More Meeples for those Sea Monsters

I really like Survive as do most of the game groups I bring it to. The problem, it only plays with up to 4 players. So when a 5-6 player expansion hit the shelves it was a must buy, especially when its only a few quid.

The expansion comes in a little box and opening it up you get a whole host of little plastic meeples and some tiles. The meeples are nice, but they are not as good as the wooden ones in the base game. You also have to put numbered stickers on the base of all of them which takes a while. When playing with 5-6 players you use different combinations so as to even things out. Reading the numbers on these new meeples is much easier than the base games which is good. I just wish they had kept up with the wooden ones.

The tiles were a bit of a mystery, but reading the rules that came with it there was apparently a printing problem with the first run. One of the mountain tiles was left with white border so players could quickly figure out what tile it was. These replacements are used to resolve this. Not sure about this, were they free or am I actually paying to fix someone else problem?

Happily the game plays quite well with 6 players. It's always going to be a bit of a bun fight but with more players it does become a little more hectic. Meeples are very quickly dispatched by an assortment of monsters swimming the shores of a shrinking island. It's a fun game and one that you can't really take too seriously. In my last game I lost every single meeple under my control. I was doing well at the start, head down and happily being ignored by all the other players. Then things turned nasty when they all realized I had not lost a meeple. One by one they were eaten, drowned or sucked under by a whirlpool.

To spice things up we had also decided to play with the Giant Squid expansion. This adds a number of large white squid to the game. These can be particularly nasty as they can pluck poor meeples off of beaches and out of boats. Nowhere is safe! As an expansion goes its pretty small and cheap and a great accompaniment to the 5-6 player expansion. It just adds to the fun and chaos.

So Survive continues to be a popular game and its nice to see that the mini expansions that have been so far released have added just enough to the game. It's not changed drastically or made things more complicated. It's just given you the opportunity to kill off more players meeples in different ways.

Domain in space......

Gaming has been mental the last month, both face to face gaming and on the web. A lot of new games have hit the table but I wanted to chat about just one for now.

Eminent Domain has hit UK stores and after a demo I picked up a copy. Its been touted as a space version of Dominion, and although it does have deck building elements I feel that it is more than just a Dominion clone.

Game play is very simple, there are 6 different base cards in the game. With each having its own Action and Role ability. All players start with the same distribution of these cards as well as a home world. You then shuffle and draw 5 cards from your starting 10.

The first thing you have to do is decide which card you are playing and use its action section. This action only affects you and can range from warfare cards which give you fighters, to survey cards which add more cards to your hand.

You then pick another card to play, but this time instead of one from your hand you take one from the piles of cards in the center of the table. This acts as the timer mechanism, the game will end when a number of piles are empty. This card is now played for its role ability. Most of the time its the same as the action but usually the person picking the card gets a bonus or different effect. Every other player can now discard cards of the same type to also use that action. So for example if I chose the colonize card I can now tuck it under a planet to go towards its colonization cost. If I also had 2 more of these cards in my hand I can also put them down. Other players that also have colonize cards can also put them into play. If they don't or don't want to use them they take a card from there deck instead.

Finally you discard and draw back to 5. Pretty simple so far.

The only part of the game which can slow things down is the research action, if you have enough of these cards and choose the research role you can take a research card. These are limited in number and give you different actions or effects. Usually altering or improving the strategy your are playing. For example the improved warfare allows you to build more fighters. You can play without these cards if you want a more basic game, but if you have played any deck building game before there's no reason not to put them in.

Planet cards are discovered with survey cards and can be either settled using colonization cards or forcibly controlled using warfare. Once the requirements have been met the planet is yours to use. Planets will usually allow you to produce and trade resources for victory points. They will also be worth points at the end of the game. Finally you will need more matching planets to research the higher tech levels. So planets are what you are aiming to get in front of you throughout the game.

The game plays well, once players have got there heads around the action/role differences they should be getting to grips with the game. What I like is that you can always choose the role you want, so your never really stuck trying to work your strategy. If you don't have a colonize card in your hand but want to settle a planet, just pick one from the table as your role.

Component wise this game is lovely, good strong box, good looking artwork and loads of lovely plastic fighters. Tasty Minstrel have really put together a good game here.

I am hoping that there will be a future expansion, it's crying out for ways to trade with other players attack there planets and steal technologies. As well as more technology cards and different planets there is quite a bit of scope for the game.

Lego

I am happy to play any game. I might not be good at some of them but I am still happy to pull up a chair and give it a go. I also find it difficult to give a game a really low score on the geek. Generally I feel like there might be something in there and someone has spent the time on putting a game together and getting it published.

Every once and a while comes along a game that I really have problems with and last weekend it was Lego Creationary. My kids like Lego, they seem to get more and more every year and are happy to build whatever there imagination creates. A couple of years ago Lego came up with a range of games, we picked up a few of the cheaper games and they were pretty good. Usually roll and move or roll and pick type games. Nothing ground breaking but they are fun and the kids enjoy them.
Creationary on the other hand is just terrible, the concept is quite good. Mix up pictionary with a box of lego and you have a new build and guess game. Players roll a dice then pick a card from one of the 3 piles of cards. Each card has 4 different objects to build on it, one for each colour on teh dice. So if you rolled a yelloe you would build the yellow transport object, green the nature object. The piles are supposed to be in different ability levels so the objects should be harder to build.

All sounds good so far, rules are a bit light with players getting a "determined" amount of time to build. We went for 5 mins, not wanting to drag things out. The ability levels of cards don't score any more or less points. I decided to handicap myself by using the level 2 cards while the kids went for level 1. I quickly changed to level 1 for the reasons below.

There are 2 major problems with this game, the amount of Lego you get just isn't enough. Not only are you limited with the amount of pieces but also the colours. My first object was a bee, easy I thought until I realized there were no black pieces in the box. I had to substitute brown for black. This happened a couple of times, Flynn got a tiger and started building one. Quickly telling us the yellow was actually orange. He ran out of pieces after building 4 legs.

Teh second issue I have with teh game is the objects. The Arc de Triumph maybe a great site in Paris but its difficult for a 7 and 8 year old to know what it is. Model T Ford, its a car!. Well yes, i'll give you that. You see a Lego car looks like a Lego car. Especially when you only have 4 big wheels and 4 tiny wheels in the box. How are kids supposed to know the difference between a transporter plane and a passenger plane. It's tough and there were a few moments when they both yelled airplane.

So, Lego Creationary is a good idea but poorly implemented. I would love to see the design team make all of the models on the card using the Lego in the box. I know that you could argue about cost and such but I think they fell short here.
The card design needs a little help, adding the names of things would also help and teach them a little as well.

Will I play it again, probably. The kids seem to enjoy it and I like to get involved but I think there will be some tweaking along the way. The best thing about the game is that the cards have sparked there imagination with other things to build which is a bonus.

It's a bit chilly

This week is shaping up nicely on the gaming front. Monday saw Quarriors getting played along with A Few Acres of Snow, tonight should see more games being unboxed and hopefully Quarriors will get another outing.

I enjoy playing wargames, but as much as I enjoy playing combat Commander I usually prefer to play something that plays a bit quicker. Memoir 44 usually wins here, probably because its quick to play and with the overlord bits can take more than 2 players. If a wargame is on the cards its usually been booked up in advance, playing a 3 hour Twilight Struggle doesn't usually just happen.

This is where A Few Acres fits in nicely, its a 2 play war game that uses cards to perform actions. It should only take about an hour to play and it has enough depth and strategy to keep it going for a while. It's not going to replace Twilight Struggle as my favorite 2 player war game but I can definitely see it being played more often.

The game follows the war over modern day Canada, with players taking the roles of either the British or the French. They both start with a number of settlements and to win the game have to either take the opponents capital or use up there settlements. Scoring then happens and the one with the most points wins the game.
Each settlement is represented by a card, as you settle you add more cards to your deck. In addition you can buy other cards to help with your money, military and settlement actions. These cards have symbols on allowing you to use them to perform actions. For example, if you wanted to settle a location you would have to play a card that connected to that location. Then another card showing the correct travel symbol. Finally a third card with a settlers symbol on it. Cards played are then put on the discard pile and you draw back to 5. This is only one possible action of many available to the players. The first time I played I was slightly overwhelmed with the options available to me. Settle, raid, siege, fortify, generate income, put cards in reserve .... getting the right combination of cards to perform the actions is a different matter.
There is an element of deck building going on, as your deck increases with cards from new settlements and other cards you purchase, but only drawing back to 5 at the end of your turn can really hinder you.

Our first game was a bit of a learning one, I won but we realized that the game should have ended a fw turns earlier. We also realized that we were too busy trying to expand and siege each other to think about how we would score in the end. That said it was a really good game, we were left discussing it for a while afterwards. Thinking about what we had done right and wrong and how we always seemed to be limited in what we could do. There were times I was desperate to expand but just couldn't get the right cards in hand. Realizing now that I should have been using the reserve action a bit more often. But then I would have needed more money.......argh!

So, A Few Acres is a very good 2 player wargame. But I think labeling it as a wargame could put people off, is Twilight Struggle a wargame? Both games are set around a time of conflict but there are no combat tables and piles of dice being rolled.

I really think Martin Wallace has come up with a great game here and its one of my favorite games of the year so far.

It's all about the dice.

Dice, you either love them or hate them. They also seem to come and go into fashion in the gaming world, and at the moment it looks like they are definitely coming back.

Recent games such as the excellent Space Frontiers and Troyes have brought dice back into favor. Both games get you to roll a number of dice and place them on the board in various worker placement guises. Troyes also allows you to buy dice from your opponents which is a really nice way of getting around those really bad dice rolls.

With Quarriors being released I think we are going to see a new wave of dice games. This is because Quarriors is the first dice building game. When Dominion was released it created a big buzz. It was the first deck building game and has spawned a number of copies and games based on this mechanic. Thunderstone being one of my favorites.
Quarriors takes the cards out and replaces them with custom dice. You draw dice from your bag, roll them and then use then to summon monsters or buy other dice from the pool in the center of the table. It sounds simple and I am sure it is, but working out the dice combos and efficient dice management techniques is going to be the hard part.
Although my copy hasn't arrived yet I am really looking forward to trying this. It has gone down very well across the pond and I believe all of the copies sent to the UK were sold out by pre-orders.

I suspect like Dominion, Quarriors will spawn not only a number of expansions but also some other games that use a similar mechanic and I am sure that some of these will be just as good.

More Thunderstone, this time online...

Thunderstone, the deck building game with theme is now available to play online over at Yucata. They have done a very good job of making this one and I am now feverishly playing a handful of games.

If you haven't managed to try Thunderstone its a deck building game where you are building up a deck of hero's and items. You can then delve into the darkness of the dungeon to fight the monsters and try and claim the Thunderstone.
There are a few elements that make a good hand, you need light. Without it you get combat penalties that get worse the deeper you try and go into the dungeon. So torches, lanterns and wizards all help generate light. Weapons increase your combat value but you have to be strong enough to wield them. Food helps here by bolstering the strength of your heroes.

there is an element of leveling up your heroes as well, as you defeat monsters you gain experience points. These can then be used in the village to upgrade your heroes to the next level. Each hero type has 3 levels and there powers and abilities improve as they level up.

As well as experience points, monsters are worth victory points, as well as the highest level (Level 3) characters. The Thunderstone card is also worth points but its hidden somewhere in the bottom of the 30 card dungeon deck.

Thunderstone has been very successful and spawned a number of expansions. Each adding more cards and slight rules additions to mix things up. The game was also re-released as Dragonspire.
This edition added a dungeon board and makes things a little easier to understand. It's probably where you should start if you are thinking of buying into the game. Although its not necessary if you already have the first base game.

Other than Thunderstone online gaming has been a little quite recently. 2 Weeks in Italy helped recharge the batteries. Or at least top them up with the local Chianti. Ryanair's luggage restrictions meant that I could only squeeze in a few card games to keep me going. But Coloretto and No thanks always go down well and helped while away the evenings.

Hopefully this months purchases should arrive soon, I am expecting a few games including the expansions for the excellent Lord of the Rings LCG. I will talk about these more after a few plays.

Deliveries

This month has seen a few parcels delivered. It's always nice to see those jiffy bags and packages waiting patiently for me when I get home.

So what did I get, well 7 Wonders Leaders was a must. 7 Wonders was my most played game of last year. The fact that its simple to teach, can handle 7 players and is pretty quick makes it a great go to game. I wasn't bored with the original as I think it still has plenty of life in it but I am a sucker for expansions. Especially if they are reasonably priced.

Leaders adds 40 cards, a few tokens and a new wonder, the Collosium of Rome. the meat of the game is the 36 leader cards. The artwork on these is really nice and I hope it will get players into researching who these people were and what they did. They are a really diverse selection that effects how the game is played, but not enough to make it too difficult.

At the start of the game everyone is dealt 4 Leaders cards. They pick one and pass the remaining 3 along. From these 3 they pick one and pass, and again until you have 4 leader cards.
Now at the start of each Age you get to play a leader. You can play the cost in gold and add it to your area to activate its ability. You can discard it for 3 coins or finally use it to build a part of your wonder. similar actions to the main game so nothing to difficult to understand.
The abilities are ranging from VP gaining abilities, cheaper card building, extra science cards, etc. The icons make them easy to understand and the rule book does a good job.

So far I am really impressed with this expansion, it adds enough to the game without making it overly complex or bloating it with useless rules. I can see every game of 7 Wonders will now include the Leaders expansion.

Paperclip Railway was a game I was very keen to try at the UK Games expo. It sounded like a fun little train game that uses paperclips to represent the railway tracks between stations. Unfortunately it was sold out at the expo, but I received an email last week offering me a copy as there were several pre-orders not picked up. I couldn't say no so a copy was posted out.

I haven't played it yet, its down to be played tonight but after reading the rules and pouring over the components it looks like it will be a lot of fun.

I will post some thoughts on the game after its been played.

Lastly there is Barons by Cambridge Games Factory. They are mainly know for the excellent Glory to Rome. Barons promised to be Glory's little brother. I saw that the first print run was quickly being snapped up so ordered a copy.

I have played it a few times now and although its a pretty good game, I have played better. The players are trying to win the game by building a Cathedral. To do this they need to spend cards from each of the 4 coloured decks. Cards in the game can be used in many ways, as "money", lands that increase the size of your barony and as action/buildings or knights.
you basically start of playing cards face down as resource generating lands. These are taxed to add more cards in your hand. This increases your options, so you can then place more lands or spend the cards to use them as knights/buildings or actions. You quickly realize that you are not going to be able to buy all the cards you want and deciding what you will have to use as payment starts to hurt. Its a balancing act of increasing the size of your realm to generate more cards as well as building up the special ability cards. All this while playing knights to attack the other players and defend your realm.

I really can't put a finger on why I am not overly enamored with this game. The components are ok, some of the cards have been cut a little wonky and the plastic box that the game comes in is a little cheap. The game itself is ok, its just missing something.

I am now eagerly awaiting the first expansion for the Lord of the Rings card game. I played my first 2 player game of it last week and it worked really well. In fact maybe too well as we managed to blitz the starting scenario. Previously playing Solo I wasn't doing that well against it. Having 2 players seemed to help with multiple cards. We were using the Spirit and Tactics decks and questing seemed too easy. We were maybe a little lucky in that we didn't get that many attacking mobs.

First print run has sold out, but I believe that the second run is hitting distribution shortly.
This has so far been my favorite game so far this year. It's just so easy to get a game in by myself that it's replacing time on the Xbox.