1223: Chronicle of the Godslayer

cards One of my favourite iOS games also happens to be one of my favourite physical multiplayer games. Dubbed Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer (not Wrath of the Godslayer as I seem to keep thinking it is), it's what's known as a "deckbuilding" game, and it has numerous attractive qualities. It has simple to understand rules, it plays at a pleasingly rapid pace, and it provides a lot of the fun found in expensive collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering and its ilk without requiring that you obsessively try and collect rare cards via fair means or foul.

Okay, it doesn't have anywhere near the depth of Magic, say, but it provides its own entertaining experience that is eminently worthwhile.

Here's the gist of Ascension for those who have never encountered either it or a deckbuilding game before. You begin the game with a deck made up of Apprentices and Militia cards. Each of these is worth one of one of the game's two currencies: Apprentices are worth 1 "rune" while Militia are worth 1 "combat". The basic mechanic of the game involves you playing cards from your hand and then using the total accumulated value of "rune" cards to purchase new cards to add to your deck, and to use the total accumulated value of "combat" cards to defeat monster cards and score points. Once a communal pool of points has been exhausted, the game draws to a close and whoever has the highest total score acquired through both defeated monsters and purchased cards wins.

Simple, right? Where it gets interesting is in the fact that most of the cards you purchase or defeat in the game have some form of special effect that gets resolved when you play them. Some are "constructs", which means that they remain in play and have an ongoing effect, in the Storm of Souls variant, there are also monsters that provide you with "trophies" to hold on to that can be redeemed at a later time for various benefits. The particularly fun thing about the game is in spotting which cards will be most advantageous to you and purchasing or defeating them. As you buy cards, your deck expands — this potentially provides you with more options, but at the same time makes it harder for "favourite" cards to come around more quickly; conversely certain cards' special abilities let you "banish" cards from your deck to whittle it down to size if necessary.

Finding a good balance between acquiring cards and offloading trash is key, because simply having the biggest deck isn't a guarantee of success; at the same time, though, the point value of the cards you have purchased is secret until the end of the game, so it's entirely possible for someone to have been apparently ahead of you on points for most of a match, only for you to swoop in and defeat them with the value of the cards you've acquired over the course of the game.

The nice thing about the iOS version of the game is that it's a totally faithful recreation of the card game experience, only with nice 21st-century benefits such as asynchronous online multiplayer — play your turn when it's convenient to you — and, well, the ability to play without faffing around with all those cards. (That said, there is something rather pleasant about playing a card game's physical incarnation.)

The iOS version of Ascension is developed by a company called Playdek, who are also responsible for a number of other excellent board and card game ports for iOS, including Nightfall, Summoner Wars, Can't Stop, Penny Arcade: Gamers vs Evil and Fluxx. They're also responsible for the upcoming iOS version of Agricola, which I'm hoping will help me end my long-standing losing streak on that bloody game by allowing me the opportunity to practice a bit more regularly. If you're an iDevice-toting board game fan, you could certainly do far worse than check their various pieces of awesomeness out.

1221: How Do You Make Friends Again...?

One of my earliest and most enduring memories of my time at secondary school is also, coincidentally, the first time I was consciously aware of what I now recognise to be a longstanding case of social anxiety.

It was the first day of secondary school. Everything was big and new and scary — I'd come from a small village school in which the entire school population was roughly the size of a single year group in my secondary school. I'd chosen to go to said secondary school because a lot of my friends were going there, and also my brother had attended there some years previously and had come out of the experience as what is generally accepted to be a Good Person. Also, a lot of the people who had been bullies to me in primary school were going to a different secondary school, so I knew that I wanted to avoid that one like the plague.

But I, as ever, digress.

It was the first day of secondary school. I was sitting in my new seat in my new tutor group, and our tutor, Miss Quirk (yes, really), had tasked us with spending a few minutes getting to know the people around us.

I gazed around me. I was sitting next to a boy named Murray whom I didn't know. In front of me was a girl named Claire, whom I had instantly fallen in love with due to her long shiny blonde hair and the fact she wore short skirts with tights — something which I found (hell, find) inexplicably attractive. (Hey. I was eleven years old and easily pleased — but to be fair, she did remain consistently stunning throughout our entire school career.)

Behind me was my sometime best friend from primary school, Matthew. I say "sometime" because he wasn't always my best friend — he was a somewhat fickle chap rather prone to occasionally deciding he'd rather hang out with the "cool" kids, whose opinion of me tended to flip-flop back and forth on an almost weekly basis. Needless to say, I ditched him fairly soon into my secondary school career as a result of two events: one, him sneezing so hard he snotted over his hands and then ate it — mmm — and two, him deciding that sitting in his chair, miming masturbation and bellowing "I'm a wanker! I'm a wanker!" would be somehow amusing. (To be fair, it was sort of amusing, but perhaps not in the way he intended; needless to say, I didn't really want to be associated with him after that.)

Anyway. Our seating arrangements were the way they were in order to encourage us to interact and get to know each other. We'd been deliberately seated next to people we didn't know to encourage us to break out of our primary school "cliques" and widen our friendship circles — a theoretically sound idea that even at that tender age, I could see the benefits of.

Unfortunately, I couldn't act on it. Given the prospect of being thrown into enforced interaction with someone I didn't know from Adam, I froze up. I had no idea how to begin a conversation, how to get to know this person. Frantically, I turned around to gaze at Matthew (a pre-"I'm a wanker! I'm a wanker!" Matthew, I might add) and looked at him pleadingly.

"I can't remember how to make friends!" I said quietly to him. He just laughed and motioned for me to turn around and talk to Murray. He obviously hadn't taken my statement seriously, and that was frustrating, but I had little option but to try. It was a terrifying experience, though, and obviously I didn't set a particularly good first impression on Murray, because he became a complete bellend who bullied me on a regular basis. (I got my own back by punching him in the face just as the principal was walking around the corner and, although I was punished for lashing out like that, the unspoken consensus between my parents and the teachers involved was that he probably deserved it — and to be fair, he didn't bother me again after that.)

That first day and that pitiful statement — "I can't remember how to make friends!" — stuck with me, though. Because I can't remember how to make friends. It just sort of happens. I have made friends with people over the years, of course — the friends I made after I abandoned Matthew following the "I'm a wanker!" incident (such as Edward James Padgett, who has been mentioned in this post since it was first written, he just didn't see it); my university flatmates; my fellow students on my music course (though not on my English course — I didn't really get to know anyone on that side of things); and people I've worked with — but if I'm thrown into a new situation with unfamiliar people, or simply decide that I want to get to know new people who perhaps share my interests… I still have no idea how to do this.

This is, as I'm sure you can appreciate, frustrating, particularly as at the age of 32 I finally feel that I have found a number of geeky "niches" that I fit nicely into, and would like to share these experiences with like-minded people. I greatly enjoyed spending time with Mark and Lynette while we were over in Canada because they are both My Kind of People who enjoy the things I do — but I also found myself somewhat envious of them for having a group of friends they play Dungeons & Dragons with, watch anime with while drinking cocktails and all manner of other things that are in keeping with their interests.

This isn't to say I don't have friends, obviously. The friends I see most frequently are my regular(ish) board gaming group, and I wouldn't exchange them for anything, since I really, really appreciate the time I spend with them indulging in our mutual hobby. However, we do have our own incompatibilities — two of our number are really into football, for example, while the rest of us either have no strong feelings or actively hate it. (I fall into the latter category.) Similarly, I very much like Japanese video games, while several of the others cling to common misconceptions about them and thus either refuse to play them or have little interest in exploring them and having their misconceptions disproven — though at least they are patient and willing to listen to me talk about them. Conversely, a couple of our number are big into Skyrim, a game which I found almost unbearably tedious after a while. To continue the pattern, I'm a big fan of anime and would really like it if I could have a semi-regular viewing session with a small group of people, but no-one from that particular group is biting for various reasons — some don't like or don't see the point of sitting and watching something together as a group; some aren't interested in anime.

You get the picture, anyway. I obviously don't begrudge my friends these incompatibilities we have — everyone is different, after all, and thus has their own tastes — but I find myself wishing on a regular basis that it was a bit easier to find additional friends (note: not "new" friends, because to me that implies a degree of "replacement", which I don't want) who have common interests.

Actually, let me qualify that somewhat: I find myself wishing that it was a bit easier to find additional local friends who have common interests. It's obviously no problem whatsoever to find new friends on the Internet who have similar tastes to me, and I'm very grateful for the fact that I do have so many people on the Internet that I can rant and rave about how awesome Ar Tonelico is or how much Kana Little Sister made me cry or whatever. But as much as I appreciate these friends in far-flung corners of the world, it's not quite the same as having someone you can just pop over and see at short notice, hang out and do some things that you both enjoy.

So, uh, anyone want to hang out, play some games and watch some anime?

1220: An Open Invitation to My Friends in the Southampton Area (and Anyone Who Can Get to Southampton Relatively Easily)

May 22 -- Board Games Hello! This is a curiously specific post, I know, but looking at my frankly quite impressive board game collection, I realise that I'm keen to share it with more people than I currently do. Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoy playing with our regular board game group — this very weekend we're taking a trip away to do nothing but play board games for several days — but as a group we have specific tastes that means certain games get to the table more often than others, and certain other games rarely get to the table at all. Everyone has different tastes, of course, so it would be good to try out these games on a selection of people — plus it'll give me some practice in teaching them to people, as well as the opportunity to socialise with people a bit more than I do currently. (Part of the reason I wanted to move back to Southampton, of course, was so I could see my friends more often — something which I could probably do more of now I'm here!)

What I thought I'd do, then, is outline the games in my collection in one or two sentences each rather than detailed writeups, then if any sound interesting or appealing to you, dear Southampton-based friend, you can let me know and we can arrange an evening of gaming good times. Sound good? Of course it does. Let us begin, then.

Here's what I have to offer you:

Advanced Heroquest: More complex version of Hero Quest. Explore dungeons, fight monsters, solve puzzles. Best played as a long-term campaign in which your characters grow in strength over time.

Agricola: A game in which you play a medieval German farmer. By carefully assigning your family members to perform various activities, you must build up your farm to be as successful and profitable as possible while ensuring you can still feed everyone. You will probably beat me at this.

Arkham Horror: A long, cooperative game in which everyone teams up to battle one of the Old Ones from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Relatively complex, but a lot of fun — particularly if you enjoy some light role-playing.

Ascension: A "deckbuilding" card game in which you gradually acquire more and more cards which can be played to either buy further cards or defeat monster cards to score points. Simple to learn, quick to play but a surprising amount of depth.

Blokus: A simple, abstract game in which you have a selection of oddly-shaped Tetris-style pieces and must arrange them so that they only touch corners. Meanwhile, your opponents are doing the same, and whoever uses the most of their pieces by the time no-one else can put a piece down wins. Available in four- and two-player formats.

Catan: A building and trading game in which three or four players compete to settle an island. Acquire resources, trade with your opponents and attempt to be the first to score ten points. I also have the Seafarers expansion, which adds a few extra mechanics and more variety.

Catan Card Game: A two-player card game loosely based on Catan in which players compete to build the best kingdom before their opponent does.

Carcassonne: A simple to understand but highly competitive tile-laying game in which players compete to control the most areas of French countryside by the time all the tiles have been laid.

Cards Against Humanity: One of the best "icebreaker" games I've ever seen — in Cards Against Humanity, one player asks a question or provides a "fill-in-the-blank" phrase from a black card, while all other players submit their answers using white cards with various words and phrases printed on them. The answers are then jumbled up, and the one who asked the question chooses their favourite, who then scores points.

Chess: It's chess.

Chez Cthulhu: A gang of Old One-worshipping slackers must make use of their items and spare time in order to gain as much "Slack" as possible without going mad… or while going as mad as possible.

Cleopatra and the Society of Architects: A beautifully-designed game in which you collect various cards in order to construct Cleopatra's palace. Similar in many ways to Ticket to Ride — see later.

Cranium Cards: I'm yet to play this, but it looks like a fun party game. Lots of vaguely cerebral, creative and improvisational challenges.

Defender: A board game adaptation of the '80s arcade game. Yes, really. Not really the best game in the world, but I keep it around for novelty value.

Descent: Journeys in the Dark: While resembling a "dungeon crawler" (a la Advanced Heroquest above), Descent is actually more of a team-based strategy battle game. A team of "hero" players, each controlling one unique character each, take on the forces of the Evil Overlord player to complete various scenarios which can optionally be linked together into a story-based campaign.

Dixit: A simple game about creative descriptions, knowing your friends and bluffing. Each player is dealt a hand of unique cards with pictures on them. The player who is currently the "storyteller" secretly chooses a card and describes it with a word, phrase or sentence. Everyone else then picks a card from their hand they think relates to the sentence, then the storyteller shuffles and reveals them. Player then vote on which one they think the storyteller's card was, with points being scored according to various criteria.

Dominion: A card game somewhat similar to Ascension in that you gradually build up a deck of cards as you play, but where instead of fighting monsters you are attempting to build up a kingdom. A lot of variety due to the fact the game doesn't use all its cards in a single play — instead, a random selection is chosen for each session.

Dungeons and Dragons Adventures: The Legend of Drizzt: A simple cooperative dungeon crawler loosely based on the popular Dungeons and Dragons role-playing system. This is strictly focused on exploring dungeons and battling monsters rather than role-playing, however, and makes use of an easy to understand system that is quick to play.

DungeonQuest: A heavily-random, brutally difficult game in which four players compete to make it to the dragon's lair at the centre of the board, nick as much treasure as possible then escape without dying in the process. Harder than it sounds. Not very strategic, but amusingly fun.

Flash Point: A cooperative game in which players control a team of firefighters as they attempt to rescue survivors from a burning building. Each player has their own special abilities, so collaboration and cooperation is a must.

Fluxx: A card game whose rules change as you play.

Gold Thief: A simple card game in which you use various "character cards" to add or remove to your personal stash of gold coins in an attempt to have the specific amount requests on a "goal card" at the start of your turn.

Guildhall: A simple, quick card game in which you must collect "sets" of cards with the same job on them in order to purchase cards with points on them. Each card has its own special ability that becomes more effective the more copies of it you have in your "Guildhall".

Hero Quest: Super-simple dungeon crawler with a wide variety of quests that can either be played as one-offs or as a longer campaign.

King of Tokyo: A very silly dice game in which you play one of several B-movie-style monsters as they attempt to take over Tokyo. Shouting "RRAAARRGH" while playing is optional, but encouraged.

Last Night on Earth: A survival horror game in which one team of players controls the survivors in a small American town, while the other controls the zombies as they attempt to eat their brains. Several different scenarios give this one a good amount of variety.

Lord of the Fries: You are a zombie that runs a fast-food restaurant. Compete against your friends to be the first to create various dishes and score points.

Monopoly Deal: How do you make Monopoly good? Ditch all the rules, pieces and board and turn it into a card game with lots of screwing each other over. Simple, quick and fun.

Munchkin: A humorous card game based on the "kill enemies and take their stuff" formula of most dungeon crawler games. Not to be taken seriously.

Mystery of the Abbey: Cluedo for grownups. Taking on the role of a monk in the titular abbey, you must use your deductive skills to determine who the murderer is while going about your usual monkly duties.

Mystery Express: It's Murder on the Orient Express: The Game. To be honest, I am yet to play a complete game of this, so I wouldn't mind busting it out with some people who would like to learn it.

Pandemic: A cooperative game in which players team up to battle four virulent diseases that are taking over the globe. Like Flash Point, each player has their own unique special ability to contribute to the team's effort as a whole.

Pit: A game in which you shout at each other in order to trade cards and attempt to be the first to collect a set.

Risk: It's Risk.

Scrabble Dash: A simple word game in which you must be the first to lay down letter cards from your hand to make a word that meets the requirements.

Smash Up: A simple and hilarious card game in which you combine two "factions" together to make a single deck of cards, then use these factions' abilities to smash the crap out of various bases and score points. The factions include zombies, pirates, ninjas, robots, fairies, dinosaurs, aliens and wizards. So yes, you can be robot pirates. Or dinosaur wizards. Or ninja fairies.

Shadows over Camelot: A cooperative game with a twist: one of the Knights of the Round Table might be a traitor secretly scheming to undermine the others' hard work questing around the realm.

Space Crusade: The classic Games Workshop game in which up to three Space Marine players enter an alien spacecraft in an attempt to take down the forces of the Alien player and complete a specific objective.

StarCraft: The Board Game: A board game adaptation of the popular computer game that actually has relatively little in common with its source material save for the factions and units. In StarCraft, you're competing against your opponents for control of the galaxy and its precious resources while attempting to wipe your rivals out.

Ticket to Ride: A fun, easy to understand game in which you collect sets of coloured cards in order to claim train routes across America and score points. Bonus points at the end if you complete specific routes on cards handed to you at the outset; penalty points if you don't complete them.

Uno: Simple card game, popular with naked people on Xbox Live.

Warhammer Quest: Variant on Advanced Heroquest and its ilk. Warhammer Quest is quite heavily randomised, but a lot of fun and friendly to both individual sessions and ongoing campaigns.

Whack a Catgirl: An anime-themed card game in which you lure an adorable catgirl over to you with various "bait" items, then whack her over the head with other amusing items to score points.

1217: Board Game Geek

I really like board games, as those of you who have been reading for a while will know. While I'm perhaps not quite as "hardcore" into the hobby as some on the Internet — largely due to not getting to play quite as often as I'd like — I do firmly count myself in that contingent of geeks who enjoy shuffling cards, fiddling with cardboard chits and moving wooden and/or plastic pieces around on a table. There's something inherently fun about it as a physical activity, and the social side of things shouldn't be understated, either — it's a great thing to do with friends if you don't feel like going out, and is an activity that can easily be "scaled" according to how many people you have and how much time you have available.

Next weekend, I'm taking a short trip away with some friends of mine to make merry and play a ton of board and card games. I'm really looking forward to it, since it will be some uninterrupted time to enjoy ourselves without having to worry about being home on time or anything like that. (I will add at this juncture that Andie is enormously understanding and patient regarding my geeky hobbies, and that I appreciate it enormously — especially when she joins in!)

Anyway, in preparation for said weekend, I catalogued the games I have available, and it seems I have amassed quite a sizeable collection over the last few years. I am happy about this, and I like displaying them as a talking point. (If you come over to our place and you see anything exciting-looking that you'd like to play on my shelf, just say the word and I'll be more than happy to bust it out.)

For those less familiar with the hobby, it's difficult to know where to start. So I thought today I'd spend a moment going over some of my favourites from "The Davison Collection" and why they're worth a look. Not all of these games hit the table regularly in our gaming group due to our varying tastes, but I enjoy all of them for various reasons.

Ticket to Ride

If you're just getting into board gaming — and by that I mean "ready to step beyond Monopoly and Scrabble" — there are few games I can recommend more than Alan R. Moon's classic Ticket to Ride. It's as simple as that.

Ticket to Ride's theme is that you are claiming train routes across North America, circa 1920. (Alternatively, in one of the many other versions of the game, you might be traversing Europe, Scandinavia or all manner of other places — each alternative version also features slightly-modified rules for variety.)

This isn't a dry, complicated business simulation, though; quite the opposite. Ticket to Ride is actually a relatively simple game of set collection. You're dealt a hand of coloured cards at the outset of the game, and on each of your turns you can do one of three things: draw two more cards, either from the selection of five face-up cards on the table, or from the face-down draw pile; claim a route by playing the corresponding number of like-coloured cards to the discard pile and scoring points for it; or drawing new "route tickets" that provide long-term challenges to be scored at the end of the game. That's essentially everything you need to know to get started — there are a couple of extra rules involving when you can and can't draw rainbow-coloured "locomotive" wild cards, but essentially those three actions are all you need to know to start playing Ticket to Ride.

Once you've got the rules down, a game of Ticket to Ride is done and dusted in maybe 30-45 minutes, depending on how many players you've got. It's a great game to introduce "non-gamers" to the hobby, and a good "start of evening" game to get everybody warmed up.

Carcassonne

Staying with the theme of "easy to understand, hard to master" games, we have Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's Carcassonne, a deceptively simple yet enormously competitive game that is as fun with two players as it is with five.

There are very few rules to learn in Carcassonne. On your turn, you draw a square tile from a face-down stack, then place it somewhere on the table in such a manner that it connects to something else. Pretty much every tile connects to something, so I believe it's impossible to get into a situation where you can't play anything at all — though clever play by your opponents may mean that you might not be able to play exactly where you want to.

Points are scored in Carcassonne by completing "features" on the map. These include cities, roads and cloisters. Each of these is claimed by placing one of your little wooden "meeples" on the tile you just placed to mark your ownership of the feature, then completing it. Cities must have a complete wall; roads must terminate at junctions, cities or cloisters; cloisters must have the eight tiles surrounding them filled. You don't get your meeple back until you complete the feature, so one strategy is to make it as hard as possible for your opponents to finish their features, thereby depriving them of further point-scoring opportunities in the later game. You also can't "share" a feature with another player unless you claim an unconnected part of it and later join it up. You can add more than one meeple to a feature to defend it more strongly in the same way — you can't, however, simply add multiple meeples to connected tiles of the same feature.

Carcassonne's "long game" comes in its "farming" mechanic, the exact implementation of which depends on how old the edition you're playing is. In most current editions of the game, farms are claimed by lying a meeple down on its side in the grasslands between roads and cities. This meeple can never be reclaimed, and scores no points at the end of the game. When the game ends, each field enclosed by cities and/or roads is calculated separately — the player with the most meeples in that field scores three points per city. Again, you can't add meeples to a farm that has already been claimed except by claiming an unconnected area and later joining it up — a process which can often be quite tricky to complete.

Carcassonne has extremely simple mechanics that belie a huge amount of tactical depth. It's quick and easy to play, yet has the potential to get enormously competitive — in other words, it's a great game for board game newbies to cut their teeth on, and one that remains relevant even as you get deeper into the hobby.

Pandemic

Pandemic is a cooperative board game in which players take on the role of disease control specialists attempting to cure four viruses that are spreading across the world. Each player has unique special abilities, and a significant amount of collaboration is required to beat the challenges the game provides.

Like the other games on this list, Pandemic's mechanics are fairly simple. To cure a disease, all you have to do is collect a set of like-coloured cards, then ensure you're in a research station to discard the cards and discover a cure. The twist is that it's a bit fiddly to trade these cards between hands, and all the while you're faffing around collecting cards, the disease is continuing to spread across the world, meaning you occasionally have to prioritise charging off on an aid mission to stop the viruses spreading unchecked.

Pandemic is a challenging game. There are several ways to lose: running out of cards to draw; running out of coloured cubes to represent a disease; or allowing the number of "outbreaks" — occasions where an already heavily-infected city causes nearby cities to be struck down also — to reach its maximum. It is fairly likely that the players will lose the game, particularly when playing on the harder difficulty levels — but it is still fun despite its challenge factor.

Pandemic is a good game to encourage cooperation, communication and collaboration, and it's great for those who aren't good with super-competitive games or direct conflict. It's strictly the players against the game — unless you're playing the "bio-terrorist" mode that comes with the "On the Brink" expansion set — and thus either everyone wins together… or more likely, everyone loses together.

Whack a Catgirl

I'm not going to pretend this is the best game in the world, but it is silly and enjoyable — and not only that, it plays super-quickly, too.

In Whack a Catgirl, you are attempting to pelt an irritatingly cute anime-style catgirl with a variety of amusing objects. The basic mechanics of the game consist of drawing cards from a central face-up pool and either playing them immediately if they are an action card, or putting them in your "arsenal" in front of you if they are item cards. Once you have at least two "hearts" worth of items in front of you, you can lure Neko-chan the catgirl over to you with them — discarding them in the process — and then batter her over the head with another one or two of your items, depending on how many "hearts" you expended to lure her. Flinging items at Neko-chan allows you to discard them into your face-down score pile, which is totted up at the end of the game.

That's basically it. The game mechanics are super-simple, but the fun in Whack a Catgirl comes from the silly cards and the theme. It's fair to say that the humour and references on the cards are probably best suited to anime fans or at least those familiar with Japanese popular entertainment, but anyone can get a kick out of the amusing artwork and inherent ridiculousness of the theme.

Fun fact: this was one of the first games from Asmadi Games, who have come to somewhat greater prominence recently through their chaotic card game We Didn't Playtest This At All.

Robo Rally

This is basically Logo: The Game, a reference which was totally lost on everyone I last mentioned it to. Come on! PEN DOWN, FORWARD 100, RIGHT 90? No? I'll be over here, being an old fart.

In Robo Rally, you take on the role of one of several amusingly-named robots and must proceed through a series of checkpoints before the other robots do. Simple as that. Except it's not quite that simple — the courses are extremely hazardous, the other robots have a habit of shooting at you if you're in their firing line, and the amount of control you have over your robot can occasionally be inconveniently unpredictable.

A single turn in Robo Rally consists of drawing cards, then using them to "program" your robot's actions for the turn. Cards allow robots to move forward and backwards and turn left and right. Once everyone has programmed their robots, everyone resolves their moves one step at a time. If a robot ends a move facing another robot, it fires at it and causes damage. If a robot moves into another robot, it pushes it along — something which can seriously fuck up a carefully-laid plan.

As a robot gets more damaged, more of its cards become "locked", which means that the robot must perform that same fixed action on its turn. As you can probably imagine, this can be enormously inconvenient, particularly if it's a "move forward" card that carries a significant risk of throwing you down a pit. Further complications are added by environmental hazards such as conveyor belts, lasers, walls and all manner of other problems. What initially appears to be a simple task quickly becomes very challenging — particularly with the chaos of the other players thrown into the mix.

Robo Rally is simple to pick up but hard to master. It's a lot of fun, particularly for those who enjoy thinking about things logically, but be warned, it's pretty rare you'll be able to pull off the "perfect" plan every time!

Ascension

This is a "deckbuilding" game — a game where you start with a fixed deck of cards, shuffled randomly, and then gradually acquire more and more cards as the game progresses. These cards fall into two main categories — cards which help you buy things, and cards which help you fight things. Your points largely come around from fighting things by playing a high enough value of "fight" cards on the table — but in order to acquire said fight cards you will, of course, have to spend some time acquiring some cards that help you buy things.

Ascension's mechanics are easy to pick up and games flow quite quickly, even with four players. The deckbuilding mechanic is a lot of fun and helps ensure that games are never quite the same, and it's just thematic enough to keep fans of fighting fantasy monsters happy, while providing enough strategy for beard-scratching tactical fans to have things to think about.

Talking of deckbuilding…

Dominion

Dominion is an interesting game that has a lot of potential variations. Each time you play, you pick a random selection of card decks to use, meaning that each game has a different combination of special abilities available to you. Thematically, you're building a kingdom by purchasing territory and constructing facilities, but in practice you're collecting cards that work well together and allow you to do more with your turn than you can at the outset of the game. The basic mechanics are relatively simple, but the tactical possibilities provided by the cards mean that the game grows gradually in complexity as you collect more cards for your deck.

Dominion perhaps isn't quite as accessible as Ascension is, but it's probably the deeper game. Once you get your head around the rules and become familiar with the cards, games can flow pretty quickly — until then, however, be prepared to spend a bit of "thinking time" determining how the various cards can benefit you.

Honourable Mention: Agricola

I feel honour-bound to mention Agricola because my gaming group is such a big fan of it, but I honestly don't enjoy it all that much when it does come out. This is largely due to the fact that I'm not very good at it, which I appreciate is a somewhat shallow reason to dislike it, but there you are.

Actually, the thing I dislike more than anything about Agricola is not that I always lose at it, but it's that I don't really understand why I lose, or how I can do any better. And looking up potential strategies online doesn't really seem to help either. It's just something I need to become more familiar with, I guess. I can certainly appreciate the interesting, complex but accessible mechanics at work in the game — I just have no idea how to do any better than I already do.

Time to practice, I guess.

1213: Another Board Game Post

Today we had another little jaunt into Toronto. Our original intention was to have a wander around Kensington Market, but by the time we got there it was so hot and sunny that it was getting not-particularly-pleasant to wander around outside, so we decided to repair to Snakes & Lattes to sit in the relative cool, play some board games and wait to meet Mark and Lynette later that afternoon.

Andie and I hit a few old favourites while we waited, including Carcassonne (which I won), Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries (which I did not win), and Blokus (which I did win). Then other people showed up, including our mutual friend Jon, who introduced us to a few interesting games I hadn't come across before.

The first of these was Fist of Dragonstones. I'd heard of this before but wasn't really familiar with it, so it was essentially new to me.

Fist of Dragonstones is a bidding game in which you're trying to be the first player to score three victory points. This might not sound like a lot, but it's not especially easy to come by points. Most of the game revolves around bidding various amounts of in-game currency (the exact amount of which you have is kept secret from the other players) in a "closed-fist" bid to acquire character cards with various special abilities. These range from dragons, which provide you with coloured dragonstones, to wizards and magicians, who help you score points from various combinations of dragonstones. Certain cards allow you to mess with the other players or hinder their efforts, but your access to the cards is limited by what money you have on hand — and there's nowhere near enough for you to be able to bid on everything.

It's an interesting game that I feel probably takes a few goes to "get" but it proved enjoyable. The dragonstones themselves are sparkly and shiny, too.

—

The "main event" for the afternoon was a game I've been curious about for a while: A Touch of Evil. This game had been sold to me as being "like Arkham Horror but a fraction of the length and a fraction of the complexity". Since I like Arkham Horror but it rarely hits the table due to the sheer amount of time it takes to play it to completion, I was very curious to try this theme-heavy game that sees you fighting various evil masterminds in Colonial America.

A Touch of Evil is indeed quite like Arkham Horror in many respects in that it encourages players to contemplate the narrative of their characters' actions rather than just following the game mechanics in a rather dry manner. There's no requirement to "role-play" or anything, but a considerable amount of enjoyment is added to the experience if you imagine or describe what the characters are getting up to and attempt to contextualise their dice rolls and skill checks.

It's also interesting in that, unlike Arkham Horror, it doesn't have to be played as a purely cooperative game. It can instead be played as a co-op-competitive game in which players split into teams to see who can be the first to take down whatever Great Evil is threatening the world this time around, or even as a "free for all" game in which all players are working individually to be the first to take down whatever Great Evil is threatening the world this time around.

There are a bunch of interesting little mechanics in A Touch of Evil that make it enjoyable, and heavily thematic. For example, the game's setting features a band of "elders" who can potentially be recruited to help out in the game's final confrontation. However, each elder has their own secret, represented by a card played under their character card. These secrets range from minor misdemeanours which don't affect the gameplay but which add some flavour to their character to the potential for them to be in league with the Great Evil — or even to be the Great Evil in disguise themselves! There's a lot of scope for surprises and hilarity, and the game never really felt like it was dragging — by the time Arkham Horror is starting to get tiresome, at least one player in A Touch of Evil is probably ready to trigger the showdown against the scenario's boss.

—

I took advantage of Snakes & Lattes' excellent prices before I left and picked up copies of Flash Point and Guild Hall to add to the copies of Smash Up and Zombie Dice I acquired the other day. Andie also bought me a copy of King of Tokyo as a belated birthday present, and I grabbed a copy of Race for the Galaxy on behalf of one of my regular board game buddies back home. I'm looking forward to trying all these games out when I get back — we have a "gaming weekend" lined up at the end of the month, so that should be a lot of fun.

Not sure what we're doing tomorrow as yet. It's possible we might have another quiet day, then we'll probably hit Toronto Zoo on our last full day here on Friday. We fly back on Saturday. It'll be sad to leave after the enjoyable time we've had here, but it'll also be nice to get back to relative "normality". I miss our rats!

1211: I Want A Place Like This

Toronto is in possession of an establishment that I very much wish was a more widespread "Thing", particularly in the U.K. Said establishment is known as Snakes & Lattes, and you can probably guess from its name what sort of place it is.

Or perhaps you can't, since it's sort of an unusual establishment.

Snakes & Lattes is a board game cafe. That is to say, it's a cafe in which the playing of board games is not only welcomed, it is actively encouraged. How, you ask? By the fact it has an impressively huge selection just sitting there on its back wall waiting to be played with, ranging from well-thumbed copies of popular card games to the hardest of the hardcore Eurogames and everything in between. It costs just $5 (plus food and drink) to hang out there for as long as you like, and that price gives you access to the establishment's impressive collection of titles as you please.

Snakes, as it tends to be known, is not just a place to go and play board games, though. It's also a great place to go and learn new board games. The staff on hand are all ready, willing and able to recommend new titles to you, and even to teach you how to play. If you're looking for a particular kind of game and you're not sure what to try, chances are someone at Snakes will be able to recommend it to you.

The other thing that Snakes is is a place to buy board games. A healthy proportion of the games that it has available for play are also available for purchase at the front of the establishment, and for very reasonable prices, too — I picked up a couple of games myself today on the recommendation of a Snakes staffer. Specifically, I grabbed a copy of Zombie Dice, which is a very simple game I've heard a few people recommend recently, and a copy of Smash Up, a very entertaining and chaotic card game that rewards being a complete dick to your opponents — I'm looking forward to introducing this one to my friends back home.

I'm certainly going to be taking at least one more trip back to Snakes before our holiday is over, since there are a number of games I've had a chance to try that I'd like to take back with me. Specifically, King of Tokyo and Flash Point are two that intrigued me a great deal — King of Tokyo for being an excellent, fun and quick game with simple but enjoyable mechanics, and Flash Point for being a great cooperative game with enough differences from Pandemic — and a similarly short play time — to be worth a look. There are also a bunch of small games that I'm keen to introduce to my friends back home, too — stuff like the color-matching card game Coloretto and the thoroughly silly Ghost Blitz and Anomia, but I haven't decided which of these, if any, I'm going to pick up my own copy of. I did also try and snag a copy of Love Letter to take home, but that game appears to be like gold dust at present.

Anyway. No idea what's on the cards for tomorrow daytime, but I believe we're going out to a comedy club tomorrow evening to see an entertaining-sounding improv and sketch show on the subject of Internet memes. There's a subject that could easily be cringeworthy, but the comedy club in question is apparently rather highly regarded in the area, and thus I'm looking forward to it quite a bit. Doubtless I will be splurging my thoughts on the matter over these pages tomorrow evening, so look forward to that then.

For now, good night!

1202: Say Anything

We're in Canada! Also quite jetlagged. Andie flaked out pretty early and went to bed, but I powered on through and played a bunch of board and card games before being introduced to Adventure Time (hilarious) and Polar Bear Cafe (also hilarious, but in a completely different way).

We played a few games this evening, including Love Letter, Magical Athlete and Say Anything. All of them are pleasantly lightweight, quick games that can easily be slotted in to an evening, and they're also particularly friendly to casual players or inexperienced gamers.

Love Letter is an exercise in simplicity. Each of the players are a prospective suitor to the princess, and they're trying to get their love letter into her hands. The card they have in their hand at any one time represents who has their letter at any given time, and the numerical rank on the card represents how "close" to the princess the love letter is. When the deck — which is made up of just 16 cards — is exhausted or all players except one have been eliminated, the surviving player with the highest-ranked card is declared the winner of that round. Play then repeats until someone has won four rounds.

The interesting part of Love Letter comes in the special effects all the cards have. Each turn, you draw a second card, and you must then "play" one of your two cards by discarding it. Discarding any card causes its effect to occur, and these range from swapping hands with other people to being able to peek at their cards or potentially eliminate them from the current round. As you might expect, the princess card is the strongest if you survive to the end of the game, but if somehow you find yourself having to discard it, you're immediately eliminated.

It's a very simple game that is easy to understand, and there's a surprising amount of hidden depth to it — card-counting, bluffing and working out the best way to pull the wool over the other players' eyes.

—

Magical Athlete, meanwhile, was described to me as "Snakes and Ladders with special powers", and that's a fairly apt description. The game unfolds in two phases — firstly, each player must assemble a team of five magical athletes, each of whom have their own special abilities, and secondly, everyone then has to compete in five rounds of roll-and-move racing using a different one of their chosen characters each time. The player with the most points at the end wins.

While roll-and-move games rely heavily on luck, Magical Athlete sidesteps the experience being completely random through the aforementioned special abilities, many of which are designed to either help the owner out, hinder the others, or sometimes both. Many of the abilities are also designed to interact with one another to various degrees, which makes for some interesting encounters. By far the most memorable race we had earlier included the combination of the Siren, who pulls every other player towards her — forwards or backwards — by a single space at the start of her turn; Cupid, who moves forward five spaces any time a male and a female character occupy the same space; and the Pirate, who can "kidnap" any player and bring them back to their space. Consequently, the race became a farce: Siren constantly pulling people onto her space activated Cupid's power, which meant that Pirate would inevitably pull him back every turn.

It's a fun game — perhaps light on the strategy, but a lot of entertainment to be had here from simply observing how the different cards interact with one another.

—

I think my highlight of the evening had to be Say Anything, though, which has a certain degree in common with Cards Against Humanity, only with dry-wipe markers and less filth provided up-front.

In Say Anything, players take it in turns to read one of several different questions from a card, and the other players must then scrawl an answer on their own personal whiteboard and put it in the middle of the table. The asker then picks their favourite and secretly records their choice, then everyone else bets their two coins on which one they think the asker will pick. Points are then awarded according to whether players bet on the asker's pick and various other means.

The beauty of Say Anything is that it "scales" to any type of social group — I'm not talking about difficulty or group size, but subject matter. The questions are all fairly "general" and you can literally write anything you want on your whiteboard as an answer — even if it's not "true". Like Cards Against Humanity, there's an element of playing to your "audience" when providing an answer, but unlike that game, there's no obligation to delve into depravity unless you really want to. Cards Against Humanity is as filthy as you make it to a certain extent, but there's little denying that a card that reads "Pac-Man uncontrollably guzzling cum" is anything but questionable in nature. There's nothing stopping you writing exactly the same thing in Say Anything, but equally you're not forced into the less salubrious side of things unless you want to. This means it can be played with the whole family, as opposed to Cards Against Humanity's well-deserved "mature" rating.

—

I'd write more about all of these but I feel like I'm about to pass out from tiredness/jetlag. So, hello Canada, goodbye U.K. for a couple of weeks — expect updates at strange times for the next two weeks! 🙂

1195: City of Horror

It's my birthday on Monday, so we decided that today would be a good day to celebrate it while people were around. As has been the tradition among the more geeky portion of my circle of friends, we decided to mark the occasion with a day of board and computer games, including Surgeon Simulator 2013, a failed attempt at getting Artemis to run due to the iOS versions not matching the PC versions, some NintendoLand (still a firm hit with everyone, and a good reason by itself to own a Wii U and four controllers) and, on the board game front, Descent and City of Horror.

It's the latter that I'd like to talk about today, as it's a very interesting game indeed, and quite unlike anything I've really played before.

For the uninitiated, City of Horror is a semi-cooperative survival horror game themed around a zombie apocalypse. Each player takes control of several survivors and then, over the course of four turns, moves them around, fends off zombies, makes deals with the other players and tries to end the game with as many points as possible. In order to acquire points, your characters have to be alive, and in order to ensure they are alive at the end of the game, they must have an antidote on hand and not have been devoured by zombies. To gain more points, you can grab food supplies or additional antidotes. Each character is worth a particular number of points at the end of the game, but loses value if they use their special ability, which can only be used once per game unless they "recharge" themselves using special cards or locations.

The gameplay is surprisingly free-for-all once it gets started, and reading the rules doesn't really make it entirely clear how things are going to unfold until you start playing. Essentially what happens is this: everyone secretly makes a decision as to which of the game's locations they are going to move one of their characters to this turn, then reveals this plan simultaneously. Then, zombies appear and move, and sometimes supplies in the form of action cards and antidotes are dropped in. Then, characters move in a set order; if there isn't a space in the location they're trying to move to, they end up in the streets in the centre of the board.

After this comes the tricky bit. Each location is "resolved" in order. Firstly, each player gets an opportunity to use the location's special ability, which usually involves discarding a card to get some sort of benefit. This happens in turn order. Next, all players — even those who don't have a character present in that location — can play action cards, negotiate, lie, cheat and backstab their way into an advantageous position. Action cards allow for the manipulation of stuff that is on the board — some allow you to move or add zombies to particular locations; others let survivors kill zombies; others still have special abilities such as guaranteeing safety from a zombie attack.

Each location has its own criterion for triggering a zombie attack — usually an upper limit of zombies milling around the outside of the building. If this criterion is met, then one of the characters present in the location will die after everyone has finished playing their actions — exactly which one is determined by a simultaneous vote among everyone present. Consequently, there's a lot of scope for making deals with other players and then stabbing them in the back by siding against them when it comes to the time when someone has to be thrown out through the window into the slobbering hordes.

In many ways, it's a nasty, horrible little game that is best played among a group of friends who won't take it personally. If you're not willing to be a complete asshole to the people you're playing with, you will not succeed — it's as simple as that. In many ways it's rather refreshing — rather than being directly competitive based on skill, random elements or accumulated resources, it's all about interacting with other people and determining where everyone's weak points are. There's a lot of bluffing, a lot of lying and a lot of outright cheating (within the confines of the rules) and I seriously doubt it's possible to finish a game with everyone still standing.

It's great fun, in short — just be sure not to play it with anyone who might get upset when you promise not to let them get killed and then promptly let them get killed!

1172: Mage Knight

It was a board games evening tonight, and since we were down one member from our usual troupe to play Descent: Second Edition we decided to crack open a new acquisition and give it a shot: Mage Knight.

None of us really knew anything about Mage Knight prior to going in save for the fact it was supposed to be good, so it was always going to be something of a learning experience. Due to the relative complexity of the rules — or at least, the relative complexity of introducing the rules to everyone — we didn't manage to finish a complete game, but at least now we have a good understanding of the basic mechanics and will probably be able to romp through the introductory scenario without too much difficulty.

Mage Knight, if you're unfamiliar, is a rather interesting game with elements of role-playing, strategy and deck-building card games. You play a single character who begins with a deck of basic abilities — one of which is unique to each character, the rest of which are the same for everyone — and then work your way towards the objective of the scenario you're playing. Scenarios vary from cooperative ones where you work together as a group to competitive ones, where whoever gets the most points after the end condition is fulfilled wins, to "very competitive" ones, where whoever fulfils the victory condition first wins.

Play is split into rounds, which represent either day or night-time, and each round can and will go on for several circuits of the table. On each turn within a round, you can play some cards from your hand, some of which award you with movement, combat or influence points, and can then use those points to do various things. For example, moving requires a particular number of points according to the type of terrain you're moving over, and influence is used in settlements and other friendly locations to do things like make use of services or acquire troops. Some cards have special abilities, too, and most have two possible functions — one simple one that can be used for "free", and a more powerful one that generally requires a specific colour of mana to activate. Mana can be acquired through cards, through crystals you've stocked up on through various means, or most frequently through the dice that represent the "Source" — the mana naturally flowing through the world.

Through moving and attacking, you'll reveal more and more areas of the map, each of which include various things to do. In villages, you can recruit new troops, get healing or pillage them. Come across a fortress and you can assault it in an attempt to take it over for yourself. Discover a wizard's tower and you'll have the opportunity to get some powerful spells. Most actions affect your "fame" level — which acts as a combined score and "experience" system, allowing the player to grow stronger in various ways every so often — and your reputation in the area, which provides bonuses or penalties to the amount of influence points required to do "friendly" actions. Defeating marauding monsters improves your reputation; attacking fortresses unprovoked has a negative impact. There's a nice feeling of "consequence" to your actions.

We didn't play far enough to finish the first scenario, but we learned enough to be able to make it through the next time we try it. We learned about the simple but elegant combat system, which requires you to make careful use of your cards to defeat your enemies, and about the various ways you can acquire the more powerful abilities and items. There's clearly a lot to this game, and the really nice thing about it is that it's one of those games that, like Descent, scratches both the strategic Eurogame and theme-heavy Ameritrash itches simultaneously. Consequently, I can see it hitting the table reasonably often — though the only downside for our group is that it only supports up to four players, whereas our full complement is typically five people.

I'm looking forward to trying it again, anyway. It looks like a great game and the components are gorgeous — lovely linen-backed cards, pre-painted miniatures and high-quality tokens and other bits and pieces. It takes a while to set up but once you're up and running it's a game that continues to look good in the middle of a session rather than devolving into a chaotic mess. Combine that with the host of scenarios and variants provided in the rulebook and here's a game with the potential to be pretty different each time you play it. I can see why it's so well-regarded.

1146: Doing It Wrong

We've had a day of board gaming today, including a game of Agricola, a game of Small World and finishing off with a quest and a half worth's of Descent: Second Edition.

Partway through our Descent session, I looked up something on a whim, and it transpires that we've been playing a certain rule completely wrong for the duration of our campaign. It turns out the Stun condition, which we'd been playing as completely eliminating a figure's go (i.e. the only action they could take that turn is getting rid of Stun status) actually only removes one of a figure's two actions per turn. Given that one of the hero characters has an ability that automatically inflicts Stun on any monster figure that begins their turn adjacent to them — and, more to the point, has been making extensive use of that ability — this has likely had a significant knock-on effect on our campaign. I knew that ability as we had been playing it felt distinctly unbalanced, and now I know why — the way we were playing it, it was!

Fortunately, Descent 2 is fun enough that even with the hero players being armed to the teeth with a variety of ill-gotten gains through earlier quests that they might not necessarily have won had my Overlord's forces not spent most of their time staggering around in a daze, it's still enjoyable to play. I'm still losing pretty much every quest and it's entirely likely that I will lose the entire campaign as a result of our earlier fuckup, but it doesn't matter too much. We know now, at least, and from the sound of the conversation around our gaming table this evening it looks highly likely that we're going to do another run through the campaign once we're finished, with everyone in different roles.

This is the one tricky thing about board games versus video games. In video games, assuming they have been programmed correctly, there is no way to do that wrong. Had Descent 2 been made as a Fire Emblem-style video game (which would be fantastic, incidentally — I would pay good money for a video game version of it, particularly with multiplayer) then there would have been no ambiguity about the rules. We'd always be using the correct skills, we wouldn't inadvertently be breaking the rules and there'd be no disputes over what the wording of certain cards meant.

This is actually a common problem with the theme-heavy games that I'm such a fan of. Because theme-heavy games tend to have a lot of rules, many of which only apply to very specific situations (usually tied to happenings in the "narrative" of the play session), it's very easy to misunderstand, forget or otherwise mutilate the rules in some way. If everyone agrees on a variation, it hurts no-one, but it can be frustrating to have played something for a hefty period of time and discover that you've been Doing It Wrong.

Oh well. As I say, I'm not too worried. I've had a blast playing through the Descent 2 campaign so far, and we're coming up on the finale. Once that's done and dusted, we'll be able to start a new game — possibly with the recently-released expansion pack — and play it, you know, properly. We have a running joke in our gaming group that if we fuck something up rules-wise and it's too late to do anything about it, the game in question is a "training game". When it comes to a multi-session campaign like this, it's a little harder to justify, but as I say, since we're highly likely to be playing it again we can chalk our experiences this time around up to learning the ropes, and hopefully do a better job next time around.

If I haven't made it clear by the several other posts I've written on this subject to date, Descent 2 is a really good game. It's been a big hit with our gaming group due to the fact that it marries genuinely strategic gameplay with theme-heavy shenanigans and lovely-quality components — the miniatures in particular are beautifully-detailed, if rendered in rather bendy plastic — and thus appeals to both the people who enjoy games with "stories" and a lot of theme, and those who enjoy competitive, strategic play. I can highly recommend it for anyone looking for a good, relatively easy to understand (rules for the Stun condition aside) game with a lot of variety and huge replay value.