The Grizzled — fun but unwinable

grizzledThe Grizzled is a co-operative card game set in the trenches of World War I.  This is not a combat game.  The focus of this war game is to help each other survive the terrors of war and come out of the conflict alive.  There are basically three “suits” and three values of cards and during play your group may only play at most two of any suit or value.  The suits are weather related:  Snow, Rain, Night.  The values are: Shells, Gas, and Whistles.  Each card has at least one set of suit and value; others have multiple of these and create quite a problem for the team.  The team must play cards from their hand with little/no table talk to see how many cards they can get out of their hands.  The goal is to end the round with an empty hand.  Good luck with that!  There are also hard knock cards that represent wounds and mental problems that manifest during the conflict.  These hard knocks modify player choices and create more trouble for the team.  For example one hard knock card makes you retreat when any pair of suit or value is in play.  This makes you stop discarding cards and sets you up for a more challenging next round.

After everyone retreats or runs out of cards in their hand you have a Support phase and you lend your support to a teammate.  Whoever gets the most support gets a benefit.  If there is no most supported person there’s no benefit for anyone.  This creates more interesting choices and some social cooperation.

The game is excellent and the theme is surprisingly emotive.  The game makes you feel like you want your team to survive these awful missions and make it out alive.  If anyone dies the game is instantly over.  This makes for good game play and when things go bad you know it and are finished soon.  It’s not like Eldritch Horror where you know you cannot win but still have 2 hours of game to play to prove you’ve lost.  In The Grizzled if you have a few bad missions you’ll be dead soon and then it’s time to shuffle the decks and try again.

That’s one of the great things about this game.  Even after being beaten up several times we wanted to play more.  Some games that are hard to win eventually stop showing up on the table because everyone knows, “yep here comes another beating, let’s play something else” — with The Grizzled there’s always that urge to try just one more time and see if we can’t make it out of the trenches alive this time.

 

Legendary Encounters: Predator (Review)

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After playing several games of Legendary Encounter: Alien I was very excited to get time to sit down with Predator.  The setup for Predator is a little more complicated since there’s really four different games in the box.  There are two games where you play through each of the two movies trying to achieve objectives from the plot.  In game one you have to find and eliminate the rebel camp, then set up a defensive position, and finally “Get to da Choppa”  Game two is the plot of the second movie.  The other two games put you in the same settings, but you take on the role of the predator hunting trophies.  This means that you have separate strike, coordinator, and barracks decks.  You need to find the right set of decks for the species that you are playing.

I played two solo games and this game is tough.  It felt much more difficult than Alien.  Many of the cards have reveal effects and they are awful.  I wound up losing expensive and powerful cards from my deck thanks to a few of these reveal effect enemies.  That was enough to cause my next few hands to be so weak that I was overwhelmed with predators and slaughtered on my way to da choppa.

The second game had me well into the second objective event cards before I had cleaned out the rebel camp.  I managed to beat back the rebels and set up my defenses before the really dangerous enemies appeared.  It was very close.  I managed to jump on da choppa with three predators on my heels looking to give me enough strike cards to kill me.

I like this game.  It is a wonderful, tense, and at time scary solo experience.  Just like the Alien game you take cards face down off the event deck and put them into the wilds.  You don’t know what sort of danger you’re facing until you scan it and sometimes scanning along costs you dearly.

I have not played the Alien/Predator crossover game but that’s next on my list.

Long time no updates

So there has been a long lag between updates here at Gamemeisters.  It’s not that we aren’t doing anything; we are.  It’s just that we don’t have any news to post.  We’ve been playing games and there will be several review posted soon…

Steampunk Rally review

retail_box_coverSteampunk 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.

GenCon purchases 2015The 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…

 

What is GenCon

GenCon is a convention in Indianapolis that calls itself “the best four days in gaming”.  The convention center and several of the downtown hotels host hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of events round the clock from Thursday morning to Sunday afternoon.  There are scheduled game sessions for an huge selection of games.  There are tournaments for card games (al la Magic the Gathering)  There are board game events and miniatures games.  An entirely different area is set aside for role play game sessions.  Many of these sessions are pay-to-play.  You purchase tickets for $2 per ticket (these are called generic tickets) and you can use those generics to get a seat at a table to play a particular game.

There are also film festivals, workshops for writers and game designers, meetings for game industry workers, and even a schedule of events for spouse who are not into gaming.  The spouse track includes things like massages, cooking classes, etc.

The biggest draw for GenCon is the exhibit hall.  Here is a massive retail space where companies big and small can sell their games and accessories.  Most big companies make new product announcements at GenCon and sometimes you can pick up those new games at their booth before the game hits the store shelves.

If you plan to go to GenCon you need to buy your badges and book a room in January.  The convention is late July/early August but the hotel rooms sell out within 12-20 hours of opening up.  This year they tried a new system to get more people into hotels downtown but we still didn’t get anywere near convention center and I booked in late January.

 

GenCon 2015

The trip was amazing and the games we got to play were awesome.  More updates soon…

Getting ready for GenCon 2015

gencon2015This summer we are headed out to Indianapolis for “the best four days in gaming”  In past years we have been there for the weekend.  There’s too much to see and do to fit into just two days.  For Gen Con 2015 we are going all four days.  It should be a wonderful experience and any new games will get posted here.

Libertalia – Review

Libertalia is a pirate game where you use crew members to acquire the most treasure over three weeks (rounds) of play.  Each player draws the same nine cards from their crew deck and selects one crewmember to play.  All the players display their card at once and then the following events take place:

  • The cards are ordred by rank on the board
  • The day effects take place in ascending rank order
  • The dusk effects take place in descending rank order
  • Treasure is taken by players in descending rank order
  • Spanish Officer & Saber treasure effects may take place (if taken as treasure)
  • Cards move from the board to player’s den
  • Night effects take place

There are six turns per round (Monday – Saturday) and then the day of rest (Sunday)  All the day of rest effects take place and then the players cash out their treasure and arrive at a final round total of doubloons.  You advance your score token and then refresh your cash (you reset to 10 doubloons)  You clear your den and any discarded crew and those cards go back into the box.  The players draw another six cards and play another round of six turns then reset and play a final round.

This game works better with more people.  The card selection feels like worker placement and selecting which cards to play and which cards to keep feels like a deck builder/manager.  The treasures to pick also present interesting choices depending on card effects.  The 30 card crew deck presents enough diversity to make the game re-playable but small enough to let people memorize card behaviors to speed game play.

We definately want to try the game with 4-6 players.  Both of my test runs where 2 player games.

 

Legendary Encounters review

 

a picture of Legendary Encounters

Legendary Encounters is a deck building game based on the four Alien movies that use

the Upper Deck Marvel Legendary card game mechanics.  The players pick an avatar out of a list of Alien movies archetypes (scientists, gunner, synthetic, corporate executive, scout, priest, mercenary, etc.) and use recruit points to gain new cards and strike points to defeat xenomorphs.  It can support solo play and is tense at time and exciting.