1440: Escape!

I spent some of my Christmas money today on some board games — I grabbed Castle Panic, which I’ve never played but which I understand is an enjoyable moderate-length game that isn’t horrendously complicated, and Escape, which I hadn’t heard of prior to today, but which came recommended by some board gamers I follow on G+.

Escape is a really interesting game, as it happens, and I’m looking forward to trying it out with various different group sizes. Andie and I gave it a shot today, initially not quite sure what to make of it, but after a third playthrough — a game is only ten minutes long — we nailed it.

Escape is a cooperative game that unfolds in real time. You and your compatriots play intrepid explorers who have gone and got themselves stuck in the middle of a temple, with no idea of where the exit is. (Presumably they fell in through the ceiling or something.) It’s your job to find the exit, then exit through it. Simple, right? NOPE.

The temple, being a mysterious old temple, is cursed, and in order to be able to escape you need to not only find the exit, but also activate some magical gems along the way. Each gem you activate makes it easier to escape, but attempting to activate them takes up valuable time.

Almost everything you do in Escape hinges on the roll of the dice. Each player has five dice they can roll, and there’s no need to take turns — you just keep rolling until you get what you want, and you can set aside dice that you haven’t used to perform an action. Roll a black mask, however, and that die is out of commission until you roll a golden mask to return up to two of your dice to play. If you’re in the same room as another player, you can use your golden masks to “heal” another player’s dice, too, so it’s in your interests to team up rather than get too far apart.

Activating the gems is generally a matter of rolling a certain number of either torch or key symbols. Certain rooms allow you to activate multiple gems in collaboration with other players by pooling your dice, but obviously rolling 10 of one symbol is going to be a little more time-consuming than rolling, say, 4, so you have to weigh up the risks and potential rewards.

Just to add a little more stress to the mix, at two points during the ten-minute play session, a gong sounds, and then you have a short span of time to get back to the central chamber or lose one of your dice permanently. Conversely, if you manage to escape before someone else does — by both finding the exit and then rolling as many keys as there are gems left in the pool, plus one — you can give one of your dice to another player. If you haven’t all escaped by the time the third gong and countdown ends, you all lose, regardless of how many people have escaped.

Escape makes use of an audio CD to manage the time limit, but also provides a sand timer for when you’re playing in quieter environments. The CD is a lot of fun, though, being full of ambient noise and dramatic stabs when you’re all racing back to the central room. It reminds me of the somewhat more complicated Space Alert, another cooperative game that involves working together against a tight time limit — unlike Space Alert, however, which unfolds in hilariously painful slow motion after the CD is over, Escape happens in completely real-time, which takes a certain degree of getting used to but gives it a pleasingly enjoyable, frantic feel to it.

Looking forward to trying it some more and adding the “Curse” and “Treasure” modules for additional complexity and strategic options. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a super-quick game to hit your table as a filler or warmup, it’s well worth a look.

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!

#oneaday Day 906: Drizzle Bizzle

I recently acquired a copy of one of the Dungeons & Dragons boardgames: The Legend of Drizzt, a game based on everyone’s favourite Dark Elf and the one character from D&D lore that most people can remember.

I’ve given the game a couple of goes so far — twice solo and once with Andie. I’ll be playing it with a larger group next week, all being well, too.

If you’ve not seen the game before, here’s the deal. It’s not really a conventional dungeon crawler in the mould of Hero Quest and its various expansions and sequels. It is, however, a challenging cooperative game that I anticipate will require at least a small degree of working together to survive.

Basically the flow of play goes like this. Each hero may move and attack, attack and move or move twice on their turn. If they end their turn on the edge of a dungeon tile, a new one is drawn and a monster appears on the tile more often than not. Some tiles also cause an “encounter” to occur, which more often than not is detrimental to the players. After that, any monsters that the current player “controls” (i.e. revealed on their turn) make their moves and attacks according to the logic on their cards, then play passes to the next player and continues until either the players have completed the objective for their chosen quest or a single hero is defeated without any remaining “healing surges” to restore them.

Combat uses a loose interpretation of D&D 4th Edition’s “Powers”-based system. Each character has a hand of “Powers” to use when they attack — some are “At Will”, meaning they may always be used, some are “Daily” meaning they may only be used once, and some are “Utility”, some of which may only be used once and others of which provide supporting abilities. Combat results are determined by dice rolls with bonuses according to the Power chosen — some have a greater chance to hit, some hit more monsters simultaneously and some do more damage.

It’s a simple, elegant system that keeps the game flowing well at a good pace. It captures the feel of D&D 4e’s excellent combat system without getting bogged down in scenario design — or the requirement to have a human “dungeon master”. And it’s considerably more accessible to non roleplayers than even a basic D&D module. At the same time, it doesn’t have the complexity of a lot of dungeon crawlers, doesn’t take nearly as long to play and encourages cooperation between players.

I’ll be very interested to see what the dynamic is like with more people as I feel it has a lot of potential. As a cooperative game, it looks set to have plenty of the usual brutal difficulty factor without the Byzantine rules of a title like Arkham Horror — much as I love the ol’ Lovecraft-em-up, I think pretty much every time we’ve played we’ve forgotten at least one rule.

It also comes in an absolutely humongous box and is packed with cool figures and lots and lots of cardboard tokens of various kinds. It’s a veritable nerdgasm to open up that box, and closing it makes the best “box fart” I’ve heard for a long time. So kudos for that.

I’ll offer a full report on the game following our play session next Tuesday; for now rest assured that if you’re the slightest but interested in low-maintenance dungeon crawling and monster bashing, you could certainly do far worse than check out any of the three D&D Adventures games.

#oneaday Day 897: Dungeon Crawling

I’m a big fan of board games, as regular readers will know. And I have fairly diverse tastes, too — I like everything from Eurogames such as Catan to theme-heavy Ameritrash like Last Night on Earth. Exactly what I want to play at any given moment is largely determined by my mood at the time, but I can pretty much always muster up enthusiasm to play a dungeon-crawling game.

I own several dungeon crawlers, but I’m planning on picking up the very interesting-looking Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition when it releases, as it sounds like just the sort of game I want to play. It also sounds like it’s been improved significantly over the original edition, which could take up to 4 or 5 hours to complete a single quest. The new version reportedly keeps play sessions down to much more manageable lengths while incorporating a solid “campaign” system for character advancement and a branching narrative. I’m looking forward to it a lot.

As for the ones I already own, each of them have their pros and cons, and I like them all.

Starting at one end of the spectrum we have Games Workshop’s Dungeonquest, which saw a rerelease by Fantasy Flight Games recently. Dungeonquest is gloriously random and is best left on the shelf if you like to plan out what you’re doing well in advance, because progression is determined largely by the luck of the draw. Consequently, it is a very difficult game to “succeed” in — even the instruction manual helpfully informs you that players have approximately a 34% chance of survival in any given playthrough.

In Dungeonquest, players take it in turns to draw dungeon tiles from a pool in order to build the dungeon as they go. If it’s a corridor, they get to move again. If it’s a room, things happen, determined largely by drawing cards and making skill checks. If it’s a special room, super-special things (usually bad for the player) happen. Many of these things end in instant death for the player, meaning games can be over relatively quickly if you’re unlucky.

The aim of Dungeonquest is to make it to the middle of the board to raid the slumbering dragon’s massive treasure pile, then make it out again before the sun rises — the time limit in question being represented by an ever-advancing “track” at the side of the board. If players don’t get out before sunrise, they die. If they run out of health, they die. If the fall down a bottomless pit, they die. Hilarity (and, usually, frustration) ensues. It’s not a great game, but it is an entertaining one.

Moving up somewhat is MB and Games Workshop’s Hero Quest. This was my introduction to fantasy role-playing when I was a kid, and it still holds a very fond place in my heart to date. It’s an adversarial game where a team of up to four “hero” characters of varying classes take on the forces of darkness, controlled by a single “evil wizard” player. The evil wizard has a book of preset quests with which to challenge the heroes, and following these through in sequence provides a rather loose narrative. The game was later expanded with a number of additional packs that broadened the scope somewhat with new monsters, traps and additional rules to make things more interesting.

Hero Quest is good because it bridges the gap between traditional “family-friendly” board game conventions and the more abstract, strategic nature of role-playing games. It’s accessible enough for pretty much anyone to understand, has high-quality components and a wide variety of things to do — plus is very expandable and customizable.

Advanced Heroquest not only changed the “correct” way to punctuate the phrase “Hero Quest”/”Heroquest” but also revamped the game completely to be significantly closer to a Dungeons & Dragons-style role-playing game. It also incorporated rules for limitless replayability including random dungeon generation, character advancement and a heavy emphasis on customization. While the original Hero Quest released an expansion allowing players to create their own adventures, Advanced Heroquest practically demanded that the Games Master (or “GM” — effectively the “evil wizard” player by another name) come up with some of their own creative, fresh ideas. And it was up to the GM in question how far they wanted to take it — Advanced Heroquest’s rules catered for simple story-free “hack and slash” dungeons as much as elaborate, story-driven scenarios featuring light role-playing. The game even came with full rules for solo play, which was a godsend for me when I was a kid, as short on nearby friends as I was.

Then came Warhammer Quest. This is pretty hard to find now, which explains why I paid nearly £100 for a copy on eBay. Warhammer Quest takes the formula of Advanced Heroquest and shoots off in a different direction rather than necessarily making it more complex. Warhammer Quest has a lot more in the way of random elements, but also features a lot more rules to prevent the game from running away from the players. Where Advanced Heroquest often had dungeons that spiralled off into myriad dead ends, Warhammer Quest’s dungeon generation rules ensure that players move quickly from encounter to encounter on a much more linear path, giving the game a much faster pace. That’s not to say that either approach is “better” as such — Advanced Heroquest had the thrill of exploring the unknown, while Warhammer Quest always had something interesting through the next door — but it marked a significant difference between the two.

Warhammer Quest contains a fairly heavy degree of luck. If you were playing a campaign, after completing a dungeon you then had to roll repeatedly on a table to determine the events that happened during the journey back to town. These frequently got rather ridiculous, as demonstrated abundantly through the adventures of Kurt von Hellstrom and his friends.

Warhammer Quest has one cool thing over its two predecessors, however — it can be played without a GM/evil wizard. The base rules for the game include an artificial intelligence system for the monsters that determine how they move and attack, allowing all the players at the game table to cooperate and take on the dungeons together rather than one being forced to constantly be “the bad guy.” Rules were there to allow the game to be played with a GM, too, but for those craving a purely cooperative experience, Warhammer Quest was a great one.

I don’t get to play these games nearly as often as I’d like to. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get Descent out regularly once I get my hands on a copy — and I’m also pretty curious about the Dungeons & Dragons boardgames, too. Full reports on each and any of those I get the chance to play will, naturally, follow.

#oneaday Day 832: The Seven Wonders of Waterdeep

So, birthday number 31 has been and gone and it’s been a pleasant one. It’s been a rather more low-key affair than last year’s few days of awesomeness that Andie arranged, but it’s still been a fine day filled with good friends, board and computer games, cookies, coffee and Catan.

I wanted to talk a little bit about two of the board games we played today that weren’t Catan — 7 Wonders and Lords of Waterdeep. These two titles are relatively new to me (in fact, today was the first time I’d even seen Lords of Waterdeep, let alone played it) but I like them both a great deal. They’re very different from one another, so let’s take them one at a time.

7 Wonders is a card game based around the concept of civilisation-building. Unlike many other civ-building games, however, a game of 7 Wonders is over and done with relatively quickly thanks to its simple, elegant mechanics.

The game is split into three “ages”, each of which has its own deck of cards. These are dealt out equally to each player to give them a unique hand. Each player then picks one of the cards from the hand and passes the rest on to the next player. Some cards may be built for free, some require the payment of gold coins (represented by cardboard chits) and some require specific resources to use.

Resources are depicted in an abstract manner by cards — unlike games like Catan, though, they are not expended when used. Rather, they represent a player’s potential to produce a certain amount of that resource per turn. For example, if a player has two cards with “wood” symbols down on the table, they may play a card which requires one or two “wood” resources to use, but the wood is not expended in the process. In order to get the ball rolling, each civilisation has its own “starting resource” which it doesn’t require any cards to make use of — and player may pay gold to one another to “borrow” resources. Again, this does not expend the other player’s resources, nor does it stop them from using the same resources themselves.

Cards are split into several different types — basic resources (wood, stone, brick, ore), luxury resources (glass, silks, papyrus), trade buildings (which generally allow players to acquire resources from other players for cheaper), point cards (which simply score points), guild cards (which provide bonuses at the end of the game for certain specific cards), military cards (which represent a civilisation’s military strength in an abstract manner) and science cards. Science cards form the basis of the game’s most complex mechanic — collecting sets of the same type of “science” provides the player with points to the value of the number of cards squared, while collecting one of each of the three “science” symbols provides the player with a further 7 points.

Players may also choose to build a stage of their civilisation’s Wonder. This costs several resources and prevents the player from using a card that turn in the process — however, this can be a good strategic means of preventing the next player from getting a card they really want. Building a Wonder stage either provides the player with points or a special ability of some description. Some allow cards to be acquired for free, others allow players to rifle through the discard deck and build something which is already out of play, others still bend the rules in different ways.

At the end of each “age”, players tot up their military strength cards and compare them to the players on either side of where they are sitting. If their military strength is greater than their neighbour, they gain a point bonus that increases with each “age”. If it is weaker, they take a score penalty. This remains the same — -1 — in each stage of the game.

At the end of the game, all scores are totalled up and whoever has the most points wins. Simple.

7 Wonders is a fun game because it’s quick to pick up and understand (despite what my description above may read like to you, it’s actually fairly straightforward to learn even if you’re a complete board game newbie) and fast-paced. There’s little in the way of “analysis paralysis” as people agonise over which cards to play, and you can get through an entire game in well under an hour. Despite its brisk pace, it has plenty of depth, though, and various randomised elements provide each session with a degree of variety.

Recommended, then.

Lords of Waterdeep, meanwhile, is a Dungeons and Dragons-themed building game where each player is competing to score the most victory points by the end of a limited number of turns. Most of these victory points come from the completion of “quests”, most of which require the expenditure of resources and money — in this case, the resources being adventurers of various types. This is D&D, after all!

The basic gameplay is quite similar to Agricola. A variety of “action spaces” are available on the board, and players take it in turns to place one of their “agents” on a space to claim it and perform its action. These actions range from simply taking resources or currency to more complex activities such as playing “intrigue cards”.

Quests are completed simply by having the appropriate combination of resources on hand, at which point the player flips over the completed quest card and takes any rewards printed on it. Quests are divided into several different categories, and at the start of the game each player receives a secret card telling them which categories of completed quests will score them bonus points at the end of the game.

The aforementioned “intrigue cards” provide a lot more interaction than something like Agricola in that they are typically used to attack other players or benefit whoever is playing them in some way. Some cards allow the player to steal resources from others. Others simply force other players to give up resources, or allow the player playing the card an extra turn. They can turn the tide of a round completely almost immediately, and provide great scope for both laughs and wanting to throw chairs at your opponents.

Players may also build buildings in the city, which become extra action spaces but typically provide a bonus to whoever “owns” the building when used. The exact buildings which turn up in the game are randomised, too, so there’s an element of chance and uncertainty to what is coming up rather than the more predictable turn order of Agricola.

I enjoyed Lords of Waterdeep a lot. I’d need to play it a few more times to understand its nuances, but I felt like I understood what I was doing a lot better than Agricola. (I am constantly comparing to Agricola because mechanically it is relatively similar, though arguably less complex.) At no point did I feel I was “out of my depth” or being “left behind” — there was always something worthwhile to do, but it never felt like there were too many things to do and not enough time to do them in, which is my biggest bugbear with Agricola. It’s not a “beginners'” game by any means, but for those who enjoy a good Eurogame and have any fondness for D&D, it’s a worthwhile investment of your time.

Two great games, then; if you’re a board game fan, be sure to check ’em out. And if you’re at all interested in the hobby but perhaps don’t know a great deal about it, I strongly suggest you check out Wil Wheaton’s new YouTube show Table Top, in which he sits down with a variety of famous people (well, famous geeks, mostly) to play a game, explaining it along the way. It’s a good way to get a feel for how a game works — including the dynamic of group interaction during play. So far they’ve covered Catan and Small World.

And on that note, time for bed, I think. Night-night.

Pete, age 31