Expansion Review - Thornwood Siege (Thunderstone)

It's time once again for a review from my old man. I could go into a belabored explanation about how I don't like Thunderstone, and he does, and how when he was at my house on vacation a year ago I gave him my copy of the game. And then I could explain how whenever Alderac sends me Thunderstone expansions, I box them up and mail them to my dad, so that he can write about them, because it saves me the trouble of playing a game I don't like, plus it gets me out of writing a review every now and then. I could explain all that, but it just seems like too much trouble. So I'm going to forget about that entire explanation and turn you over to my favorite (and only) guest reviewer - my dad!

The first thing I noticed as I was taking the wrappers off the cards to Thornwood Siege was the exceptional artwork. It is, in my opinion, the best yet. Dragonspire was a great step up in the Thunderstone series, but as I noted in my review of that game, it had some really awful art. (I’m still not over the green hand holding the burning seaweed that passes for a torch.) But in Thornwood’s case the artwork has reached a higher plane – there isn’t one card that makes me shudder the way Dragonspire’s torch does. The hero “Thornwood” has a picture of an archer that is inspiring – a gaming nut could want this as a poster on his wall. I could go on and on about the awesome art, but since you get the idea I’ll just leave it at that.

As I began to read the cards I noticed that in Thornwood there are a lot more cards that promote interaction among players. Well, we could say cards that promote harming, bashing, or stabbing your fellow gamers in the back. In the village you can take the Scroll of Chaos and make everyone discard a card, you take your choice of the cards, and the others get one back randomly. Yeah, pretty chaotic for those who have honed the perfect deck. (Actually, I kind of like this card – chaos in a game can be a good thing if designed well.) With the Stalking Spell you can force everyone else to enter the dungeon in their turn, which we all know could be onerous. On the other hand, The Guiding Light allows you go give everyone +1 light for one turn, so the cards aren’t all mean-spirited. I really like the greater player interaction the cards provide.

In the same vein, Thronwood cards are meant to complement one another, especially in the disease realm. If you have monsters in the dungeon that give disease – and there are more of them now – you’ll really want the Herbalist as an available hero. He’s allowed me to take some nasty cards with his advantage.

There are some really cool monsters introduced in Thronwood (and some I don’t appreciate, but more on that next paragraph). There are Verminfolk – basically rats – that give you disease when you go into the dungeon, so for those of you who like that effect, you’ll love these cards. And btw, the artwork on these guys is truly some of the best yet. One new monster feature is “Raid.” The monsters are really just guys who are taking advantage of the siege on Thornwood to take spoils from the village. When you reveal a Raider card, you have to destroy cards in the village, always either from the least expensive stack or the most expensive. If all ten of these guys come into play in a game, 32 village cards in all will be destroyed. And if the siege engines Doomsday Bombard or Stonepitcher breach, that’s four more cards, for a total of 36 cards that can just disappear. Folks, THAT’S A LOT! From my own play experience, we had several village stacks exhausted before the end of the game. (In one game we had six empty village spaces before the game finally ended.) The other feature new to the game is “Stalk”. All stalk monsters are centaurs, and they give you grief when revealed. (I’m not a fan of the centaurs, but some guys love to see the damage they bestow.) And then there’s the Abyssal Malformed. These guys could cause you some real trouble when you take them on, since you could possibly take more than one disease when you fight them. Disease can be rough in this expansion – in one game I took THREE disease in one trip into the dungeon.

But then on the other hand, I just really don’t like the siege engines, which is sad since they’re the heart of the title of this expansion. Once you get past oohing and ahhing over the artwork and start to read the cards, you just may notice one quirk they present. I don’t think they play out the theme all that well. You still have the dungeon that goes deeper and deeper into the earth, and you still need sufficient light to take on the monsters, but the siege engines somehow manage to do their damage while still in the deep dungeon. And the damage they cause is also not in keeping with the theme, as I see it. As siege engines, they should all breach to cause their damage, and the damage should be tailored to the engine on the card. The catapult is OK, IMO, but the Siege Tower causes damage only when a player goes INTO the dungeon. WHAT!?! The Siege Tower is protecting the dungeon?!? Maybe if they’d breach to cause damage they’d pass inspection, but no, these things are still in the bowels of the earth and besieging Thornwood all the same. (But the artwork is really good.) If you’re trying to see the game as a bit of a dungeon crawl, you may choke on the siege engines. If you’re just into playing a card game, this won’t bother you at all. To help understand my meaning, I jotted down the dialogue made by two guys who were playing Thornwood for the first time, and if you listen in you can grasp the problem.

(The following dialogue may be apocryphal.)

OK, so you’ve played Dominion, right?

Yeah.

Well, Thunderstone plays almost exactly like Dominion, but this game has a theme. It’s a deck-building game, but here you have a purpose. Here you play a guy who’s hiring heroes and arming them to go into a dungeon and kill these monsters that are guarding a Thunderstone – a really powerful artifact that’s been hidden for millennia. You have to go into this deep dungeon and the deeper you go the darker it gets, so you need more light. Got it?

Yeah, I got it. Let’s play.

(About 15 minutes later.)

So, I’m going into the dungeon to take on this Spike Lasher. Got the light, have enough attack points, so I take’im out. (cards shifted in dungeon) OK, a Dynamos moves into rank three.

Here, take this token so you’ll remember to discard a card beginning next turn.

Whadayamean discard a card next turn! Let me read that!

He’s stalking you, so you have to discard a card next turn.

Stalking me? He’s in the pit of the dungeon! How the hell’s he stalking me?

C’mon! It’s a deck-building game, and that’s what this card does.

Yeah, well you gave me the wrong token. This is a different centaur.

Well, the artwork is for another centaur, but the card’s effect goes to the one in the dungeon.

How do ya’ know that?? Maybe I’m supposed to get the token for the centaur on the card.

They screwed up printing the tokens, OK. Just take the damn token.

You told me this game had a theme. Well, the theme’s not working very well – how the hell is a centaur, in the pit of the dungeon, stalking anything?? This morphed cantaur’d be bangin’ his head on the ceiling just groping around.

Look here, it says in the rules, “The heroes are gathered in Wulfburg at the border of the forest,” so this expansion takes place in the forest.

So do I still need to have light to get into the higher ranks?

YES!! That’s just part of the game – you HAVE TO HAVE LIGHT, OK!

So it’s still a dungeon, any way you look at it.

Dammit! It’s just a deck-building game. Don’t get too carried away with the theme. So, I’m goin’ after the Swipepaw in rank one. Hand me a disease card, will ya’? (cards shifted in dungeon) Cool! A catapult moves into rank three.

AH, FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD!! So the centaur stumbles into rank two with a bleeding head and now you tell me a catapult’s in the deepest depths of the dungeon!?! What kind of a game is this!! Is it a dungeon or not!!

I keep tellin’ ya’ it’s just a deck-building game! It’s Thornwood SIEGE, OK!! So the game has to have some siege in it!

But it hasn’t even breached! You tellin’ me it’s hurlin’ crap into the village from THE DEEPEST PIT OF THE DUNGEON!?!

IT’S A DECK-BULDING GAME!! OK!! Now, I’m goin’ after the centaur! Here’s two light points and there’s the attack points. I’m taking the token.

The token with the wrong picture.

YES!! And now the next monster comin’ into the dungeon is . . . a siege tower.

(Sound of cards being slammed on the table.) AH FOR . . . WHAT!?! Are they building the siege tower in the deepest pit and then gonna push it out the mouth of the dungeon? THIS IS LUDICROUS!!

(Sound of a punch landing on human flesh.) IT’S A DECK-BULDING GAME, DAMMIT!!

Hopefully you get the idea on how some players, who appreciate theme, might react to some of the siege engines.

Enough about monsters. Some great heroes are introduced in Thornwood. The “Herbalist” actually gains attack points when facing a monster that give disease. A very clever mechanic! I especially like “Thornwood Ranger,” and not only because of his awesome art. He gets more attack points for the deeper you go into the dungeon – I like a lot of these in my deck. And I think I should give honorable mention to “Krell Warrior to become Warmaster” – since militia play prominently in this game, these guys can really kick butt.

Not a lot to say about the village cards. Of notable mention are “Village Mob,” which does some really weird stuff, but mostly I like the concept – pretty cool. My favorite village card, which elicited a guffaw when I first saw it, is “Unicorn Steaks”. A fairly powerful card – much more so than Iron Rations – and helps explain the extinction of the unicorn.

Now for one complaint that some might find a bit silly, but I think Thunderstone expansions are past the need for the full-size box to hold 284 cards. There are a lot of other card games that have over 100 cards and come in a compact box. When you open Thornwood, the first thing that should strike you is how empty the box is, unless you count all the foam dividers. Hey, AEG! Everyone who buys Thornwood, or any other expansions to follow, already owns either Thunderstone or Dragonspire or both! You say right in the Overview that it requires one of those two games. No one needs yet ANOTHER box to clutter their closet, OK? I agree that the price for the game is reasonable, but if you packaged it in a simple box holding the cards, couldn’t you cut the price by a couple dollars?

Summary

Pros:
Exceptional art; the best yet – kudos to all of you on the art team!
Some great new concepts.
Greater player interaction.
Inspired deck-building options – they integrate well together.

Cons:
The siege cards don’t actually fit the theme all that well. Not a problem if you don’t care about the theme.
Enough over-sized boxes for expansions, already. They’re not necessary.

Apart from my negative comments, this is a great addition to Thunderstone, and if you own the base game, you’ll love this expansion. (You don’t have to use the siege engines, but then it wouldn’t be Thornwood SIEGE, would it?)

You can get Thornwood Siege at Noble Knight Games:

THORNWOOD SIEGE

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Preview - Masked Surrogate (for Omen)

Last April, I reviewed a card game called Omen: A Reign of War. It was not only the best game from Small Box Games that I've ever played, it was also one of the best games I played last April. It's fast and smart, balanced and tense, and has some seriously kick-ass art. Just look at that picture up there. That's seriously kick-ass art.

That seriously kick-ass art is not from Omen, though. It's from Shattered Aegis, which is the first expansion for Omen. Shattered Aegis comes from a Greek word that means, 'broken clavicle', an injury usually sustained by the ancient Greeks while they were skating empty pools. These predecessors of the X Games probably should not have been skating bare naked. Helmets, at least.

Shattered Aegis adds a bunch of new units, all illustrated by the same seriously kick-ass artist who did the first game. You can use them in the normal rules that come with Omen, but there are also three variant games you can play if you're feeling adventurous. If you're really feeling adventurous, you can trying skating a pool naked. I don't recommend it, though apparently the Greeks thought it was entertaining enough that they came up with a word for what happened when you bailed at the top of a frontside alley-oop.

The first new game mode is called Grand Melee, and allows four players to draft their decks of ten units to play against everyone else. You play until someone wins twice. Then there's pure deck building, where each player build his deck to play against an opponent who also builds a deck. If you want to do that, you need two copies of Omen and Shattered Collarbone. The last mode is Test of Skill, which gives each player an identical deck of 40 units.

There's also a new status effect in Shattered Aegis, called Enrage, which happens when the other player bails an axle stall on the diving board and then you nail it. It turns non-beast units into beast units because they're so infuriated at your prodigious skating ability. Those Greeks were serious about their skating.

Shattered Aegis is not out yet. Preorders for the game will open up in a few days, at the first of August. This is just a preview, and I expect to be giving the game an actual review in a few weeks. In the meantime, if you want to get on the preorder bandwagon, keep an eye on the Small Box site:

http://smallboxgames.com/

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Card Game Review - Sentinels of the Multiverse

Theme-lovin' gamers have it pretty good. Think of a cool theme, and you can probably find a game that does it well. If you want world war, we've got it (frequently with robots or aliens). Zombies? We've got it. Swords and sorcery? Holy crap, have we got it.

But what seems to be missing - and what should be a pretty obvious hole in gaming history - is a good game about comic book heroes. That's not to say that nobody has tried, but no game I've played is able to really bring to life the feel of comic book supers throwing each other through windows, pounding each other with heavy machinery, or blasting away with laser eyes or bursts of arcane power. Sure, the games are there, and some are even fun, but so far, none really brings home the battle for the future of planet Earth against a mad genius with unparalleled power.

But now, thanks to one tiny game company with a whole lot of balls, we can finally blast the evil right into space. Sentinels of the Multiverse might be a low-budget production, but what it lacks in plastic widgets and cardboard mats, it makes up in pure story-inspired enthusiasm. The game pits a team of players against a seriously dangerous villain in all manner of crazy comic-book locales, like moon bases and lost worlds full of dinosaurs. It's cooperative, so it has lots of hurdles to overcome, but it manages to deliver an exciting story full of smackdowns and last-minute saves.

Everything in Sentinels of the Multiverse is done with cards. The box comes with hundreds of 'em, so the first thing you'll want to do when you open the game is put the various decks into some sort of storage, like tuckboxes or card dividers or sandwich baggies tied up like heroin balloons. If you don't organize the cards, they'll slide around in the box, and every time you play you'll have to separate all the decks again. And since there are more than twenty different decks in here, you could be at it for a while.

Each hero is represented by a deck of cards, as is the villain. What's especially interesting is that your combat zone is also a deck of cards, and every turn, you'll run afoul of crumbling ancient traps (if you're battling in Atlantis) or dinosaurs (if you're fighting in the lost world) or bikini slippage (if you're wrestling in a kiddie pool full of olive oil and grape Jello).

Play is pretty easy, though there are lots of elements to track. The bad guy goes first, summoning minions or deploying weapons or whatever other nefarious badness is on the card he plays. Then the heroes each get a turn, and they can play their cards to blast the hero with ice rays or encourage their comrades to fight harder or rest up and try to recover from the recent ass-whipping the villain has handed out.

The final round, and the thing that grounds the battle and makes it feel like you're somewhere doing something instead of battling in some nebulous gray zone, is when the environment plays. The villain may have his base on Mars, but that doesn't mean Mars works for him. The self-destruct sequence might begin counting down, and even Baron Blade will be in trouble if the whole place blows up. Or the red dust could get into everything and gum up the works in your gyro-salad shooter. Or the Baron might reprogram his Rhoomba to shoot anything it bumps into, which seems like a good idea until he blows up his sofa and puts a hole right through his big-screen TV.

Now, everybody knows that no comic book villain is ever defeated after just one beatdown, and when a really tough bad guy takes a serious beating, he's going to have to step up his game. He'll jump into his power armor or transform into his more deadly form or put on some inspirational 80s music and strap a headband around his forehead, and then come out to kick some serious hero ass. This is simulated by a ridiculously easy mechanic - after the first beating, you flip over the villain's card.

Sentinels of the Multiverse enthusiastically embraces its comic book roots by giving you ten different heroes, four different villains and four places to duke it out, but it also embraces its small press origins by having a lot of things that will bother you. That's how you know it's small press, because a big company would have spent the extra money to fix those problems. For instance, you have to track hits for your heroes and villains and minions and mobile weapons platforms and attacking velociraptors, and the game recommends you keep pen and paper handy. So do I, because you're going to be doing a lot of adding and subtracting and it's going to get impossible to remember how everyone is feeling. A board with numerical tracks for heroes and villains would have been super nice, though you can use dice for evil robots, because they're usually really easy to knock down.

Another problem is how many things there are to remember. You'll want a conductor to run the game for you, so that he can run down every step and make sure you don't forget to advance the clock on the self-destruct sequence, or give Ra his damage for overloading his fire-blasting skills, or get distracted by Wonder Woman if she forgets that her plane is invisible when she's changing her super bra. You'll have to count the cards in Baron Blade's discard pile and keep track of how many environment cards are all acting at the same time. Basically, there's a lot to follow, and it can get confusing.

The most exciting part of the game, whacking things, is sadly also encumbered by the need to remember every modifier to your punch. Imagine this exchange:

"Evil Overlord, I will hit you with my power fist! It will do six points of damage!
"But Bunker, I am wearing a personal force field, so you only do four points!"
"Aha, Overlord, you forgot that I have had Legacy telling me how good I look in cotton trousers, and so my added self-esteem does you one extra!"
"Blast, Bunker, I forgot about Legacy's motivational tapes!"
"So did I, until just now! I can't figure out why I keep ending every sentence with an exclamation point!"
"Because it's a comic book, you self-righteous asshat!"

I won't pretend that the foibles present in Sentinels of the Multiverse did not bother us as we played, but I can tell you that we unequivocally had a very good time in spite of them. I stole some dice out of some very bad games to track hits for minions, kept the rulebook handy to remember the turn order, and frequently wound time backward to remember to fix whatever I had forgotten before. We got past it, and enjoyed the romping story of a team of super-powered warriors throwing a beating on evil and saving the world.

It's not a slick game, by any measure that matters, but Sentinels of the Multiverse is very entertaining. The art is very cool, with a style that resembles modern superhero cartoons and some engaging graphic design. For instance, each hero gets a card for his hero that tells him how many hits he has and what powers he can wield every turn, and these cards look like comic book covers, including having the hits look like the issue number. It's clever and fun and cooperatively entertaining, and more than any other superhero game I've played, actually feels like a comic book battle. There's a lot to be said for a game that brings home the bacon when it comes to the theme, and if you've been looking for a good supers game, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Sentinels of the Multiverse.

Summary

2-5 players

Pros:
Story plays out naturally, doesn't feel forced, and is a blast to experience
Easy to play, without too many complicated rules
Great art really enhances the theme
Delivers the feel of a comic book battle extraordinaire
With a wide selection of heroes, villains and environments, provides tons of replayability

Cons:
Lots of irritating little things to remember
Hit tracking feels sloppy
Overall lack of polish
Doesn't scale - 2 players will get their asses kicked, 5 will clean up before lunch is ready

Sentinels of the Multiverse goes for forty clams at the publisher's site, which might seem steep until you see the hundreds of cards in the box. You can pick up a copy here, and start kicking some villain ass:
http://www.sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/store

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Kids Game Review - Connect 4 Launchers

I like games designed for kids. There is often a simple and grin-inducing pleasure in playing a game meant to entertain people who eat paste in art class. Not only that, but when I was a kid, Connect 4 was one of my favorites. It was smart without being complicated, yet simple without being condescending. It helped that I won a lot.

This year, Hasbro is breaking out a new version of Connect 4. This one doesn't have the old vertical board where you drop checkers down from above. In this version, you shoot your checkers like a carnival game, only if you win, you don't get the giant stuffed panda. There are a bunch of checker-sized buckets, and your goal is to shoot your checkers into the buckets with plastic launchers. It's a little like tic-tac-toe, but you can put out somebody's eye. So I'm in.

Of course, as soon as I got Connect 4 Launchers (they went with an obvious name, so as not to confuse children who still can't spell their own names), I took it out and spent an hour honing my checker-launching skills. I had pets to feed, dinner to cook, laundry to wash and paying work to do, but I still blew an hour of my night firing checkers into plastic buckets. I almost said I wasted that time, but that would be wrong. I loved every minute of it.

It gets even better if you're playing against someone else, because then it's a frantic free-for-all. You need to keep your nerves calm, or you'll fall prey to the panic that builds up when your opponent is landing shot after shot and all of yours keep zooming off the table. You need to steady yourself, take careful aim, and shoot your opponent in the nose. See how good his aim is when he's snorting a plastic checker!

If you can't stand the pressure of constantly firing plastic discs into the air as fast as you can while your eight-year-old laughs at your completely lack of coordination and self-control, you can always try out the advanced rules. In these only-slightly-more-intelligent rules, you take turns shooting your plastic hoops. That alone is not inherently more clever, because all it means is that you've slowed down the game (which is a good idea if your advanced years have given your children an unfair edge).

What makes the advanced rules a little more clever is that some of the checkers now have special powers. If you use a special power checker, you might be able to take another turn, or clear out a big piece of the board, or take your opponent's checkers out of their buckets and stymie his four-in-a-row. This is also nice to do if your children are talking too much smack, which they probably are if they are anything like my kids.

Any way you play it, Connect 4 Launchers is a fun little game. It's not a cerebral thinking-man's exercise, and you won't be managing any resources or employing the cunning tactics that you have to use every day so your children keep thinking you're smarter than they are (this will become essential when they become teenagers, as they will undoubtedly assume they are smarter than you are until you beat them mercilessly in a battle of wits). It is, however, a riotous, action-packed good time that will have you laughing and firing plastic doodads as fast as you can reload and aim. Blind-firing won't do you any good, so you'll have to have some wits about you, but it's still a great excuse to let your mind regress to when you thought it was still a good idea to make fake pies out of schoolyard mud.

Summary

2 players, or 4 if you decide to play in teams

Pros:
Dexterity games are supposed to be this much fun
Easy to set up, easy to store, easy to play
Your kids will play with this for at least 15 minutes, which is three times as long as you got out of the last GI Joe action figure you bought

Cons:
Good luck finding all those checkers after your spasmodic pre-teen shoots them all over the kitchen

It should probably be pretty obvious that Noble Knight Games isn't carrying this game. But you can get it from Toys-R-Us real cheap:
http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=11825651

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Book Series Review - Song of Ice and Fire

I was going to write this review last night, but I was busy. Then I was going to write it today, and I was busy again. So I'm finally getting to it, and I have to confess what I was doing when I was so busy - I was reading a book.

For those of you who have not managed to hear all the hubbub about A Song of Ice and Fire, possibly because you live in the hills of Kentucky and only have Internet access when you vacation in a town with more people than pigs, this is a fantasy series that has gotten so much critical acclaim that HBO decided to turn it into a TV show. It's a fictional land with fictional people and an absolutely ludicrous amount of killing, maiming and sexual deviancy. So it's pretty entertaining.

My wife bought me the first book, A Game of Thrones, for Christmas a few years ago. I had never even heard of it, but two weeks later I was out buying the next two. Then I had to wait for the fourth book, and then I had to wait five years for the fifth, because George RR Martin was off somewhere doing lines of cocaine off the backsides of Thai hookers. He had enough time to work on the TV show, apparently, but not enough to write the damned book.

The thing about the Song of Ice and Fire series is that it's not fantasy the way you're used to it. You're used to elves and orcs and fireball-tossing wizards, and that's not in here (I should note that there are dwarfs, but they prefer to be called 'little people'). What is in here is a huge, well-developed world with an enormous history and just enough magic that when you see it, you'll end up telling yourself there's a logical explanation for it. The tale spins out more like a deeply engrossing history than you expect in a novel.

What it means to follow a fantastical history is that all the elements you expect to see in a novel are gone. There's great story-telling, sure, but there are no bad guys getting their just rewards or happy endings that tie up everything with a neat little bow. There are no characters with plot protection, and nobody gets killed just to ramp up the tension. Just as history doesn't care if you were really attached to Abe Lincoln, George Martin writes a story that is intensely believable because anyone can die at any time for any reason. A little like real life.

In fact, as you progress from A Game of Thrones to A Clash of Kings and into A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, you'll begin to really realize that the heroes can die, the villains can win, and a happy ending for most of the characters would be to survive until the book is over. If you're constantly waiting for justice to prevail and good to overcome evil, go read those Harry Potter books again. This is not a story for kids.

It's especially not a child's bedtime story because apart from all the death and war and what-not, A Song of Ice and Fire includes an amount of nearly pornographic material that borders on the illegal. There are 14-year-old girls getting knocked up by grown men, brothers sleeping with sisters, and more than one description of a very ugly penis (although Martin always calls it a 'member', like the pecker was in a rotary club).

One big-shot book reviewer said that Martin is the American Tolkien. If that's true, then America should be a little embarrassed. These books are fantastic, and I find them exceptionally enjoyable, and I dare say I'm hooked. I've read each of them at least twice (except for the one I'm reading now), and they're some of the best fantasy I've ever read. I'm wishing I was done with this review so I could go back and read more.

But they're not Tolkien. For one thing, Tolkien was far more original. Since the Middle Earth saga, every fantasy tale starts with Tolkien and goes from there. Tolkien is the gold standard for fantasy, because his creations were so compelling, so exciting, so imaginative that nobody has been able to top them. Martin obviously starts with Tolkien and goes from there. Before Martin and every other fantasy writer, there was Tolkien. Before Tolkien, all we had was The Brothers Grimm.

For another thing, Tolkien wrote stories that came alive as you read, and he never once had to describe a man's junk to make you interested in the story. There are no salacious tales of lesbian love affairs or underage rapes. Honestly, as I read Martin's books, I tend to believe that he's a pretty twisted old man. It's one thing to have a barbarian warrior deflower a maiden who should still be in junior high. It's another to describe the scene in so much detail that trashy romance novels look like Goosebumps books. There's a reason that HBO made it a TV show, and not, say, the Disney Channel.

I could keep going, but my point is, Martin's books are good, but they are nowhere near as universally accessible as Tolkien, and calling Martin the American Tolkien is either a big nut-kick to America or one hell of a slight to Tolkien. However, while I would not recommend A Song of Ice and Fire to anyone with a weak stomach or sensitivity to explicit sex, I still think they're pretty damned awesome. They're full of political intrigue and thrilling swordplay, exciting chases and mighty battles. From time to time, we even see some actual supernatural phenomena, and it's all the more fascinating because it is so rare.

I could keep talking about how much I love A Song of Ice and Fire, but the fifth book is waiting for me and I can no longer resist. If you want to know how awesome these books really are, you'll have to just go get the first one and see for yourself.

Summary

Pros:
Exceptionally readable and tough to put down
Incredibly believable
Anyone can die. Anyone. Seriously, anyone.

Cons:
Adult to the point of being pornographic
Five books in, and he's still not done

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Board Game Review - Mansions of Madness

There are lots of kinds of games. There are pure mental challenges with bright colors and chunky wooden pieces, but no story at all. There are athletic games that require you to be coordinated and hopefully not very fat. There are cooperative games and card games and dice games. But my favorite games are the ones that tell a story, which is why I have fallen hopelessly in love with Mansions of Madness.

The ironic thing is that I don't really care for the Cthulhu stuff. Lovecraft was a hack. He was imaginative, but he had all the readability of a high school geography textbook, and he made up names for his bad guys by randomly combining consonants and vowels. I can picture these super-villainous denizens of bizarre worlds rising up from their summoning rituals and saying, 'Now feel the wrath of shub… shoobagoober… sheber… well, me!'

But I love a good story, and even more, I love being part of that good story, and that's where Mansions of Madness rocks my face off. A group of gritty investigators will go into a haunted mansion and discover all manner of badness, and one player will be the bad guy who attacks them with zombies and cultists and monsters that look like they were built out of gummy worms. The investigators will go from room to room, exploring and looking for clues, while the bad guy player will use all the powers at his disposal to trap them in the house or eat them or turn them into gibbering lunatics by making them watch hour after hour of Hannah Montana reruns.

When you read the rules for Mansions of Madness, it will at first remind you of Descent or Doom. The bad guy gets threat tokens every turn that he can spend on his nefarious plans, and there are several pages describing combat. Fortunately, however, this is not Descent. For one thing, you don't have to stop every five minutes to figure out what a monster's special power means. For another, there is a lot more for the investigators to do than shoot things.

The funny thing about Mansions of Madness is that while there are 25 pages of rather dense rules and a set-up time that can take 45 minutes, the game is really quite easy to play. Most of the rules describe special cases, like how to defeat the lock on the mysterious suitcase or how to turn on the lights after a monster uses the wires as dental floss. Investigators can block doors to keep monsters on the other side, or use the axe to smash the lock on a door, or sprint madly for the safety of the walk-in refrigerator (where they will unfortunately be eaten by leftover Spam, which as we all know, is made from the meat that the packing plant decides can't be put into hot dogs, and Cthulhu loves to animate tongue meat).

Part of the beauty of the game comes from the meticulous manner in which stories are built. There's enough flavor text in here to choke Gordon Ramsey. Cards describe events as they occur in the house, and those descriptions often provide clues telling the investigators where to search next. Time is not on their side - the bad guy will just keep throwing badness at the heroes, and there's a built-in timer that will eventually result in a loss for everyone playing the game. Heroes will have to hustle to find keys, unlock puzzle boxes, and explore dank basements before the clock strikes two and the house collapses under the weight of its own evilness. Monsters are obstacles that the villain uses to slow and disable the investigators, as opposed to many dungeon-crawl style games, where killing the monsters is why the heroes got out of bed.

A series of cards placed before the game begin will allow the tale to unfold. The heroes might be investigating a missing businessman in his very creepy house, or they might be searching a monastery that has been taken over by a cult. As time progresses, events get more dire, and if the heroes can't uncover the clues that tell them how they win the game, they might just find themselves staying for dinner - as the main course.


The evil keeper is full of dirty tricks, too. He has a deck of trauma cards that he can use to make bad things worse, so when a dog shaped like a tapeworm manages to bite the hero on the leg, the keeper can play a card that maims the investigator and makes him move really slow for a while. The bad guy also gets a deck of mythos cards, and these are even more fun and delightfully nasty. Whenever he has a few extra threat tokens, he can make the lights turn off or make paintings fly off the wall to smack the heroes in the side of the head like a scene from Scooby Doo. These mythos cards are hilariously fun to use, though the investigators might not be as excited about them when the two-gun gumshoe goes raving mad from sheer terror as unseen voices call his name and remind him that he forgot to turn off the iron.

Plus all kinds of dark secrets are hidden in the house. As the investigators hunt for clues, they'll uncover bodies that rise up and chase them, journal entries penned by madmen, and dark rituals that will turn them against each other. Their ultimate goal is to uncover enough clues to figure out what they need to do to defeat the evil that lurks in the darkness, but along the way they might take the time out to search empty rooms for weapons or spells or collectible Hot Wheels cars. Waste too much time, though, and the keeper will have time to ramp up, and you might find yourself facing more grief than you can handle.

Mansions of Madness is so much fun, I wish I didn't have any complaints. Unfortunately, it's a Fantasy Flight game, and that means there are problems. I'm beginning to think Fantasy Flight is practicing branding to identify themselves with a handful of very specific errors. For one thing, there are approximately 725,000 tiny pieces of cardboard in the box (once you finish punching them all out, which will take you slightly less than one lunar year). That's a pain in the ass. Here's a suggestion for future game designers - more pieces does not mean a better game. Sometimes it just means there's a lot more to clean up.

I can get past a whole mess of pieces, but I really do wish Fantasy Flight didn't absolutely require an updated FAQ every time they release a game. Sometimes these FAQs come out before the game even hits stores, because it takes almost no time to start finding all the mistakes and oversights in the rules. In this case, there's a little piece of paper right in the box that describes a number of errors they made before they sent the rules to print. There are even updated cards that replace cards they got wrong the first time. And now they're on a second printing, and they fixed the mistakes from the first version. The second version, however, has all new mistakes.

So if you like story games that aren't hard to play, here's what you need to do:

1) Schedule a day off work that you can spend punching the game, organizing the pieces and learning the rules.
2) Read up on the FAQ and find out what mistakes other people have made, so that when you play, you can make completely different mistakes.

It's a pain in the ass to keep up with Fantasy Flight's miserable quality control, but when you play Mansions of Madness, it will be totally worth the effort. This game is capital F U N fun. It's equal parts competitive free-for-all and story-telling experience, and when you're done, you'll look over the gigantic pile of miniatures and room tiles and cards and teeny tiny cardboard bits and say, 'now, which of you unlucky bastards has to put this away?'

Summary

2-5 players

Pros:
Exciting story-telling experience
Easy to play in spite of the 25-page rulebook
An amazing amount of theme and flavor
Simply remarkable components

Cons:
Mistakes will send you to the Internet to see what you're doing wrong
Rules will consume a couple hours of your life
Humongous number of little cardboard pieces

I can't wait to play Mansions of Madness again. This could be the template for all manner of great story-telling games. You really should run over to Noble Knight Games and pick up a copy:
GO CRAZY

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Board Game Review - Astra Titanus

Last week, I reviewed the ridiculously fun Battleship Galaxies. So it's almost fitting that this week, I should review Astra Titanus, another space battle game. And it's a great time for it because it allows me to compare and contrast the Hasbro big box space extravaganza with the Victory Point plastic bag full of cardstock.

The biggest elephant in the room, of course, is that Astra Titanus comes in an oversized sandwich bag, and thus does not have space for actual model spaceships. Model spaceships would have made the game a heck of a lot more awesome, but they would not have fit in the bag unless they were very, very small, and that would effectively eliminate their cool factor. The spaceships in Astra Titanus are printed on cardboard sheets so you can punch them out and have square ships. Not as awesome as it sounds. And I doubt it sounds awesome.

Battleship Galaxies is a two-player game of asymmetrical but balanced enemy forces. Astra Titanus is a one-player game where you control a huge fleet of space ships as they head out to fight the Titan, a super-huge world-killer ship that will blow up your guys left and right as it heads toward your moon bases. It's not balanced at all, but it's not supposed to be, so that's OK.

The Titan ships (they're different, depending on the scenario you choose) are controlled by a deck of cards, so every turn that they move, you draw one and figure out where the bad guy goes. Then you can move your ships in and try to blast the big bastard, and then if he's still alive (and he will be alive, because he's a freaking monster), he will blow up a bunch of your ships. It's the classic quantity versus quality scenario.

There are a few things that make this a pretty decent solo game. For starters, when you move your ships, you won't be able to use them that turn, because they're all in hyperspace or portable wormholes or Narnia. They can't be shot, they can't fire, and they can't do anything until they climb back out of the wardrobe. So you have to plan pretty well, because if you keep having to move your ships, you'll never be able to shoot the bad guy.

Another thing that makes this interesting is the ability to combine fire. You'll have to balance your willingness to make a lot of separate attacks with your ability to make just one or two strong attacks. Since even the weakest titan is going to require dozens of hits before it takes a dirt nap, you'll need to hit it fast. It advances every turn (slowing down as you blow up its interstellar space engines), so it helps to place your ships so that the maximum number of ships will have a shot at it. Of course, since the titan moves before you can shoot, you have to place your ships very carefully and hope the titan doesn't make a crazy zig-zag and run right into your heavy carrier, which will smash it to pieces without making a dent in the big bruiser.

If Astra Titanus were a big-box board game, and if it came with plastic spaceships and a big sturdy hex map, I think it would sell pretty damned well. It's a little unfortunate that you can only play it solo, because it could be fun against an opponent, but it's still a very interesting game. There's not much planning or long-term strategy, but your tactical decisions have a profound impact on your ability to destroy the titan before he blows up your moon base and Obi Wan feels a disturbance in the force.

Sadly, Astra Titanus does not come with a sturdy board or plastic spaceships. It comes with cardboard squares and circles and a hex map printed on a sheet of cardstock, so that I had to put the map under glass if I wanted to move my ships around, because the cardstock kept flipping up and making all my destroyers slide into the battle cruisers. I also got my chocolate into my peanut butter. It was a mess.

I played several scenarios of Astra Titanus when I was testing it, and while I didn't win them all, I did enjoy the game. I don't think I'm likely to play it again, though. It's not that it's a complete dud, exactly. It's more the fact that I've got Battleship Galaxies, and it's way more fun, and I can play with two players, and it actually does have plastic spaceships and a sturdy space map. I don't play solo games very often, because I have a television and a Netflix account.

So, in summary, Astra Titanus is not Battleship Galaxies, and will not be replacing it any time soon. It isn't bad, if you want to play a game all by yourself using ugly cardboard squares on a flimsy map. I don't, though.

Summary

1 player who does not have a television or Netflix account

Pros:
Clever tactical options
Plays fast and makes sense
Intuitive and exciting
Challenging, which is impressive in a solo game

Cons:
Solo only
Cardboard squares and a flimsy map

If you are a shut-in with no access to actual entertainment, you can go here and get a copy of Astra Titanus:
I'M SORRY YOU DON'T HAVE ANY FRIENDS

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