“This is the greatest trick taking game of all time Vic”…..
“Go on so I’ll bite”
There are a LOT of trick taking games out there. There’s more than a passing similarity between them. Some are more complex than others. Some based on the standard 52 deck of cards. Quite a few not. Saying this is the greatest trick taking game of all time smacks of talking big. A punishable gaming crime… He wasn’t wrong though 

Wizard is a deceptively simple game similar to 45, 110 you name it. It shares a mechanic with the mighty Tichu. Not only can you bet beforehand, You HAVE to bet beforehand. In this case on how many tricks you’re going to win. Get it wrong and you lose ten point per trick you’re out by. Get it right and you get a bonus and points for your psychics hotline accuracy. To help in your judge childlike precognitions the deck contains four wizards and four fools. The wizards are round winners. Unbeatable once played so if you have a couple in your hand odds are you’re winning a couple of tricks. The fools on the other hand are super low cards that definitely lose you the round (I know it seems non intuitive to LOSE a round). With this little bit of wriggle room and based on the cards in hand you can make a fair stab at how you’re going to do in the round. At least at first

The game is played out over fifteen rounds or so. Each round your hand size increases by one. Early on it’s easy enough to predict how many tricks you’ll win. Later it becomes trickier (no pun intended) with larger hands. Flash forward to a hand of fifteen cards and it’s quite the skill to predict how you will fare out in the coming round, but predict you must. 
I was skeptical when I played this. The artwork is simply atrocious. I could close my eyes and draw better princes, peasants and wizards with a sore hand and a brown noddy crayon. The colors are terrible too, truly ghastly but after a few rounds you get used to it like an arthritic hip. Once you play it a bit the game starts to make sense and you can see the depth of this beauty appear. There is so much joy to be had in foiling another player’s plans, doubly so if you complete yours. 
I have to admit this IS one of the best trick taking games I’ve ever played. It’s not a team game like Tichu (although I’m sure you could play in teams) this is a free for all and it’s glorious. 

Some people are going to play this game and be totally nonplussed, some are going to clutch it to their ample bosoms. Me, I went out and bought it straight away. For a Tenner it was a no brainer 
If card games are your poison I recommend you get with this program and start dosing yourself now
Huzzah!
Vic 

“Gaming is like the black pudding industry. It needs constant fresh blood”

In conjunction with the Grand Raffle I’m offering tickets and games for dragging new victims, I mean gamers to the next Knavecon.  I want you knaves to get out there and persuade some fresh blood to join us.

So here’s the plan…

Persuade a buddy who hasn’t come to Knavecon before to join us and I’ll give you a couple of tickets for the grand raffle.  Better still get them to click on the event and add themselves in to “going” section.

If I get a nice gush of gamers,  I’m going to add something something special (not Sin City or 30 seconds) to the Raffle

Now take to the skies my flying monkeys and bring me back fresh blood for the blood God

Huzzah!

Vic

For all of you planning to attend or just happy to support Knavecon I once again give you the Grand Raffle.  for the princely sum of €1 your name will be entered into our now famous draw for a selection of Board Games which will be raffled on the day.  (early supporters will get TWO entries for their buck up until midnight Friday 3rd March)

The prize fund will be added to as time progresses and more games will be appended to the list and this post updated.

Kicking off we have a brand new still in the shrink copy of NEW ANGELES a game Knavecon describes as “really good so it is” and my favourite game of 2017 so far

MORE TO FOLLOW

SO! how do I get tickets early and beat the rush on the day and benefit from the 2 for 1 offer before the friday before the Knavecon?  Simples just paypal my Swiss bank account at

victorgannon@yahoo.com

Prices are currently

• 2 x raffle tickets for €1
• 20 x raffle tickets for €7
• 50 x raffle tickets for €12

Should you feel inclined, feel free to pre-book your tickets for the event too.  Tickets will be available on the door on the day as usual.  It’s going to be a busy con!

• Adults €18
• Students and unwaged €10
• Accompanied Children Free

Huzzah!

Vic

“Last Christmas I gave you my heart” I thought was the perfect song to have in the background for this game. Opinions varied
Last Friday is a hidden movement game surprisingly close to Letters from Whitechapel. One player takes the role of the crazed maniac (guess who I played) who’s out to murder the campers in Traditional slasher movie fashion. The others play the hapless campers destined to more than likely get popped in a horrible way. 
The game is split into four chapters and can be played out sequentially or as just one single chapter for a quick fix.  

The main board is a nicely rendered map of camp apache with a boating pond in the middle, surrounded by a shore and further back a set of five cabins. The map is made up of a few hundred spots which can be moved around by campers and mixed in with these a hundred plus numbered spots that the manic moves. If you’ve played white chapel it’s EXACTLY the same, bar the pond in the middle that offers rapid transport across the board (if the boat token is at your pier) 
While the campers move around visibly on the map the maniac moves by noting down his numbered location behind his GM screen. If the maniac comes in contact with a camper it’s bad news for one or the other. That said it does give a clue to his location if he’s murdered someone. The other clue to his location is every three turns he has to show where he was three turns ago. I’m not sure what I think of this mechanic. It works in game terms but I do prefer a hidden movement game where often the others haven’t a CLUE where the hunted is until it’s too late. It’s not by any means a deal breaker it just feels a little weird coming from a lot of Fury of Dracula plays.  

To assist both parties the killer gets a set of one shot maniac tokens which allows him to do stuff like move two squares, not reveal his location when called upon to do so, take an extra turn at the very end or wield and axe to break into cabins. 
On the flip side and very welcome are clue tokens that give players acute hearing (can detect the killer close by), bear trap (reveal location of killer if he walks on it, lantern (reveals killer nearby), shovel (bury bodies and reduce killers score), the best of all are running shoes that allows the camper to move two rather than the slow poke one space. In addition each camper has a special ability which is most welcome. It’s hard out there being a camper 
Chapter one sees the campers starting near the lake with the manic sliding unseen in from one edge of the board. The campers aware that something is wrong have to move around and flip the tent counters over to reveal keys or possibly the remains of the owners so they can gain access to the safety of the locked cabins. 

The maniac has to move around and bump them off before they can get to safety. 
Chapter two sees the tables reversed with the campers hunting the killer. The one who does the deed becomes the chosen. Chapter three sees the killer back from the dead hunting just the chosen while the other campers try and defend them and chapter four the camper have had enough and try and end it once and for all
Now the chapter system I like. I’ve complained before about the new Dracula where night and day is too fast. Here you’ve got a good long stretch at being the hunter then a good long stretch being hunted. On top of this successes early on carry on into the next chapter. So a good start will see the killer with a few more maniac tokens for the next chapter and visa versa 
I’d heard this game spoken highly of by some. Thematically it’s excellent. Having the manic appear suddenly beside a group of campers (don’t bunch up) is superb when it’s been too quiet for a while. Production is good. Art is not up to the standard of Fantasy Flight but it’s perfectly fine. The game is nicely presented and it doesn’t have too many fiddly components or cards 
Compared to other hidden movement games it holds it’s own. It’s a match for White Chapel and being new it’s novel. I haven’t played enough of it yet to see what it’s like long term but I’m liking it so far. The chapter idea is good and being able to play as many chapters as you like means it won’t drag like Dracula. 
All in all a decent, hidden movement game with a great theme. Will be demoing it at Knavecon. See what you think
Huzzah! 
Vic 

My copy of New Angeles has had a very roundabout route to get to me but it arrived a few days back and there was no doubt it would be played straight away on games night. Better still come the night come the players and we had a full compliment of six to test drive it. 

It’s semi coop with a POSSIBLE traitor in there which makes for a nice level of paranoia. Each player takes the role of a powerful Mega Corporation all of which will be familiar to anyone who have played in the Android universe before. The corporations are all working together like ebony and ivory to give the people what they demand in the form of tech, entertainment, and four other resources I can’t recall the name of. Doesn’t matter what they are. You flip a demand card three times in the course of the game and the people suddenly want various quantities of different resources (the feckless rogues) and it’s up to all of you in two turns to give them want they want or face the ire of the government. 

Ire it seems can be quantified. The government is keeping New Angeles under its Sauronlike gaze. If the corporations working together can keep the people happy then they too are happy, but if they fail to match the people’s wants the group incurs threat points and if it reaches 25 EVERYONE loses. Other things each turn like unchecked disease and crime earns you threats. It’s all too easy to gain these and extremely hard to reduce them so it’s a race to get to the end of turn six before the bottom falls out of your gravy train world. 
Obviously I wouldn’t be talking so excitedly about a game if it was pure coop. It’s not. At the start each player draws a secret rival card. Your goal apart from having everyone win is to have higher capital than your secretly drawn opponent. So it’s a case of a number of of people could potentially win but there’s going to be some really bad losers. Now. Add to this one of the rival cards is actually a traitor card and that player is now secretly working for the government and wants the threat to get to 25 and everyone to lose, in which case they win, you’ve got a tasty paranoid meaty stew with secret agenda lumps glistening under the bubbling surface. 

The game plays out by the rotating active player putting forward a proposal card to fix or improve something in one of the ten sectors of the city. Another player may put a counter proposal card in place and everyone abstains or throws a number of limited action cards in to vote for one or the other. The winner gains an asset as a result that will give him some plus or bonus later on and may well benefit from the proposal in terms of more capital (both your gold and your score). What’s really thematic here is someone could play a proposal card that stamps out crime in two sectors which would be very laudable if they didn’t control private security and made capital like a bandit from the action. Worse still it might be a case you can’t ignore crime any longer so you all willingly have to make it happen. 
Everyone has an angle in this game. Players also draw a secret agenda card at the start of the demand arc that benefits them if certain things happen when demand is fulfilled, like ensuring there’s a certain amount of outages in the city, the police are out in force and so on. It’s entirely believable and if it wasn’t a cyberpunk setting you could certainly see players all dressed in stovepipe hats waxing their villain mustaches and grinning manically and most certainly not being able to comment on their motivations. 
The game is surprisingly fast. It’s only 6 turns. Even with a full compliment of six and all new to the game it took a little under 3 hours to finish and everyone wanted badly to see how it finished. In our case the traitor slipped the clutch on the very last action and won it for himself. Damn government. 

There’s a lovely plate spinning mechanic going on here. Each of the various corps specialize in things like medicine, law enforcement, repair and construction and they benefit in capital when these actions happen in the city. Ignore a particular area like health completely and it goes from a headache to a migraine which will cost everyone the game. 
Deals are a big part of the game to get your agendas over the line as is backstabbing and general caddish behavior. It’s wonderful. 
Something I’ve heard from a number of sources is this is like a new version of Battlestar. Absolutely not. It’s a very different beast (Battlestar rocks btw). While it does have a whiff of Battlestar it also has a whiff (as opposed to a pong) of XCOM and maybe a dash of the original Android board game. It’s very much it’s own unique self and I love the unlikely allies mechanic in the game very much. 
Production values are excellent as always from Fantasy Flight. Good artwork. Nice minis, everything you’d expect. The action cards a little small and the card type is tiny and hard to make out but that’s more my issue than the games. 
So far I’m loving this and it’s shot in straight away as one of my top games alongside Battlestar and Imperial 2030. 
Will be there in force at Knavecon 9. Reckon it could be the game of the con
Huzzah!
Vic 

Three sticks is an abstract game for two to four players. It’s a bit like Android Mainframe but even more shit. Oh dear I said it. 
The idea behind the game is to make shapes from three different sized straight pieces. Two, three and four long. You can go diagonal with the four length piece so you wind up making triangles, squares, rectangles and other shapes which have names too. 

You score points if you’re the one who completes a shape. Score is based on how long the perimeter is, a bonus for the complexity of the shape (octagons score more than rectangles and so on) and also for surrounding a spot on the board with a score number on it (a bit like the triple word score in scrabble)

All in all it’s dull and generic. It plays like a big game of dots and if you try more than two players it’s pretty random. It’s also hugely open to analysis paralysis. Kids may like it. 
Any pros you say? Well it’s packaged nicely and I suppose it would burn for a good while but give off Black smoke because of all the plastic). It’s so bad I suspect it will turn up in the toy isle of Tescos or be used to torture school kids. 

All in all there’s a lot better out there for kids. This doesn’t cut the rhombus either for small or big kids. 
Huzzah!
Vic  

Is there anything worse than Monopoly? Perhaps Junior Monopoly? Actually no! Having played junior Monopoly I can say I kind of approve for the simple reason…. it’s mercifully brief. (I’m reliably informed Game of Life junior is even worse btw)
Junior Monopoly takes the very last vestiges of a game from monopoly and pasteurized, sterilizes and bleaches it so you’re left with a random number generator. The game is entirely predetermined. You don’t have to actually play the game to play the game. You move by rolling the dice and moving your cartoony piece on a smaller board than the regular one (six squares per side rather than ten) and HAVE to buy a property where you land if it’s vacant. HAVE to. The money has been simplified so everything is in millions. The first row of properties cost 1m, the second edge of the map 2m and so on around each side. Land on someone else’s and you pay out that much money. If you can’t afford to either buy or pay rent (you start with 20m) game’s over and the person with the most money wins…

Oh yeah there’s chance cards to. One of which send you jail. Woohoo. 
No building houses or hotels, making deals, all gone. In fairness I know it’s a kids game but holy shite this is poor stuff indeed and a terrible introduction to gaming for any child. There’s so many better games out there that are kid friendly. Avoid
Huzzah!
Vic 

Mechs v Minions is a co-op game set in a cutesie manga world full of locust like minions whom could be dealt with much easier with some nasty 70s proximity disease like moxamatosis
The game is fully co-op so like a Garda who’s uttered a few “ah ha’s” as you’ve tried to explain yourself through the window of the car you just dropped out of warp in, I shall begin reading it it’s rights 

Set in the magical land of Whocaresless each player takes a cartoony mech and sets about completing a particular task (possibly while shouting COOPERATION! And high fiving each other) like moving a bomb from one spot to another or kill some dudes or other stuff I haven’t gotten to yet. In the words of Adam West “some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb”
Now I have to qualify this. I’ve only played three games so far so this is my brutally honest early opinion from our Thur night gaming sessions that are not a million miles from xfactor insofar as we have a shed load of unplayed games and we wheel a new one out each week to see if it’s good enough to make the semis. Mechs and Minions didn’t get me anywhere near semi….

The game is beautifully presented. You get a lot of plastic for your buck. It’s beautifully packaged like an €85 box of chocolates and the various trays with dozens of minis all slot together real nice. It’s a surprisingly big box, bigger than Scythe I’d wager. Bigger than War of the Ring. It also has a bubbly personality.
The artwork and models are straight out of World of Warcraft or anything by Blizzard. Big, angular, bright and distinctive. Actually Dota 2 could be it’s twin. I’ll be honest I’ve never been a fan of this art style it’s just too sacerine sweet for my tastes. 
Ok let’s get to the crux. The game is a programming game not a million miles from Robo Rally. Each mech has got eight slots on It’s programming board where you can place a program card which will make it move, turn, shoot, defend. Each round players take it in turn to draw an additional card of their choice from a draft of five or six and add it on their board. Once everyone’s done that the programs are executed and the mechs take you literally and perambulate away in roughly the direction you hoped for. The minions then move, spawn like rabbits and if they wind up beside you spank your hams. 

Once you’ve been hit you wind up with random damage cards that throw spanners in your programming works. Your very handy move forward two spaces could get replaced with a turn 90 degrees glitch instead. Some of the glitch cards transpose some of your programming slots and go away whilst others hang around on top of a slot denying you the move under it until it’s repaired. Getting glitches is a royal pain in the hoop
Each of the slots can have up to three of the same card type,so a move forward might be powered up to be two or three spaces forward or 90, 180, anyway you like turning. Cards often double up with weapon abilities so you might have a turn and fire or a slide sideways and kill all the adjacent minions. Rolling over a minion will bump them off too. 
And that’s it. You move your mech. You cull annoying minions and you attempt to complete a mission. The difficulty of the game is not based so much on your skill as the granularity of the moves open to you. Moving faster means it’s harder to get to specific spots. In robo rally unexpected results were genuinely funny (20 years ago) in Mechs and Minions they just feel frustrating. You don’t feel as in control of the mechs as you did the robots in Robo Rally. They career around the place and it’s often a case of having to wait a few turns before the movement card you need comes up. It’s often a bit too random. Yes yes think smarter, but no movement cards coming out for two turns is again frustrating 

Now it’s more than possible I’m missing something and the earlier missions lead to really enjoyable ones but so far I’m nonplused by the whole affair. I’ll play it again. It’s far too Purdy to just abandon but it better start putting out soon or it’s the pit of despair for it and fast. So far so average. 
Stay tuned for the next play in a few weeks
Huzzah!
Vic 

The Cold War was an extraordinary time. Like any historical conflict it’s easy to look back and say “Wow! Why did they do that?”. Easy when you’re not in the middle of it and when you know the world won’t end today. 
KGB v CIA is a super two player game. I played it with my wife recently and it’s still as good as ever. Now there is a Star Wars version of this out there “Star Wars. Empire v Rebellion”. It’s pretty much the same game, however having played both, this version is still my favorite. 

The game has several elements going on at once, bluffing, push your luck, card counting, black jackery to name a few. 
The idea is to score 100 points before your opponent. You do this by winning various missions valued from 5 – 20 points each. Each of the missions is some historical spot where The KGB and CIA tried to gain popular support like Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and so on. If you’ve played Twilight Struggle you’re in familiar territory.  

Players take it in turn to blind draw support cards and place them on their side to try and reach but not go over the support level needed to take the region. Support cards themselves come in different strengths (1-6) and flavors (military, government, media and business). This is where the black jack element comes in where you push your luck to outdo your opponent and hope not to go bust and lose one of your limited spys.  
The game is a lot more forgiving than blackjack. The different types of cards allow you to look ahead before you draw, remove cards, steal opponents cards and reactivate a card a second time. There’s a lot of in your face interaction which I love. Often times it’s possible to pull your ass out of the fire with some clever thinking when all looks lost. 

before a mission you pick one of your specialist spies to carry it out. Some of them have awesome powers. The master spy is my favorite (followed by the assassin). In the case of the master spy you win the round if you lose it so there’s some real bluffing going on and some lovely paranoia. 
The game plays out in between half and an hour and it feels fast. Losing a round makes you dig in and try and catch up. Winning rounds can make you fatally cocky. Games are nearly always close and it’s a reasonably easy game to teach. 
Production wise it’s a card game at the end of the day and the cards are all very nice with a muted 70s quality to the art work. It’s all type writers and rooms full of smoking men style

This is a game that’s going to appear again and again at my table. It’s another excellent holiday game. It’s light and portable (albeit less beer proof than Hive). Highly recommended and you can pick it up for a song. 
Huzzah!
Vic 

I didn’t expect much from this game. I didn’t pay much for it (fidden euro) but after one game it’s starting to make Risk Godstorm look good. 
Sheer Panic should be a kids game. It looks gorgeous. It comes with a flock of eleven swanky cartoon resin sheep. The pieces are fantastically sculpted, real Wallace and Gromit/Shaun the sheep stuff. Savor the models for a while It goes downhill from there. 

It should be a kids game but it’s not. The rules are a tad over complicated for kids. It should be a fun game, it’s not, it’s dull and dry. 
Here’s and interesting fact. Computers can’t generate real random numbers (shut up they can’t) they generate pseudo random numbers based on a formula and the system clock, it’s pretty random, more than enough for most things. Get them to play a quick game of Sheer Panic and check the scores you’d have a totally random set of numbers right there. There’s practically no skill here. More so if you play with a full four players. By the time your turn comes around it’s pure chance if you’ve scored or not. 

What kills me here is the game LOOKS fantastic and if the designers had have put as much time into the rules as they did the look they would have had a hit on their hands. As it stands we have a game with a theme bolted into a dry and boring set of rules. It’s not like the game can be modified to be a better game. From the foundation up its piddly poor. 
I wanted to like this game. I wanted something I could whip out and play with my youngest. No such luck. 

Shame. Shame. Shame. 
Vic