Gaming resolutions for 2020

Ok so I notice that this blog hasn't had any new posts for over three years. Personally I've had some life changing events happen to me, and real life has definitely taken precedent. As for the other contributors. Well. I believe they all died during an acrimonious game of Battlestar Galactica.

Nonetheless I fully intend to start to fill out this thing a bit more. Even if it's just me posting.

It being the new year imminently, it's a good time to take stock and make some resolutions I fully intend to keep, even though its inevitable I will fail utterly.

Firstly where am I hobby wise?

Well I managed to get the kickstarter monkey off my back of late. I backed 7 projects last year (believe me that is good compared to previous years) consisting of 2 board games, a small card game, an rpg book, and 3 small minis kickstarters. In particular I think I am finally over the big overblown minis heavy stuff.

Board game wise I am pretty set. I will occasionally buy a new game if it appeals but I am lucky that between my regular board game group and Cabincon, the annual get together where 20 odd of us get together in a big house for a week, I am able to play a lot of games which really scratch that itch for me. Big news this year was that I managed to have a board games night with some of my old school friends, none of whom are gamers really, and it went down well. So much so that I've had some of them ask when the next one is. This will also let me play some of my more neglected games.

Minis are my issue. I have always been prone to the lure of the ooh shiny. Starter sets are a particular issue. I've managed to avoid buying into new systems that caught my eye (Cruel Seas/Black Seas, Dredd, Mortal Gods and 7TV have tested me in the last year or so) but I still have far too many projects on the go. I've started to reverse this by selling my untouched Necromunda stuff to a friend. I fully intend to concentrate on my unfinished projects in 2020 and try and actually get some done.

So in order to do this I am allowing myself ZERO HOBBY BUDGET. Yes that's right. Although...

Well... That's not completely practical. So I am going to allow myself to buy essentials, but that will be subject to a cooling off period. No more impulse buys (I bought an entire Laeteri Elf Runewars army because it was 'a bargain') everything has to be accounted for.

Also 2020 sees the release of Oathmark and Muskets and Tomahawks 2. I have minis for both games so you know. Its just books...

We will see how I go. I intend to start using this blog again and will start putting some project logs up throughout the year.

Until then. Happy new year Y'all. Happy gaming.

You remind me of the Babe...Jim Henson's Labyrinth (2016) board game review

Jim Henson's Labyrinth (2016) -River Horse Games

 Jim Henson's Labyrinth was a big film for me as a child One I'd always watch if it was on TV and a film I've owned on both VHS, DVD and BluRay. Its a film that I bonded with my fiancee over when we first started seeing each other. It has endured from childhood to adulthood as one of my favourite films. I also love board games so when I heard that there was to be a Labyrinth board game, with official Jim Henson Creature shop miniatures I was always going to buy it. Well I have it now, I have played it and I have also read a few unfavourable reviews on sites like Boardgamegeek. Are these fair?

What is best in life? Conan- Monolith games (2016)

Conan- Monolith Games (2016)

Back in January 2015, a time of high adventure, a game hit kickstarter that promised beautiful minis and an authentic representation of the world of Robert E Howards Conan the Cimmerian, backed up with a game that had some of the biggest names in boardgaming attached. That game was Conan by Monolith games. It went on to be one of the largest grossing tabletop game kickstarters and delivered last month some monumental boxes full to the brim with stuff, and things. But are these good things and fine stuff? The game is not without its controversies, more of which later, but more importantly, did it deliver on its promises?

A big box of stuff

Game Review - Koi-koi Hanafuda

 In news that will not surprise anyone I am once again reviewing a relatively obscure game from Japan. However, it is not based on anime, does not have an obtuse and impenetrable theme and so is probably quite good and recommendable to people who aren't weird cartoon people. The game is Hanafuda, a traditional card game from the 1800s designed to be intentionally obscure and unusual to get around restrictions on gambling. If you are interested in learning how this game works, there is a cheap and readily-available computer version on Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/app/364930/) which costs a mere £6.99 at the time of this article's publication.

The Witches - Board Game Review

The Witches, a game by Martin Wallace, was published in 2013 so I may be a little late to the party with this review, but I feel like this game is somewhat underrated. As something that I will almost always suggest to play whenever we have a gaming session with 3 or 4 people I wanted to put my thoughts about it down in writing.

Dead of Winter

By Charles Etheridge-Nunn

It’s the middle of winter and you’re alone in an abandoned school, scavenging for supplies. It’s bitterly cold but you made it out this far. Your eyes catch on something metallic, barely visible in the heavy snow. It’s a truck. You draw closer and realise it’s still intact. Sod the school, you could take drive it back to camp and harvest the fuel… at least you could if not for the zombies. They’re everywhere, the looming reminder of your own mortality. You’re faced with a simple choice; do you drive the truck home and draw all the local zombies to your camp… or do you sigh that such dreams are beyond you and safely rummage through the school without drawing any more attention to you or the camp?
Or how about this.
In all the desolation you see a horse. A real horse! It’s like something out of a dream after so long with your faithful dog Sparky as the only animal in the community. You’re faced with a choice. Do you ride the horse… or do you come back from your hunt with a lot of meat to feed your camp?

Dead of Winter is a zombie game. I know, I know, “Yawn, zombie games are so 2010, Zombies!!! is a rubbish game and Last Night on Earth is wildly and sporadically unbalanced” but this isn’t that kind of zombie game.

I’ve always felt that the best zombie films are ones where the zombies are an elemental force rather than a gore-splattered killing machines. The zombies are what drive people to desperate decisions, what brings a community together and turns them against each other, all because if you let your guard down for a single second then you’re dead. They heighten the drama and they show people what kind of human beings they really are, for better or worse.

Dead of Winter is that kind of zombie game.

Dead of Winter is a semi-cooperative game about a community of people trying to survive the winter in a little community filled with helpful (and helpless) souls. Together everyone has one main goal which might be looking for a cure to the zombie virus or simply living through eight weeks of winter. The main goals all have different play lengths and ‘hardcore’ modes just in case the board wasn’t kicking your arse enough.

To shake up the players’ goals however is a secret objective each of them is given at the start of the game. So while the community needs to clear the streets of zombies and board everything up, you might be busily trying to hoard medicine or fuel, you might be building a zombie-killing robot or trying to keep your people free from germs by having them not take any wounds. Each player only wins if they complete the main objective AND the secret objective, so no matter how selfless you want to be there’s always that nagging voice in your head which says you need to hoard and do terrible things for the sake of your own slice of the community. I’ve had points in multiple games where I’ve had to decide whether I should give up on my own success to help everyone else have a chance at winning. The first time I did and it was the right move; I lost but the others had a chance at victory. The second time, victory landed in my lap seconds before I would have given up on my slim chances of success. I played a game where three people had objectives which involved medicine, meaning if any of them went too selfishly they would cost the others their win… in the end they all helped the community and all lost their own goals. Other players may not be so generous as my players. Boardgamegeek have had threads about people’s purposeful sabotage of the other players once they realise they can’t succeed at their own goal, something I’m pleased to say most of my group couldn’t understand the thinking behind.

So that’s the fun of the co-operative side, I’m drooling and already wanting to dive into the game and I’ve not even told you how it works, so let’s get to that.

Each player controls a couple of characters, a number which might grow or dwindle depending on your actions. Each turn you get an amount of action dice equal to the number of characters you control plus one. These dice are used for searching, attacking, putting up barricades and removing the filth which threatens to drown your home if you play too many cards. There are other actions like trading resources, playing cards or moving which don’t take dice so even with one active character you’ve got a lot you can do.

Aside from sending your people out of the community to help your goal and the community’s goal, you also need to prevent a crisis which will pop up every turn. EVERY TURN. One time, the zombies are knocking the walls of your home down and you all need to put junk into the crisis. Another turn, maybe food has spoilt so you need to have even more than the amount of food you have to spend every turn to keep your people from starving. Oh yeah, your people will starve. They will also bring zombies to the gates every turn. People are jerks like that and bring mess to your camp every damn turn.

If you’re moving people out of your camp or fight zombies who are knocking at your door you’ll have to roll the exposure die. This is King Bastard of all the dice:

It’s a d12 and I’ve already made my opinion on those clear. If you move then you complete the movement and roll the exposure die. If you attack a zombie you spend an action die with a result of your character’s attack skill, trash the zombie and roll for exposure.

On a blank side, you’re safe. On a pointy skull you’ve taken a wound, three of those bad boys and you’re dead. A snowflake skull is a frostbite wound which will only get worse every turn without treatment. Again, three of any type of wound will murder you. Then there’s the tooth symbol which only appears on one side and yet keeps turning up way more often than it damn well should.
It means your survivor has been bitten and here’s an example of that.

It’s turn one and the camp is crowded, ten players’ survivors and five helpless survivors. There are zombies on every space of our gates so if one zombie gets added (and seven will appear at the end of the turn) then we lose a person per zombie which couldn’t be placed. That would be the seven lowest influence people out of ten, starting with one of my characters, Sparky the stunt dog, who had the lowest influence in the game. 10. Worse even than Forest Plum, the creepy mall Santa.

We need to kill a lot of zombies to lessen the casualties by seven, ideally. Another player has Olivia, the Doctor. He decides to use her to attack one of the zombies at the gates, removes an action die, takes the zombie off the board and rolls for exposure. It’s a tooth. Olivia is instantly dead. Gone. Then we pick the lowest influence person, Sparky, who then has to either die instantly or risk dying and passing the infection on. If he does that then the next one dies or rolls and so on. 
(As a little addendum, Sparky can’t get bit as he’s a dog, something we know now but at the time we lost a fifth of our forces and sent as many of our people outside of the colony so fewer zombies would be added at the end of the turn, we would have lost the mall Santa instead of the dog.)

Dead of Night

A horror movie role-playing game.

The sun’s setting and you’re on your way to the camp site. You had tents, booze and a flimsy excuse about school work up on that old Indian burial site. No one cared about the work, or the warnings from the old man at the gas station, instead you pitched the tents, started playing loud music and drinking.

Now it’s the dead of night and a noise broke you out of slumber. Was it a scream? It’s not worth waking your girlfriend or getting a weapon. It’s probably just a coyote. That’s your thought until you undo the zip and see the slathering jaws of the creature, larger than any wolf you’ve ever seen. You scream…

Dead of Night is a game which touts itself as a ‘campfire roleplaying game’. It is played with minimal rules and only two dice, passed around like a talking stick. The first edition was small enough to fit in a pocket and charmingly ugly. The second has more finesse, a little less about the portability, but far better than the original.

Dead of Night is meant for single role-playing sessions. There’s nothing saying it can’t be a series, but Dead of Night is the kind of game which highlights the the moment a player’s character is at risk of death or bring turned into a monster. The system replicates the drama of a horror movie, and that’s its intent.

The priest asks, “Does anyone here object to the union of…”

He is cut off as shadow beasts charge through the groom’s side of the church, ripping them to pieces. The bride faints. The groom runs away, only to be torn apart by one of the beasts who are now entering from behind the altar.

What do you do?

The book contains several plot hooks in the style of any horror movie you’ve seen in the past or present. It could be a Friday the 13th style slasher flick, a strange body horror movie, a zombie invasion or a modern Saw-type movie. The book lists examples and gives example stories for each genre, sometimes with convincing movie posters for them. In the core book are four full adventures but Steampower Publishing site has made a few more including hooks on the back of fake movie poster postcards and the tools for building your own game are immense.

Once the storyteller has picked or created their own game, the players make characters. This is a quick process, so that you can make characters on the night and replace any dead characters pretty easily.

Each character has eight stats, each paired off (Identify/Obscure, Persuade/Dissuade, Escape/Pursue, Assault/Protect) and each pair totalling ten points. That means if you’re good at attacking you’re bad at defending. There are ways to mitigate this, including sacrificing points from both to gain an even higher-rated speciality. For instance you could have Identify 6 & Obscure 4, but if you wanted some flavour to your character an an identifiable skill you could change that to: Identify 5, Obscure 3, Expert Tracker 7.

Whatever stats you have, you roll 2d10 and aim high. Normally a 15 will get you the result, but the storyteller might make things easier or harder for you depending on the roll. And don’t roll a 13. Whatever you do, don’t roll a 13.

There’s only one pair of dice to use, and once you’ve rolled them, you’re not allowed to roll again until someone else has. This way people can’t dominate the scenes and everyone gets a turn. This helps keep the pace and makes scenes really frantic when players are alone and can’t act again until someone else has narrated something and rolled a dice. The ‘campfire game’ mentality really speaks to this, creating a kind of ‘talking stick’ of the dice.

Since the zombies had eaten everyone else in Parliament, James had kept calling himself Prime Minister. His driver, Doug, bore the brunt of most of his bad behaviour. James wanted to keep the journalists on his side, after all.

Once the bunker doors opened, they had seen the wreckage London had been left in.

“We need to get out of here,” James said. “Go somewhere safe. With food. Bring the car round, Dougie, old boy.”

Doug sighed and started the walk down to the car park. The limo was still there, in the distance. The only car untouched, probably because it was such a bad choice of escape vehicle. He still didn’t believe this whole ‘zombie’ thing. It was probably just immigrants, like the tabloids always said. Or loony left-wingers. Or hoodies.

The car park’s lights flickered. Broken, like everything else in this country, he thought. As he got closer, he saw a shadow, then another. There were people down here. Other survivors, possibly?

“Hello?” he called out. Then louder, “Hello? Can you hear me?”

The shadows stopped, and he heard the noises of footsteps shuffling towards him.

I’ve mentioned previously about my love of elegant mechanics in games, how I like it when they reflect the behaviours of the medium they’re representing. In Dead of Night the main currency is Survival Points. You start with five, and they go down the more you’re attacked. If you see something man was not meant to see, if you’re slashed by a werewolf claw, then you lose a survival point. If you’re out of them, then you’re out of the game.

You can earn Survival Points back, though. If you act out a horror trope, you earn a Survival Point. Call out to the zombies, alerting them. Drop the weapon and run after you successfully hit a monster. Say the words, “It’s just the cat” or “I’ll be right back.” Each of these could earn you some Survival Points. The game is essentially a balancing act between acting like all those awful horror movie character tropes and surviving being in an awful horror movie.

Survival Points aren’t just health either. They can add dice to your roll, they can even allow you to switch your paired stats for a moment. That way the nerd who’s good at defending himself but not attacking might rage out and start laying into the axe murderer long enough for the cheerleaders to escape. You can also use Survival Points to find an essential item in the nick of time. It’s costly, as that’s potentially your character’s life you’re gambling, but it might be worth it. In a game against werewolves, one player was a former dance superstar who had become a drama teacher. He was on one Survival Point as the werewolf closed in on him and decided to use his final piece of health to have his treasured pair of silver tap shoes in his bag. He plunged one into the face of the werewolf, sacrificing himself for the greater good.

They had secured the press room. The snow was thicker than they had ever seen before, and somewhere out there were the creatures. They were scientists once, but no more. Each one killed by the cold and raised into those things.

“We need to get out there, get the fuel for the coach. Then we can escape.”

The survivors nodded, all but the last of the scientists. He kept to the back of the group, clutching his hand. He felt cold, too cold. His fingers were breaking apart at the tips, with nothing but ice and bone underneath. The illness had to be hidden from the others, or if any of them found out, he would have to kill them…

Dead of Night is a really simple system, and the Survival Point currency is elegant in its portrayal of the behaviour of horror movie characters. Choices are difficult and players are often forced into strange and genius decisions. The book has several modifications to the system according to the kind of game you’re playing.

One modification which I really like is conversion. In Ice Station Zero, players can be infected by the ice zombies. I used red poker chips for Survival Points, but when an ice zombie hit a player, there was a chance they would be infected. An infected player would replace a red poker chip with a blue one. The blue chips were Survival Points the players couldn’t use. Once a player had more of the blue chips than the red ones, they were zombies. As the chips grew, my players started acting oddly, slower, more used to the cold. Oddly entranced by it. When the characters went full zombie, I let the players remain in control of them. The same with the werewolf game. The cheerleader and the nerd survived the werewolves, while one player failed to fight off his infection and gave in to his wolfy impulses. No one survived Ice Station Zero. It’s one of the few times a total party kill (TPK) is acceptable. As the final human player blew up the coach which had been surrounded by ice zombies, it felt like an acceptable ending to the ‘horror movie’ we’d been playing. The camera pulled away from the shot of the burning coach and the ruined ice station. They’d saved the world but it had cost them their lives.

Dead of Night is a great convention game as it doesn’t last long and encourages hasty, awful decision-making. In a really deadly game like this one, there’s a risk of killing people in an unsatisfactory manner. The Survival Point currency can often get around this problem and there aren’t often instant kills without people knowing them. If you want a fun horror game which replicates the most serious and silly tropes of the genre, this is definitely one of the best light games to reflect all of that.

Dead of Night can be found at Drive Thru RPG or ordered through your friendly local game store.