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!

Table Top Game Club Week 19 and 20: Chickens, Hunters, and Open House

Whew...Long time, no type.  Since my last post we had Final Exams and the beginning of the new semester.  Luckily the club managed to get their game on and get in some good sessions. 

Week 19 had only one day of gaming, a great session of Sheriff of Nottingham.  If you're familiar with the blog, you know how much I love the game.  I gave it some kudos in my Top Five Board Games for the Holiday Season discussion.  This game is a club favourite, and thankfully can accommodate five players.  It was a great session.

After a week of Final Exams and Semester turn-around, we were back to the games with one I've been wanting to debut with the club for quite some time: Specter Ops.  For those new to the game, Specter Ops is a "hidden movement" game, where one of up to five players takes on the role of Agent, a data thief who specializes in stealth. The remaining players team up as the Hunters, a group of futuristic humanoids (I use the term loosely) whose job is to track down and eliminate the Agent.  The Agent tracks their movement on a sheet of paper which is a map of the game board.  Hunters use special abilities and teamwork to track down the Agent.  In a five player game, one Hunter is in fact a traitor secretly working with the Agent.  We never played the five player variant, but I hope we get the chance.  Tuesday's session had two games of Specter Ops while another group played Love Letter.  In both games of Specter Ops the Agent scored their objectives, but were eliminated before they could escape from the board (the final requirement of the Agent).  Friday's game session once again featured Specter Ops as well as a couple games of Splendor.  The Agent was killed again, but finally picked up a win in the second game.  As the Agent, I managed some smart manoeuvring, but if I wasn't playing as Orangutan (the Agent with the most health) I surely would have lost.  This is a great game with very easy set up.  In a two hour session, it's easy to get in two games.

This week was also my school's Open House, an evening where we open the school and run tours for Grade 8 students who are considering our collegiate for next year.  The various clubs in my school set up displays to advertise what is available to students in our school.  Using display cases, I set up games that have great visual appeal, or games that could fit in the case after bigger games were set up.  If you look closely you can see I used Zombie 15, Diamonds, Pandemic, Age of War, Hive, Splendor, Blokus, Camel Up, and Mission Red Planet.

Inspired by our own display, next week, we tackle Zombie 15!  Thanks for reading!

Table Top Game Club Week 18: Madness!

Week 18 has come and gone, and we had a great week of gaming.  Tuesday's session featured a new game to our collection, The Big Book of Madness, a clever deck building game from IELLO.  In TBBoM, players take on the role of first-year students in a wizard college (*cough* Hogwarts *cough* *cough*) who have accidentally opened a grimoire of magical creatures.  The players each have a deck of cards made up of symbols representing the four elements.  Players use element cards to thwart curses, cast spells, and deal with ever increasing doses of madness inflicted by the aforesaid grimoire.  The cooperative aspect of the game is reinforced by players having the option of sharing their element cards, and casting spells that benefit your fellow wizards.  We played two games, with a loss for us the first time around, but we rallied to a win the for the second game.  The more I played the game, the more I was hoping we will get a second chance to have a go at this game.  There is tremendous replayability built into the game, and I want as many students to get to try it.

Friday's open-gaming session was a treat when a student brought a game from home that is a tradition in her family.  Her family apparently has played the game for decades, and they call it "Ching", but the more common name for it is Gimme Five.  It's a fun game that can be played by up to six people.  It's a game with a simple concept; two decks of standard playing cards are shuffled together and dealt out to players.  As you lay down a card, you play a chip on a board that has pictures that correspond to the cards.  The goal is to lay down five chips in a row while preventing opponents from completing their rows of five. We played in teams of two, and my student brought her custom made board from home along with customized chips (not pictured above).  It's a simple game in concept, but the strategy is surprisingly deep.  Looking for possible five in a row while thwarting your opponents takes some great multi-tasking.  We had tremendous fun while playing this game, and I can see how it can be a family tradition akin to cribbage.  It's a great game, so I might try to get a hold of the game for the club's collection.

I'll be taking a couple weeks off from the blog as we head into final exams.  The club doesn't run during finals, but when we return, we'll jump into Specter Ops!

I recently learned my little blog has had a thousand page views.  Thanks for all of the support, and please stay tuned.

Thanks for reading!

Table Top Game Club Week 17: Good Things in Small Packages

Hey folks!  This week we busted into the new year with our first game session of 2016.  To kick off the new year, we celebrated Micro-games, great little games that are quick to play, and although they're not particularly long, they are loaded with solid strategy.  We played all three games on both Tuesday and Friday, and they were exceptionally well received.  Our games included:

Rumble in the Dungeon: I think this is a great little game, and is especially endearing to fans of Dungeons and Dragons as there are little visual references and homages to the classic game.  Rumble in the Dungeon begins with the quick creation of a dungeon using colourful two-sided tiles, and then adding a treasure room and exit.  The treasure room gets a small plastic treasure chest, and then twelve cardboard standees are placed throughout the dungeon, one per tile.  Secretly, each player is designated two-three characters (depending on how many people are playing), and then the game can begin.

      Players decide to move or eliminate characters until one is left standing with the treasure chest.  The trick is to eliminate certain characters while preserving your own, but not be too obvious that you are favouring your secret tokens.  It's not the deepest game-play experience, but as a quick micro-game, it serves its purpose, and the art has some humorous notes.  As a group, it was well received on both game-days.

Age of War: Look at that box art!  I love a good samurai, and Age of War delivers a nice little experience of strategy and conquest in a "push-your-luck" dice-rolling game similar to Yahtzee, with an interesting mechanic for acquiring and protecting territory.  Some students felt too much was determined by luck (it is inherent to the game's mechanics mind you). Others got into the subtle strategy of trying to manipulate what territories other players should be interested in, while at the same time trying to reach their own goals.  Three-way grabs for territory can get very intense.  This is a new game for the club, and I think it was a success.





No Thanks!: This is easily the best micro-game for one's money.  Who knew a simple math game could pack so much fun and strategy?  No Thanks! is like combining blackjack with a game of Russian Roulette.  It blends pushing your luck, a little bluffing and manipulation, and some decent strategy.  Considering how some games with massive production values and price-tags sometimes fail to deliver, it's great to see an iexpensive math game strike a chord with the students.  This was easily the game of the week as we played it multiple times.  That said, all three micro-games were well received, and the variety was a nice way to start off the new year.

Next Week, time for some co-operative gaming as we try our newest accquisition, The Big Book of Madness.

Table Top Game Club Week Fourteen and Fifteen: More Cowboys, Pirates, and Wizardry

Sorry for the late update folks.  December 18th began our Christmas break.  That day I began typing this blogpost, but I have only had the chance to pick up where I left off today.  I'll try and make the most of it, so I'll salvage as much from my original post.  These sessions go back a bit, but now that we're back at school, My reports will be a bit more regular (I hope).

The Table Top game club kept the cowboy spirit alive.  We recently played the game Flick 'em Up, and even though I wanted to feature the game Takenoko, the club wanted to try Flick one more time, now including the possibility of horses courtesy of the Stallion Canyon expansion.  Right before the game started, another teacher wandered in to check out the action.  After one look, he was hooked, and it was now even teams of males to females and teachers to students.  We played two games of guys vs girls with teachers and students on both teams.  The guys' lawmen took out the girls' outlaws in the first game, but the girls easily won the second game with some amazing horse manoeuvring.  Poor Takenoko did not get any love, but the return of Flick 'em Up was a great treat.

Friday's open gaming had a good turn-out, so we broke out Libertalia once again.  I wrote about the game on a previous post.  It was an excellent session.

The following week we tried Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre (love the title). Prior to trying it with the group, I decided to buy the sequel called Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Rumble at Castle Tentakill, because apparantly I didn't notice the small warning on the front of the box.  The original game has some cheeky humour, but the sequel has quite a few cards that are rather inappropriate for school.  I don't consider myself a prude, or a supporter of censorship, but the fact is I couldn't justify including cards like the Auto-Erotic Sexsquatch.  Saddly, it was not a good purchase because I didn't feel cofortable with too many of the cards.  For the very same reason, I'm glad I didn't buy the Oatmeal's Exploding Kittens game.  Although it is fun, the theme and imagery on some of the cards just doesn't work for school.  The session itself was fine, as a couple new players were exposed to the original game.

Anyway, now that I'm back at school, expect regular updates once again.  This holiday I managed to pick up The Grizzled, Specter Ops, and The Big Book of Madness.  Here's to a great start to 2016.  Thank you all for reading and supporting the blog.

Cheers

Top Five Board Games for the Holiday Season

So being a self-professed dork comes with a couple perks.  A) I've always had plenty of room on public transit, as geeky waves of nerdiness surround me like dirt on Pigpen, and B) I am occasionally asked for my opinion on certain topics as if I'm some sort of expert, which I'm not, but the ego boost is nice.  I was recently asked about what games would make suitable gifts this holiday season, games that would be engaging, thought provoking, and of course fun.  After a couple titles popped into my head, I decided to compile a short list for you fine folks.  These games are not just great gifts, but one or two at the right Christmas or New Years get together might be just the thing to go down with the eggnog, turkey, and/or champagne.  So...without further ado...

Top Five Board Games for the Holiday Season:

1. Dead of Winter
This is currently my favourite game, and with The Walking Dead taking a break until the Spring, this game is an excellent way to fill the void until its return.  Even if you are not a fan of zombies, Dead of Winter is a phenomenally good game with the right mix of people. 

In Dead of Winter, two to five players each control a small group of survivors, and the combination of these groups form the colony.  The game is semi-cooperative, as the players must all work together to find food, medicine, weapons, and perform other tasks to see their way through a brutal snowstorm during a zombie apocalypse.  Like all great stories from the genre, the true threat of Dead of Winter is not the zombies, but from the human drama that unfolds, for one player is most likely a traitor who has a hidden agenda and is attempting to secretly foil the plans of the other survivors.  There are also special cards (called Crossroads cards) that are drawn every turn that pose players with moral dilemmas that have to be resolved.  It has the all the tension of a taught thriller, and is the perfect game for a chilly December evening.

2. Codenames

Codenames is a great party game I recently discussed in one of my weekly reports.  Here's what I wrote about it a few weeks ago: "The game is incredibly simple to play, but it's also a game that rewards creative thinking and risk taking. Players are divided into teams, and each team has a "codemaster". Looking at a five by five grid of cards, (each card featuring a word) each codemaster tries to encourage their team into guessing certain cards representing operatives, all the while avoiding innocent bystanders and an assassin."  Codenames is great for large groups as the players break into teams.  It's a very easy game to learn with simple components.  The card design is smart in that the words are presented so they can be read from different angles.  It's a game that is bound to generate some interesting "house rules" over time.  I see this game replacing classic party games like Scattergories and Cranium.



3. Sheriff of Nottingham

The term "Instant Classic" might get thrown around a little loosely at times, but after one game of Sheriff of Nottingham, you'll be hooked.  Up to five players take on the role of humble merchants attempting to import simple goods like bread, apples, cheese, and chickens.  Each merchant might also be attempting to smuggle in contraband like crossbows, alcohol, and spices.  Each round a player takes on the role of Sheriff, who basically acts as a customs agent, inspecting shipments of goods each merchant is bringing in to Nottingham.  The joy comes from the combination of bluffing, suspicion, bribery, and corrupt shakedowns.  There's some sublte roleplaying as well, as each player tries to appeal to the Sherrif.  "I'm just trying to import some cheese...oh...how did these coins get here?  Well, why don't you just put this in the Sheriff's Retirement Fund, and let me be on my way with my...'cheese'...".  This is a great game.

4. Camel Up!

The award winning Camel Up! kills quite a few birds with one proverbial stone; it can play up to eight people (few games can), it's suitable for all ages, it's easy to learn but has enough strategy to keep hardcore gamers entertained.  Again, I mentioned the game a few weeks ago; "The game actually has you playing as the spectators, playing bets on first camel, last camel, placing obstacles on the track, and advancing the race through rolling dice. The dice are rolled via a pyramid you construct before you play. Dice are dropped into the pyramid, and a neat locking mechanic allows one die to be released at random, changing the position of the camels. When two or more camels occupy the same space, they stack up, with the "lead" camel being the camel on top of the stack. " An expansion was recently released for the game, making the racetrack a little longer. 

5. Mission Red Planet (2nd Edition)

The second edition of Mission Red Planet was recently released, and is a very fun game.  It's a good game for fans of Settlers of Catan who are looking for a new challenge involving area control and resource management.  The players (up to six!) send rockets to Mars and the nighbouring moon of Phobos.  Players not only attempt to control territory, but can also sabotage rival rockets to be redirected or even blow-up.  The game has great components and a geat Steampunk aesthetic for fans of the genre.  It's not overly-complicated, but like 'Settlers, it has room for some clever strategies.  Meeting condition cards drawn at random at the start of the game add a great deal of replayability.

To get a better idea about each of the games mentioned, check out the videos below.  Each either demonstrates the game or gives it a more in-depth review.  Thanks for reading!

Dead of Winter

Code Names

Sheriff of Nottingham

Camel Up

Mission Red Planet