judge me — and hoping that one day they might actually get played.

Will they? I have no idea. I can dream, though. And if I can just roll a 20, perhaps I can make it reality.

1616: Ascension + Dominion = Thunderstone

That's something of an oversimplification, of course, but it's not inaccurate; the card game Thunderstone Advance (of which I have the set themed around Monte Cook's Numenera setting) very much combines elements of the two distinct deckbuilding games Dominion and Ascension to create an experience that is altogether its own thing, rather challenging, enormously variable and a whole lot of fun.

Thematically, the game represents you and your friends each commanding a band of heroes as they attempt to storm a dungeon and defeat a Thunderstone Bearer, a powerful boss monster that triggers the end of the game if they are either defeated or reach the top level of the dungeon. In order to best your enemies, you'll have to recruit new heroes to your cause, gather a suitable source of income with which to equip them, level them up and proceed on regular expeditions into the dungeon to stomp all over monster faces and plaster their entrails all over the walls.

There's a strongly thematic RPG feeling, in other words, but the deckbuilding aspect brings up some interesting new twists. The Dominion side of things comes from the "Village" phase of the game, whereby you can use the cash value on the cards you have in your hand — you draw a completely new hand from your deck every turn — to either hire new heroes or purchase items. These are then added to your discard pile, which means they'll start coming up in your hand the next time you cycle through your whole deck. As with any deckbuilder, though, cluttering up your deck with too much chaff makes it less likely that you'll pull a killer hand with a brilliant combination of cards to use together, so at times it's necessary to exercise a bit of restraint and determine the most efficient way to proceed — that or look into acquiring cards that let you draw more from your deck once your turn has begun.

The Ascension side of things, meanwhile, comes in the dungeoneering side of the game, where you'll take your hand into the dungeon instead of the village and attempt to defeat the monsters therein. This is mainly a simple task of ensuring you have enough light to deal with a monster in a particular "layer" of the dungeon — deeper levels require more light, or you suffer an attack penalty — and then having enough attack score to equal or beat the monster's health value. The difficulty comes in the monsters' various special abilities, and each monster mini-deck, three of which are shuffled together at the start of the game, is themed around a particular style of opposition to the player. One set of monsters, for example, demands that you not only equal or beat the monster's health value with your attack, but ensure that you do not exceed a particular value, either — or, in a couple of particularly unpleasant cases, you have to get an exact match. Another becomes more powerful if certain types of card are in your hand; another still focuses on forcing you to discard (temporarily) or destroy (permanently) heroes and items you have in your hand. Nasty stuff.

Defeating monsters awards you experience points and victory points. Victory points are how you win — whoever has the most when the Thunderstone Bearer either goes down or escapes the dungeon wins — while experience points can either be used to level up your hero cards into more powerful versions, or expended as "cyphers" to give you small, but often extremely helpful benefits during a turn.

There's a nice balance of strategy and luck in the game. You can build a great deck but be stymied by a string of tough monsters storming through the dungeon. Alternatively, you can have a seemingly mediocre hand, decide to take a chance on a few extra-draw abilities and end up absolutely kicking arse. Either way, it's a lot of fun, and it never feels like games are a foregone conclusion.

I've only had the opportunity to play the game twice so far — four times if you count the two solo games I've played — but I've really liked it every time. Hopefully I'll get the chance to give it another go at some point in the near future.

1567: Hunting Mr. X

We've played through a whole bunch of board games this weekend, and it's quite difficult to pick a specific highlight. This morning's Battlestar Galactica game was very enjoyable — it was the first time I'd been a Cylon player — but I think that it was our Scotland Yard game that made for some of my favourite moments.

We haven't played Scotland Yard for quite a long time. It's a fairly simple, straightforward game and thus it's the sort of thing that often gets overlooked in favour of more complicated and/or flashy-looking titles, but it's a hugely enjoyable game. Its simplicity really works in its favour, because it means you're not constantly looking up rules or checking you're "doing it right" — all you're basically doing is moving around the board.

For the unfamiliar, Scotland Yard is an asymmetrical game in which a team of up to four detective players attempt to track down the criminal mastermind and all-round bastard Mr. X by chasing him across London and apprehending him. The twist is that Mr. X moves around the board in secret, only revealing himself after making specified numbers of moves. At all other times, the detective players can see which forms of transport he has taken — each space on the board is connected to at least one other by any combination of taxi, bus and underground routes, and making use of a route requires discarding a ticket of the appropriate type — but not exactly where he has gone. Thus, the challenge is determining where Mr. X is, where he is going and how you can possibly stop him when you're all moving by the same rules.

Scotland Yard is a masterful game for the amount of tension it creates on both sides. Early in the game, it's easy for the detectives to stumble around blindly, not having a clue where their quarry might be; at the same time, though, Mr. X is trying to quietly slip away without being notices so he is, preferably, on the other side of the board by the time he has to reveal himself for the first time.

The real tension comes from the fact that no-one ever feels like they're "winning" until very late in the game, which is the only point at which it becomes clear that either Mr. X is probably going to escape, or the detectives are almost certainly going to catch him. Up until you reach that point — which doesn't come along until the last couple of turns in many cases — both sides are constantly on edge, thinking "shiiiit…" while trying to outwit the others. It's a particularly nerve-wracking experience for Mr. X, who has to make some tough decisions about whether or not he's going to risk moving within capture distance of the detectives — who might not know where he is at this point — or try and get as far away as possible. The game creates a good feeling of "closing the net" on the Mr. X player, even with the very limited number of pieces on the board. It's hugely atmospheric and a lot of fun.

Our game today went pretty well. I was Mr. X, which I was quite pleased about. For a lot of the game, I had the opportunity to sit back and chuckle to myself about how my opponents were making completely incorrect assumptions about which way I'd gone, but things gradually ramped up towards the end. I was within a couple of turns of winning — my opponents were down to their last few tickets, at which point it becomes more difficult for them to move around, particularly if they'd exhausted a particular type of transportation at that point — and I thought I'd outwitted them. Unfortunately, they managed to squeeze me into an unwinnable situation and I was eventually caught.

Scotland Yard is one of those experiences that is distinctive to board games. There are video games that involve hiding from one another and trying not to give your position away, but the implementation of the mechanics in Scotland Yard makes it a huge amount of fun to get together around a table for. I believe there's an iOS version available out there, but I frankly can't see it being quite as much fun. Part of the enjoyment is in listening in on your opponents' discussions and thinking "I hope they don't figure out what I've done", and that's something that's best enjoyed in the live company of one another.

Anyhow. This has been a pleasant weekend away from it all, and I should have a nice relaxing day off tomorrow for the Bank Holiday. Then it's back to shitting myself over whether or not I can find a new job. Yay.

But I'm not going to think about that right now. For now, bed.

1519: Hidden Traitor

I've played quite a few "hidden role" board games recently, and I'm coming to enjoy them quite a bit.

Most recently, I've had the chance to have a go at Saboteur, Avalon and Quicksand, each of which have a very different feel to them but all make good use of the "hidden roles" mechanic. They're added to my list of "enjoyably backstabby games" that also contains the excellent Shadows Over Camelot and Battlestar Galactica.

Quicksand was a new one on me this evening, and it's an enjoyable, lightweight, "filler" title. It's a simple race game at heart, but the hidden role aspect makes it very interesting

There's six different characters, you see, and only you know which one is yours. On your turn, you can play cards from your hand to move one of the characters — one space per card played. Landing a character on a space of the same colour as themselves allows you to discard any number of cards from your hand and then draw back up to a full hand; otherwise, you simply replenish your hand at the end of the turn without discarding anything. Consequently, the game becomes about shifting the other pieces around to get an optimal hand of cars, then storming ahead with your own character — though naturally, there's the opportunity to fuck with each other thanks to Quicksand cards, which immobilise a character until you play an extra card of the correct colour.

Saboteur, meanwhile, was an interesting little game that not only had hidden roles, but also asymmetrical play. Taking on the role of dwarves, two teams are racing to be the first to dig their way to the gold, but playing alongside them is at least one Saboteur, who is aiming to deplete the deck of cards as quickly as possible; a Geologist, who is aiming to get as many "crystal" cards on the table as possible; a Captain, who is aiming to help one of the teams to win; and… and… possibly something else I've forgotten but can't be bothered to look up because I feel like crap and just want to get this post over and done with. (Hey. At least I'm honest.)

Avalon, on the other hand, is a completely different beast again. In this game, several of the players are around the table are loyal knights of King Arthur, while the others are evil people of various descriptions. Through an enjoyably silly "open your eyes, close your eyes" sequence at the outset, certain characters know who each other are but others don't, and from there it's a matter of assigning people to "quests" and then hoping they don't vote that it fails. It's actually a pretty simple, relatively quick game to play, but the amount of interaction around the table makes it a lot of fun and, I would have thought, a fun party game for those willing to invest a little time to learn the rules.

I really do feel awful now so I'm going to go to bed and hope I feel better in the morning. Apologies for the bluntness but, you know. Whatever. Later!

1516: New Dawn for the Galaxy

Been looking forward to this weekend not only for the fact I had the aforementioned shitty week, but also because it's been planned for quite a while to be a weekend of board gaming goodness, perhaps punctuated with a jaunt into starship bridge simulator Artemis tomorrow once everyone is here.

Tonight, however, we played Eclipse, a game which we've had a good crack at on several occasions but never actually finished. Tonight, with no commitments, no-one needing to get home in the morning or any other considerations, we finally played a full game, and it was a lot of fun.

Eclipse, for those unfamiliar, is a sci-fi "4X" (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) strategy game in which each player is attempting to build the best galactic civilisation over the course of nine rounds. You do this through a combination of researching new technology, improving the ships and starbases of your fleet, exploring the cosmos and gradually expanding your sphere of influence across the galaxy. Meanwhile, your opponents are all attempting to the same thing, too, but interestingly — and unlike a multiplayer game of Sid Meier's classic 4X title Civilization, there's rarely a feeling that the game is forcing you into direct conflict against other players — indeed, the majority of our game tonight was a fairly peaceful affair, with most people building up their empires in relative isolation, but there's a pleasing feeling of "cold war" throughout; the sensation that, at any moment, things could erupt into unpleasant hostilities.

This happened in the last round of the game, with several daredevil attacks and the unfortunate loss of a couple of my systems. I still managed to come second, though, which is considerably better than I usually do in strategy games.

The thing I particularly like about Eclipse is how well designed it is. Your player information board may be full to bursting with small wooden cubes and discs, but the way the game asks you to place these and move them around means that you can always see the state of your empire at an easy glance. Take more actions in a round and your cost of upkeep will be higher; have more cubes taken off your population stock and you'll reveal higher numbers for production of money, science and resources. It works really well.

The research system is also rather neat; it reminds me a little of the PC game Endless Space in some ways in that you have basic "blueprints" for your various ships and can upgrade and retrofit them over the course of the game according to the situation. And there's a lot of flexibility, too; I saw some mid-game success with interceptors and cruisers outfitted with powerful missiles and efficient targeting computers, while in the late game two of my opponents were slugging it out with immensely heavily armoured but not all that powerfully-armed vessels, leading to a lengthy exchange of dice rolls as they attempted to whittle one another down.

It's a long game and a complete pain in the arse to set up due to the sheer number of pieces there are to lay out in appropriate places. There's also a fairly hefty element of luck regarding things like initial placement and whether or not you come across powerful alien technologies to immediately add to your ship blueprints, but there's also a pleasant feeling of being able to approach the game in your own way. I tend not to be an overly warlike player when playing something like Civilization against the computer, so I appreciate a tabletop game that doesn't necessarily force me into direct conflict against another player until it becomes apparent that things are otherwise at a stalemate. (As it stands, I should have probably prepared better for the attack that came in the final turn, but eh; I'm happy with second place.)

The expansion supposedly improves the game in a number of areas, so we're probably going to check it out at some point. This one is very much a "weekend game" though; it's not one you can easily get through on a weeknight evening!

1514: New Journeys in the Dark

We finally got around to starting a new campaign of Descent: Journeys in the Dark 2nd Edition (hereafer Descent to save my own sanity) recently. We eventually abandoned our original campaign on the "finale" quest after getting a number of rules exceedingly wrong for the entire campaign, which meant that the party of heroes were exceedingly overpowered, while the Overlord (me) was vastly underpowered.

This time around, we're going to do it right. I'm playing a hero this time around, so it'll be fun to be on the other side of the table, and we're also playing with the Lair of the Wyrm expansion, which adds a couple of new character classes plus rules for "rumors" and extra quests that bolt on to the existing campaign. They're mostly fairly minor changes, but it should be fun.

The new class I'm playing as — a Geomancer — is looking like it has potential to be fun. Beginning with a ranged magic weapon and the ability to summon a stone familiar which can subsequently make use of aforementioned ranged magic weapon, levelling up eventually equips me with the ability to summon more than one stone, detonate them and blast enemies in the vicinity, and all sort of other happy funtimes.

I actually haven't really explored the other classes all that much, but the way Descent is designed makes for an interesting set of combinations. Each player gets to pick a hero character, and that hero has fixed stats and special abilities (one of which can always be used, one of which may only be used once per "encounter" in a quest) — but from there, you can pick one of several specific classes for that hero's archetype. This allows for a ton of variety, particularly given that the game and the expansion certainly don't skimp on the available heroes. I'm looking forward to working through the campaign and getting a feel for how my character fits into the party as a whole.

The game continues to impress me as a good balance between cooperative and competitive, strategic and thematic play. It is, I think, one of the best games in our collection for keeping pretty much everyone around the table happy for one reason or another, and thus I'm always glad to be able to get it out.

As I think I've probably mentioned before, one of the things I particularly like is that it isn't a straightforward dungeon crawl, despite how it positions itself on its packaging and in its marketing. No, instead it's more of a small-scale skirmish game in which a small team of heroes faces off against a modest force of monsters, with both sides trying to complete objectives that are usually a lot more interesting than just "kill all of the other team". In the introductory quest, for example, the Overlord's task is to get five goblins off the map — and said goblins keep respawning even if the heroes kill them. The heroes, meanwhile, are tasked with defeating a strong boss monster while simultaneously attempting to block the flow of goblins. All of the quests are like this to one degree or another; it gives the game a pleasant feeling of asymmetry while keeping things interesting for both sides and preventing it from becoming mindless hack-and-slash.

There's also a really nice system of dice for combat. A basic attack uses a blue six-sided die, which determines whether or not you hit and a small amount of damage. Equipped weapons then add additional dice to this basic die of either the yellow or red variety. Yellow dice do less damage overall, but they have more in the way of "surges" — energy markers that, when rolled, can be used to trigger special abilities. They can also be used to increase the range of ranged weapons — in order to hit something at range, you have to roll a high enough number as well as hitting with the blue die. Red dice, meanwhile, are largely focused on dealing more damage.

On top of that, there are brown, grey and black defense dice that reflect how much protection a character has thanks to their equipment and innate abilities — but then certain weapons have a "pierce" skill that allows them to ignore some defense. The systems all gradually build on top of each other, but things never get overwhelmingly complicated. It's satisfying.

In fact, the only thing I'm really not a fan of about Descent is that the box insert it comes with is absolute garbage — in fact, I chucked in in order to get everything fitting in the box a bit better. Between all the miniatures, the zillion tokens and the big thick cardboard map tiles, there's a lot of stuff in that box, though, and it's tricky to keep it organised. I'm going to have to look into a better storage solution for it if I want to play it a bit more often, I think!

1500: Make a Run

[Aside: Gosh. 1,500 daily posts. Good job, me. I'd celebrate, but I already had something in mind to write about today, sooo…]

Spent a pleasant hour or two teaching and playing Netrunner this evening. This is the third time I've had the opportunity to give this interesting game a go now, and each time I play, I like it a little more.

I think the best thing about it is the psychology aspect of it. Like a good game of poker, success in Netrunner relies as least partly upon reading your opponent, figuring out how they're likely to act and taking advantage of it. When playing as the Corporation, for example, choosing which of your Remote Servers you're going to install Ice in front of is extremely important: do you think your opponent will assume your most valuable cards — the ones they're trying to steal in order to win the game — are heavily protected behind Ice, or will he see through the common bluff of leaving valuable cards unprotected as if they're no big deal?

There's a wonderful sense of tension in the game, on both sides, and the game is seemingly balanced in such a way as to encourage this feeling as often as possible.

In the last game I played today, for example, I was playing as the Corporation, and a victory on points was looking likely. My last Agenda card — the cards I needed to spend credits on to "advance" in order to score — was heavily protected behind three pieces of Ice, and I had enough credits to rez all of them without any difficulty. Moreover, I could see that my opponent James didn't have the Icebreakers he'd need to defeat my pieces of Ice, so I was feeling pretty confident. I advanced my last Agenda until it was one token away from final victory for me, and then it was the end of my turn.

Naturally, James used this opportunity to make a final Run on my Remote Server, obviously hoping to pick up my Agenda and bring himself closer to victory, while denying me the win. He began with the Tinkering card, which made one of my already-revealed pieces of Ice into a type that his Icebreakers could deal with. Uh-oh. He also had enough money to power up his Icebreaker enough to crack through it and deactivate its subroutines. Uh-oh. James broke through the first piece of Ice without any difficulty, so I rezzed the next one — an infuriating little card called a "portal" whose main effect was to send James back to confront the first piece of Ice again. This would fuck him over nicely, since he didn't have enough credits left to confront it again, but unfortunately his Icebreaker was of the correct type to bypass the portal without any difficulty.

This left the final piece of Ice for him to confront. My confidence had evaporated by this point, but I rezzed it anyway. It was pretty weak, but its subroutine would end his Run immediately — and best of all, it transpired that it was of a type his Icebreaker couldn't crack.

My heart leapt. I had done it. I had fended off an attack that had got a whole lot further than I thought it was going to — and now I was going to win for sure. And win I did — and great it felt, too.

I'm starting to get my head around this game now, and I'm really interested to play it some more. It's a big challenge — one false move, or an unfortunate draw of the cards, can leave you in serious shit or even with an instant loss if you're not careful. But knowing the things to watch out for allows you to prepare for most eventualities — and if you're playing against an evenly-matched opponent, it can lead to some genuinely thrilling faceoffs.

I'm not quite brave enough to approach the clearly experienced Netrunner players in the Monday night board game group as yet, but I'm definitely keen to play more. Hopefully I'll have the opportunity to do so soon.

1497: Lab Work

Andie and I had another go at Pandemic: In the Lab this evening. I really like it; it completely changes the dynamic of the base game and, although it offers the potential to slow all players down considerably — for those unfamiliar, it makes the process of curing a disease considerably more complicated than just collecting enough cards — it encourages much more cooperative play, which is good.

The reason for this is that the new "Lab" mechanics allow more than one player to collaborate on putting together a cure for one of the four diseases. No longer is it a case of trying to get five cards of the same colour into the hands of one player (four if they're the Scientist) — instead, one player can "sequence" the disease by playing an appropriately coloured card; another can test the cure by playing another appropriately coloured card; other players still can collect samples of the diseases required to build the necessary molecular structure for the cure itself. Finally, one player only now needs to collect three cards rather than five — because two have already been played to sequence and test the cure — in order to finally cure it. Despite the curing process taking more steps, then, this actually frees up players to stomp off around the world doing a bit of curing while collecting additional samples.

It's still bloody hard, though. Andie and I played on the Introductory difficulty with just four out of the seven Epidemic cards, and we still lost — once without discovering any cures at all, and a second time after discovering two, with the third and fourth on the way. This is pretty much in keeping with the base game of Pandemic, which has a relatively low victory rate — particularly when playing on the more difficult settings with additional Epidemic cards — but has a pleasingly different feel to it all.

So far it seems to be a great expansion. In fact, I've been really impressed with both of Pandemic's expansions to date — On the Brink added a wide variety of new ways to play (which, to my shame, I'm actually still to try any of) plus a bunch of new character roles, while In the Lab's main contribution is this new "Lab Challenge" mode. I'm not sure if I'd want to play the game this way every time, but that's the beauty of it, in a way; you don't have to. The expansions have both been build in such a way that it's easy to pick and choose the bits you bolt onto the base rules. If you want to play vanilla Pandemic with nothing more than the new roles, no problem. If, conversely, you want to play the Lab Challenge with a Bio-Terrorist player and a Virulent Strain, you can. It's your choice, and that's pretty great.

Anyway. Looking forward to playing it more. Now we have a better handle on the way the new mechanics work, I have faith that we can save the world from the terrible plight of Itchy Scrot and Brown Rot once more. Maybe.

1495: Epidemic!

I really enjoy the board game Pandemic, as has been fairly well established on these very pages, but I was a little skeptical about trying the iOS version. After all, I have a perfectly good copy of the board game on my shelf — plus its expansions — so what use is a digital version?

Well, it's easier to simply start playing, for one thing; for another, it has a somewhat different "feel" to it than gathering around a board with friends to play. The board game can be played solo too, of course — particularly with the solo rules introduced in the In the Lab expansion — but the iOS version is particularly friendly to either solo or pass-and-play formats. I'd argue that it feels more "right" to play it as a single-player, multi-character strategy game on the iPad, actually; it's much easier to collaborate on cooperative multiplayer moves when the board is right there in front of you, whereas passing an iPad around isn't nearly so practical from that perspective.

I think the thing I like the most about the iOS version, though, is the presentation. Drawing most of its futuristic aesthetic from the newer edition of the board game that came out recently, its visual style is simple but effective, and the background music is excellent. Building in intensity as the Infection Rate increases over the course of a game, it keeps things feeling exciting and dramatic — and the special, super-intense music that plays when an Epidemic card is drawn really drives home the whole "Uh-oh, we might be fucked now" nature of the experience.

The other thing worth considering about the iOS version is that it's a good way for people to try the game out without having to invest in the considerably more expensive board game version. It has a good interactive tutorial that explains the rules to you as you play, and a comprehensive in-game reference manual that goes into full detail about the game rules and all the available cards for special events, player roles and the like. It is, in short, like many iOS adaptations of board games, an excellent way of learning the game before jumping into a session with live tabletop players, or to refresh your memory on how it all works before teaching it to a group of newcomers.

Plus, you know, Pandemic is just a great game, too. It is, for many people, their introduction to truly cooperative gaming — a team of players against the board — and at less than an hour for a game to unfold (considerably less for the digital adaptation) it's friendly to groups who tend to play on "school nights", too.

Give it a shot. And don't worry if you doom the world to oblivion at the hands of Radical-6 (or whatever you call the Blue disease this time around) — it happens to the best of us.