Posts Tagged: boardgames
Pulp Detective — a review
Pulp Detective is a solo card and dice game set in the mystery/detective genre of the 1930-40s The art work is very thematic and reminds me of comics like The Shadow.
The setup is easy. You pick a detective from a list of characters. Each detective has a unique special power that you can use during play. You have two other cards: one tracks which item is in your inventory and the other tracks stamina (aka health) and how many clues you have found.
You have a set number of hours to collect enough clues to confront the villain and solve the crime. At the start of the round you select three cards from the investigation deck face down and pick one to play, one to discard, and one to put back into the deck. There are three types of investigation cards and each type has a probability to grant specific rewards if you succeed.
The card you play has a task (much like Elder Sign or Five Year Mission) that you use the dice to roll the correct symbols. Here’s one of the tricks of this game: the dice have non-standard faces. Each die has a multiples of the same symbol (e.g. the two eyes and two newspaper die) but each die is unique so pick which die to roll carefully.
Impressions and game play thoughts
This game is super difficult. There is a lot of randomness in how the cards come out of the deck and what symbols turn up when you roll. There’s a merciful mechanic where if you fail a card task you can take a token that counts for one of the dice faces you did roll during the attempt. If you are successful and don’t need to roll all your dice on a card you can peek at the three cards that come at the start of the next round. You need to pay close attention to the time tracker and take care picking what type of card to put into play each turn. My first game I just grabbed whatever looked good and lost very quickly.
The game is thematic and feels like an old Humphrey Bogart movie as you rough up an informant, then have a shoot out, then find a tied up dame who has a clue for you. It’s just I had a terrible run of luck with the dice and could not get enough clues to find the bad guy for the final conflict. I do look forward to trying until I solve the case. The core game has three cases in the box.
Photosythesis – a review
The abstract tree growing and harvesting game from Blue Orange is not something that I would have normally picked up. It’s a game about growning trees. Every once in a while I find a game that is outside my normal fare (pirates, Cthulhu, space conquest, fantasy combat) that I find fun and fresh. Photosythensis is in this club.
Steampunk Rally review
Steampunk Rally is a drafting/dice-rolling and placement/racing game from Roxley games. The main idea of the game is that you are a turn of the century inventor building a contraption to race other inventors around the Swiss Alps (or on a track in Paris.) You draft cards to get parts for your machine, dice to power your machine, or cogs to help repair your machine. You roll dice to see what part of the contraption you can activate. The contraptions moves along the track. Finally you check to see how much damage you take.
It sounds like a lot of things are happening and when you watch a game you may get lost quickly. Game play is simultaneous. No waiting and watching here; you work on your invention and race at the same time.
There is some order to the chaos, the game is broken down into four phases:
Draft phase
You take one of the four types of cards and make a hand. Select a card and play it then pass the cards in the direction of the game play token (either clock or counter-clock wise.) After you play four cards, you have finished the draft phase. Cards are either: added to your contraption, discarded to gain cogs. discarded to gain dice, or kept in order to play later (if it’s a boost card.) There are several copies of each card so spending a coal burner this turn doesn’t mean you won’t see another coal burner card for the rest of the game. You’ll see another one, probably two. There are enough cards to see variety. You won’t see the same three parts over and over again. After only a few plays it seems well balanced.
Vent phase
Dice you play on your invention stay. Let’s say you used steam (blue dice) to drive your wheels last turn. Those steam dice are still stuck there on the contraption until you vent them. You can’t just keep tossing steam at that part of the machine without proper maintenance. Cogs are spent during the vent phase to clean and grease and generally fix up a part. 2 pips worth of maintenance happens for each cog spent. It’s a nice way of balancing out powerful machine parts that need high numbers (5’s and 6’s) to activate. Great, you use the time machine to get shielding and cogs but it’s going to take a lot of cogs during the next vent phase to reset the time machine back to working order.
Race phase
This is where the fun is. You roll any dice you picked up in the draft and you activate parts of your invention. Some parts move you; others generate dice; still others give you cogs or shield you from damage or even vent dice for you. The key for me is to try to build a machine that can with one set of dice (red for example) generate other dice and cogs while using those newly generated dice to move.
Damage phase
You take damage as you move around the track or if you activate certain parts or use boost cards. That damage is recorded on a counter and in the damage phase you lose parts equal to the number of damage taken. You can generate shields using certain parts that soak the damage. If you lose all your parts you explode and get sent to last place. You never get completely kicked out of the game.
Tips
Spend some time building your machine. If you move right away you can wind up exploded rather suddenly. My first game I was Ada Lovelace and I got a fist full of steam dice and tried to jump out ahead only to explode since I took three damage and had only one part to lose. My second game I took more time constructing the machine and then started out down the track. I didn’t explode that game and won by coasting two space past my opponent.
I find it helpful to plan a turn for a specific activity. Example: this turn I’m collecting cogs to vent since my contraction is packed full of spent dice –or– this turn I’m going to move as much as possible since I’m sitting on a +3 shield value. I haven’t found a way to do a bunch of venting and racing on the same turn, but perhaps I haven’t found the sweet spot between collecting cogs and grabbing dice yet.
Conclusion
It’s fun! After three or four turns you pick up on the phases and learn the symbols. They are easy to follow and there’s a helpful card for player reference. By the end of the game everyone I’ve played with is working their vent and race phases on their own. It’s exciting to see the machine you’ve cobbled together generate dice and cogs and move along the track. There’s something in this game for everyone. Drafting, rolling dice, placing dice (aka worker placement), resource management (collecting and spending cogs) and racing. All the mechanics work together to make the game go and none of them felt as an extraneous addition (i.e. “Quick! toss in drafting to attract 7 Wonders fans who cares if it doesn’t make sense for the game, <insert marketing jerk laughter here>”) There is hardly any down time and a little analysis paralysis when selecting cards or picking the order of machine parts to activate but it hasn’t made the game unfun or overly slow.
This is rapidly becoming my favorite game!
The final GenCon shopping results
The exhibit hall at GenCon was a chaotic whirlwind of retail bliss. We found several new and exciting board games. The “scores” aka those games that sold out) that we managed to grab up are: Halo Fleet Wars from Spartan Games, Star Trek 5 Year Mission from Mayfair, Legendary Encounters Predator from Upper Deck. The one that got away was Mysterium.
The final list here is:
- Halo Fleet Battles
- Star Trek 5 Year Mission
- Sheriff of Nottingham
- Super Dungeon Explore (1st edition and expansions)
- Munchkin Steampunk
- Mage Wars
- Dark Seas
- Nautilus
- Medieval Academy
- Dominion Adventures
- Takanoko (w/ expansion)
- 7 Wonders Babel expansion
- Darkstalkers universal fighting system
- Red Dragon Inn 1 and expansions
- Toledo
- Legendary Encounters Predator
Look for reviews of these games coming soon…
Sails of Glory review
Sails of Glory is a miniatures based naval combat game from Ares Games that is a great way to fight ship to ship in the age of sail. The game has similar mechanics to Ares airplane game Wings of Glory or X-Wing from Fantasy Flight. Each player selects actions in secret and reveals what they are planning to do at the same time. Movement resolves at the same time and then players get to make a shoot/no shoot decision. Damage is resolved at the same time as well, so there’s always a risk you’ll take damage if you are within the range of enemy guns. You enter the reload phase and start the reloading process. Cannons that just fired are cleaned or empty cannons are reloaded. Just like in real life it takes time to reload your cannons. You continue repeating these steps: Plan, Move, Combat, Reload, until one side has surrendered or been driven off the map.
The starter set comes with four ships, a wind indicator, two attitude pointers, and a huge number of counters and tokens. The rule book is 63 pages and is section off into initial setup, basic, standard, advanced, optional rules and scenarios. It took about 45-60 minutes to punch out all the bits. It’s important to keep all the counters separated, especially the ship tokens. Each ship needs to have the same action tokens during advanced play. I can see it might be easy to toss all the ship related bits into a single bag, but if you play the advanced game you’ll have to spend some time sorting and counting to ensure you have the right number of action tokens per ship.
Here is what my set looked like after punch out. Each ship has a ship board, that’s the mat in the lower left corner of the image. The large hole across the top fits a ship’s specific stats board. This is a neat design and allows you to take one of the stats boards from an expansion set ship and place it into the ship board. Damage, actions, and gun status (loaded or unloaded) are all represented on the board.
All the letter/colored counters (A-E, Yellow-Blue) are damage counters. When you fire your cannons at an enemy your range and ammunition determine what tokens you use. You draw a number out of a cup or bag based on your attack rating and the enemy turns over the counters to see the damage. This is a cool mechanic because you dish out damage at the same time to anyone who was shot at in the round.
My test game with Louis did not got well for me. We sailed around the table trying to get a first shot. I watch Master and Commander before playing this and took the small English ship where Louis wanted the large French ship. I proved to be no Jack Aubrey and got hammered with two broadsides before I could bring my guns to bear. After taking so much damage my shots were too little too late and her majesty lost a ship to those vile French. The basic game plays a lot like X-wing. You plan, move, shoot, reload and repeat. You have to watch the wind direction; it will determine what movement cards you can select in the plan phase and how effective the move turns out to be. Measuring is not done until you move or declare a shot so you may not know exactly if you are going to move as far as you want or hit your target. As your ship takes damage it becomes less capable and that makes it harder to do damage to the enemy.
The one thing I was worried about with a game with SO MANY tokens is how to put it away. I was happy that there is a large cutout in the form under the rule book that holds most of the tokens in snack baggies. The wind gauge and indicators have their own spots in the form. The mats and rulers fit in the large space in the upper right. Each deck and ship fits in its own space. It’s very nice to have a game with so many bits fit back in the original box and not require special extra boxing (I’m looking at you X-Wing Fantasy Flight!) The next time this hits the table I am going to try out the standard rules, which adds a little more complexity by giving the player an option for ammo to load (chain and grape shot) and creates more realism in planning phase by creating a two step process where you select a move for the next turn. This requires you to plan two steps at a time because a ship doesn’t respond as quickly as a plane or a TIE fighter.