CBM64 Coup

I Like Coup. It’s a great little filler game. The expansion for it is good too. G54 rebellion is like the big brother of Coup. A chip off the old block but way cooler and with a leather jacket.

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Rebellion has 25 roles each of which have various abilities, five of these are randomly picked and you have at it with these. The one constant from the original is you can always draw one coin per turn and if you have eight coins you can unstoppably coup someone. Oh that and everyone is still lying through their teeth about their roles. The setup is reminiscent of Dominion where you assemble a deck from mini stacks of identical cards and AWWWAAAAYYY you go.

The plus to this is every game is different. There’s an infinite amount of combinations or more accurately 25 factorial 5. Let’s call it 6 million or so. The down side is it’s going to take a while to learn this game as there’s so many bloody roles. Ok maybe that’s not a bad side, but it’s not conducive to a fast start. Players tend to roll back to the old reliable of amassing enough for a coup and just grabbing one coin in their turn.

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It’s also a little harder to lie as you’ll be unfamiliar with the roles. That said the five roles are visible in the centre and it wouldn’t be above some players to use this to their advantage by appearing to read their role from their card before they pronounce what they are
If you like Coup you’ll like rebellion. I can’t say I’ve played it enough to get a full overview but let’s pretend I have and it’s great

Huzzah!

Vic

December 15, 2015 0

Coup de’grass

I reckon I’m being a bit more obscure with this picture reference, will take people seconds to figure it out.

Coup, which I never reviewed before is the base game for the expansion I mentioned. Coup is a winner. it comes in a natty silver box and just like Love Letter it’s following the trend of low card games. There’s around 20 or so cards in Coup. all multiple copies of five possible roles

Captain – Thieving bastick
Duke – Money Machine
Assassin – Death for hire
Contessa – Blocks Assasins
Ambassador – Allows you to swap your hand

Each player up to eight (I think) starts with two random cards face down, known to their player. Each turn they SAY they have a particular dude and can take the appropriate action. e.g. on their turn a player claims they have the Duke and takes 3 coins from the bank.

NOW. other players can call them on it with statements like “I’m sorry but I find that hard to believe” or realistically something a little bit more robust. At this point the player has to reveal the role or lose a card. Lost two cards and it’s game over

So Coup is a knockout game, you have to kill off everyone elses two characters while not knowing whom they are. Some characters have reactions to others

So for example someone says they have the captain and their going to use him to steal from a target player. That target player says they have a captain themselves and they’re going to block it. Each of which can be called out by the other player. Since there’s a finite amount of roles and as players die the actual roles they had get revealed it’s possibly to make an educated guess as to what people may or may not have.

This is a SUPERB game, it’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s portable and it’s as good as the players you have. It’s a real mind game of bluff and counter bluff. If you have a gaming group THIS is one of the essential games to have. It’s the perfect warm up warm down game. I have spoken

Huzzah!

Vic

ps. the dude down the right hand side there doesn’t come with the base game.

December 2, 2014 1

Official Knifey Spooney

We’ve been playing the expansion for Coup for some months or knifey spoony as its better know in these parts. Being short of the requisite cards we used either knives or spoons to represent the two warring factions

We didn’t do too bad. We only missed one rule. The one about not being a duke to steal the bribes.

Now don’t make the mistake I made. If you already have a copy of coup and have played it for a while buy another copy of it. The new shiny reformation cards will stick out like a sore thumb at a wake (I know).

The new game plays similarly to the original accept the ambassador has replaced by the inquisitor who is like a mini ambassador (she only exchanges one card rather than two) but with the additional power to look at someone’s hand and force them to exchange it with the court deck.

If this is all making no sense by the way have a look at my earlier review of coup. WHICH it turns out I never did so I’ll do a review on that then

Anyhoe. All in all Reformation is more of a patch to the original game than an add on. It makes the game better for sure but it’s in no way essential as the original was a cracker of a game. Would i buy it ? Yes. Would I rush out and buy it? No

The Inquisitor adds a few more tactical options. The new character I can’t say I’m fond of. Her ability is a little so so. It’s definitely better than the ambassador but I’m happier to get a couple of other roles in my hand rather than her. That said its early days yet and only two or three games with a game like coup is no measure of how good or bad it is.

It’s a cheap expansion so it’s a no brainier to pick up. If you get it let me know what you think of it. Our group doesn’t play without it now but then again you’re either knifey spooney or your little people

Huzzah

Vic

December 1, 2014 0

Nations Thur – Being a Drax Report

There are at least a dozen jokes made each gaming session, all of them based on the game we’re playing and all schoolboy humour of the highest order. Some of them are even funny. Some of them. “Have you got wood for sheep?” (Settles or Catan), “Fill my ship with Seamen” (Serenissima), “My Turtle wins because he’s on top” (Pedzace Zotwie). Yes, the evenings just fly by! A new one materialised last night “you’re man rich”. But I digress

If you’re now in innuendo mode please switch back to normal or it will take twice as long to read this review

It was a hot, wet night in Murroe. Ok OK, stop it now. back to normal I said. We started with a quick lash of eight minute empire which took fifteen minutes with four players. enough said about that

Then the piece of resistance arrived. NATIONS

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/126042/nations

For some reason madam yer wan or whomever it is reminds me of Supergirl doing here whole, “leave this place and do no harm” thing but that’s neither here nor there.

Nations is a game quite similar to Through the ages but quite different in ways

I’ve ranted about Through the ages before. It’s a GREAT game, a great great game however like all great games it has it’s faults, it’s long (3-4 hours+), it’s only four players, it doesn’t have much variety, it’s unforgiving and it only works well if all the players are at the same level.

It’s like the designers of Nations decided to rewrite it and change all of those points. so here goes

Nations is

Up to Five Players
Plays in maybe 2 hours
It has a HUGE variety of cards
Wars and mistakes aren’t the end of the world
you can handicap/boost players based on their skills

Actually the more I think about it the more I like it.

Everyone starts in the stone age with a few basic buildings that allow you to raise a meagre amount of food/ore/gold/stability/research ALL of which are important

There’s a touch of eclipse about it, insofar as you can start with a standard civilisation where everyone has the same abilities from the off or you can pick a different one so say Egyptians start with the pyramids which give them bonuses in one area but miss out on something a basic nation gets. I like that it’s neat.

As the game progresses you can spend gold to buy advanced buildings, advisor’s (leaders), military units, battles, wars and wonders all of which adjust and affect the income and spend of your various resources. It’s a fairly complex game but you’ll pick it up pretty quickly if it’s explained right (which it was) and it’s certainly a little simpler to play that Through the ages. Gone is happiness of your people, gone is revolt (well it works differently) and the whole thing feels a little bit easier to juggle without the killer of TTA where if you mess up one little thing you might as well give up now.

I’m not going to explain all the rules it’s far too complex and better rule readers than I can do that on boardgamegeek but here’s a few highlights

Like TTA it’s all about getting the right cards, getting the right rhythm for you building whilst blocking others from doing the same. Again like TTA you don’t directly affect others you just throw massive military spanners in the works and deflect people from the important purpose of building libraries and onto the important business of building spears.

There are eight rounds in the game spanning four ages after which each round a mini scoring round happens with a big score at the end. There’s several ways to pick up and quite often lose victory points and no one path to victory.

Something I really like about the game is you get a ton of cards for each age and you only pick a few so replay value of this game is very high indeed and there will never be two games exactly the same.

Our game rattled on with a few interruptions for about 2.5 hours. Not bad at all. I lost, it’s ok, I’m over it now. I was playing to learn and it was my first game and lots of reasons which I don’t need to explain. Let’s move on, nothing to see here.

Would I buy it? yes I would. It’s a great game. It does need another game for it to sink in but I really liked it and all those bullet points had me sold from the get go. The production values of the game are good, better than most but not quite up there with Fantasy Flight games. I can see this being reprinted in different stock at some stage but any copy is good.

This is solid, fun game, I take my hat off to the designers who seem to have gotten it all right. If you like TTA you’ll love this game

We rounded off with a bit of knifey spoony coup (don’t ask)

More of that next week

Huzzah!

Vic

January 24, 2014 2