I spoke some time about a trend in games I was uncomfortable with. App driven games. Well more specifically board games that won’t run without apps. I’m seeing less of these appearing. Maybe the trend is petering out or maybe I’m looking for games in all the wrong places (there’s a song in that). A trend I’m seeing and while not as uncomfortable as I was with the apps issue it’s making my spider senses tingle. It’s kickstarters with stretch goals and lots and lots of minis. 
I’ve never backed a Kickstarter. No never. Not even once. Wouldn’t even know how and not because I’m a tight git who wouldn’t buy two liters of milk at night in case I die in my sleep. It’s because I don’t want to wait. I want my pay off now. I may be persuaded btw. I don’t have a problem. Honestly. No what I’m tired of is games where the big wow factor is the beautifully sculpted models (BSM). Games that are grand and dandy but weight in at €100 plus because they’re bursting with BSMs. Personally I’m nonplussed by minis. Let’s face if I’m not going to paint them and chances are you won’t either. They’re fine and dandy but it’s the gameplay I’m interested in not fur coat and no knickers. There’s been a number of games released that have had ok gameplay. Just ok but look only gorgeous. No thanks. 
Why can’t we be wowed by a set of mechanics rather than the “look at the monkey” beautiful minis? Look at Scythe, maybe one of the most hyped games. Ever. Ever. Looks gorgeous but the gameplay is solitaire. I would have much preferred wooden cubes and better interaction. I’d jump onboard a game for €50 no problem if it was a hit with the option of buying a deluxe version if I chose to. Not a deluxe as the base game and the super and super duper deluxe version as the luxury one. 
Look at Twilight Struggle would it be a better game if it had sculptured models of armies? Blood Rage on the other hand wouldn’t be quite the same without the monsters. 
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve no issue with minis in a game, look at xwing and armada. Look at Blood Rage. The models compliment the game but Jesus Christ and all his little wizards can we have a new block buster game that’s not mini lead? It’s becoming tiring and I demand to be entertained 
Huzzah!
Vic 

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war” Gandalf in the movie Heart break ridge. 
Cry havoc is an asymmetric area control conquest game. It reminds me a bit of a study in emerald first edition (amazing) and blood rage (pretty amazing). 
Players start with a hand of action cards a home base and a map of a dozen plus locations full of native trogs (damn trogs) ripe for the murdering of. The map is tight with every spot next to three or four others. The map wraps around so there are no safe spots to hold. 

Each round of which there will there will be 4 to 6 roughly consists of three moves per player in which you raise troops, move them, build structures and maybe kick off scoring. When troops wander into enemies they halt and once everyone has had their moves battles are all resolved. Battles are clever and different. There’s no dice. You have limited troops. Twelve in total (sixteen If you’re trogs (damn trogs)) it’s possible in a battle to not only kill enemy troops but take them hostage which is worth points and reduces a player’s ability to impose their rule. 
The game is all about taking territories which have crystals in them (battles add more) and holding them during a scoring round to gain points. To operate you spend your cards leveraging in icons on them for movement, recruitment, building/activating and scoring. The other action available is drawing cards from the four terrain decks. Terrain decks add more cards with specific actions on them so you can beef up your action deck with more movement cards, more building cards wherever suits your strategy. 

Cards also have actions on them, a lot of which can be used in battle and knowing if an opponent has a stack of cards in their hand before you kick off is important. 
Now what’s really interesting is how each faction works. The trogs are the planet natives and are fast at moving via tunnels, can lay traps and defenses and pretty much annoy the shite out of you. The robot dudes have access to lots of defensive and offensive buildings so they are masters of digging in and slowly advancing. The humans are great at scouting, fast moving and calling in really unwelcome artillery. The other dudes (space elves or something) are fast and well I dunno they’re good too. Each of them is different enough to warranty many replays. Each of them have (which I obviously love) a real FU sting in their tail. Being a king maker or vengeance is just a move away. 
Production quality is very good. Not exceptional. The models are serviceable but could benefit (much like myself) from more definition. Cards and components are bang on. No complaints. 

So far I’ve played the same faction a couple of times and my overwhelming urge is to play again. 
I like games where all the factions are different to each other. I couldn’t say for sure if one is more powerful than another but it didn’t seem that way. There’s so much going on here that it would be hard to figure that out. 
I REALLY like this game. I thought I might when I first heard about it but I wasn’t so sure after my first game. After the second I was sold. Just like a good album. I’ll tell you how much I like it. I’m going to lobby my wife to buy it for me for xmas
Very high marks
Huzzah!
Vic 

Ok Bloodbowlers we’ve talked about this already, but now is the perfect time for it to Begin. Knavecon are running their annual Bloodbowl 2 League and we want players

The league will be contested on Bloodbowl 2 for the PC over the next few months with players required to play ONE league game per week

There’s a sale on Steam at the moment and Blowbowl 2 is selling for 11.50 so get over there if you don’t have it already and snap it up

Everyone will start with a new Team of their chosen race

Places are limited to 16 players.

Who’s game?

Vic

Did you know there are Seven cities in the Irish Republic. DONT look them up. Guess and stick them in the comments. Bet you get it wrong….
Cathedrals was a random find in Easons who started stocking a few board games as an experiment I assume. The experiment will fail btw If they maintain the high prices for them. It was cheap €11.99 and comes beautifully presented in a wooden case with wooden pieces. It’s the magnetic travel edition and it’s a lovely little objet d’art presented in a polish wooden case that itself opens to form the playing field. 

The game is very simple. Each player starts with a dozen plus wooden Tetris type shapes that they take turns to place on the 10×10 grid. The grid is surrounded by a perimeter wall and the goal is to complete walled off sections that then become your exclusive reservations for your pieces. If this was a video game there would be a Bling! Sound and a change of colours. You can place pieces anywhere on the grid (except enemy owned reservations) but the real trick is to grab spots and deny them to your opponent so they have nowhere to place their pieces. Play continues until players cant place any more pieces (it’s a tight board) and the player with the least pieces Unplaced wins. 

Play begins after one player places the neutral awkward and big cathedral piece somewhere on the grid and the other player places their first piece. 
It’s a really nice game. It’s fast. A game will last five minutes. To be correct you need to play two games with each player taking it in turns to take the slightly advantageous first turn and then add both final scores together to decide whom won. It’s very moorish and coupled with fast means you’ll play a half dozen games before you realize how long you’ve been playing. 
This is a real coffee table game. It looks lovely. Now it’s not polished ivory but it’s good enough to leave lying around without it looking untidy and it’s simple enough that you’ll press visitors to play it when they call. 

There’s definitely a little depth to it. A little trickery and subterfuge. It’s not chess. It’s a five minute game and one bad move will cost you the game. Which is fine. For the asking price it’s punching well above it’s weight. I recommend it and it’s coming on the road trip
Figure out what the seven cities are ?
Huzzah!
Vic 

There are no bad board games. Just awesome board games and not so awesome boardgames. We played a real shit game on Thur. I was lying about that first bit.  
Risk Godstorm is bad. It’s not as bad as Snake Oil or pimps and hos but it’s not far off. On paper it should be average If not above average but it falls on it’s face as soon as the starting gate is open. I had mixed hopes for it and it was on my long list of unplayed games so off we went. 

Chances are you’ve played Risk. Maybe you’re all fancy and played one of the variants like LOTR (it’s ok) or Star Wars (not really risk) or the Legacy Version (dunno seemingly not bad) well stay that way don’t bother turning this rock over. Move on. 
On paper this should work, it’s Risk Plus with elements similar to Kemet. Gods from your chosen Pantheon can be summoned to aid you in battle, temples can be raised to gain faith points, mighty spells can be invoked to turn the tide of battle. Soldiers that die swell the ranks of the dead and get to battle on the afterlife map. But. It doesn’t. Having read and reread the rules we couldn’t find a way of increasing our faith and buying anything beyond a single god per turn and every turn became a pointless spread out of troops which got quickly mowed down by the next player who in turn got mowed down by the next player and with five players and downtime between turns it became a pointless random exercise. 

The killer of all this was classic Risk is a superior game despite all the bells and whistles. The superfluous additions just slowed it down. The map too was horrible. Every region was impossible to hold. It felt like a map with five Europes on it. 
That said we did laugh our heads off for the first few turns as players rolled ridiculous highs and lows (after which we didn’t) and the game was a cheap purchase at a Knavecon Buy and Sell but it’s still gaming time I’ll never get back. Now I need just to keep it all quiet and sell it off…. 

DOH!
Vic 

It’s xmas soon. Like it or lump it. It’s coming down the tracks so this year rather than the mess of things you made last year let’s organize the gaming presents correct.

Firstly

Speak to your significant other (yes a lot of gamers lack an SO but there must be someone who feels sorry for you and feeds you) and explain in no uncertain terms that you want board games as presents.  (Note board GAMES). No hints, just clear simple Language. Not clothes, I mean you have plenty of black t-shirts, clothes are covered. Not books, you have a screen, not blu rays, albums, vouchers, weekends away, meals, meds, basically anything that isn’t a boardgame. You don’t want it.

I’m not saying this will be easy but remember money spent foolishly is money not spent on boardgames.

Next up are your children or someone else’s children. You may be aware of some short people that moved into your house some time back and never left. If this is the case the only humane thing to do is teach them boardgaming and they’re going to need their own stuff (which is really your stuff too). Don’t make the classic mistake of buying something like Fire in the Lake for them if they’re under 5. If the long term plan of having them become useful members of society and therefore pay back their gaming debt to you, it’s important to lure them in correctly. You’re going to need a list of stuff you wouldn’t normally buy for yourself and I’m here to help. Now remember if your children don’t play boardgames it’s not a fault with the child it’s a fault with the parent and you will be judged by your peers.

Some people ask me, at what age should you start children gaming? A tricky enough question. I suppose it makes sense to wait until the umbilical cord has been cut as delivery suites generally lack adequate table space for bigger games. Also check if you’re public or private.

Now I’m going make a few recommendations for games for kids based on my experience but really I’m looking to you guys to recommend some stuff too. Remember this is a vocation and we’re all gaming missionaries.

Here’s my recommendations. Now you’ll have to check bgg for age appropriate and it will vary. I’ve split them into can and can’t read for simplicity

Can’t read

• Ribbit (the turtles game)
• Zombie dice
• Skull
• Labyrinth
• Hive
• Castle Panic
• Cube quest
• Survive Space attack
• Escape from Atlantis
• Settlers of catan
• Hey that’s my fish
• Tsuro
• Cash and guns
• Stone Age
• One night werewolf
• 6 Nimitz
• Dragon heart
• Game of Thrones Westeros Intrigue
• Age of war
• Splendor
• Loopin Louie
• Dobble

Can Read

• 221b Baker Street
• Scotland Yard
• X-wing
• Evolution
• Star Wars risk
• Coup
• Camel cup
• The downfall of Pompeii
• Hoax
• Lord of the rings
• Code names
• Bang dice game
• Main frame
• Junta
• Scrabble
• Mag blast
• Love letter
• Boss monster
• The resistance
• Fauna
• King of Tokyo
• Zombicide
• City of fear

Huzzah!

Vic

I wasn’t a console kid. I grew up in harder times where If you wanted a game, well then you just typed the code from a magazine into your computer and If you were real posh you saved it onto a tape. We also lived in a rolled up newspaper, ate gravel for breakfast and our fathers would come home from mill and kill us in cold blood. But you tell that to kids these days and the don’t believe you
Nintendo have released a mini version of the classic Nintendo Entertainment System (not the SNES the original NES) its a tiny little thing with 30 games built in and apart from being able to add a second controller it has NO expansion capability including no extra games. You pays your money you take your chances. It also has pretty short cables so be prepared to sit near your TV 
It’s slick with a simple and retro menu system giving you access to such old classics as Pacman, Bubble Bobble, Kirby’s Adventure and early Mario Bro games. If you’re a retro fan this is going to be a big hit for xmas. I got to play it on the release date with a few buddies and a few beers and it was bliss. I can’t remember the last time I partook of the simple pleasure of a console evening. 

The games are a nice selection. All of them are from the 80s. They’re pure old school with limited 2d graphics and music a Nokia phone would blush at. All of them are nails hard which is a surprise for some. We didn’t mess around in the eighties. None of your second chance nonsense here. 
This thing is purely a novelty. You’ll tire of it after a while but I can see people throwing it on every so often and despite the limited graphics there really was some depth to some of these old games. Sure you could set this up for free with an emulator but the old controllers are charming and the thing is cheap as chips (€60 or so)

This is a lovely slice of nostalgia and I understand the SNES is next on Nintendos list for rerelease. That’s something I really want to see. Until then this is a fun and worth the entry price of a good boardgame 
Huzzah!
Vic 

You know in a horror movie when one of the Actors hears a noise that sounds awfully like a crazed killer, the music racks up a notch and Phew! it turns out it was just the cat and we let out a sigh of relief …. Now is the time the crazed killer jumps out. We know this, we’ve seen enough horrors to expect it. When a game says “1-8” players, this is the cat. You should know better. It’s a one player player game really. 
So having not seen the 1-8 players tag and having ignored the fact that it’s a coop I sat down with five chums to play Eldridge Horror. I didn’t really like it. 

Eldridge Horror is like playing Wack a Mole with a big dog trying to hump your leg whilst someone throws flaming chips at you and A another shouts “boat number 3 your time is nearly up!” so you can’t enjoy the experience. If that’s what the designers were aiming for they got it bang on
We’ve been here before with Arkham Horror, Elder Sign and even xCom. Portals are opening around the world hastening the end game timer, various bad events have to be solved or they add to your woes and in the center of these distractions is an uber baddie you have to gather weapons and tools to defeat. It’s not a million miles from Talisman is it?  

The game is to the usual high standard of Fantasy Flight production but interestingly doesn’t come with models for investigators or monsters. Fair enough it would be too expensive. The standees are fine. 
Let’s get straight to it. The game is dull. It’s also practically solitaire, has long downtimes between player turns. For me it just doesn’t work and it’s a pity. The IP is as good as you can ask for. It’s just the premise of the game is bore ring. Yes there’s lots of atmospheric text but guess what? I don’t read it. I also pick the default character when I play a RPG video game and don’t spent ages on their looks. I want to get to the game proper asap. 
This is not an RPG, it’s not scary. It’s a big old puzzle where everyone is playing against the game but rarely together. Now If a game is solitaire then it doesn’t require multiple players. If it doesn’t require multiple players it’s not really a game is it?

I’m going to stick a pin in Eldridge Horror. I had heard ok things about it and I feel I’m missing something. Maybe it’s better with four. I dunno but it left me cold and I wouldn’t rush out and buy it
Bad Fantasy Flight. Sit
Huzzah!
Vic 

The Swiss are interesting cats. They’ve mostly stayed out of conquest games like diplomacy being happier to spend their time crimping Toblerones (the villians) but when it comes to Imperial 2030, being Swiss is the surest way toNot lose badly
Imperial 2030 is one of my very favourite 6 player games, hands down for years now and I’m too old to change. It’s got everything a conquest game should have, armies (check), conquest (check), world map (check), diplomatic deals (check), backstabbing (check and check). What makes it all the more interesting is it’s not a conquest game. It’s a stock market game. GASP!

The surest way to lose a game of Imperial 2030 (apart from playing it) is to come into the game thinking it’s a conquest game. It’s not. it has all the trappings but the game is all about backing the right horse and that may not always be you. Truth be told you may not have your own best interests at heart when you run a country.
In the same way as “Don’t trust Vic” gets bandied about before a game starts, “You don’t own the country, you just invest in it” is a truth universally acknowledged by losers of this game (usually 5 of them each play). I’ll tell you what write that on the back of your hand in black biro before you start and refer to it often.

The sizzle of 2030 is you INVEST in a country by buying shares in it. The player with the biggest investment gets to control the country and call the shots when it comes to building and moving armies, building factories, taxation and dealing out dividends. unfortunately there’s nearly always lesser investors with their snouts in the trough when it comes to dividend dinner time. This is where the real skills comes in. Having played this game a lot I’ve found that doing a William Reiker and letting someone else make the hard decisions can win you the game. Actually doing a Reiker with multiple people at the same time and not controlling any countries will win the game for you. However like all great games the skill is in judging when to jump ship and become a citizen of the world and egging others into investing in your country and have them take it over when it’s as valuable as stale bread. 
Time and again it’s the Swiss that win the game. Lose you’re country to a higher stake holder and you become a Swiss investment banker (their entry requirements are questionable if you ask me) and critically you can invest every time someone else does unlike landed premiers who are too busy with matters of state and only get to invest every so often. 

Now if you can time it right and you leave office with enough of a wad and a resonable portfolia of investments you have a good shot at winning if you can manage your money and invest in sure things (there are no sure things). Suddenly this doesn’t sound at all like a conquest game does it? No sir. Don’t be fooled your conquest skills are critical early on but like all the presidents before you, you only start to make real cash money once you’ve left office
Huzzah!
Vic

Black Plague is the latest version of Zombicide. It’s a coop but it’s a decent coop. If you’ve played any of the other zombicides then this is much the same again with a new lick of ye olde lead paint. 
The copy we played was owned by our host and he’d gone elbows deep in the Kickstarter and had pretty much one of everything including the expansion. We opted for the heroes from Monty Python’s Holy Grail which were grand but not side splittingly funny. 

The game is one of the better unstoppable mission based zombie horde games. Perhaps they’re a an acronym for that. It’s set in fantasy land with the usual dwarf, elf, human, whatever stereotypes. What if all elves are not good archers? Or dwarves prefer oil painting to cleaving. Anyhoe the Necromancers have something or other and bang! Zombies a go go. 
Each character starts with a special ability like healing, magic missile (yes there’s magic) and maybe a starting weapon. An overall mission which might see you trying to gather food or kill x amount of zombies or whatever. Then it’s off to the starting spot and a surprisingly quiet set of streets. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of no zombies. They’re in the post. Remember those projects in college where towards the end you wished you did more at the start? Zombicide. 

Each turn consists of moving you’re dudes and doing actions like opening doors (bad), searching buildings (probably good), culling zombies (good) and despairing. Once everyone has moved more zombies appear and then they move. Some in the case of the runners quite quickly. In the case of everyone else nice and slow. Don’t be fooled, it’s unforgiving and nails hard. 

There’s a few zombie varieties some impossible to kill with you’re starting weapons and some apocalyptic. More If you’re masochist enough to buy the bigga bosses add ons. 
As you kill zombies you start to level up and gain extra abilities like more moves/attacks better shooting but the flip side is now more and nastier zombies start to appear to match your level. Very quickly it goes from a small leak to a tsunami of zombie porridge. 
The game is hard. The zombies are unstoppable this game is like left4dead only way harder. I’d played the original but a few versions on it’s become really really tough. 
Now normally I don’t like coops but I make some exceptions. This is one of them. As dungeon bashes go this is very slick indeed. The production values are excellent. Better than Fantasy Flight. Granted we were playing the Rolls Royce Kickstarter but even the base game is very nicely appointed. 

If you were going to dip you toe (and get it bitten) in the Zombicide world Black Plague is definitely the place to start. It’s a fine polished zombie game and if you’re a collector a game in itself sourcing all the extras for it if you’re one who just has to have it all. It’s also quick (scenario dependent), Pricey and only gorgeous. 

Top marks for a coop
Huzzah!
Vic