Week 12 (20th - 26th January 2014): Runebound - Stroking My Steelhorns

I'm so busy at the moment that this week's entry will need to be kept very short, unfortunately. As a start to exploring some of my solitaire fantasy adventure games, this week I brought Fantasy Flight's Runebound to my gaming table. I will be brief: this is one of my all-time favourites, and has probably seen close to 50 solitaire plays. As is standard for this type of game, each player takes the role of a character - on this occasion the mighty Steelhorns...

 

Steelhorns prepares for battle

...and seeks to vanquish the returning Dragon Kings who threaten the world of Terrinoth. This involves travelling around Terrinoth, defeat monstrous minions, take their stuff, and level up before confronting the Dragon Kings themselves.

Runebound set up and ready to play

The great thing about Runebound is that it has a very concise ruleset, and whilst quick and easy to play, does lack tactical depth when it comes to combat. In addition to which, the large number of expansions means the game offers significant variety. The only downside is that Runebound appears to be out of print at the moment, with no sign of its coming back into production.

A part of my (complete) Runebound collection.

In short, this one gets a whopping 9/10 on the Gaming Self Abuse scale (tm), and pretty much counts as my 'desert island' solitaire game.

Apologies for the brevity, but I must dash - if I find time in the coming weeks, I will probably return to Runebound for a more in-depth review.

Week 11 (13th - 19th Jan 2014): Dungeon Roll - I've Got a Big Broadsword Made Out of Cardboard...

Another quickie today - the past week has been very busy, and as a consequence I've not had much time to devote to gaming (hence this week's fairly poor attempt at themed onanist inneuendo - although I did take the role of a cleric in this game). As such, I've opted for a recent purchase which is also an unplayed game, but one I am aware plays very quickly: Dungeon Roll, published by Tasty Minstrel Games. In keeping with the game's brevity, I'm going to knock this one off fairly switftly )ooh-err).

I picked up Dungeon Roll for no other reason than  it was a) solitaire and b) came in an attractive box shaped like the typical treasure chest your average dungeon delver is likely to find after dispatching a bunch of orcs. The game is (like last week's offering) a dice game, and a dungeoncrawl-themed one to boot. It is unsurprising, then, that in the game you take the role of a dungeon delver seeking to fight monsters, take their stuff, and defeat the big bad (a dragon). To do so, you roll a group of dice whose symbols represent various kinds of archetypical D&D characters (thief, fighter, cleric, magic user, etc.), and the dungeon master (or yourself if playing solitaire) rolls a number of dungeon dice equal to the current game term. These display symbols representing the typical kinds of things you'd expect to find in your average dungeon: oozes, skeletons, goblins, treasure chests and magic potions. If you have the appropriate dice, you clear the dungeon room (i.e. fighters remove goblins en masse, thieves can open treasure chests, clerics can banish skeletons, etc.) and possibly gain treasure as well as experience. Thus the game grinds (thankfully quickly) onwards. The game is lost if you do not posses on a given turn the appropriate dice to defeat the monsters rolled; alternatively, you win once three dragon dice have appeared and you have the appropriate dice symbols in your pool to defeat said dragon.

Nice box, shame about the gameplay.

Overall, this is quick and easy, with some nice production values as far as the box is concerned; however, the rules, whilst simple, are badly organised, and the game doesn't feel as if it has much by way of strategy. Whilst it seems sound enough as a quick solitaire dice roller (the game doesn't take more than about 10 minutes to play) it does lack stretgic depth and a sense of narrative, so is not for me.

On the Gaming Self-Abuse Scale (tm), this scores a lowly 4/10, and will be added to the ebay pile.

Anticipating being very busy over the coming weeks, this may be the last 'new' game played for a while. However, the next run of games will be themed around solitaire fantasy dungeoncrawler/adventure games, starting either with Runebound or the Lord of the Rings boardgame next week.

Over and out.

Week 10 (6th - 12th January 2014): D-Day Dice - Buffing My Bayonet

Just a quick one (ooh-err) this week, as I've been busy again, as well as having been struck down by some variant of the dreaded Winter illness that is going down (hacking cough, nausea, hairs growing on the palms of my hands) - no doubt brought on by too much ludic self-abuse. Any way, this week's  entry (ooh-err) is D-Day Dice, a dice-rolling/push your luck/resource manangement offering published by Valley Games.

The premise of the D-Day Dice is that you are leading a platoon of Allied troops, sector by sector, up one of the beaches during D-Day (Omaha, Utah, Sword, Juno, etc.). There are eight game boards, each representing one of the beaches (and of varying difficulty) upon which the game is played. Your platoon is represented by a dice with various symbols on (mainly chevrons), which are used to indicate how long you can remain in a sector (usually a maximum of three turns). Each turn, you roll a set of six dice, also bearing various symbols which represents resources (such as soldiers and courage),  or difficulties (a skull, which cancels out one other of your dice so you cannot claim those resources) to aid or hinder you until you reach the objective at the end of the beach. In order to mover from sector to sector, you need to acquire enough points of courage to advance (the number required is marked on the board). You also have to engage in combat in each sector, which will reduce the number of soldiers you have acquired. Other symbols marked on each sector cause various effects (including minefields which cause randomly determined losses; or machinegune nests, which randomly increase the combat value of the sector - also causing you to lose more troops).

Game in progress, towards the end of play

To win the game, you need to enter the bunker at the end of the beach, and survive combat in that sector. You lose if you have no more troops left, or you are in a position where you must move but are unable to. I played two games, each taking about twenty minutes, using the training battle map. The first game using only the very basic rules I won without much trouble. The second, in which I used all of the rules, proved more difficult and I ended up losing due to ll of my troops being wiped out.

In brief, the game is very quick, easy to learn, and does look quite nice (fairly high production values, and all of the special dice are of good quality). The game works co-operative or solitaire, and is a nice filler if you have twenty minutes to spare and fancy a bit of a dice fest. Having said that, D-Day Dice didn't quite work for me - it just didn't really engage me, although it seems to have quite a following on boardgamegeek. Quite likely, this one will end up on my ebay pile. Not that it is a bad game, just not for me. Bearing that in mind, I can see the appeal of this, so on the Gaming Self-Abuse Scale (TM), this scores 7/10.

Week 9 (30th December 2013 - 5th January 2014): Relic - Grasping My Force Staff in Both Hands.

 

 

For the uninitiated, a force staff is actually a thing. Here's a space marine librarian grasping his proudly in both hands.

Inquistors only have force rods which are, of course, much smaller.

This week another newbie: Relic, by Fantasy Flight Games. Set in Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe, as a huge fan of the 40K fluff, this was a must-buy for me when it came out last year. Not only was this an adventure game (a category of boardgame I particularly enjoy), it also contained some lovely character busts for use as player pieces. Since purchasing, I've made some headway with painting the minis, but have never seemed to get round to playing. This was in part due to caution on my part as Relic is also an iteration of GW's classic Talisman adventure game - and I wasn't hugely impressed by the Black Industries/ FFG reissue of this some years back.

Talisman is notable as an early example of the adventure game genre, by which I mean pretty much taking the classic tropes of roleplaying games and translating them to a boardgame format. In games like Talisman, players usually take on the role of classic fantasy rpg characters (fighter, thief, magic user, cleric, etc.), and travel around the game world (represented by the game board) in the fulfilment of quests, killing monsters and taking their stuff, gaining experience and levelling-up - though usually with some final, overarching goal in mind. Whilst rpgs tend to be fully co-operative, adventure boardgames often have a competitive component - in Talisman, the winner being the person who makes it to the centre of the board to claim the crown of command (or some other such trinket). The two main things I dislike about Talisman are its repetitive character and its lack of theme and  narrative, being little more than a random series of encounters in a generic fantasy world with little or no sense of place, identity or theme. Unfortunately, Relic still suffers from being a relatively random dice-fest as well as a bit of a grind as you move from encounter to encounter, killing things, taking their stuff, etc., in preparation for the final big push into the centre of the board to achieve the final objective. In fact, I will admit to not completing my first game - after about three hours, I estimated I was about halfway to the end, at which point I decided to give up. In its favour, Relic does attempt to incorporate a greater degree of complexity into the game, which can on occasion give rise to some interesting tactical/strategic choices having to be made. It is also much more flavoursome than Talisman, being firmly grounded in a pre-existing gameworld - and here FFG have done a great job of drenching the game in theme.

Relic set up and ready to play.

In Relic, players take on the role of typical characters from the 40K universe, including space marines, inquisitors, techpriests, imperial guard and so on. Each of the 10 characters available to play comes with a sheet listing attributes (strength, cunning and willpower) at a level appropriate to their role. Each character sheet also lists a range of special abilities - unique to that individual - which can be used to help players win the game. At set-up, each player also gains a number of influence counters which can be spent during the game - usually to gain access to powers and equipment that can further aid them. Each player is also given a mission which sets out a short-term goal that players can achieve (for example defeating a particular creature on a particular part of the board).

Some of the character busts used in Relic. From left to right: Ordo Malleus Inquisitor, Space Marine of the Ultramarines Chapter, Tech Priest and Assassin. Yes, I painted these because I am awesome...

The Space Marine in close-up.

The Ordo Malleus Inquisitor - the character I used for my first game.

Whenever a player completes three missions, they can trade the mission cards in for a relic - a powerful item which further enhances their abilities. Players then travel around the board - a beautifully illustrated abstraction of a sector of the Imperium of the 40K universe - which is constructed into three tiers (outer, mid- and inner) with a view to first reaching the centre of the board. The centre space is represented by one of five cards, outlining specific criteria by which players can win the game on entering the final space. Starting in the outer tier, players move by rolling a dice, and moving that exact number of spaces either clockwise or anti-clockwise around the board. Progression into both the mid-tier and inner tier is dependent on landing on specific spaces and fulfilling given criteria (such as discarding an item). Whilst there is a race element to the game, rushing straight to the centre of the board early in the game is not recommended. Each space a player lands on also involves some sort of challenge, which become harder the nearer one gets to the final space in the inner tier. Thus players have to level up during the game to enhance their chances of meeting these challenges. Gaining experience is usually a matter of killing various beasties from the 40K universe which one encounters once completing movement. Most spaces are marked by one or more seals which are either red, blue or yellow. Each colour corresponds to a specific encounter deck and a particular kind of challenge coded to character attributes (red f0or strength, yellow for cunning and blue for willpower). Ergo, players are at an advantage if they seek encounters matching their highest attribute. In the game I player, my Ordo Malleus Inquisitor's highest attribute was willpower, and thus it made sense to aim for spaces marked with a blue seal as I would have a better chance of beating challenges drawn from the blue encounter deck. As mentioned, these are often creatures such as tyranids, orks or chaos daemons, although encounter decks also contain events, allies and items which can be acquired. A d6 dice roll is added to each of the character's and monster's attribute, the two are compared and the highest wins. If the player wins, he or she takes the monster card and gains experience points equal to its attribute number, and can level up (gaining higher attributes and other abilities) for every 6 points worth of cards acquired. If the player loses, he/she forfeits  a life, and may also gain a corruption card. If reduced to 0 life points, your character loses certain cards and is forced to move to a particular space on the board. If at any time a player has 6 corruption cards (representing the insidious influence of the forces of chaos), that character is out of the game, and the player has to start from scratch with a new player. So, the game is also about managing resources and pushing luck as well as rolling a shedload of dice.

Whilst an improvement on Talisman, Relic still has its problems: as mentioned, it does seem to take a long time to play (three hours from start to finish tends to be my maximum for solitaire games); repetition (roll, move, fight) means that the game can become little hackneyed after a while; there is also no PvP in the current rules (though these have been promised in the inevitable expansion) so the game does player somewhat like a multiplayer solitaire, with only a modicum of player interaction. This latter point, does, however, have the benefit of making this playable solo - I failed to mention that Relic is meant as a multiplayer and is not specifically designed as a solitaire game. However, soloing Relic is simply a matter of seeing if you can get to the centre before acquiring 6 corruption cards, and redrawing any cards which require player interaction (there are relatively few of these).

I really want to like this game, as I've been hoping for a 40K-based advanture game for ages - it is just a shame that it was designed as an (albeit improved) re-implementation of Relic. Even so, I shall probably give it another go at some point. On the Gaming Self-Abuse scale (tm), this one rather is rather disappointingly awarded a 6/10.