This weekend, there was an UNPUB event here in Tucson!  Thanks to Mozu productions for helping put this together.

Thanks to Charlie, Alison, Andrew and Sean for coming out!  (Andrew came late but offered his support!)  Everyone had fun and we had some great feedback by everyone.  My favorite part was when Sean started showing Andrew how to play!  Sean (who I had never met before that day) was emotionally invested enough to show Andrew how to play!  That was great.

Sidekick Saga

Sidekick Saga is the newest game from Return from Subroutine Studios.  It’s been in development for about a year.   The hope is to kickstart in January 2019, but I won’t kickstart it until it’s ready.

Sidekick Saga is a cooperative SuperHero gaame for 1-4 Players.  It’s an adventure, exploration, and combat game where the Sidekick explore the city, fight Bad Guys, and try to find out what happened to all the Big, Powerful, Superheroes!

Watch this space for more information about Sidekick Saga!

Art by Phil Cho

I kickstarted a game called Venom Assault a number of years ago.  Good game!  It even made the Honorable Mention from my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2017.  One of the things I liked best about the game was the art—it was done by an artist named Phil Cho.  I am working with Phil Cho right now to draw Villains, Heroes, and all sorts of art!  So far, I have been blown away by how great his art is.  It really adds to the VIBE of the game: His clean, colorful heroes kind of reminds me of John Byrne meets George Perez.

I can’t wait to see what he does for the Cover.  His Deviant Art site has some great pictures!

Conclusion

I am super happy (no pun intended) with the direction.  People seem to be enjoying the game, the art is coming along great, and I am happy with how this is turning out.  Watch here for further developments!

A few weeks ago, I posted my initial impressions of Robit Riddle: a cooperative, story-telling game for 1-6 players.   I was able to get it played at RichieCon 2018, and I got some great feedback.

Number of Players

From my first thoughts, I mentioned that, although I was happy there was a solo mode (yay, Saunders’ Law), it wasn’t very fun alone.  It felt kinda … sad … playing and telling a story to myself.   Two player was better, but my group said “I can’t really see playing this with less than 3 people”.   We didn’t get a chance to play with more than that, but the overwhelming opinion was that this game needs 3-6 players.  It’s great to learn the game with 1 player (my preferred way to learn and teach), but the game shines at 3 or more people.

Why more people?  Because this is a game of shared story-telling. Taking the narrative and expanding on it.  It was fun and cute.

Audience

One of my friends who played the game is a teacher at mid-school, and another has a couple of younger kids.  They both echoed my thoughts: “This is a fun game, and I’d play it again, but it feels like it would go over best as a family game with kids 8-12.”  Yes, I think older players can play this, as it’s a fun light game (not a filler per se), but it would do best with kids.

Educational Content

My friend who is a teacher pointed out something quite interesting.  He uses board games in his classroom (for kids who are having trouble with reading and vocabulary) to help them

He has used both Mythos Tales and Tales Of Arabian Nights to help kids read—I’m the one who introduced Junkerman to Mythos Tales at RichieCon 2017!  He has great success in the classroom.  With Tales of Arabian Nights, he is getting kids to read, expanding their vocabulary (the vocabulary of Arabian Nights is quite sophisticated).  Kids who were lack-luster and uninterested in the classroom lit-up/engaged when playing Mythos Tales–it teaches problem solving, cooperation, reading, and literacy.  Both of those games were just so successful!

What did Junkerman think of Robit Riddle?

Continuing Narrative

Junkerman told a very interesting story about his kids and the kinds of things they are tested on.  In a recent test, the kids had to take a paragraph and “expand” upon it, using the same tense, voice, and narrative style, to continue a previous paragraph.    He thinks Robit Riddle would be perfect for this kind of exercise.  It has terrific educational content.

Continuing the narrative, like Robit Riddle does, engages the imagination, while the same forcing constraints on the narrative.    I personally believes this shows that imagination can be used in all contexts, not just free-form and untethered.

From this perspective, Robit Riddle really succeeded.  You know what, and the game was fun.

Conclusion

I still stand by some of the negative things I said earlier: The entire game (cards and rulebook) could still use another pass by an editor.  The cards were pretty low quality.  But, overall, this was a good game.  We had fun, and I would give it a 7/10 on the BoardGameGeek scale.   It’s probably best as a family game, but it would work wonders in an educational scenario.

So, this year’s RichieCon 2018 was a success!  Recall last year’s RichieCon 2017 was also a success. Thanks to everyone from Long Beach, Las Cruces, and Phoenix who came down to Tucson! In the summer!! To play Games!!!

Why RichieCon?

RichieCon was started … because I don’t like big conventions.  I have real trouble in rooms with lots of ambient noise.  I was thinking very hard about going to Dice Tower Con in Florida in 2017, and my friend pointed out “You hate big groups!”.   So, I decided to make my own Con!  The name RICHIE CON was a joke:  Really, I Can’t Haul myself to dIcE tower CON.  I also only invite people I know will be respectful and nice: friends of Richie.  (Reminder: Don’t be a jerk!)

Cool Stuff that Happened!

Joe made a board game table than can be played in the pool.  We had Martian Dice and Plastic Uno for that.  Go Joe!

Jeremy made barbeque with his new smoker!  Wow, was it good!

Many games were played!

Games games games!

Here were some games that worked real well:

•  The Unlock games!  I have all the Unlock games, and I think these were the most popular games at the Con. I myself played the new “Wizard of OZ” unlock game, and it was fun fun fun!  I think everytime I turned around, I saw an Unlock game being played!
•  Star Trek: RPG: A group of about 8 people played this for a significant amount of time in the afternoon, then took it back to their AirBnB for another 3 hours of playing!  People seemed to really enjoy this.
• D&D 5th Ed.  A small group had a a grand old time playing this for about 2 hours!
• Castles of Mad King Ludwig:  Played a lot, seemed well received.

There were some “not so great” moments:

• Okey Dokey works great at 1,2,3 and 4 players.  We hated it at 5: the last player always has to play the last card.  We think maybe a rule that rotates the last player would have fixed this.
• Tiny  Epic Quest:  The game box says 1 hour, right?  Nah, especially if you’ve never played.  A few too many rules for a group that wanted a game of about an hour.  They set-up, played a few rounds, and said “no thank you” and put it all away.

Some surprising “Favorites”:

• Burgle Brothers: This is an older game I picked up from the original Kickstarter.  I just happened to put it in the group of games.  A surprising number of people played and really liked this game!  This was many people’s favorite!
• Azul:  Not my thing, but it was a hit!
• Century Spice Road: original and Golem edition.  Great game(s), but everyone said the same thing: the Golem edition is SO MUCH PRETTIER!  That seemed to be the hit!

 

Top 10 Games That Need Fixing … and Here’s the Fix!

Stealing, I mean borrowing from the Dice Tower, Kurt Joe and myself did a “Top 10 games that need fixing .. and here’s the Fix!”

Richie:  My list was ordered from the Easiest Fix to the Hardest Fix.

• (10) Legendary: Why are there victory points? Just play cooperative and ignore the Victory Points at the end.  It’s what we always do anyways.
• (9) Witch Of Salem: Why can’t you talk and show people where the gates are?  The game is plenty hard as it is, so we just ignore this rule and we just talk!
• (8) Thunderstone Quest: No cooperative mode.  Add a Cooperative mode, please.  Like you promised when I backed the game.  (They will add it soon, but it’s gonna cost me $50!)
• (7) Professor Evil and The Citadel of Time: Too hard, too random.  Fix: Make it so Professor Evil DOES NOT LOCK THINGS BACK UP after you save an item.
• (6) The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game.  It’s too hard and the ending is too random.  Fix: Each player gets another card and you play open hand. See this blog posting for more details.
• (5) GloomHaven:  Get rid of the stupid Loot rule.  Have the players decide (as a group) when it makes sense to get the Treasure. More discussion here.
• (4) Bethel Woods: Add a few more actions you can do … the game feels rather samey after a while.  Add a Golem you can control, or a bunch of drones who have a different kind of movement. See the review and more dicussion here.
• (3) DungeonLords.  In DungeonLords, gameplay suffers immensely if the players go after the same resources.  The fix is to add a “Minor Improvements”-like deck (like Agricola) for when you try to get a resource and are thwarted by the other player—you instead can play one of your cards so you at least get todo something! See the deck here.
• (2) Zephyr: Winds of Change. Problem: too much combat … that’s pretty much all you do!  Great components, great combat, but I wanted more Adventure!  An Adventure deck maybe where the characters can get off the ship and have adventures?  Or some deck that makes the Zephyrs do MORE that just fight!  This is number two because I am not quite sure how to fix.  See my review here.
• (1) Deadline.  I hate it when I can’t investigate a crime correctly because I can’t go to Locations because I can’t do the proper symbols—it’s not thematic and it really brings me out of the game.  This is my number 1 because I am not sure how to fix it.  Maybe make the symbol matching easier?  Or allow me to discard cards to match symbols?  Or discard a card and force-go a to Location a few times per game?

(I am working on getting the Top 10 lists from Kurt and Joe …. watch this space for updates …)

Conclusion

 

As RichieCON floats away from another year, I declare it a success! Fun was had by all!  The Top 10 lists were a hoot!

Many people (including myself) commented, “Who decided to hold a Con in Tucson in the summer?”  Oh, that was me!  It was just timing more than anything.  Maybe in the future, we’ll try to run it when it’s actually NICE in Tucson …

 

 

I received Robit Riddle from Kickstarter about a month ago.  I just got it to the table last night.  It’s a cooperative story-telling game for 1-6 players, based in a universe where we are robots! In this universe, our Robits (pets) have disappeared, and we are working together to try and find them.

The ages listed on the box are 8+, and that seems apropos.  The game seems aimed at younger kids: I almost felt like it could have gone down to 7.

What’s In the Box?

Gameplay

After playing it though a few times, the best description I have for this game is Fate (the RPG) meets Choose Your Own Adventure Books.  The players collectively tell a story, advancing the plot.  There are decision points in the game, where players simply decide which way to go.

The core of the game are the Adventure books: the game comes with three.  The players choose which adventure to challenge, and start reading!  It’s very much like Choose Your Own Adventure books, as you read through the book, but with a difference.  First, you are cooperatively going through the story as Robot characters (and the reader/leader rotates) and secondly, there are challenges!

There are also challenges to overcome, based on your Robot’s abilities and some dice you roll.   Depending on the outcome, you go to a different place in the story.    Other players can also help, using story points.  These story points are a limited resource.

 

Your job is to solve the mystery/adventure presented.  The rulebook intimates that there is a large overarching story that you are discovering.  In the short term, you try and get as many victory points as you can.

Art

First and foremost, I really like the art!  The art does an outstanding job of bringing the theme out: I feel like I am a little robot in this world!   From the cover, to the cards, to the little black and white illustrations, wow.  This art really brings the game alive.

Components

The components are a mixed bag.  Some are good, some are bad.

The little adventure books are readable and well bound.  They are very usable.

The little story markers are little metal sprockets. Kind of cool.

The dice are fine: custom dice are always cool.

As much as I like the art, the card quality isn’t very good.  The cards are very thin and very dent/bend easily.   I just opened the the box, and I feel like the cards are already starting to get wear and tear!  They are fine, and they work, but I feel like this detracts from the amazing art on the cards.  I suspect cards sleeves would go a long way here.

The Rulebook

The rulebook is decent, but it could have used another pass by an editor (I found a few spelling errors and it was hard to follow at a few points). I struggled to get through the rules.  The rulebooks could have used a few more examples of game play and rules applications.  But, the rulebook did a good job of showing the components on the front cover (so you could separate them into semantic decks: see picture above!)

And the set-up was easy to follow: see above!

The rulebook starts off quite good, but I felt like it didn’t do a great job at explaining the game.  In the end, I got through it and it was just “okay” overall.

Having said that, the game summary cards saved the day!  Thank you for having these!  I don’t know why most games don’t have these!

Solo Play

So, the game has rules for solo play!  Hurray!  They adhered to Saunders’ Law! The basic idea is for the solo player to play several Robot characters.  I am happy they addressed this elephant in the room, but I feel like the best way to solo play this game is with a single Robot, especially on your first play.  I sort of cheated and gave myself another few Story Cue cards and that seemed to be enough to make progress.

I made it through a few games, and I have come to the conclusion that I don’t think this is a  good solo game.  I think the fun in this game, like Fate (RPG), is the interactions of the other players collectively telling a story.  Playing alone felt very … sad.  The game is set-up to have others help you out in a very interactive way.  Playing by yourself just wasn’t very fun.  I am glad Robit Riddle has a solo mode, but I think I will only ever get this out as a group game.  The more players, the better!

Comma Thief

My first play left me feeling like the game needed another pass by an editor.  It looks like a Comma Thief came along and stole most of the commas out of the adventure books!  Take a look at the very first page:  there are at least two commas missing!   All games have mistakes (and I am sure I have some on my blog), but the very first page has two errors!  As I went through the book, I found more missing commas and some awkward phrases.

The entire game needs one more pass by an editor.

Saving and Loading

In the old Infocom text adventures, you had to make sure you saved your game often.  It was easy to die in Zork (and several of the older Infocom games), so you had to make sure you saved the game frequently! Otherwise, you’d have to start ALL THE WAY over, and that was no fun.

And this is one of the problem I have with Choose Your Own Adventure games: you make a bad (under some unknown definition of “bad”) choice and die!  (It was one of my complaints of the Arkham Horror: LCG) But, Robit Riddle at least acknowledges this potential problem and includes … a book mark!  (Okay, this is kinda silly save system  … but …)

I think that the bookmark  is supposed to be the “SAVE GAME” mechanism.  It’s sort of a silly way to save your game, but at least it acknowledges the “Oops! Bad Choice!” problem of Choose Your Own Adventures.  In fact, I almost wish there had been more bookmarks so that I could  have multiple “Save Games” (like the old Infocom games!)

Overall

So what’s my first impression?  I think this is a good game, if aimed at a younger crowd—I could see this being a good family game.  There is a fun and interesting story here.  I don’t think this game really works as a solo game (it’s okay), but I am excited to try it with larger groups!  The art is really awesome, but the card quality isn’t great.  I really think another pass with an editor would have made a noticeable difference, but I think the game is still solid.  What I have seen of the story looks fun and the mechanics are interesting.  I realize my review sounds a bit negative, but my first impression is that this is a 6 or 7 out of 10 (on the BoardGameGeek scale).  If it goes over well with a big group, I suspect this will end up at a 7.  Stay Tuned.

(RichieCon 2018 is coming up soon, so I suspect I’ll get it played there!)

 

 

 

Recently, a friend of mine sent an email to several of us saying “Sentinels of the Multiverse is on sale for Android”.  Cool.  I was going to forward to some other friends, but then realized … they don’t like Sentinels.  And in fact, all of my friends who don’t like Sentinels seem to like Seven Wonders.

In fact, it seems, in my game groups, Sentinels and Seven Wonders are anti-correlated: If you like Sentinels, you don’t like Seven Wonders.  If you like Seven Wonders, you don’t like Sentinels.

Is this true in general?  Or is it just a blip in our game group?

BoardGameGeek Data

If we could just tap into BoardGameGeek, find everyone that rated both games and compare them, maybe we could see if this were a real trend!  But, alas, we can’t do that.  Or can we?

My friend Josh pointed out that BoardGameGeek allows an interface to download just such data:

https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/BGG_XML_API2

With this interface, Josh downloaded what we needed (he used  a curl script to gobble the data and parsed the data with a Python script) and generated some stats and graphs.  It was easy: he did it in about an hour.

Findings

So what did we find?  In general, people who like Sentinels tend to like Seven Wonders, and people who like Seven Wonders tend to like Sentinels.  There DID NOT seem to be the anti-correlation that we thought!  Apparently, my little game group is its own little microcosm.

Here’s the data graphed:

On the left axis are the ratings (from 1-10) for Sentinels, on the right axis are the ratings (from 1-10) for Seven Wonders.  The height of the 3D graph shows how many BGG users rated the game (on BGG’s scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the best).   You can see that the data seems pretty consistently rising on both sides.  People who like Sentinels tend to like Seven Wonders and vice-versa.

Other interesting data from the time of the comparison:

• Seven Wonders had 61037 reviews
• Sentinels of the Multiverse had 12425 reviews
• There were 7880 overlapping reviews (i.e., users who reviewed both)

I am curious, what do other people see?

This last weekend, I went down to Las Cruces for many reasons, but really wanted to playtest The Island of Dr. Necreaux: Second Edition.  (And we will get around to comparing the First Edition and the Second Edition later in this blog).  But, we played lots of games that weekend, and one of them really surprised me: Muse.

Muse is basically a party game where you try to get your teammates to guess one of six pictures.

You give hints based one of the “inspiration” cards:

Whenever your team guesses a Masterpiece (pretty picture of art) correctly, your team gets that card as a point (like Apples to Apples).  When your team has 5 points, you win!

The rules are a little more complicated than that, but not much.  It’s a real fun party game.  We played a bunch of times early in the night and everyone had fun.

COOPERATIVE MODE!

Surprisingly, this game contains a cooperative mode!  In a 2 or 3 player version, the game becomes cooperative!  See the rules above, but basically you have to guess 5 cards before you fail 5 times.

This was a fun, low-key cooperative game.  It was late at night, and 3 of us just sat around playing this while another group finished up the Star Trek RPG.  Not a lot of thought, just fun.

Dixit

The only real problem with the game is that there are only 84 Masterpieces.  After a little bit, the cards started to repeat. 84 cards / 6 cards per play = about 14 plays before repeats.

After we played for a while, we started seeing the same “Masterpieces” again.  So, Kurt pulled out his Dixit cards and we used those for a while.  It worked fine!   We didn’t get to play with Mysterium cards, but we are pretty sure those would work fine as well.

After playing cooperatively for almost an hour with both Muse and Dixit cards, I declare this game a success.  Everyone who played wanted to get a copy.

Conclusion

Muse is pretty cheap ($18 on CoolStuffInc) and pretty fun.  It has some limited replayability, but both Dixit and Mysterium can easily be used for expansion cards.

This was a huge surprise as a cooperative game.  It was a light, fun, cheap cooperative game (for 2-3 people) that also happens to be a good party game for larger player counts.

The first K is silent.  Today’s blogpost is brought to you by the letter K.

Kallax, Kallax, Kallax

The Dice Tower people mention the Kallax shelves all the time for their games.  Zee Garcia even mentioned them in a “Top 10 Gaming Accessories” video.  So, it’s become almost cliche’ for a gamer to order Kallax shelves.  To paraphrase Yoda:

Kallax gonna come, poke me in the Kokonut.  And they did.  And they did.

I live in Tucson, and Ikea lives in Phoenix.  I was going to make a trip to Phoenix to pick them up, but they would deliver to to Tucson.  For an extra $79.  Well, given the time outlay (2 hours up, 2 hours back) and the money outlay (a full tank of gas), I chose the delivery. All in:  $199 + $79 + tax, so about $290.

They delivered the shelves straight to my house.  Even put them in the right place for me.  They were great.

Saunders’ Law in the Real World

So, I opened the instruction book and saw the “pictures only” instructions for assembly.

Hilarious!  The instructions say “Don’t assemble them by yourself.”  The assembly is (drum roll), a cooperative activity!  I think this is one of the best pictures I’ve seen to show “cooperation”.  Although I really like this one too:

The funny thing is, I invoked Saunders’ Law on the Shelves!  I made it into a solo activity!  Basically, my wife was visiting her Mom, and I was by myself.  So, I made assembling the shelves into a “solo game”.

Honestly, it wasn’t too bad assembling the shelves by myself.  I went slowly, made sure I read all the rules (I mean instructions) in advance and tried things out slowly.  It really almost felt like I was learning a board game by myself.  I will say this: the assembly instructions are quite good.

The final result?

I am pleased with how they came out.

Psuedo-Kallax Kshelves?

Shortly after I was proudly showing off my Kallax Kshelves, my friend Josh found an alternative shelf that looks almost exactly like the Kallax ones.  For almost half the price.  And free shipping!

I got some of the 4×2 shelves and liked them. They are similar (I think) to the thicker old-style Kallax shelves.

https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=better%20homes%20and%20gardens%20cube%20organizer

Shipping was free, which was the big kicker.

I think, at the time of this writing, those alternative 5×5 shelves are $158.  With free shipping.

Sigh.  So, I overpaid.  I offer up the shelves (above) as a public service announcement to the gaming community.  You can get basically the same shelves as the Kallax Kshelves, but you don’t have to pay extra money for the extra Ks.

Kontainers

Recently, I was helping my wife out at Target, and found these:

The 8 extra small Ziploc Kontainers are only $2.72 (plus tax, but -5% if you have a Target cards).  Each Ziploc Kontainer ends up being about 35 cents.  What a deal!

These containers are perfect containers for some games.  Case in Point: Ron gave me Terraforming Mars for Christmas,  Fun game!  But there are sooo many little components.  The bags work fine, but they add set-up and tear-down time as you pull all the little cubes out.

But, with these little Kontainers, set-up is trivial: pull the Kontainer out!  During gameplay, it’s easy to pass these little Kontainers around for everyone.

And they all fit well into the box.  So, for a little under $3, I was able to get some nice Kontainers!  I will probably get some more: they work really well in some of the standard sized game boxes.

 

One more thing: I found these Ziploc thingees on-line at Target, but you have to order $25 worth for free shipping.  So, it might be worth it to get 9 packages of 8 for 72 Kontainers?  And don’t go to Amazon!  They were like $6.99 for a package of 8! More than twice as much.  If you have a Target in your area, just it up on your next visit. (I assume other stores have them too…)

 

(Apologies for the overuse of the letter K; that was a stipulation for his support of today’s blog entry.  K feels he is overshadowed by his controlling, older brother C …)

 

So, about a week ago, one of my “Pandemic Legacy” friends had to cancel because he was sick.  Bogus!  My other two friends were still coming over, but what would we play?  It turns out my copy of Thunderstone Quest arrived early that afternoon!  So, I scrambled home early, unboxed, and started reading the rules so we could play that night.

Wow, That’s a Big Game!

Okay. So, that’s a big box.  It’s not quite as big as Gloomhaven, but it’s pretty big.

It has two levels!  See how tall it is above!  The top level has a little drawer with handles is for non-card things …

The main board and player boards are in the top tray …

… And then everything else under the boards!

The left of the tray has some little miniatures (they are nice), and some nice wood components.  The right side of the tray has a bunch of thick cardboard dungeon locations.  Really nice quality components.

Oh, and by the way, even though I took all these photos with my thought of doing a review, I am REALLY GLAD I did!  I wasn’t sure how everything fit back in the box!  In fact, I now always take some pictures of my games when I unbox for just this reason!

What’s Under The Tray?

 

So, there are a LOT of cards.  Like, a LOT.  I think I counted 30? decks of shrink-wrapped cards!  But, you’ll notice the middle two sections are empty.  Why?  C’mon!  You deckbuilders know!  So the cards will all fit EVEN WHEN IN CARD PROTECTORS.  And for expansions.

The Rulebook

The rulebook is good.  I have never played any of the original Thunderstone variants, so this game is brand new to me.  There are a lot of cards, and I wasn’t sure where to start, but the rulebook guides you pretty well.  Within an hour, I was set-up for a two player game.

My main frustration was not knowing if I should ONLY unwrap deck 1, and then unwrap deck 2 later?   You see, I had an EXCELLENT experience unwrapping Aeon’s End:

So, after festering a little, I came to realize: YOU OPEN ALL THREE AT ONCE.  AND SORT THEM ALL AT ONCE. The reason for three decks was more of a manufacturing reason.  I just wish the rules were a little clearer.  They also messed up in the first game: they tell you what cards to play, but one of the Adventurers is the wrong name!  So, I had to figure that out …

 

This is a minor pet peeve, but it bothered me: the players were Ashley, Drew and Adam.  In cryptography examples, they always use Alice, Bob, and Charlie.  Why?  Because all the names start with different letters (ABC) so you can tell which player at a glance is which.  Ashley and Adam are poor examples because they start with the same letter.

Yes, it is a pet peeve.  The rulebook does a good job or going through some sample turns, but occasionally you have to reread a section and ask “Wait, was the Ashley or Adam”?  It just makes things harder to learn than they should have been.

Components

The components are pretty darn nice.  The cards are great looking.

The board is easy to read and easy to get around.  It has rules labeled on it to help you remember things.

The player boards are incredibly high-quality!  They can FOLD!  They are of the same quality as the board!  The also have summaries of rules on there.  I applaud that!  Rather than having a separate card for the rules, the player board has just about everything you need to get through a turn.  These player boards were really phenomenal!

My only gripe about the boards is that each player has EXACTLY the same one. There are no special player powers in the game, but each player does gets his own mini.  It would have been nice to have a picture of the mini on the board … (but then they would be stuck with only 4 minis, and you can see that they give us 6 …)

So, each player can choose which mini they want.  But honestly, since there are no special powers, it doesn’t matter for gameplay.  It just looks nice.

The tokens are all wood.  Very nice, and you get plenty.  The dice were great!  But I couldn’t find ANY MENTION of using the dice in the rules?  Why were the dice included?  It turns out, after you deck build, some of the later cards require dice.  But, ya, you may not use the dice in your first few games.

First Game

So, my first game is all set-up and ready to go.  Looks good set-up, doesn’t it?  You’ll notice I have two players set-up.  Why?  THERE ARE NO COOPERATIVE OR SOLO RULES. 

“But Rich!  This is a Cooperative Games blog?  Why are you reviewing a game that doesn’t have a cooperative mode?”

That’s a real good question.   Let’s take a look at the Kickstarter:

We have had a lot of questions about co-op or solo play rules. Our developers have great ideas for these modes of play but they won’t start working on them until after work is finalized on the regular competitive rules. We don’t have an ETA on when we will have co-op or solo play rules ready but we’ll make them available as soon as they’re ready.

In more detail, from the FAQ (on the Kickstarter page)

 

• Can people play the game co-operatively, or is it only competitively?

  We have plans to write co-op and solo play rules for the game but we won’t begin work on them until after we’ve finished the rules for normal competitive play.

  Last updated: Tue, February 21 2017 10:05 AM MST

And finally, from Update 31 from the Kickstarter:

AEG Developer Bryan Reese is actively at work on Solo & Co-Op Rules for the game. He recruited a small group of playtesters to help and once they’ve progressed towards a more final ruleset we’ll be sharing those rules with you as well. This project has blossomed into something much more comprehensive than just a rules addenda and our plan now is to bundle the Solo and Co-Op Rules into a future Quest release. Our plan now includes special cards and other materials to facilitate Solo and Co-Op play.

 

In other words, no CO-OP or solo play comes with this game.

Granted, they never promised it would come with the game, but I guess I felt like they were implying (maybe I was just inferring) that a CO-OP mode would come with the game … just as soon as they finished with the competitive game.   And, it sounds like it will be another product I have to buy.  Sigh.  I am disappointed and feel like a little bait-and-switch happened.  But, yes, they didn’t promise it … but I really felt like I was lead down the garden path a little ..

 

Anyways, Part II of this review will come out AFTER they publish the solo and co-op rules.

 

Play

How does the game play?  I played a single player version with 2 players (just a few rounds to get the sense of it), then my friends Sara and Teresa came over and we played a three player game.

So, the game was fun.  It was a deck-building game with lots of little twists on that.

• Exploring.  On your turn, you can either go to town to buy something, or go exploring in the Dungeon and fight something!
• Wounds.  Every player take wounds when you fight.  You can heal those in town with cards or by going to special locations.
• Treasure.  You can get some amazing cards for your deck either by fighting a monster or buying it in town.
• Light.  You can’t go too far into the dungeon unless you have enough light
• Big Bad.  There’s a big bad YOU ALL FIGHT at the end of the game
• Tokens.  You can buy tokens with your money in case you don’t have enough for something big.  (Light, Healing, or Iron Rations). In other words, you always have something you can buy, even if you don’t have much.  The Iron Rations are nice because you can buy a ration for 2 gold, and use it for 1 gold on your next turn—it’s a way to “preserve” some of your gold for a later turn.

At the end of the day, it felt a little like Legendary (the super-hero version).  You pick adventurers (like superheroes in Legendary) to go into your deck, and you have to buy things to go into your deck.  And you fight a big bad.  And whomever has the most Victory Points at the end of the game wins!  At a high level, very much like Legendary.

Thoughts on Gameplay 

After playing through, we had fun.  We want to play again.  Players don’t really get in each other’s Kool-Aid too much.  Someone may fight a monster you wanted, or buy a resource you wanted, but that’s about it.  Again, very much like Legendary. 

One thing we DO with Legendary is just ignore the Victory Points at the end of the game and just play like it was a CO-OP.  Can you do that with Thunderstone Quest?  Kind of?   In this game, the Big Bad comes out at the end, and no one really defeats it, you just all fight it.  If you fight it and win, it doesn’t die.  It just gives you victory points.  And then the next player can fight it. And get victory points.   And that’s the end of the game.  So, you could play that way.   I guess?  It just doesn’t feel very satisfying or thematic in this configuration because the Big Bad doesn’t die.

One way to play solo would be to just take one player and get the most Victory points you can, and try to beat that score next time.  It’s not a bad way to play solo.

Conclusions

At the end of the day, I liked this game.  But, I think I like Aeon’s End better.  Aeon’s End is an amazing solo and cooperative co-op game: it was built from the ground up as a co-op.  This is a good competitive deck -builder that’s pretty fun to play.   And I don’t regret getting it (although I am annoyed how the co-op and solo modes fell off the radar).  When the co-op expansion comes out, we’ll see how well it fares.  Watch this space for Part II  of my review  … which may be a while … because they don’t even have it yet …

But, as a competitive game, it was good.  The components are amazing, there’s a lot of variety in all the decks, and the game just wows you with the components.  It was fun.  I’ll play again and my friends want to play again.  And my other friends want to try it out.

It was fun.  But be clear: THERE ARE NO COOPERATIVE OR SOLO MODES INCLUDED.  You must wait for some expansion you have to buy.

 

 

 

Sometime ago, I wrote a blog post called “Fastball Special” about Player Selected Turn Order in cooperative games.   The idea is simple: why can’t players select the order they get to act in a cooperative game?  It’s another place players can work together to get optimal results.  I have been buying lots of cooperative board games over the last year.   It’s been almost 2 years since I wrote the “Fastball Special” entry!   And I have only found 3 (well … 2 and half …) games with Player Selected Turn Order!  And none of them are well known games!  Here’s the ones I know of.

The Daedalus Sentence

I kickstarted this game quite some time ago and gave a review here.  This is the first game out “in the wild” I found where players could actively choose the order to use their action points.  Every player gets 4 action points, but you can use them (among the players) anyway you want!  You could even intersperse your actions among the actions of other players.  It was very cool!  But, in my plays of the game, we didn’t seem to take advantage of this.  Or rather, we didn’t seem to NEED to take advantage of this.  So, it was cool, but it wasn’t clear it was necessary to win.

Sharknado: The Board Game

Yes, you read that right.  There was a Sharknado: the board game.  But … this was a Kickstarter  that didn’t fund.  So, I count it as “half” a game.  According to the web site, they still plan to release this!  But I haven’t seen anything about it.  Anyway, here’s why it caught my eye at the time:

No specific turn order – The game plays in two phases: the Player phase and the Sharknado phase. During the Player phase, you and your team can take actions in whatever order works best for your strategy.

How cool!  But … I never saw how well it worked.  Because, at the time of this writing, it still hasn’t come out.

CO-OP: the co-op game

Yeah, the game I made.  It one of the central mechanisms of the game: players go in any order they can in the Player’s Turn phase:

On the Players’ Turn, they can choose to go in any order they want.  For example:

Players decide they really need goods in the Warehouse.  If CP goes before Henry, CP can give Henry the card he needs!  CP Junior goes first and gives Henry Hall a Distributor card.  Then, Henry Hall plays the Distributor, using his special power to get one more good to the Warehouse.

Sometimes, you don’t need this extra flexibility, but sometimes you do!  Take a look at this review from kh-km.com for further look and discussion of this.

Player Selected Turn Order Necessary?

I feel like Player Selected Turn Order is a “natural mechanic” for cooperative games.  For example, I house rule Sentinels of the Multiverse and allow Player Selected Turn Order when I play.  It makes it more “fun” (at least to me) as I  have more choices.

But there are reasons not to like it:

• It can make complicated games “more complicated” as you add yet “another choice” /”set of choices”  to a myriad of choices a player already has.
• It’s harder to notate.  In most cooperative games, players go clockwise, following the first player marker.  As soon as you make the players select, it gets harder to notate.  “Who’s played this turn?  Did I play?  Did you play?  Wait, how can I tell?” During my play testing of CO-OP, I went through a lot of different ways to notate it until I arrived at something that seemed to work well enough.
• Players aren’t used to it.  If there are only three (well, 2.5) games with this mechanic, players really aren’t used to it.  So, it may tend to confuse people more.

Are there other cooperative games I have missed (heck, I’ll even take semi-cooperative) with this mechanic?

Recently, The Games Crafter discontinued their purple coin game piece.  See picture below.  In other words, you can’t get games with the purple coin  (at least, made by the Games Crafter) any more.

Those of you familiar with CO-OP: the co-op game may know the purple coin as something slightly different: The Happening Dude token!   It’s very similar in function to a First Player Token but not quite the same: The Happening Dude doesn’t go first, he just reads the Happenings for that day, and then the marker rotates to the next player.

What Do I Want in First Player (or Happening Dude) Marker?

What characteristics do you want in a First Player (Happening Dude) marker?

The reasons I chose the purple coin as The Happening Dude:

1. Cost.  It was cheap.  Don’t discount this.  I printed 120 games and had to pay for every single piece!
2. Heft.  It had some heft.  Among the tokens in the Games Crafter menagerie, it was one of the larger ones.  You want to have something large enough to “pick up and pass around” the table.  Admittedly, the purple coin is smaller than I liked, but I didn’t have a lot of options.
3. Visually Distinct.  When passing the token around the table, you want something visually distinct that you can pick out from across the table. “Who’s the first player?  Oh, you!”  I remember the first player token from Arkham Horror getting lost in the shuffle sometimes because it tended to blend with a lot of the other components.
4. Thematic.  You want it to fit with the game.  The purple coin was fairly generic and had a happy guy on it: The Happening Dude!  But yes, I admit, it wasn’t particularly thematic for CO-OP: the co-op game.

In a perfect world, I would have had something “fun and unique”.  We talked about a hat, a talking stick, a bead (seriously!), and a headband (Hippies like headbands).   In the end, the purple coin was “good enough” for the price.  Recall that CO-OP wasn’t as cheap as I hoped: my cost was about $34 per game.  The purple coin was only 10-12 cents If I recall correctly.

The “obvious” Happening Dude token would have been a ‘peace sign’ on a poker chip or a large cardboard cutout.   A poker chip would be cheap, but the way stickers work in the Games Crafter made it complicated (and more expensive) to make that work.    Similarly for a card board token.  (If you buy a sheet of stickers or cardboard, you have to buy the entire sheet, regardless of how much you use it.  And that’s PER GAME.  The Games Crafter charges you PER GAME for one sheet, even if you only use a little bit of the sheet.  And you can’t split the sheet across games, unless you (the buyer) do it manually off-line in a  separate order.  Like I said, complicated.)

In the end, I made a tradeoff.  The cost was probably the main reason I didn’t choose a “funner” piece.

RIP Purple Coin

Oh what great times we had Purple Coin!  I’ll miss you!   Your friend looks like he’s a pretty Happening Dude.  Do you think he can do your job?  He’ll never replace you, but he can have fun with us.

 

 

What do you think?  He’s a pretty cool Happening Dude (or Dudette)… I mean, I can see right through him!