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I have found myself away from home once more for a couple of days, and with a schedule of rehearsals and performances which mitigated against playing any games, even short ones, so, for once, I came away from the meepleonboard abode without anything packed into my bag. As I had suspected deep down, this was a mistake, as a cancelled performance meant that I did have some time on my hands after all.
Eager for something gamey to get my teeth into to pass the time I managed to take a first real look at the core instructions for Four Against Darkness, which I had managed to get a hold of thanks to another member of this parish (thank you!). I have a soft spot for dungeon delving, probably triggered by those days of playing Legend on the Amiga, and there are still a couple of boxes of unplayed delvey goodness on my shelves, so it definitely appeals to me.
Four Against Darkness does it slightly differently, of course, asking only the barest of materials from its players, namely pencil, eraser, dice and graph paper. Oh, and instructions, naturally. After that you are off and exploring, dealing with monsters and picking up treasure, the traditional stuff.
I had everything that I needed apart from graph paper, which I must admit I do not normally carry around with me, but that is something I intend to put right this very afternoon, for this seems like a game that I could add to in idle moments here and there and keep running on the back burner while life tries to get in the way. Have the right tools in place and the work will be easier to do.
While I do wonder how many of these dungeon exploring experiences I really need, there is something appealingly old school about being able to create such a thing with pencil and paper, and I have no doubt that it will bring back strong memories of the hours I spent with the Fighting Fantasy books. It is worth mentioning as well that the titular Four appear to have got themselves into various other scrapes as well, so there is plenty to explore should I ever tire of the dungeon.
Happy gaming!
meepleonboard.wordpress.com
Meepleonboard
When I am not putting notes on paper I like to play. Here are my scribblings.
Archive for Nick
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I took my gallant Argonauts for another adventure over the weekend, setting sail across the board in an attempt to make it back home in one piece. After my single learning play of last week, this was my first run at the game in anger and with a decent idea of the rules, and, while the rule book itself is a little scattergun with its information, I think that I played things more or less correctly, with only a couple of grey areas.
This time through I was much better at managing my crew, trying to make sure that I had sailors in hand for when we were out on the open sea, and scouts and diplomats for when we were in harbour. As far as emergent strategies go, this was just one of many that gradually began to open up to me as I progressed through this play.
The rules say that the default level for the game, that described in the set up, is difficult, and I have to say that I would concur with that sentiment. While the Argo made it further round the board than in my first play, we still had to run away like cowardly custards from various encounters and eventually reaped the reward for our weaselly nature.
I still found it to be great fun, though, dealing with traders and repairing the ship, fighting off Harpies and adding Medea to the crew, and that gradual clearing of the strategic mists that I mentioned earlier led me to try out a couple of things that I would not have thought of first time through. Yes, just like the seas that my ship traversed, there are hidden depths here.
The temptation is to drop down a level of difficulty for my next play and see how that goes, but I must admit that the lure of the story and the fight against the inexorable atrophy of resources and crew is something I enjoy, just like that seemingly unavoidable doom in Robinson Crusoe. That management of heroes is just one small aspect of what came to light in the last play – I have barely begun to use their abilities effectively, for example – and makes me keen to find out what other tricks might lie in wait.:strip_icc()/pic6413449.jpg)
Adventure awaits.
Happy gaming!
meepleonboard.wordpress.com
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As one of my Saturday evening plays I shuffled up the deck for Blueprints once more and decided to have another run at the solo beat-your-own-score variant. I had played this a couple of times before, scoring 83 points the one time I had played it correctly, and felt that I was definitely on for a better result this time around.
Thus it proved, as my three buildings scored 32, 33 and 34 for a grand total of 99, just shy of a lovely, tidy century. I looked back over the course of the game, and I am sure that I could have eked out an extra point here or there, so I feel certain that a score of at least 100 is possible.
There is a slight balance of risk and reward in this variant, given that you do not know which two dice will come out of the bag for the next roll, but it is still quite forgiving, as you always have four dice on the table from round to round from which to choose. It makes planning ahead a fairly simple matter and means that detours are small shifts as opposed to large deviations.
It feels that the difference between routes can come down to very fine margins, so a point or two rather than something hugely swingy, and while this means that one does not necessarily feel that any decision could sink your game, it does nonetheless imply that every point really does count. Two points for an award may not feel like much in the scheme of a thirty point round, for example, but they still count at the end.
I would still like to try this game with other people around the table, but my impression is that it is a light and frothy diversion rather than something that needs to sit at the core of the collection. Time will tell whether it will become a central part of my solo rotation, but I suspect that once I hit the heights of a three-figure score I may possibly feel that I am done with it, so I need to keep chipping away.:strip_icc()/pic6411502.jpg)
Floored...
Happy gaming!
meepleonboard.wordpress.com
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That constant noise of hammering from The Shed is the sound of a man who is always on the go, the physical manifestation of a brain that is constantly starting a Museum of Board Games or creating a new deck for Nusfjord or, slightly less obviously, putting together a trilogy of solo games, all of which start with a single deck of cards and then move on from there. This triumludate of designs sits at various points along the developmental road from prototype to fully published product, but, having had the chance to experience all three, and with a gentle nudge from the designer himself, I felt that it might be helpful to artiulate my thoughts on these three boxfellows. So if you are a solo player or merely curious about how a fine designer approaches a challenge from different angles, maybe I can help.
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Lux Aeterna - can you kick it?
Lux Aeterna has been out for a while, of course, may be purchased from the aforementioned Museum, and you can even read my full review of it if you wish. Like the other two games discussed here, Lux's action is distilled to a single but rather lovely deck of cards, resplendent in this case with Alex Lee's beautiful, evocative and subtle art, and the rules are simple to grasp. You set your timer (yes, this is a real-time game, although there is an option to go for the less stressed option), draw four cards each turn and then assign them, plus one which has been saved from before, to one of four slots around your player "board". Three of the cards are activated by the particular slot in which they sit, while a fourth may be saved for the next round and the last is discarded.
Off to the side are the six areas of the ship which need repair, their statuses indicated by a die placed on each. Repair a certain part of the ship and a special ability should then become available, but let it atrophy into destruction and something far nastier will come to pass. All the while you are attempting to keep the Lux out of the black hole which is slowly drawing it in, so there is plenty to be thinking about.
Lux is definitely the lightest of the three designs, and my preference is to play it on an eight-minute timer and with the repair cards face down, which means that I do not know which delights or despairs await me when they are flipped over. I lose a couple of the abilities because of this - swapping dice makes no real sense when I cannot see what advantage doing this might confer - but the thrill of it all up against the tick-tick-tick of the clock is worth that small loss.:strip_icc()/pic6408989.jpg)
Aleph Null - the devil is in the details.
Next along the road to fully fledged design is Aleph Null, a game about the cheery topic of summoning demons, inspired by the novels of James Blish. While Aleph also essentially consists of a single deck of cards, it is the only one of these designs in which you go through the deck multiple times, although each reshuffle advances the Book Of Hours and potentially brings something nasty with it.
Aleph has you draw your hand and pay magic to summon certain objects and characters into being, the aim of the game being to thin out your deck more or less to nothing by the time Baphomet appears through careful timing and sacrificing of people and items. Ideally by the end of the game you should have been able to fire all the cards off each other so that (a) Mr. B (Baphomet, not Boydell) turns up and (b) he is not intensely displeased, although I should point out that despite my many plays of this game I have yet to win.
With that series of failures in mind, the following should be taken with a pinch of salt, but the route through Aleph is essentially the same each time, in that you need to find this to trigger that and gain the other, but the flies in the ointment vary from play to play, as well as the order of the cards. The game is also punishing in that unused magic will cause damage at the end of a turn and the limit on the damage you can sustain before losing the game is very, very tight indeed.
For a single deck of cards Aleph feels very heavy in the playing, although it might feel different when I finally unlock that elusive first victory, as the possibilities for digging yourself out of a tight situation narrow drastically as your deck diminishes, as it must. I definitely need to be in the mood to play this, where I can slap Lux onto the table happily at pretty much any time, mainly because Aleph is so tough and unforgiving. It is also slightly unsettling, what with summoning demons and all that, although I seem to recall mention of a Jane Austen retheme, which would be interesting to see.:strip_icc()/pic6408992.jpg)
Triskaidekaphobia - lucky for some.
Lastly, and still in the prototype stage, is Triskaidekaphobia, so prototypical that I cannot link to it yet on the Geek. Again, the solo player is presented with a single deck of cards which display abilities and numbers. The mechanisms are simple - you draw three, place one at the bottom of the deck to come back and cause you pain later, and play the other two in either order, also activating the abilities of anything that happens to be on the table at the time. It takes a few moments, but eventually this becomes a delightful riffage of possibilities.
The bite in the game is that you begin with a number of survivors of the zombie apocalypse which forms the game's subject matter, but at the end of each round if the values on the top of the played cards are higher than your remaining survivors then you lose half of those survivors, rounded up, so no holding onto that single person hiding in the basement in the hopes of squeaking out the win.
Like Lux, Triskaidekaphobia runs you through the deck but once, but, in common with Aleph as well, every decision counts. In Lux and Triskaidekaphobia it is becuase you have very few opportunities to go back and correct mistakes whereas in Aleph it is because the road begins narrow and gets narrower. Still, this newest design feels lighter and breezier than the mind-bending of Aleph, and there is something deeply satisfying about getting a great selection of cards onto the table and triggering them off each other. There is also that balance of choice about what goes back into the deck - can you afford to lose one of the kinder cards now, or are you going to hope that you are utterly tooled up by the time something snarling comes bounding into your hand?
Setting the three of them side by side, and remembering always that they are in different stages of development, I would say that Lux is definitely the brightest and the breeziest to play, partially because the timer pushes you into quick decisions, but also because each card is fundamentally a self-contained entity. Triskaidekaphobia is the next along, and will definitely please folks who enjoy setting up deeply satisfying combos, while Aleph is so curled up upon itself that it feels profoundly unforgiving.
Ultimately the question to be asked is whether these games are any good, and, with twenty two plays of Lux and sixteen of Aleph under my belt, I would have to say definitely and wholeheartedly that they are. If anything, I am surprised to see Lux at that number, as I was sure that I had played it more, but that is more testament to having some other solo games in my travelling deck box which comes with me when I am away from home. The game I have played the least of the three is Triskaidekaphobia, but my experience of it thus far has been that it is at least as enjoyable as the other two, bolstered by its quirky thematicism.
All three of these games are contrasting answers to the challenge of making a solo game out of a single deck of cards (with a couple of other components as markers), but to have such a diverse approach from the same mind is something fundamentally impressive. They all come at that challenge from different angles - run through, reshuffle/destroy, stack the deck - and thus offer different experiences, but still feel as though they all belong to the same family, that the same DNA courses through their cards.
Maybe one day we will get a collected box with all three games as part of a single package, because it would keep a solo gamer going through many a half hour, but for now most of us just need to sit tight and wait for the final versions to get out there. You can try Lux now, of course, and see if you like it, know that the designs to follow it will be tougher and more demanding, and make your decisions from there. I can assure you that if you enjoy Lux then the other two in this tip top trio will be well worth the wait.
Happy gaming!
meepleonboard.wordpress.com
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Two new games in as many days is not the way that I usually go playing, but I need to begin to make some kind of a dent in my Shelf Of Opportunity before it overwhelms me, so much as I might resist taking on too many new rules at once, needs must. This afternoon, while KT was out and about, I decided to set up another of this week's acquisitions and had a quick run for about an hour or so, and today it was the turn of Argonauts.
In this game you run four teams of heroes as the Argo travels around the map and encounters adventures, monsters, traders and the like, and the distinctive mechanism is that each team is made up of four heroes, but once one of the characters is used they become exhausted. Once another character in their team becomes exhausted then the previously exhausted one is merely resting, and any resting one comes back into hand.:strip_icc()/pic6406049.jpg)
Keep bailing her out!
This would require management even if it were simply a question of ensuring that you end up with a balanced set of abilities across the teams, but given that some actions require certain categories of hero - Sailor or Diplomat, for example - you can find yourself stuck unless you actually have one of those characters in hand. There is usually something that can be done on each turn, but you really do need to think ahead, and it reminds me of the system that underpins BattleCON: Devastation of Indines, with a similar idea of exhaustion and recovery.
Apart from that the game is rather smooth in the playing, tokens on the board showing how much gold or how many Argonauts remain and, in my copy, a cardboard representation of the damage to the Argo. The ship moves inexorably from space to space during the game, the adventuring happening in the same order in each play, unless using the Entropy variant, but there appears to be more than enough in terms of randomness and new challenges to keep this fresh for a while.:strip_icc()/pic6406054.jpg)
The end of the line.
Eventually I ran out of Argonauts once they got tired of not having anything much to eat, and I came to a grinding halt some way short of my destination, but I really enjoyed this play and I think that I could derive much more pleasure from it next time, especially now that I think that I know what I am doing. It appears to be a really delightful package, and I am very glad that something that appeared briefly on my radar and then vanished has found its way into my collection, and hopefully this is just the start of a fine adventure.
Happy gaming!
meepleonboard.wordpress.com
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I tucked in a second solo game of Blueprints last night, my score slightly lower than in my first play but at least following the correct rules this time. It plays quickly and cleanly, and although I know that I am missing many of the subtleties of getting extra points, it is quite enjoyable for the ten or so minutes that it lasts.
At the moment I feel strongly hemmed in by my desire to stick to the blueprint as shown on the card, which would seem to be the sensible thing to do, although there are definitely points out there for simply building your own thing. I would guess that the moment at which one breaks free from the required building is one of those junctions at which the player needs to decide to forge a new route in the search of greater pointage, but for now it is the careful and obedient me who is constructing these towers of dice.
My two plays last night bookended an online session which featured my first ever play of Lewis & Clark: The Expedition, and I have to say that I was mightily impressed by this, not least because it punishes its players so hard for stocking up on too many resources. Normally the more resources one has the better, but here they simply slow you down and force you to try to cross the mountains again and again.
I ended up losing, though agonisingly close to a win, and really enjoyed the way that the game went about its thing, making me work hard for every small moment of progress, punishing me for storing too many of these or using too many of those. I now wonder how the various solo modes feel, for, upon first acquaintance, this feels substantial and detailed and I feel that I would enjoy it if the multiplayer challenge can be replicated.
We finished our online evening with a few games of Coup, at which I was roundly hosed, although I did manage to win one of our four games, my only victory of the night. It had all come at the end of a frenetic day as well, so I was completely exhausted by the end of it, but happy for having done it.
Happy gaming!
meepleonboard.wordpress.com
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I decided to get going with yesterday's new games straight away, although my choice was a little left field and certainly not the one that I might have suspected would be at the top of the list, but things were just too busy for me to get involved in anything lengthy. Instead I found a beat-your-own-score solo variant for Blueprints and a spare fifteen minutes in a hectic day to give it a run.
To my shame, and despite the game having a set of rules that takes a bare five minutes to get to grips with, I managed to miss one of the requirements of building, that each die should go atop one of the same value or less, but it was still a bright and breezy play. I scored in the eighties, which was apparently not a great result, but it was more to get to grips with the mechanisms than anything else.
My initial impression is that, as a solo game, it might have limited longevity, but it could be the kind of thing that I might get a taste for, something light and with a bunch of dice to chuck at the end of a tough day. I shall certainly be playing it a few more times at the very least before I decide whether it is a long term keeper.
Of course, if it springs to life as a multiplayer game then it will fare much better, but that very much depends upon whether KT will like it, although there is a friend of ours who is definitely a fan of the lighter side of play, so it might well suit him. Thankfully, after a long period of not being able to meet, we shall be seeing him next week, so we shall find out soon enough if this is something that he might enjoy.
I have to admit that since the lifting of restrictions here in the UK work has been frenetic, as if all the pent up energy of the past eighteen months has suddenly been unleashed. This is undeniably a good thing, although it does mean that I am struggling just a little to get in the plays that I had become used to, so Blueprints might well find itself on the table a few more times before things settle down.
Happy gaming!
meepleonboard.wordpress.com
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I dropped by to see a nearby gamer this afternoon in order to pick up a stash of gaming magazines that he had put aside for me after a recent clear out. As tends to happen, in addition to what I had dropped by to pick up I also left with a selection of games under my arm to try and, in some cases, to add to the collection.
First up was the copy of Mansions of Madness: Second Edition that he had put aside for me and which I had been looking forward to getting. I have a huge pile of fine solo games that I have yet to play, so adding yet another to that tottery tower might not have seemed a great idea, but my friend had found it at a good price and was happy to pass it on to me at cost, and I was powerless to resist.
Next up was something light and frothy for me to try with KT when she decides that she is ready to game again, in which case light and frothy would be a perfect fit. Said game is Star Trek: Conflick in the Neutral Zone which, admittedly, does not have a great rating here on the Geek, but which might lead on to FlickFleet if it proves to be a concept worth sticking with.
Lastly there were two small games, both of which I had been aware of in the dim and distant past, probably through some blog post or other, but which had fallen away from my consciousness in the way that older games do. If it was you who blogged about them then thank you for putting them onto my radar and I'll happily tap out my opinions in due course.
Exhibit A is Blueprints, which I remember wanting to try once upon a time, but Exhibit B is even more exciting, something I had read about, not been able to track down, and then cast from my memory, namely Argonauts, the copy of which also appears to include the expansion, so there should be plenty to explore. With so many unplayed games now on the shelves I really think that I might finally have to embark upon a new game playing bonanza to filter the wheat from the chaff and get their numbers down to something more reasonable, but it is a good problem to have.
Happy gaming!
meepleonboard.wordpress.com
Tue Sep 21, 2021 11:06 pm
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At the bottom of the pile of boxes that I had brought to the burrow with me to play with my brother, most of which went unplayed as I instead scoured the country in search of his passport, lay Legends of Andor, which I had intended to be my big solo play of the weekend. Thus it proved, thankfully, as I tackled the second legend, attempting to heal the king.
Upon reading the set up instructions for this legend I realised that I might have run before I could walk in the opening scenario, as I had bought equipment from the merchant, which it seems is an option that only opens up later on, so maybe that win was acquired a little deviously, but I'll take it for the time being. With everything on the board, and various exciting possibilities hinted at by the figures waiting to come into play - a prince! a tower! runes! - I was good to go.
Well, I think that it is safe to say that things get a little busy in this legend, as the monsters keep on coming, and eventually get joined by some wardraks, who turn out to be very nasty indeed. Thankfully the prince arrives to help out but only for a short time, and we struggled on as best we could against wave after wave of enemy attacks.
As with the first legend, knowing now what lies in wait will make things easier next time around, and at least I managed to get some farmers to the castle and transport herbs to safety, but the end came when my safe haven was overrun by those wardraks. Let us just say that the black dice took my heroes just a little by surprise, and that I might need a bigger gang and a few more items when I come across them again.
If felt like a much richer experience than the first legend, with multiple options and avenues to explore. I suspect that there is a particular way to defeat it and that part of the learning process is working out how that is achieved, but it was an immersive and enveloping play, and certainly better than driving up and down the A303 in the dead of night.:strip_icc()/pic6399469.jpg)
Getting crowded, and not in a good way...
Happy gaming!
meepleonboard.wordpress.com
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I am working towards scribbling something comparing Tony Boydell's solo trilogy, and would like it to be something rather longer than my usual blog entry, so I got in another play of Triskaidekaphobia this evening to try to become more familiar with it. Both Lux Aeterna and Aleph Null I know quite well, but the new kid on the block is still relatively unfamiliar to me.
The mechanisms are really quite simple - you draw three cards, pop one of them back onto the bottom of the deck to come back and bite you later on, and play the other two in either order, also activating the abilities of cards already in play. At the end of each turn you compare the number of survivors with the number of zombies, and if the latter is higher you lose half of your survivors rounded up.
Hit zero at the end of a turn and it's game over, man, game over, but keep at least one survivor clinging on and you get to fight another day, well, another round. It is fast to play, but requires some serious thinking, and it has some quirky and enjoyable thematic twists going on as well.
In my latest play the Safe Haven bolstered my survivors, but it did not last long, and I felt that I was doing okay, but while refreshing my memory about the rules I had not quite got as far as double checking the win condition, having got it into my head that it was simply about surviving to the end of the game. Not so.
You need to survive until the end, do a little bit of tweaking with the numbers and then do a final survivor/zombie comparison. Anything above zero is a win, and my score this evening remained at zero, no matter how many times I checked it. Already this game feels like a great deal of fun, and there's a serious punch in what is really just thirty cards, a worthy addition to Tony's solo canon.:strip_icc()/pic6398249.jpg)
A final plot twist...
Happy gaming!
meepleonboard.wordpress.com
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