2294: Partners in Space Empires

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

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

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

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

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

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

2293: Scorched Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

2289: Star Realms: Space Cards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2282: What Kind of Gamer are You?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2195: Quest Complete

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We played through the whole Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game campaign today with the full complement of four players, and despite failing the first four quests, we were ultimately victorious, saving our local town-in-peril from a full-on orc invasion.

It’s an interesting game. The first four quests felt very difficult indeed, with our party quickly getting overwhelmed before we were able to complete our objective. On one occasion we got frustratingly close to victory — like, one extra action would have let us win, probably — while on others it very quickly became apparent that we weren’t going to make it out of this particular dungeon in one piece.

What’s interesting is that if you know this is going to happen, you’re not necessarily resigned to playing out the last few turns of your inevitable bloody demises; instead, you can do what you can to minimise the damage you’ll suffer in the subsequent quest. Each quest has both “reward” and “penalty” affects according to whether you succeeded or failed, you see, and these range from adding a “Nemesis” monster into the monster deck for the subsequent quest (a penalty, obviously) to adding one of the four “Legendary Fortune” cards into the Gear deck, allowing the lucky drawer to take and equip one of their three Legendary items.

Where the interesting stuff comes is once a couple of these rewards or penalties have resolved themselves. Since we failed the first few quests, the Nemesis from the previous mission would end up in the next quest’s monster deck, in addition to any Nemeses the quest threw at us. This was obviously a bad position to be in, but there’s a ray of hope for a party in this situation: if you kill a Nemesis added to the monster deck in this way, they are perma-killed and won’t come back again. As such, when it became clear that we weren’t going to successfully complete a quest, we’d simply turn our attention to the Nemeses who were harassing us and take them down so we wouldn’t have to deal with them again in the campaign, and this ultimately worked out pretty well. Facing three or four extra Nemeses in the final quest rather than the one we did successfully deal with would have made a big difference to the eventual outcome of the campaign.

At the moment, we’re not quite sure whether our failures in the first quests were due to our own incompetence (largely due to lack of knowledge of the game) or due to bad luck — or a combination of both. I suspect a bit of both, though it’s not at all unusual for a cooperative game such as this to be tuned to a very high level of difficulty to encourage replayability. I’d be interested to try the campaign again and see if we perform any better — or if the few random, non-fixed elements and dice rolls we had to deal with throughout really were the deciding factor in our success or failure.

Interestingly, Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game also comes with a non-campaign “Delve” quest that is much longer than an individual campaign quest, and provides a condensed form of the campaign’s progression automatically at set intervals through your progress. It sounds like this will be a stiff challenge as well as significantly more randomised than the campaign quests, so it will be fun to give that a go sometime.

All in all, it seems like a great game, and I’d be happy to play it again sometime. A day well-spent, I feel!

2184: Warhammer Quest Cards: A First Attempt

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Tried out Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game with three of my regular board gaming buddies for the first time this evening. We challenged the first quest, which challenges the party to make it through three random locations and a quest location before getting splattered across the nearest wall, and came pretty close to completing it, but were ultimately unsuccessful. Fortunately, the penalties for losing this first quest are relatively minor, though we do miss out on the potential to grab a Legendary item in the next quest as a result.

So how does the game play? Very well, as it happens; each of the four characters gradually start to show how distinctive they are as the game progresses, with each having a clear specialism which can be further developed through the campaign progression system after each quest. The Bright Wizard is particularly good at dealing area-of-effect damage, for example, though many of her abilities require her to take damage in order to have increased effects. The Waywatcher, meanwhile, is very good at exploring, while the Dwarf Ironbreaker is good at tanking enemies and attacking two (or, later, three) at once. The Warrior Priest, meanwhile, is the aid-bot of the group, with his Aid and Rest actions both being particularly strong and benefiting both him and the party: Aid, aside from its usual effect of potentially granting a party member bonus “free” successes on a subsequent action, also heals both the Warrior Priest and the target of his Aid, while his Rest action allows him to endow a party member with the Empowered condition, which is very useful indeed — it prevents an action from being exhausted on use, as well as providing a bonus automatic success and defence on top of any results rolled.

The quest starts relatively straightforward, but gradually escalates as you progress. We cleared the last random location in a somewhat bloodied fashion, which meant we weren’t in a particularly good position to deal with the Nemesis Odious Grump in the final location, particularly as the Peril track had advanced to its final stage, granting him two bonus activations per turn on top of his usual attack. Somehow we reached a position where in the last couple of turns, two party members were dead, leaving the Waywatcher (my friend Tom) and the Warrior Priest (me) to soak up the incoming damage from a good seven or eight enemies, which, of course, wasn’t going to happen at all.

I get the impression the different quests each reward a somewhat different approach. This first quest rewards a quick, efficient exploration process, for example; the quicker you can get through the locations, the fewer enfeebling effects you’ll suffer and the less you’ll have to deal with Odious Grump being a nuisance. It’s all very well knowing that, mind, but it’s not always easy to put into practice: the game’s elegant mechanics of exhausting your actions as you use them but allowing you to refresh them through the use of your character’s otherwise weakest ability makes for some interesting strategies, particularly when you contemplate how the different party members can interact with one another by, say, Aiding one another to refresh actions ahead of time, or using other actions to exhaust enemies or cause them to retreat, taking some of the pressure off comrades.

It’s a really interesting game. The basic mechanics are very simple to understand, but the execution of a quest gives the game a surprising amount of depth that might not be immediately apparent. I’m very keen to see how the game progresses over the course of the complete five-quest campaign, and everyone in our group seemed to enjoy the experience, too. So I call that a win — particularly as it was eminently possible to get through a whole quest on a weeknight evening, which is more than can be said for more conventional board-based dungeon crawlers such as Descent: Journeys in the Dark or indeed the original Warhammer Quest.

2179: Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game Blind Tutorial Playthrough

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Longtime readers will know that I’m a fan of Games Workshop’s wonderful but out-of-print dungeon crawler games, including Hero Quest, Advanced Heroquest and Warhammer Quest. Unfortunately, these don’t hit the table nearly as often as I’d like, since they’re quite time-consuming to play and fiddly to set up due to their sheer number of components and pen-and-paper RPG-style necessity to prepare adventures beforehand.

I was, as you might expect, quite excited to hear that Fantasy Flight Games, who have been leveraging a whole bunch of Games Workshop properties recently, had released an official card game adaptation of Warhammer Quest which promised to play in 30-60 minutes, and which many claimed offered a fun dungeon-crawling experience without the need for festooning your table in thousands of miniatures and cardboard tiles.

The game is extremely well-regarded on legendary boardgaming community site Boardgamegeek, so I was keen to give it a go. One of the most common complaints, however, was that neither the Learn to Play manual nor the Rules Reference guide were particularly well laid out, meaning it took a little while to get your head around how to actually play. This is nothing unusual for Fantasy Flight Games, however, who, although they produce absolutely beautiful components and cards, aren’t particularly well-regarded when it comes to writing instruction manuals. (Hey. If anyone from FFG is reading, I am very much available for freelance manual and tutorial writing. Please get in touch.)

With that in mind, I decided to try the game’s tutorial scenario and record my experiences for the benefit of anyone else considering this game. So let’s jump right in.

This is all the stuff you get in the box. Two rulebooks — a “learn to play” guide and a reference manual — plus a selection of quest sheets, a deck of large cards, a deck of small cards, six dice and a selection of tokens. Numbered tokens are double-sided so can be used to denote a value of either 1 or 3.

Let’s get set up! I’ll be trying out the Tutorial solo. The Tutorial isn’t a full quest, rather just an opportunity to try out all the main mechanics before jumping in to a full session. I’m going into this pretty much blind, so I may get things wrong along the way. As such, do not take this post as a definitive How to Play guide for now!

First thing to do is pick two heroes to play. There must be at least two heroes in the party, even if you’re playing solo. There are variations on each hero card according to how many party members you have. Generally speaking, the fewer party members you have, the more life each individual character has. If playing with two heroes, each hero gets two turns. If playing with three heroes, one hero per round gets an extra turn.

I’m going to go with the Ironbreaker dwarf and the Bright Wizard for this playthrough, because a tank/wizard combo sounds sensible, and also they’re the two characters I’ve played most in Warhammer End Times: Vermintide on PC.

Each hero starts with four basic action cards that allow them to Attack, Aid, Explore or Rest. During a Campaign or Delve quest, these can be upgraded to Advanced versions later. Here are the Bright Wizard’s basic actions:

And here are the Ironbreaker’s:

The Bright Wizard begins the Tutorial engaged in combat with a Night Goblin Archer, while the Ironbreaker has been set upon by a Rat Swarm. There are also two face-down enemies in the middle of the table, considered to be “in the shadows” for now.

The Tutorial also specifies that we’ll be exploring the Throng of Webs location for now, so this card goes in the middle of the table along with the shuffled Dungeon deck.

We’re now ready to start. We begin with the Hero Activation phase, during which each hero activates in turn, beginning with the current Party Leader, and performs an action. The relevant card is exhausted once it is used, unless it has a Prepare symbol in the corner, in which case all action cards can be readied for the next round.

The Bright Wizard is first to play. Let’s play her in an appropriately hot-tempered manner by immediately flinging a fireball at that pesky Night Goblin Archer in front of her.

Fireball is the Bright Wizard’s Attack action, and it allows her two white dice with which to attempt to deal damage. It’s also a ranged attack, so she can fling fireballs at enemies in the shadows or engaged with other heroes and even target more than one enemy in exchange for taking a point of damage, but for now let’s concentrate on the immediate threat.

The Bright Wizard gets two white dice for her attack, and rolls against one black die because she’s engaged with one enemy. She rolls two success symbols (the crossed axes) plus a defence shield, while the goblin rolls an attack for one point of damage. Since the Bright Wizard rolled a shield, she successfully defends against this damage, and since the goblin only has two hit points in the first place, she defeats it with an appropriately explosive flourish.

Now it’s the Ironbreaker’s turn. He, too, is going to attack. His attack allows him to engage up to two enemies. He’s already engaged with one, but he’s feeling cocky, so he also chooses to engage one of the enemies in the shadows. This flips the card face-up and places it in his engagement area in front of him.

It’s a second Rat Swarm. They don’t do much damage, but they do have 3HP each so it’s unlikely either of them are going down this turn. Regardless, the intrepid Ironbreaker pushes on, rolling two white dice against two black dice.

He rolls one point of damage, which he applies to the enemy of his choice, and successfully defends against one incoming point of damage thanks to the two shields he rolled.

Now it’s the Bright Wizard’s turn again. Since her Fireball is exhausted, she can’t use it again against the enemies engaged with the Ironbreaker or the one remaining in the shadows. She instead takes the opportunity to explore the location by rolling one white die against no black dice, since there are no enemies engaged with her right now.

She rolls a success, which puts the party 1/7 of the way to completing this location. She finds some Cool Waters, which allows her to recover 2HP or ready an action, but since she has taken no damage and her Explore action allows her to ready all her actions anyway, it’s not much use right now. Since she’s flush with life right now, she then chooses to take two points of damage to claim two success tokens and put them in her play area. These can be used next turn for two automatic successes on the Explore action if she uses it.

That’s the end of the Bright Wizard’s actions this round.

The Ironbreaker, meanwhile, is still engaged with the two Rat Swarms. He chooses to use his Stubborn Resolve ability to exhaust one enemy in front of him and automatically defend against up to two points of damage. He then gets to rest, which allows him to recover HP by rolling white dice against black dice, but since he hasn’t taken any damage and there’s no way for the single remaining readied Rat Swarm to do enough damage to get through that monstrous 2 defence, there’s no need to roll any dice.

That’s the end of all the Hero turns this round, which brings us to the enemies.

The Bright Wizard is first to activate an enemy. Since she is not engaged with any enemies right now, she must activate one of the enemies in the shadows, and since there is only one face-down enemy left in the shadows, she flips it face-up to reveal a Giant Wolf.

The Giant Wolf then resolves its three actions in turn. First is Lacerate, which causes whoever it is engaged with to be afflicted with the Bleeding status. Since it is not yet engaged with anyone, however, it does nothing.

Next, its Prey ability causes it to engage the Hero with the most HP, which is the Ironbreaker. It moves into his engagement area. Since the Ironbreaker is now engaged with the maximum three enemies, any additional engagements will simply cause him to take automatic damage, but since there are no other enemies on the table right now, that probably won’t be an issue.

Finally, the Giant Wolf’s Inflict ability deals two damage to the Ironbreaker. This can’t be defended against. The Giant Wolf is then exhausted.

That leaves just the injured Rat Swarm for the Ironbreaker to activate. First it would Advance to engage the Hero activating it if it was in the shadows, but since it’s already engaged with the Ironbreaker, nothing happens. It then deals another point of damage to the Ironbreaker.

At the end of the enemy phase, the Bright Wizard is on 20/22HP, while the Ironbreaker is on 23/26HP. Of the enemies, one of the Rat Swarms and the Giant Wolf are on 3/3HP, while the other Rat Swarm is on 2/3HP. All the enemies are now re-readied for the next round.

Before the round ends, the location’s effects are resolved. In this case, the party leader (currently the Bright Wizard) must exhaust one of her four actions, though it can’t be her Explore action, which has the Prepare icon on it — if this was exhausted, she would eventually be completely unable to act! She instead chooses to exhaust her Rest action Smouldering Wrath, since she’s fairly hale and hearty right now.

Now the round ends, and the party leader token passes to the Ironbreaker.

The Ironbreaker is in a slightly sticky situation, since he’s engaged with three enemies and two of his actions are exhausted. He chooses to offer his Aid to the Bright Wizard, since he has the HP to spare right now. He throws up a Shield Wall, rolling one white die against three black dice.

He rolls two successes, which the Bright Wizard chooses to “bank” on her Fireball action. He also rolls two attacks, causing him to take three points of damage — two from the Giant Wolf and one from one of the Rat Swarms, since higher attack value enemies are always prioritised in situations where not all enemies are attacking. He’s now down to 20/26HP, but those two banked successes for the Bright Wizard will be useful.

Shield Wall also allows the Ironbreaker to re-ready all his actions, so he does so.

The Bright Wizard is up. She chooses to cast Fireball and engage the uninjured Rat Swarm, pulling it off the Ironbreaker. She then voluntarily takes a point of damage to target a second enemy. She then rolls two white dice against one black die.

She rolls one success and two defence, the latter of which allows her to shrug off the Rat Swarm’s counterattack of a single point of damage. With the two banked successes from the Ironbreaker’s Aid action, she has a total of three successes to assign between up to two enemies as she pleases, and since her Fireball is ranged she doesn’t even have to attack the enemy she’s engaged with. She chooses to assign all three points of damage to the Giant Wolf in front of the Ironbreaker, killing it instantly and levelling the playing field somewhat.

Next it’s the Ironbreaker’s turn again. Since he readied all his actions last turn, he is free to use his Attack skill Inexorable Advance. Since this allows him to engage two enemies, he pulls the Rat Swarm back off the Bright Wizard with a mind to cleaving both remaining enemies with a lucky roll. He rolls two white dice against two black dice.

He rolls a normal success, a critical success and an attack. The critical success counts as a normal success but also allows an additional roll of that white die.

Impressively, he rolls another critical success, which means another reroll. That’s a total of three successes so far.

His final roll is a shield, allowing him to shrug off the single point of incoming damage. He assigns two of the successes to the injured Rat Swarm, killing it, while the remainder goes on the last enemy. This round is now over for the Ironbreaker.

That leaves one action for the Bright Wizard. She chooses to use her Burning Sight ability to explore, using her two banked success tokens from the previous turn — these must be declared and used before rolling dice — and rolling a critical success.

She then rolls another two successes, bringing her to a total of five, including the banked tokens she used. This brings the overall progress on the location to 6/7. She then draws a Dungeon card.

The Shrine she discovers gives her the option of exhausting an action to recover 1HP and claim a success token. Since the Explore action allows her to re-ready all her actions anyway, there’s no reason for her not to do this. She heals 1HP, exhausts her Aid ability Fan the Flames and banks a success token on it.

The Bright Wizard cannot finish the exploration this turn by burning HP, but she can bank one token for next turn. She takes the 1HP damage she just healed and claims a success token. She then re-readies all her actions, and that’s the end of the Hero phase.

The only remaining enemy on the table is engaged with the Ironbreaker, who takes one point of damage.

The location effect then causes the party leader (currently the Ironbreaker) to exhaust one action dealing with sticky webbing. He chooses to exhaust his Explore action. Leadership of the party then passes to the Bright Wizard for what will probably be the final round.

To clear the Tutorial, the party must fully explore the Throng of Webs location (which requires just one more Explore success to do so) and defeat all the enemies. With that in mind, the Bright Wizard uses her first action to Aid the Ironbreaker for two dice plus the success token she banked earlier.

She rolls a success and a critical success…

…followed by a defence, which isn’t much good right now, but three success tokens is still plenty. In fact, you can only bank up to two success tokens per card, so the Ironbreaker banks two on his Inexorable Advance card and a third on his Shield Wall card. He also readies his Into the Dark action to explore if necessary, since the Bright Wizard’s Aid action allows him to ready one action.

The Ironbreaker uses Inexorable Advance and rolls two defence, which is more than enough to shrug off the incoming damage from the Rat Swarm. He uses his two banked success tokens from the Bright Wizard’s Aid to defeat the Rat Swarm without the need for rolling further successes. Now the area is clear of enemies, which just leaves the exploration.

The Bright Wizard has a banked success token, so rolling the die is just a formality at this point, but she rolls a critical success anyway. That brings the location to 7/7 progress, completing it and clearing the Tutorial. Full quests would require the exploration of other locations and perhaps the completion of other objectives, but for now… victory!

2074: Karate Fight

A little while ago, I wrote about my experiences with the fun, silly and provocative card game Tentacle Bento, which I picked up a copy of at PAX a while back. It occurs to me that I’ve also played its companion game Karate Fight, but haven’t written about that at all, so that’s what I’ll discuss today.

Tentacle Bento is a reasonably sedate game with a strong degree of randomness to it, but it’s fun for the silly situations it creates. It’s somewhat akin to Rummy in that it involves collecting various combinations of cards in order to score, though the special events and characters add some chaos to the mix that can flip the outcome on its head if you’re not prepared. Karate Fight, meanwhile, is a game determined almost entirely by randomness; there’s no real strategy involved, and instead, appropriately enough for the theme, it’s a game of fast reactions, observation and responding to situations.

In Karate Fight, the entire deck is dealt out to all the players, who hold it in their hand face down. One at a time, they lay down and flip the top card from their deck in the middle of the table, and a number of rules then come into play.

If the card laid was an “attack” card, the next player has a number of draws indicated on the attack card to draw another attack or counter card, otherwise the attacker wins that hand and collects all the cards laid in the middle.

If a “Strike” card is laid, that triggers a “Hit” and everyone around the table has to slam their hand onto the pile in the middle, with whoever was first (i.e. on the bottom of the inevitable pile-up) taking the entire pile. A “Hit” is also caused by certain combinations of cards being laid down — all the attack cards being used in this particular hand, for example, regardless of other cards that have come in between, or the same defense card being used several times in a row.

A “Counter” card counts as an attack card and also reverses the direction of play. And a “Janken” card requires everyone to play rock-paper-scissors (in Japanese, naturally), with the winner taking the pile in the middle. Once someone gets all the cards, they win. The whole thing lasts about 15-20 minutes or so, even with stubborn players who seem to be doing nothing but passing cards back and forth between themselves.

Our game group is used to more sedate games in which you can take your time over your moves, but this seemed to go down pretty well when we tried it — perhaps because it was a break from the norm, and perhaps because its highly energetic, somewhat physical nature is inherently amusing. From my perspective, I certainly enjoyed its paciness — “thinky” games are somewhat prone to analysis paralysis, particularly with our group, and so this was an enjoyable change from what we usually play. It’s not something I’d consider bringing out as the “main game” for a session by any means — there’s a lot of luck and randomness involved, though it will ultimately come down to who has the best reactions, memory and observational skills — but it’s a fun warm-up, quick to play and a good means of getting people alert and aware. I also imagine it would be quite fun after a drink or two.

Also its boobylicious, panty-flashing artwork is clearly channelling Senran Kagura something rotten, which is no bad thing, unless you write for Vice.

2012: Tentacle Bento

It occurs to me that I haven’t yet written about Tentacle Bento, a card game I picked up at PAX but have only recently had the opportunity to try for the first time.

Tentacle Bento is a fairly simple game whose concept made the Outrage Brigade piss their collective pants a while back, which these days, to be honest, is enough to make me want to check anything out. Essentially, it’s an anime-inspired (all right, hentai-inspired) game in which you and your friends take on the role of ill-defined tentacle monsters of some description, and your task is to sneak into the all-girls’ school Takoashi University and “capture” as many nubile young ladies as you possibly can before the end of term.

Lewd premise aside, Tentacle Bento is actually a pretty fun game. It’s largely based around playing sets of cards — known as “captures” in the game — in order to score points at the end. In order to play a capture, you have to play a location, a capture event and a character at the same time. Playing a location, capture event and character of two or more different suits is a “sloppy capture” and allows you to get something on the table, but only lets you capture one girl at a time. Playing a complete capture of the same suit, however, is a “noble capture” and allows you to capture up to three girls at the same time. It also allows you to add extra girls of the same suit to a capture from your hand once you’ve put it on the table, up to a maximum of three girls per capture.

Alongside the basic location, capture event and character cards are a few special types of cards. All-Star cards can only be captured through a noble capture — and, moreover, can be the only girl in that capture. They have specific special effects once they’re played; normally a noble capture has a special “mayhem” effect (ranging from changing the direction of play to passing cards around the table) according to the suit it was, but All-Stars override and replace this effect.

Special character cards, meanwhile, have (usually negative) effects to play on other players. Some prevent players from playing certain types of captures, others need to be dismissed via meeting a particular condition, and some can be passed around. Several of them complement and interact with one another nicely, making for some enjoyable moment-to-moment strategy.

Finally, Event cards occur immediately when someone draws them on their turn. These have immediate — and often game-changing — effects. They also act as the game’s timer — once the fourth Event card comes up, the game is over, and players score points according to the captures they have on the table, and lose points for the girls and All-Stars they still have in their hand.

It’s a pretty simple game to get to grips with, and there’s a fair amount of randomness involved — particularly with the events — so it’s not especially deep, all told, but it is a whole lot of fun, primarily for the impromptu mini-narratives that the capture combinations inspire. Once capture might see three girls having a wardrobe malfunction in the headmaster’s office; another might see a lone girl attempting to have a cuddle party by herself on the school racetrack; another still might see two girls having a pillow fight in the nurse’s office.

Despite the morally questionable premise — if you know what tentacle monsters typically get up to, you know what I mean — the game is designed with good humour and wit. The cards all incorporate entertaining little snippets of flavour text, many of which are genuinely amusing both to people who recognise anime tropes and normies alike.

All in all, it’s very much a filler game rather than something you’d take particularly seriously, but I like it a whole lot and am looking forward to giving it another shot at some point in the near future. I was surprised how much my regular gaming group — most of whom aren’t particularly involved in anime culture — took to the game, so hopefully it will hit the table again soon.

1616: Ascension + Dominion = Thunderstone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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