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!