Bad Planning

wilson

I first played Survive! on a PC way way back and it was called last days of Atlantis or something like that. I liked it. It was good clean water based fun. One of the reasons it faded from my view like retinal afterimage was I had played the computer version and I had played it against bots. Fast forward with suitable sound effects to near present day and I get to play it at the last Knavecon with the expansion making it a six player water polo mosh. It’s a great game. Well ok let’s hold on. It’s at least as good as The Downfall of Pompeii. If you liked that game and it’s game play style you’re in familiar territory for sure.

Survive

It’s the last days of Hanoi and everyone’s partying like it’s 1999. You need to get your best and brighest off the sinking island across shark infested water from the centre slowly shrinking centre island to the welcome corner islands. To help you in your endeavor you have row boats that take three peeps, friendly dolphins and the good old reliable breaststroke. Hindering you, you have Sharks, Krakens, Squids, limited time and worse still other survivors who will happily make a raft from your bloated body to row ashore.

In hindsight it may have been a bit foolhardy to settle an overpopulated unstable island surrounded by monsters. I’m convinced it was all a royal stag party dare that went horribly wrong.

The centre island consists of a random blob spread of hexes that come in three types. Sand which is the first to go, jungle the second lot to sink and rock that stands hero steady like a hob knob dunked in tea to the biter end.

Once the centre island is laid out players take it in turn to place their soon to be hopefully survivors. Each hex can accomodate up to three dudes and the aforementioned dudes have values written under them which in turn are worth points at the end if they survive so it’s key to get the high value guys to shore.

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Players during their turn can move surviors either by boat if they have the most dudes in it or more slowly swim for it. You get a limited amount of movement points per turn and there will never be enough to save all your guys. In addition you get to move the monsters (preferably away from your guys and evil cackle towards other players). Each turn the island shrinks by one tile and once all the tiles have sunk it’s game over, full stop, count your points. (especially tough if you have some high point guys almost home)

The system is very neat and straightforward. There’s no ambiguity on rules. Monsters cover all posibiliteies Sharks can eat surviors in the water but not in boats. Krakens destroy boats and their survivors. Octipi do something something. Dolphins can give your swimmers a three hex boost towards the shore.

Is it fun? hell yeah. Getting your VIPs to land and inducing the monsters to block or destroy a flotilla of other player’s dudes is crush your enemies best. I had a lot of fun playing this game. It’s quick to learn and teach. It’s simple and it’s fast fun. forty minutes to an hour will see you done depending on numbers. There’s little down time because you’re constantly watching other players for where they’re heading to or where they’re directing the monsters

I’m going to make it my business to pick up a copy of this sometime soon. It’s that much fun.

Huzzah!

Vic

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It Never Sparkled

red

Eclipse is not a new game but since another expansion is on the way for it and I recently reacquainted myself with the game let’s have a look at it….

I bought Eclipse a couple of years back when it came out quickly followed by the first expansion Rise of the Ancients. Eclipse is a 4x space game. It features a very clever economic model and it does play out in a respectable time( player numbers and experience dependent).  It’s quick to figure out despite the large amount of counters and tokens even for new players.

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It’s got all you would expect from a 4x game and a good bit more. Research and ship design is a wonderful addition. Players can pimp their rides in a wide variety of ways and there’s no one killer combo. Fancy lightly armored gunned up cruisers? No problem. Hulking Dreadnoughts with massive shields? You got it! Zippy cloaked missile boats? It’s all in there. I love the ship design. Because you’re all grabbing from a limited randomly doled out set of tech blueprints you’ll never be up against the same ship designs as any other player. One of the complaints about the base game was a race to build one shot missile boats that dominated battles. this has been effectively patched by a host of new techs introduced in the expansion. I like when a game company listens to players and does this sort of thing.

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The game we played last night was great there was a wide range of designs. The most interesting was one players cruisers which were heavily stealthed and in their first battle they annihilated a much bigger force of ships who couldn’t draw a bead on them (after that everyone was racing for aiming tech to counter it).

The other star of the show is the economic model. Specifically the control disks. You get a limited amount of these and need to allocate them to Sectors to keep control and Harvest resources from them. The control disks are also spent to take actions. The more you use the bigger your bill at the end of the turn will be in resources. So a bigger empire will become costly to run and less able to act than smaller more agile ones. It’s a stroke of genius.

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Throw in some rules for alliances, traitors, ancient AIs and alien abilities and you have a top TOP game.

I love Eclipse. For me it’s got everything I look for in a 4x game and more to boot. We need to play more of this and we will

Great game well worth the entrance fee

Huzzah!

Vic

0

Flick it like it’s hot

foundation

Ascending Empires is an oddity. It’s a 4x space game with and unusual movement technique…. You flick the pieces to move them. That’s right it subbuteo in space. OK you’re first thoughts are this is dumb until you sit down and play a game. It’s really really good. Play this game if you get a chance. I’ve had it at Knavecons and its proved itself a minor hit.

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The game sees you and up to three chums expanding out from your initial home planet with a growing murder of ships and troops, colonizing and more importantly defending planets which come in four different colors.

It’s like a condensed version of Twilight Imperium, all in, in under two hours. The flicking mechanism is subtle. It’s not Rampage. You won’t end up flicking pieces off the board. It’s way more interesting than that and it works so well. It does add a random element but rarely a game ruiner and I’d take this over dice rolling any day. Well at least in this game.

Depending on what planets you grab you can tech up different paths and getting to the top of any of these gives you near apocalyptic abilities.

Everything you would expect from a space game are in there. Exploring unknown worlds so you can grab resources and build more stuff. Epic space battles. Well the battles tend to be small scale but no less heart stopping. Back stabbing (my group would back stab at snakes and ladders if it could), researching tech so you can lord it over the other cave man like empires.

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Compared to other games of its type this is a fast game. It certainly packs in a lot during it’s playtime. There’s also very little downtime. I can see why they stuck to four players. Any more would drag the game too much so four is bang on.

This is one I’m going to whip out again and again (oh matron) when i need a four player. Its got everything I want and it certainly gets a place in my cold dead hands collection (c). It’s that good

Huzzah!

Vic

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Wolve’s Clothing

sheep-redorbit

“You’ve NEVER played Catan? NEVER? and neither has your brother…. Ok let’s fix that”, thus i found myself playing Catan after quite a break from it.

Settlers of Catan is a classic game which is shockingly knocking on twenty years of age. Catan was like the Dune II of Boardgames. It was new. It was fresh and if kickstarted a new genre into life. Catan is still a great game. It’s aged well. If you haven’t played it. It’s definitely worth a go. Actually if you consider yourself a gamer it’s your duty to play it. It’s patriotic.

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Catan sees you and three chums trying to get to ten points first, so it’s a race game. It has you building settlements and roads on a map, so it’s a conquest game. You need to trade resources to get the ones you want so it’s a trading game. It’s got sheep in there and wood so it’s a great setup for jokes game

If you haven’t played this game it’s pretty straightforward. A random spread of five possible typed and numbered hex tiles makes up the map. You setup your starting settlements on the edge of them so each of your bases is at the nexus of up to three tiles. Each turn you roll two dice and the corresponding numbered tile pays out to whomever is next to it.

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These resources when you have the right combos can be exchanged for roads, settlements, cities or cards. The bigger your civilization the more points it’s worth. First to ten wins.

Bonuses come from having the longest road or the most soldiers. Oh and let’s not forget the robber. Roll a seven when you’re seeing which spots pay out and you get to move the robber who zooms in like an unwelcome relative and sets up shop in one spot shutting it down until another seven is rolled. (he also has a nasty hand size reduction trait you’ll come to hate)

There’s surprisingly good opportunities to block other players and generally cause mayhem. I forgot how much cursing and swearing accompanies this game as you’re THIS close to winning and someone micturates on your plans.

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This is rightly a classic game. It hasn’t aged badly. It’s still balanced. Some people complain that there’s luck involved but I disagree. Roll a dice enough times and it events out. There’s real skill here in negotiating and out thinking your opponents to a win. A great game always worth a play

Huzzah!

Vic

0

Our Finest Hour

magnif

Quarter Master General is a great game. It’s a map conquest game. It’s fast. It’s easy to learn. It’s a barrel of monkeys fun. The expansion Air Marshall is good. It’s more of the same. It’s not essential but it does add something. To be exact planes.

Air Marshall introduces airplanes to the proceedings which… don’t act the way you think they would. You were expecting dakka dakka? Sorry try sacrificial meat shield.

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Planes can jump in, take one for the team, lookout sir style if they’re cohabiting army is about to get blasted or they equally can jump in and remove enemy air support. A few of the new cards allow actions on sectors next to or containing planes too. Again like the base game you’ll really need to play through each faction to see what’s in the post for you during a game.

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Air Marshall adds about a dozen cards to each deck which makes it more difficult to run your opponent out of cards but also opens players up to dumping more and not being as tied to the whim of the deal gods.

The game also introduces bolster cards. These are reactions (in some cases) and can be played directly from your hand as a reaction to someone else’s move or else cards that play out of sequence and setup a chain of plays. They’re interesting. Certainly way more interesting than reaction cards, which I found were a bit of a waste in the base game.  That said I’ve never won as the Axis so what would I know.

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The new cards and planes not only offer new possibilities but also patch the original game and make it harder to go for proven killer combos.  It can lead to players turtling which for this game is fine as the base could often feel like a knife fight in a phone box.

All in all I liked this. I think the card play system is solid and I’d like to see Griddly Games use it on another setting for their next game.  The only negative I can see with this is games can often feel a little samey, then again this is a semi simulation of an historical event and for me I’m still excited by this game and happy to play it at the drop of a hat

More of this sort of thing

Huzzah!

Vic

0

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