1223: Chronicle of the Godslayer

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.

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.

#oneaday Day 725: The Godslayer is Still a Bit Peeved

I’m a big fan of Ascension: Wrath of the Godslayer on iOS. It introduced me to an excellent deck-building card game and provides some excellent transatlantic asynchronous multiplayer fun. Always a bonus.

I’d been intending to check out the physical version for some time but hadn’t seen a copy of it anywhere. Until today, that is, when I found not only the original Wrath of the Godslayer set, but also a new package known as Storm of Souls.

I shan’t get into the nitty-gritty of Ascension‘s mechanics here as those of you reading this will either already know what it’s all about or have the good sense to look it up for yourself. Suffice to say its a deck-building game with some superficial similarities to Dominion, but a much faster pace of play and a greater focus on “combat” of sorts, though not specifically against another player. Rather, all participants in the game compete against the game itself, and whoever does the best is declared the winner and the Lord of All Awesomeness, or something. There is a plot, but as tends to happen with many board and card games, it has little to no importance on how the game actually pans out.

For those already familiar with Ascension, Storm of Souls adds a few new bits and pieces. Firstly, it adds a bunch of new cards. These can be combined with Wrath of the Godslayer‘s cards to have games for up to six people at once. I haven’t tried this yet, but I can imagine it’s a very different dynamic to two-player games.

Secondly, a new Event mechanic allows cards to enter play that have ongoing effects. For example, one Event strengthens the Cultist “cannon fodder” enemies, making them more difficult to defeat but also making them worth more points. Others add modifiers to certain cards, some of which require you to think about the order in which you play your cards much more than in Wrath of the Godslayer.

Then there’s the Trophy mechanic. Rather than Banishing certain monsters, putting them out of the game forever, certain monsters can be kept as trophies and banished at a later time for various benefits. This adds an extra layer of strategy which is very welcome.

As with many deckbuilding games, the joy of Ascension comes in building good synergies of cards and then unleashing them in a vast combo attack that looks suitably impressive. While it takes time to build up to this point in Dominion, in Ascension you’re there within a turn or two, particularly if you pay careful attention to Events and the type of cards you’re playing.

So is the new version any good? Most definitely. Tonight has been an all-nighter of play, hence the lateness of this entry — haven’t been to bed yet! I hasten to add that it hasn’t been Ascension that we’ve been playing all night — we also took on Dominion and Last Night on Earth. Ascension was the clear favourite though, particularly as its setup is straightforward enough to make three games in a row a very practical prospect.

So, I shall certainly look forward to playing it more in the future, and if you’re a fan of the deckbuilding subgenre of card games, I suggest you check it out. And if you don’t want to splurge on the physical edition, be sure to check out the excellent iOS version — a faithful adaptation that is very well designed for the small screen and the mobile platform.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I better get some sleep…

#oneaday Day 637: Card-Carrying Lunatic

I like card games. I’m not sure why. It’s one of those things where something indefinably pleasant goes through my head when I think of holding cards, seeing (hopefully) gorgeous artwork and enjoying a game that (in most cases) combines elements of luck with skill and strategy. It may be something to do with the fact that, statistically, I appear to be better at card games than I am at some full-on board games — particularly Agricola and Power Grid, it has to be said — but I’m not sure that’s quite the right reason.

I’ve started playing a couple of good games on iOS recently. One, Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer is, I believe, an adaptation of an actual proper physical card game. It’s one of those games that initially sounded horrendously complex, with all manner of stats and numbers floating around to make lesser men and women tremble in their +5 Boots of Courage. But, in fact, it’s a rather simple game with very straightforward mechanics and, like the best games, it’s all about what you do with those mechanics that makes it interesting to play.

Essentially, the game revolves around building a deck of cards and making use of their various abilities to score as many points as possible. Points are scored by purchasing cards using the Runes stat, and by defeating monsters using the Power stat. Both Runes and Power are acquired by playing thematically-appropriate cards and adding up their totals to provide a pool of points to “spend” each turn — for example, Apprentices add Runes and allow you to purchase additional cards, while Militia adds Power and allows you to kick the bottom of monsters.

Points are acquired as you go along but also tallied up at the end of the game, so there’s an element of uncertainty as you go along — additional points are added according to the value of purchased cards at the end, while defeated monsters and cards with point-scoring special abilities grant their rewards immediately.

That’s about it — you buy cards, you kill monsters, repeat until the available pool of points is depleted. Then, if you’re anything like me, repeat until bored, which is, in my experience so far, a very long time away.

My experience with the iOS version has certainly made me curious to check out the physical version, though I hear its components aren’t up to much. Based on this and Dominion, which I do own a physical copy of and which seriously needs an iOS adaptation, however, I think I can say with some confidence that I enjoy deck-building games.

The second game I’ve given a shot is a slightly different deal. Shadow Era is more along the lines of a CCG like Magic: The Gathering rather than using the preset cards of Ascension. As such, there’s (arguably) a lot more variety, and the game involves a lot more in the way of direct conflict between players than Ascension does — the latter involves a number of cards which indirectly screw over other players rather than attacking them directly, while Shadow Era is an outright fight between the two participants.

I’ve only had one game of Shadow Era so far but it seems like a solid game, and props to it for offering virtual cards for either real money or, for the more patient, from in-game soft currency, or hard acquired through levelling up. I’ll report back further on it when I’ve given it a bit more time, along with Kard Combat, codesigned by Richard “Magic: The Gathering” Garfield.