The Gaming thread - anything but video games

[Thunderplex]

As the Dm, you just need to remember you provide the fun.  If a player has an idea that will create good times and entertainment for everyone, there is no harm in you fudging a dice roll behind the DM screen.

[Carbomb]

A friend got me a trio of Judge Dredd games, two of which are the Judge Dredd edition of BlockMania and its expansion. The third is a stand-alone, multiplayer game, whilst the BlockMania one is two players only - the expansion enables two more players. 

Played the basic BlockMania game with a friend last week - very high crunch, a lot to absorb, but once it gets going, it's a load of fun. You play as the residents of a block, which is practically a self-contained town, in MegaCity One, who, because of the violence and unemployment they experience, have very little to do other than go to war with their rival residents of the next block over, trying to kill each other and destroy their block.

There are all sorts of tactics you can employ: looting parts of the block and spray-painting the outside sections gets you points, but you can also take out the powerhouse or try to do structural damage, which, if severe enough, spreads to the next sections, and, if enough damage is done, collapses the entire block and the game is over.

After a certain amount of time, the Judges show up, meaning you play as them, and you use various Judge cards to take out the opponent's units.

Looking forward to playing it with more mates with the expansion - it's very chaotic, so it'll be interesting to see how manic it gets with four players.

[JNLister]

Played Merv in which you are a moustache-touting fast bowler trader in a Silk Road city, so very original. It's your basic take actions, get resources (aka cubes), claim spots but with a neat mechanical setup. The city is based around a grid of locations (randomly laid out each game) which you can build on and which give visitors a resource and an action. The twist is that on your turn you claim a row and select a location in that row for the action, but you actually get all the resources from buildings of the same colour in the row. So over time, some rows become much more attractive as you can get loads of resources, but you need to balance that against getting the action you want. Each round, you move round the board so you are alternating between choosing a row or a column.

The other big mechanic is that at two key points in the game, Mongols attack and will destroy cities unless they are protected by walls. (You can also put a solider in a city but that is in place of taking an action on a turn, or you can bribe the Mongols by paying a specific resource.) Naturally you want to build walls that protect your cities, but building one that protects somebody else gets you up a prestige track which brings other benefits.

The real challenge is that you have lots of ways of scoring (some of which interact nicely) but you only have 12 turns in the whole game, so it's impossible to do everything. You really need to concentrate on a particular strategy without making it too obvious that people start blocking you, plus you usually need back-up plans in case you can't take the particular action you were planning. Nicely pitched level where none of the individual elements are too difficult to understand, and the complexity comes from the way you have to choose between the actions and the way they play off each other.

[Jazzy G]

One of the Thursday D&D party is away next week, so the DM has suggested I run a one shot as a little test of my skills. I'm tempted to see what I can hunt down online to run, but also tempted to try and assemble one of my own with it being half term and me having some time on my hands. I'm thinking something quick and easy like a murder mystery with a locked room kind of puzzle. The captain of the guards has called three recruits in to investigate something, the building is magically sealed until the case is cracked and the evidence etc is all there, but a little lighthearted as well, more Columbo or Death In Paradise than Marple or Poirot. I'm nervous, but also looking forward to it. 

[Chest Rockwell]

I think a good middle ground and something that I did when I was learning the ropes was to find something online and then make changes and adaptations, but it was helpful to have something to work from that was known to be well balanced. 

[Jesse]

It's not D&D, so not suggesting this for you, but you reminded me that there's an ongoing open playtest for a locked room murder mystery game that has been a ton of fun to play https://lockedroomgame.com/

Just needs a deck of cards and a printer to make your life easy if you play in person. Only played Huckleberry's Art Lodge case so far but really want to give Murder On A Train a go

[Jazzy G]

I ran the D&D session this week, which meant I didn't have to pay, which was weird but cool. 

The guy that usually DMs was trying to be a bit chaotic at the start, but it was a bit lighthearted and I think to see how I'd deal with it, and we almost blew the entire thing immediately when one of the party used a detect magic spell that would have led to them immediately identifying the killer, but we fudged a way around it and worked in a character trait for them as well. 

There were a few things that could have been filled out, like one of the characters has a wine cellar, but then nothing in the document about said cellar. However from some of the character details I managed to create the situation. We even got to do some combat at the end, and left it open to do a follow up scenario thanks to some world building. 

[JNLister]

Played The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. Theme means very little to me, but it's a campaign game of 18 rounds, each of which is a cooperative trick taking game. Think Whist, Hearts, and the like, but instead of competing you are all trying to make sure you all achieve an individual goal, eg win the fewest tricks, win the most tricks, win the most cards of a specific suit, win at least a certain number of cards of a specific suit, etc. It gets increasingly complex with each "mission" and throws in more challenging stuff like "don't win any 8s" or "win exactly three tricks in a row and no other trick".

The theming is apparently quite well done and tied in well to events in the book. The most direct is that one of the suits is Rings and the One of Rings is the supreme card. Whoever draws it has to play as Frodo and if you play it you can choose (or choose not to) to win the trick regardless of what else is played.

Quite fun, decent challenge, probably very little replayability if you finish it (we got to round 10 with a few losses/retries). If nothing else, worth it for the character of Bill the Pony having to win exactly one trick. I think we all spotted the gag at the same moment.

[JNLister]

Played dnup, which is a simple card game from the maker of Scout (and something of a simpler version of it). You're playing sets of matching cards (eg all 7s) to try to get rid of them, the one catch being that if you play the same number of cards as somebody else, it has to be a higher value (which will then force them to pick up their cards again). If you can't play cards, you can add a card to somebody else's set, pick up somebody else's set, or rotate your cards. The Scout-like twist is that the cards all have two numbers (one top, one bottom) and whenever you pick up cards you have to rotate them. 

Only played it once and the hitch is that it feels like you don't have much decision making to do because there's always an obvious choice. I think it probably takes a few plays to figure out the strategy (particularly how the cards rotating can help/hinder you or your opponents) and it definitely feels like there'd be more to it at a higher player count because you'd have to beat somebody else's hand more often.

[JNLister]

Three new games last weekend as we had a gaming weekend:

Welcome To Your New Home is a roll-and-write (though technically a draw cards and write) which can play a theoretically infinite number of players. You have a sheet showing a development lot with three streets and each round you choose one of three effect/number combos to add to one of the houses (everyone has the same choice of three.) The number goes on one of the houses (which obviously have to be in numerical order) and the effect is a thing like adding a fence to create a smaller block, adding a "b" next to an existing house (eg 4b next to 4) but taking a penalty, etc. Definitely a fun game which I'd play again, but the downside is that you really need to know and remember all the rules before playing, which can be a tricky teach with a very large group all chiming in.

Hitster is basically a music version of Timeline. You get a card with a QR code on one side and the name and artist on the other (which you don't look at till you've guessed). The QR code plays a 30 second clip on your phone and you then have to figure out where the song fits chronologically in the row of cards in front of you. If you're right it stays in your row (meaning smaller gaps to fit your next card in) and if you're wrong, the card is discarded. Everyone else has two challenge tokens which they can spend to bet that you are wrong (and that they can correctly fit the song in *their* timeline). As a bonus, if you correctly name the song and artist on your card you get another challenge token. First to build up a line of seven cards wins. Surpisingly playable even when you don't recognise the song because you can try to guess the exact level of schmaltz/autotune/wobble effect and figure out the era.

Star Wars: Outer Rim is about a 1-2 hour game where you control a character who you fly around the Star Wars universe, delivering goods (legal or otherwise), having encounters, collecting bounties, and having fights or not depending on your current standing with the four main factions. It's mainly about earning money and then spending it to upgrade your ship/weapons/armour/crew etc. The neat thing is every character has a completely different set of win conditions (I was Boba Fett and had to complete a series of increasingly challenging bounty deliveries) but you also have to get 8 "fame points" (which come from various tasks/fights) before you can claim the victory.

[JNLister]

Played Sea, Salt and Paper, a 20-30 minute card game. No really meaningful theme - it's all sea creatures and the card illustrations are origami, but doesn't really matter. It's a pretty basic "pick up cards, play cards" deal where you get points for collecting pairs (which let you pick up new cards from different places like the deck, discard or other people), sets and a bonus for lots of cards the same colour.

It has two main twists. One is that you have a deck and two discard piles. You either pick one from the top of a discard pile, or pick two unseen from the top of the deck, keep one and discard the other to either pile. That means there's quite a bit of "put something on a discard pile to hide the card somebody else needs" and "oh fuck, which discard pile is that card I need in, is it worth taking cards from it until I find it again and hope nobody notices. 

The other is that rounds continue until somebody has seven points among their played cards and their hand and then chooses to end it. They can then either just say everybody scores their hand/played cards, or gamble that if everyone else gets one turn, they still have the most points. If they do, they score everything and the opponents  only score the colour bonus. If not, vice versa.

Simple enough game but looks to have a bit of depth in your tactics and strategy.

[JNLister]

Played Condotierre which was intended as a quick filler and very much was not. It's a (by modern standards) simple game with a series of battles to win control of a region of Italy. First to win five regions total (or three adjacent ones) wins. A battle is simply playing cards in front of you until everyone has passed, at which point highest total of card values wins.

The gameplay comes from two factors. One is a bunch of special power cards which do things like let you take a card back to your hand, wipe out all copies of the highest value card anyone has on display, or instantly end the battle with no more cards played. The other is that all the cards you play in a battle are discarded, but you don't get new cards for the next battle. Nobody can draw up until only one person has got cards left (you can choose to discard your hand if you only have special power cards left). So there's a lot of strategy in deciding which battles are worth continuing to fight, when it's better to save your cards for the next battle, and the sheer pain of sunk cost fallacy. And a lot of mindgames.

It was very enjoyable despite having an advertised play time of 20-45 minutes (which is reportedly accurate) and taking us three and a half hours. It's probably partly that being a 30-year-old game, we pretty quickly figured out the mechanics and were all playing effective strategies/figuring out what other players were doing, but partly because it scales disproportionately when you play with more people (we had the maximum of six). Not only is each battle taking longer, but it also makes it much harder for any one player to string together enough victories to win. We ended up with no instant winner and filling the board, triggering the "most areas wins" fallback which is supposed to be a rare situtation.

It's a really effective but simple design, with all the special cards doing something useful and adding to the game of figuring out what other people might be up to.

Edited August 7 by JNLister

[Chest Rockwell]

Picked up Stonespine Architects recently, as a new board game for the kids to enjoy over the summertime. I had played it before on boardgame arena and thought they would like it. It's been a big hit!

The core of the game is a pick and pass drafting mechanism to build your dungeon. You score points by completing various objectives for what's in your dungeon.  I love drafting so it's right up my street. It plays quick because you're never really waiting for anyone else to do stuff.

[JNLister]

Played The Game Makers, which is yet to be physically released but is on Board Game Arena. In principle it's a fairly straightforward worker placement with a rondel mechanism: you have player tokens on a wheel where each space is an action and as the wheel turns you'll have three spaces available, with the closest, middle and furthest ones letting you do a basic/medium/advanced version of the respective actions. You don't get to use a token until the wheel gets round to it again, so it's a choice between taking more powerful actions but having less available to do on the next couple of turns, or doing less powerful actions now and having more options next turn.

The big gimmick is the theme, which is running a board games factory, so it's completely meta for regular games players. There's three main lovely ways this is integrated:

* The things you actually produce with resources (in effect, completing an order) are real, licensed games.

* Every resource has dual use. There's game play ones: Dice can be rolled and they add points on a marketing track; the wooden meeples are workers who can perform an action; the cardboard hexes are machine parts that help you permanently reduce requirements on orders; cards are the games you have to complete, etc. But the resources are also used for completing the orders: a game might need a particular combination of dice, meeples and cards, and it's largely based on reality.

* The bulk of the scoring is from the placement of your completed games in a display shelf. Most games have their own indvidual scoring, but there's also heavily themed scoring for the type of games. For war games, you score based on how many opponents have fewer war games. For co-op games, you get points for every other player who has also made a co-op game. For set collections, you score for every two set collection games you make, and so on.

The BGA implementation is pretty confusing for a first play (it really doesn't make the order of steps clear of where you place your tokens on the rondel, what you get in return and when you can use the token again), but it seems to play quite nicely. It's also set up so that everyone plays simultaneously on each turn (or skips if they have no tokens available), so there should be minimal downtime. Definitely interested in playing this as a physical copy.

[JNLister]

With a large family group this week and somebody brought The Traitors: The Card Game.

My review is that it's Werewolf.