Table Top Game Club Week 24 and 25: Dungeons, Lanterns, and Concepts

Two more weeks are in the books, and with Parent/Teacher interviews replacing one of our Fridays, there are three game sessions to review.  Let's get at it.

Week 24: Boss Monster and Lanterns

Boss Monster is a card game where players take on the role of a boss monster, the final bad guy in a dungeon as seen in classic videogames like Castlevania, Metroid, and Legend of Zelda.  Players draw cards representing rooms in a dungeon.  Room cards are played face up to the left of the boss monster.  The rooms include traps and creatures, and the cards are drawn in a pixelated style akin to 16-Bit videogames.  Every round, players build on to their dungeon and then attempt to attract and kill adventurers.  The adventurers, who are usually the heroes of these sidescroller videogames, venture through the players' dungeons.  If an adventurer dies in the dungeon, the player scores points.  If the adventurer makes it to the boss, the player loses points (or is killed after five heroes, depending on the rules you wish to use).

Boss Monster is a game I wish I enjoyed more.  I love the premise, and the gameplay is quite easy to learn.  Unfortunately, it's a little lackluster.  Once the dungeons have been built, it's difficult to adjust your strategy, and if you had a bad hand and some unlucky draws, you're going to sit for a while and watch the remaining players run away with the game.  The students enjoyed it, but they mentioned that given a choice, they would rather play something else.  They are also a little too young (14-15 years old) to get the jokes and references on the cards, which are grounded in the 80s and 90s.  

Lanterns: The Harvest Festival

Friday's open gaming session introduced the crew to Lanterns: The Harvest Festival.  I originally had no intention of picking up this game, but when Wil Wheaton revealed that it would be featured on the newest season of Table Top, I decided to investigate the game further (Here's a video of Wil Playing Lanterns on 'Game the Game'). This is a smart, innovative tile-laying game that's easy to learn, but hard to master. That sounds almost cliche, but in this case, it's an accurate assessment. The goal of Lanterns is to score points based on coloured patterns of lanterns that are placed on a lake during a harvest festival. Each tile represents four sections of lanterns and their corresponding colours. Matching colours with an adjacent tile scores cards that serve as a form of currency. If you have the cards matching requirements on special scoring tokens called Dedications, you keep the token and score the points on that token. The trick to Lanterns is that every time you lay a tile (and you must lay a tile every turn) it also grants every opponent cards as well, based on where the player is sitting in relation to the tile played. It's a very clever idea, in that in order to win, you must consider every tile's potential ramifications. Greedily pursuing your own goals may help opponents score cards they need, but a more defensive approach will deny you the cards you need.

The only limitation to the game is that it only plays four people. I didn't get a chance to play the game; I wanted students to enjoy the experience, so I oversaw four grade 9s as they played. They quickly picked up the nuances of the game, and they really enjoyed it.

It was followed up with a couple rounds of Sushi Go! and No Thanks!

Week 25: Concept and Blokus

Concept was a 2014 Spiel de Jahres Nominee (that's a big deal, trust me). Concept is a fascinating intellectual exercise that doubles as a party game. At its heart, Concept is basically Charades, but instead of acting out a word, title, or saying, players use a massive board featuring images, shapes, colours, and other simple icons to lead the other players into guessing the answer. On a player's turn, they will draw a card with several different ideas that can serve as answers. The player uses small coloured plastic cubes, exclamation marks, and a question mark to lead the players to the right answer. The main player cannot speak during their turn; they can only use pictures on the board to provide clues. For example, if the answer is "Statue of Liberty", the main player might drop the question mark on the image of a box indicating "thing" instead of "person". This is the core idea for the concept. Since the question mark piece is green, any green cubes placed mean their images relate to the "thing". The player might put green cubes on the images for "art", "female", and "big", implying that the "thing" is a large piece of art in the image of a woman. If no one can guess the answer, the main player might place an exclamation mark piece on the image of a map, indicating a "location". Exclamation marks indicate a "sub-concept", an idea to consider when guessing the main answer. If the red exclamation mark is used, any red cubes placed correspond to the sub-concept, a "location". The player places red cubes on the spaces on the board indicating "red", "white", and "blue". Therefore, our "thing" is a large piece of art in the image of a woman, in a location known for being red, white, and blue.

Concept was a hit with the students. The scoring is almost abstract. The game comes with tokens of lightbulbs that can be used to indicate points, but after a while people stop keeping score. The exercise is challenging and rewarding in its own right. The game was a little tricky for our EAL student (English as an Additional Language), as many answers were based on English phrases, slogan, or nouns she had not grasped yet, but she enjoyed the process of concept building. It's a great game for so many different occasions. It's great for parties and in an educational setting.

Wrapping up Concept early, we got the chance to play Blokus.  Blokus might be a bit pedestrian for most hardcore gamers, but I think it's a slick little game reminiscent of a marriage between Tetris and a crossword puzzle.  Opponents take turns placing coloured game pieces onto a grid in an area control fashion.  The goal of the game is to get rid of as many of your own pieces as possible, while blocking opponents from doing the same.  It's a game that's really easy to teach, but a shrewd player can easily start to see the depth of strategies.  Even though I was the "veteran" player (I use the term loosely), I was schooled by a Grade 9.  Overall, it was a very satisfying session.

Next week, we'll jump into King of New York, but then we run into Good Friday and Easter Break.  I'll update this blog in about three weeks.  Thank you all for the kind words and support. 

Thanks for Reading!

Table Top Game Club Week 21, 22, and 23: Zombies, Steampunks, and Aliens (no...not Smash Up...)

Wow...it's been a while folks.  Sorry for the delay once again, but after Spring Break and some pretty heavy work days, I finally have some time to give you a gaming update.  In each week of gaming, my crew engaged in some pretty intense and varied gaming.  Here's the rundown:

Week 21: Zombie 15

Zombie 15 is a fun game, but it's also a tricky game to run.  Zombie 15 is a cooperative game where players take on the role of fifteen year old survivors of a zombie apocalypse.  Unlike many other zombie games (Dead of Winter, Zombicide, Run Fight or Die), Zombie 15 is on a timer, a fifteen minute audio track that come on a CD included with the game.  The audio tracks are also available on Youtube, along with some custom soundtracks made by fans.  The soundtracks for the game are an integral part of the gameplay experience and game mechanics.  The players are working to reach an objective outlined in the scenario guide.  Working quickly, the players each have four actions they can use to move through the game map (constructed from tiles), kill zombies, and search for equipment.  Some scenarios require players to eliminate every zombie on the board or search for specific items like keys to a locked shopping mall.  All of these objectives must be reached in fifteen minutes or the players lose.  Not only used as a timer, the soundtracks feature zombie “growls”.  Whenever a growl is heard, the players flip over a card from a Zombie deck to indicate how many zombies appear on the street. The soundtrack also features tense music and the sounds of sirens and other emergency response noises.

Students really enjoy this game, and due to the quick, tense nature of the game-play, it does not encourage “Alpha-gaming” unlike Pandemic; the players are acting too quickly, and the random zombie arrivals prevent one person from playing quarterback and barking too many orders.  The students encourage and help each other, and it’s great to see a student come to the rescue of another who is being overwhelmed.

 As far as I’m concerned, the game has two drawbacks: facilitating and set-up.  Because of the speedy nature of the game-play, this game needs a fifth person to make sure the rules are followed, zombies are added or removed at the right moment, and players don’t take too many actions on their turn.  The game instructions state that the players should police themselves, but it seems to run much smoother with a referee. The game also takes a while to set up.  For each scenario, a tile map must be built, zombies are added to the map, and often decks of cards and special token have to be adjusted.  That’s not such a big deal when you’re sitting down to a one to two hour game experience, but Zombie 15 takes only fifteen minutes to play the scenario.  The set up and adjustments made after each scenario hurt the momentum of game-play.  Then again, it’s not a marathon; it’s a series of sprints.  Still, I enjoy the game, and my students don’t mind helping with the construction of each new scenario.  

Week 22: Steampunk Rally

Steampunk Rally, no surprise here, is a game with a ton of moving parts, literally and figuratively.  It’s a racing game that can accommodate up to eight players.  The game is focused on a fictitious race through the Swiss Alps among history’s greatest inventors and scientists, including Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, the Wright Brothers, and a host of others.  As a teacher, I’m glad to see a good mix of both male and female historic figures, as well as a mini biography of each person featured in the rulebook. 

Steampunk Rally combines several different elements together: card drafting, dice rolling, resource management, and simultaneous game-play.  The opening phase is a card draft as players select parts of a machine they are building to help them win their race, by generating heat, electricity, or steam.  These elements power the machine.  The next two phases involve managing resources and rolling a dice pool.  Lastly, damage may be applied to each vehicle depending on certain obstacles. 

The game has a few different elements to wrap one’s head around.  It’s not a simple roll and move mechanic like Formula D.  This game involves understanding how each piece works in tandem with the others.  Applying a piece that adds movement based on generating electricity is next to useless if your other pieces all generate steam. The game suggests that for the first couple rounds, every player takes turns applying their dice pool to the machine so everyone gains an understanding of the mechanics. However, as the game progresses, players can start playing simultaneously as they become familiar with the pattern of gameplay.  I strongly suggest that for the last round, players describe their final moves one at a time.  This eliminates a great deal of confusion, as we learned when we played the game.  In our first game, players kept finding new combinations after they scored, so finding an eventual winner was a long process.  The second time we had players finish one at a time, so each understood their options and completed every possible combination.

As a game for a club in school, I like the use of math and logic in determining how to optimize the vehicles, as well as the historic touchstones.  We found our biggest hurdle came from the confusion regarding when dice are played, and when they are vented (a process where used dice are removed).  Dice create effects when they are applied to the machine.  Once applied, the die must be vented the next round, and removed for the part to be used again.  When the machines get big and unwieldy, students would get confused and forget whether they just applied a die, or if it was left over from last round and needed venting.  I think after a few more sessions, the players will have a better grasp on the rhythm of venting, rolling, and movement.   

Week 23: Cosmic Encounter

If you're an experienced game enthusiast, then Cosmic Encounter is on your proverbial radar. For the few of you who are not familiar with the game, Cosmic Encounter is a negotiation game of galactic conquest. The game plays up to five people out of the box, but I picked up two expansions that allow the game to accommodate seven players (more expansions are available and are quite pricey, but the game can be expanded up to eight). The game has some wonderful components. Each player gets five planets representing their home-worlds, and twenty plastic spaceships representing their armada and colonies. The ships are 50's inspired flying saucers that also stack like poker chips. That's a good analogy for how they are played; they're used by each player to represent an invasion force or defence, but since every encounter is a gamble, the poker chip feel is appropriate.

Each player in turn flips a card from a deck called the Destiny deck. This deck directs each player's target for conquest. Once a player has declared they are invading another player's territory, the attacker and defender lay down cards from their hands. The cards played will result in either a one sided victory, or negotiation for shared territory. As a result, due to the possible terms of the negotiations, multiple people can tie for first place. Attackers and defenders can also ask for help from the other players, making for some strategic alliances.

Even though the negotiation vs conquest mechanic is entertaining as is, the real draw of Cosmic Encounter is the massive selection of alien races included in the game. Each player selects an alien race that gives them an interesting power. These powers allow for bending the rules and give the game a massive amount of strategy and replay-ability. The game can easily be scaled down for a beginner gamers, or can be made quite complex for experienced gamers by adding optional decks of cards. We played several games of Cosmic Encounter this week, and I found it quite easy to teach. The core mechanics are simple to grasp, and the cards and alien races are labelled to allow for easily pulling out the more complex elements of the game. My only disappointment was that we had a small turnout this week. Tuesday had four players, and Friday had only three. The small turnout did allow us to have multiple games during our time, but I was hoping to get more kids involved and engaged in the interactive nature of the game. I hope this game hits the table again because it has great potential.

Well folks, sorry for the delay. Next week, we'll press the start button on Boss Monster.

Thanks for reading!