I have always been aware of Broadsides and Boarding Parties (B&P) by Milton Bradley. From the first time I laid eyes on the large plastic ships with masts that stick up over a foot off the game table I became filled with a yearning desire to play and own the game. Appealing to the plastic-whore inside of me I’ve been keeping an eye out hoping to find a copy for a reasonable price for some time. Over that time I’ve seen copies pop up on eBay or at local game auctions but the price was always driven higher than I was willing to spend at the time, but recently I was able to finalize a trade which brought a pretty good copy of the game into my possession. As I unpacked the parcel and started playing with all the plastic bits, I felt as giddy as I did on Christmas about fifteen years back when I opened up BattleMasters for the first time.

That night I ripped into the rules because I just had to know how to put these great toys to use. And it is then that my heart and excitement started to sink. I had heard that the game was a fairly simple affair so I wasn’t expecting a whole lot of depth or complexity but being part of the GameMaster Series I was expecting more than what I was reading.

The game takes place over two phases the Broadside Phase and the Boarding Party Phase. During the Broadside phase players use small little ships to sail around the map which details a small area of sea spattered with a few islands. Superimposed on the map is a dot grid with lines connecting at ninety and forty five degree angles creating eight directions out of each point and these points and lines determine movement and facing. During this phase players move around the map by using a plotting system where each player takes three cards from their movement deck, places them face down in the order they want to execute the moves. Similar to systems used in Space Alert and Robo Rally. The movement options are Move Forward, Stand Still, Turn Port and Turn Starboard.

Once players have selected their movement for the turn one card at a time is flipped over and players move their ship according to the card selected. This process is then repeated for the next two cards. But, if the two ships land on adjacent and connected dots after a card flip it is possible for both ships to open up with their cannons and try to pepper the enemy to weaken them up before the Boarding Party portion of the game. Depending on the facing of the ships in relation to each other determines how many shots each ship will get on the other. Once the number of shots is determined players select which area of the ship they want to target (there are eight “zones” that can be attacked). Once a player selects the zone they roll a dice and depending on what they roll the shots can can cause masts to be blown off, crew members killed, cannons destroyed, structural damage to the ship or just harmlessly plonk into the sea.

This dance between the two ships goes on for a while but at some point the chances are high that these two ships will meet in the same dot on the map as they jockey for the better firing angle. When this happens the Broadside portion of the game ends and the Boarding Parties portion beings. The map where the smaller ships were sailing around is cleared, masts removed from the large ships which are then placed next to each other with an orientation dependent on how the ships collided with one another. During this phase players move their crew members around the deck and over onto their opponent’s ship all with the effort of killing the opposing captain in hand to hand combat.

Players get three moves a turn which can be divided between various crew members or used to move one crew member three spaces. After a player has conduced their three moves combat takes place with each side rolling a dice and adding to the roll the difference in crew strength. For example if one side had three crew members and the other side had one the side with three would add +2 to their dice roll. The losing side removes a crew member. The differential in crew is calculated again, more dice are rolled and this process is continued until one side is eliminated from the space. Players then go back and forth with players executing three moves and rolling for combat until one side’s captain is slain - The winner being the surviving captain.

As I mentioned when I first started to read the rules I was less than impressed and a ball of regret started to form. I wasn’t sure if I made the right decision to try to acquire this game and had I read the rules beforehand, even though the toy factor is strong, I’m not sure if it would have overcome how unexcited I was while reading. The lavish production of the game didn’t match the simplicity of the rules and that caused my worry.

Finally though the game hit the table and as our little ships picked up anchors and sailed out of port I started to get excited again. The movement around the map started to get interesting as we closed together. I tried to get inside my opponent’s head trying to out fox and out maneuver him attempting to get maximum firepower from my cannons while minimizing him. As our ships sustained more and more damage the time came for the crews to leave the ships attempting to board the other. The excitement and overall level of fun was rising and eventually we were laughing and chucking dice like there was no tomorrow.

What resulted from that first game was a gaming memory that will last a lifetime and that alone makes any game worth the price in my opinion. The captains of both ships must have been cursed or something before they left port. As our ships first closed within firing range the first volley of the battle was unleashed with me rolling first, killing a couple of crew members as well as destroying a few cannons. “Great opening volley” I thought but then the return fire happened with my captain taking a cannonball to the head. This caused my crew to panic while a new captain was field promoted causing me to miss my next movement phase. This allowed my opponent to sail around me peppering me with 12 more shots.

Some poor dice rolls lessened the damage I should have taken, but I was in pretty poor shape compared to the other ship. And then we finally moved to the same space and the Boarding Parties Phase began. We lined up the ships and lo my opponent’s captain was standing there with one other crew member right across from two of my crew mates. A quick roll to determine who would go first was executed and I won allowing me to move my guys first. As soon as the ships were grappled together these two crew members jumped over their railings giving the opposing captain what for. A few dice rolls later the captain was dead and my plundering of his ship began.

Overall the game is simple and has a heavy dose of luck. The ships and components are a bit problematic especially since some of the places where you’re supposed to balance crew and cannons are tilted. The masts are loose and have a potential of falling at the first strong table knock, but despite the problems of the game and production it more than makes up for it in terms of pure fun. As my captain took a cannonball to the head my opponent struck the pose of the captain figure and acted out the final moments of my captain before his head exploded. We laughed as my dudes jumped the rail and planted a nice shot between the eyes of the opposing captain and laughed as the rest of his crew dropped arms and surrendered.

Yes, I was behind in the game before a few lucky rolls went my way, but what I’ve found is defying the odds, getting a little bit of luck and having game mechanics that allows some improbable things to happen is what got me into gaming in the first place. The laughs we have had and gratification of a positive shared experience, those are the main reasons why I game and Broadsides and Boarding Parties delivers on those experiences. Even though the game box is huge and the components grossly more than what is needed the game is quick at about 45 mins or so and heaps of goofy fun.

Rating: 4 out of 5

‘Til Next Time - Happy Gaming
LvT

Filed under: Broadsides & Boarding Parties, Games - Board Games by LordVonTush
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Have you ever had one of those moments where you just slap your forehead and exclaim “Why didn’t I think of that?” That is the reaction that I had when I read the rules and played Catacombs by Sands of Time Games. Catacombs combines the ease of play found in dexterity games with the rich theme and character of a dungeon crawl. Dexterity games are a genre that I do not get excited about since I like to drink a few brews when gaming and over time my skills diminish so the high skill ones like Crokinole, while fun, have been low on my radar. Others like Elk Fest carry a theme that is so paper thin they just don’t sink their talons into me and keep me interested past a few plays. Catacombs though manages to pull from different genres to create a game that is rich in theme and through the theme creates a dexterity game that doesn’t fall back to “who is the more accurate flicker” that many others fall victim to.

The components to Catacombs are pretty straight forward. There are three two sided game boards, a few decks of cards and tons of wooden discs with stickers that need to be applied. A neat little feature to the gameboards are holes that are cut in them to hold large wooden discs that create obstacles for players to flick and maneuver around. The dungeon is setup by taking the dungeon cards and separating them into their different levels. Starting with ‘0′ and ending at ‘2′ they progressively get harder by putting more or stronger enemies on them. Eight cards are placed face down which form the dungeon. Mixed in at specific areas is a merchant, healer and the final dungeon lord who is the big bad guy who the heroes are tasked with killing.

To start the game the first room card is flipped over (which at this point is a Level 0 room), the proper board is picked and the monsters detailed on the cards removed from the monster pool. The heroes setup first along the back edge and then the monsters setup about a third of the way up the board on the opposite end. Heroes get the first turn and can either move/melee or use a special power. Special powers are things like a bow for the Elf, magic for the Wizard and a berserk attack for the barbarian. A move/melee attack is a simple flicking of the hero and if it hits an enemy it is a melee attack and if they don’t then it is considered a move. When a hero hits an enemy that token is flipped over if the monster has multiple wounds or removed if they have only one or are down to one wound left. Monsters work in the same way with some (though not many) having special attacks or they can do a move/melee attack but the heroes are able to take substantially more damage than a monster.

What I really love about the game is the shooting attacks. Say for example the Elf was shooting their bow, a small yellow disc is placed next to the hero and then flicked. I just like the neat little feature of seeing a projectile actually shoot out of heroes or monsters it just feels more thematic instead of rolling a dice and saying “oh I hit” or “oh I missed”. You actually see the arrow bounce off of a stone pillar or just missing the target by a fraction of an inch. I found that when my wizard misses with a fireball it isn’t my fault even though I flicked the disc, it was the wizards poor mastery of the spell that caused the failed shot.

With all this praise though there are a few issues I see with the game. First is there are times where you want to get a little oomph behind the shot perhaps to cause some dramatic ricochets to try to hit two or more targets, or perhaps you want to try to bounce a fireball off a pillar to hit something you don’t have a straight shot to. What happens is the disc moves so fast that it is sometimes hard to tell what hit what. Was it the actual projectile that hit to cause the enemy to move, or did something else bump into it? It is just hard to tell at times. The second issue I have with the game is the boards don’t have rails or a moat to catch discs that may fall off the board. When a disc does come off the board you’re supposed to place it back on at the location that it came off which sometimes is very tricky to do because it might be a two or three inch area that looks like the area where it came off the board. But on the flip-side some sort of rails along the side would mean that a target that was on the edge that you were shooting for and missed could be the victim of a bounce off the wall making it easier to hit targets.

All in all though there is a bonus to these potential areas of vagueness - It keeps the game light. To play the game cutthroat will lead to constant arguments with what hit what and where things may have left the board and to get caught up in that will do little more than kill the fun of the game. It is a light romp that should take no more than an hour or so to complete.

Overall this is a unique game in my collection and one where I don’t think I’ll ever have the desire to get rid of it. I greatly look forward to future expansions and look forward to a day where I can select my party of four from a good size pool of heroes. I look forward to seeing more monsters added to an already diverse selection. And most importantly I look forward to the many, many more times that I anticipate this game to be played.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

‘Til Next Time - Happy Gaming
LvT

Filed under: Catacombs, Games - Board Games by LordVonTush
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When Horus Heresy was announced I was filled with excitement since Fantasy Flight Games was giving their treatment to the epic battle in the 40k cannon that set the tone for the grim and dark future that is Warhammer 40,000. As photos started to pop up showing the components and the production quality I frothed even more at the mouth. There was no question that HH was a game that I had to play. The day finally came where Deacon’s copy arrived in the mail and soon after the date was set where we ourselves were going to determine the path of mankind in this landmark battle. But then we started playing…

The first thing I noticed after we started to play was that this game was more FFG than GW. Charm and character are words that I use to describe the boardgames of Games Workshop. Fairly straight forward rules with simple, intuitive and quick gameplay were traits to many of their titles. Outside of the 40k theme, FFG removed these intangibles and instead went in the FFG direction which is intricate and interwoven mechanics and procedures. Which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but for me I quickly sensed that my personal peak in terms of interest and enjoyment had already passed during the discovery phase of the game. Now that I had it in front of me and was playing I realized that what I wanted from the game was a GW game updated to modern game design standards through FFG’s resources. What I realized was that HH was a FFG design with a 40k theme and for me that was not what I wanted - It just felt like more of same. The “innovation” that was touted in the promotional material felt very similar to mechanics in their other games like Red November and StarCraft: The Boardgame although some twists had been added.

For me this game was a flop - mentally there was a point where in my head a sound echoed that could only be described as a large-mouth bass slipping off of your hook and hitting the wooden dock creating a thud that was hollow with a hint of a smacking sound from the fish’s slime coat. That sound was my hope and optimism for this game dropping as I realized that the game is not what I was hoping or wanted it to be. With opaque gameplay and layers that I felt were more bloated than Nurgle’s gut, my interest and enthusiasm waned.

Horus Heresy is a fine game and I was expecting it to quickly become one of my favorites and perhaps that is partially to blame for the downfall in my personal opinion. The rules and mechanics work and there are tons of options for players to pursue during the course of the Assault on Terra. And from what I can tell everything functions well and for all practical purposes work. For me though the bloat from things like the strategic map and the piles of piles of cards were just too much. Had the older GW design characteristics like dice and charts and a general lightheartedness been captured it would have fallen more inline with my expectations but as it stands, outside of the 40k theme, there is nothing in the game that really kept my attention or interest. Perhaps with a dozen or more plays this opaque feeling I get from the game would thin out or the cumbersome nature would disappear but even if I committed that much time and effort into this game I just do not think that it would inject any fun into the game which I feel is sorely lacking.

At this point I will admit that I have only played one full game and one partial game so you can take what I said with however many grains of salt you want, but truth be told I just don’t know if I’ll ever summon up the enthusiasm to play the game again. After my first partial play I felt that the only thing pulling me back was the 40k theme and after the full game even that was gone especially when I noticed my mind wandering less than a third of the way through the game to the game we were playing after HH. What I will say about the game is try before you buy as it will likely not meet your expectations if you enjoy the intangible traits that GW games used to have like I do. I wish I had it in me to play the game some more and offer up a full review, but I just don’t.

‘Til Next Time - Happy Gaming
LvT

Filed under: Games - Board Games, Horus Heresy by LordVonTush
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Cooperative games are ones that I find myself drawn to for whatever reason. Part of the appeal I feel is because I trick myself to thinking that the lack of competition between players will get some of my very casual gamer friends to play. The other easy justification is often co-op games can be played solitaire without much in the way of rule changes or things like that. You just have to take on the roll of a few players by yourself. Pandemic appeared to be a game that would deliver a solitaire puzzle as well as be simple enough to allow my casual gamer friends to play. Both of which the game delivered on to an extent.

In Pandemic players become an emergency response specialist team sent to control sudden outbreaks of various diseases that are breaking out at pandemic levels (hence the name) world wide. The game contains a map of the world with various cities called out and lines which denote travel routes (for both the players and the diseases). Some wooden cubes which represent the viruses, diseases are of four different colors which are isolated by regions. For example the US and Europe are afflicted by the blue cubes, the Middle East by black cubes, South America and Africa by yellow cubes and Asia by red cubes. In addition to the disease cubes, there are pawns for the players and two decks of cards. The two decks of cards form the bulk of play.

The first deck forms the Infection Deck. This is just a deck with all the cities and when a card is required to be drawn from this deck the top card is flipped and a cube of the proper color is placed in that city. What is interesting about this deck of cards is that there are points in the game when the discards need to be shuffled (prior to the deck being exhausted). These are shuffled and placed on the top of the draw deck so what happens is you have the same cities popping up over and over again which I thought was a neat little mechanic to detail how a city, once infected, has a difficult time of eradicating the virus from the population.

The second deck is the player deck which contains yet another set of city cards in their respective colors but also has a few special event cards as well as the dreaded Epidemic Cards. Prior to play this deck is stacked to a certain degree. After players are dealt their initial starting hand the deck is divided into equal piles (the number of piles depends on the “difficulty level” being played with more decks being harder). To these decks one Epidemic Card is mixed in. Each deck is then shuffled individually and then stacked on top of each other to form one overall deck. The Epidemic Cards in effect becomes the game clock since the players must satisfy the winning conditions prior to the last card being drawn, and if they don’t they lose as the world succumbs to virus outbreaks of horrendous and devastating scales. Epidemic Cards are also the trigger for that neat little mechanic where the Infection Deck has the discards shuffled and placed on top of that deck.

When I initially bought the game I was having a blast with the game and I really thought it was the cat’s pajamas. It combined simple gameplay with some interesting little twists and was pretty thematic. The rules were simple and easy to teach and for new players to grasp. But after a while it started to lose some of that shine. Each game felt like they were just the same thing over and over again which in reality it was. The only real variation were the roles that players had. As each role has a different bonus they can provide the team, the roles drawn was about the only true variety. Then as players became accustomed to the roles they fell into predictable patterns. Overall the it got a little stale.

On the Brink was then released which introduced new roles for the players to use as well as Virulent Strain which makes one of the disease colors react and grow in different ways as well as the Mutation Challenge which adds in a fifth color (purple) which behaves in a different manor than the other four colors. On the Brink added variety, variation and some unpredictability. What was once getting stale, started to have some differences from game to game. The new roles that were added makes a wide possibility of potential teams with each team having some strengths and weaknesses. The changes to the behaviors of the diseases added some nice twists. In other words to me the game felt complete when playing with On the Brink. Also included in OtB is the BioTerrorist option which has one person running around the board via hidden map setting off bio-chemical weapons in various cities and generally causing havoc. I haven’t had the opportunity to play with this variant yet but I do look forward to when the opportunity presents itself.

Pandemic though is a tough game for me to recommend, especially since it doesn’t feel complete unless you have OtB. I love the simple and easy to grasp rules, but the gameplay at first feels a little opaque and puzzle like. To a new player, the rules aren’t intuitive and often I felt like they were looking to me and my past experience with the game to make their choices for them. Once I thought this game would have mass appeal, but as time wore on I see that this just isn’t the case. In my opinion the game is fun, but not great. What I feel the game really lacks is those moments of disbelief or those moments of exuberance where things go horribly wrong or where the odds are defied causing hoots and hollers in excitement or disbelief, the game just felt level even though the tension builds through the game - It is usually in those moments where I personally derive the most fun from games and unfortunately Pandemic just lacks those moments.  It is one of those games where you should try it at least once because it may be the perfect game, or it could just be boring and procedural depending on your preferences.

Rating: 3 out of 5 (base game); 3.5 out of 5 (with expansion)

‘Til Next time - Happy Gaming
LvT

Filed under: Games - Board Games, Pandemic by LordVonTush
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DungeonQuest is a game where just a few years ago I would have echoed a lot of the criticisms that people have placed at the games feet but what I have realized is that this game delivers just about everything that I want from a quick dungeon crawl game. The game is random, almost to a fault, but that same randomness makes the game endearing and charming. Played with the right group of people with the proper amount of beer pumping in their veins this game is tough to beat in terms of pure fun.

Players take the role of one of four preset adventurers set with the task of diving deep into underground catacombs to raid the Dragon’s Stash and try to make it out alive before night fall all the real baddies come out. Players start the game in one of four corners of a gridded board and draw random tile counters which can be rooms, traps, cave-ins, a portcullis closing behind you and other dastardly things all to hinder, actually flat out kill, the adventurers. As players work towards the center of the dungeon, it starts to develop with all the twists and turns you’d expect.

Once a player settles a room they draw an aptly named “Room Card”. This card could contain a further trap, a monster, the corpse of a previous adventurer as well as other events, or it could just be a blank room. Some of the cards will have you draw from another deck. For example if you decide to loot the corpse you come across you can find other items or nothing. So like I mentioned the game is random and has you drawing cards all over the place and rolling dice to determine the outcome of events. This randomness creates wild swings in playtime, but none of which last more than an hour. More often than not, your adventurers will meet his untimely end (if I recall correctly the rulebook states you should expect to die about 70% of the time). But the goal of the game is to make it out of the dungeon with the most treasure.

One of the shortest, but also the most memorable games I played had my opponent falling into a pit to his death two tiles in. I proceeded to find a sack of gold with thirty gold pieces and ran out for the quick and easy win. Considering a good stash to run out with is 500-1000, it was a pretty hollow victory (but a victory none-the-less) but that quick victory allowed us to kick off another game very quickly as time was starting to run short that evening.

Thinking about this game though I really do think that it is the best dungeon crawl I have played. Typical dungeon crawl games in my opinion have two issues. The first one is not wanting to see your character die. Many games are expected to have a role playing/character development type aspect to the game to give the players a reason to be fighting off these monsters and seeking hard to find artifacts and in time players develop a bond with this person they’ve been leveling up and gathering goodies for. In this game, you expect your character to die and if he doesn’t that in itself is a victory.

The second problem I feel dungeon crawls run into is too often the dungeon-master is just there to shepherd the adventurers through the dungeon, present them with challenges, but not make it too hard where the death of a character is at risk. So between these two what happens is you develop a game that lacks competition. Descent by Fantasy Flight Games looked to add that competition between the players and DM, but in my opinion that game starts to bog down and doesn’t have the pacing that I want from a dungeon crawl which is something quick and leaves a lot of dead monsters at my feet.

So what develops is a disconnect of competition between the players. With this game though, the DM’ing is handled by the game and cards and players are expected to die. So a competition exists to not only make it to the Dragon’s Stash but what also develops is the basic competition of survival in a very harsh environment.

There is a slight downside the Dungeon Quest though. A game that has a DM, provided the DM is good, can create a very colorful narrative with lots of description and can create a lovely ambiance for the game. There is not a lot of descriptive text on the cards with the extent being “Trap - Arrows! Roll a D6-Luck in Damage”. Personally though that is all that I need as I’m not a roleplayer, but one thing that I’ve been thinking about is for players who really dig and enjoy that narrative and there is a quick fix that can be done - Have an opponent draw and read your card to you and embellish what is happening. Instead of drawing a card that says “Crypt - Draw Crypt Card” a creative person can embellish it with text like “As you walk into the room a beam of light from a strategically positioned window shines down onto a stone tomb. Engraved along the side is a relief detailing a battle long since forgotten to this land. Etched onto the ornate lid is a Coat of Arms and below it the name that you recognize as a street in your hometown not to far from here. Do you want to open the tomb?” A simple little modification that can make what is a random and chaotic game that much more colorful and memorable.

There are rumors that Fantasy Flight Games will be reprinting this and I beg and plead that they not change a single thing about the game. It is just about perfect as originally printed with charming early 90’s graphics and gameplay. With the exception of combat. The way combat is handled is each person is given three tokens which say either “Slash” “Mighty Blow” “Jump Aside”. Each player picks one and places it face down. They’re then turned face up, a small matrix consulted and damage dealt. It feels like a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors and to me is lacking. If FFG does do a re-release, I wouldn’t mind seeing a change to the combat system, but with that said, if it came down to a complete overhaul or a reprint as originally printed, I’d take the straight reprint because this game is near perfect as is.

Overall this has become one of my favorite games to play. It is short at 30-60 minutes (and if everyone has a quick death can be as short as 5 or 10), easy to teach and though not really interactive between players still interactive in the race to get to the center and back while keeping your skin. For me it is the perfect vehicle for people to get together, share a few brews and a few laughs. For me DungeonQuest shouldn’t be the focus of that night but the focus should be on the company you keep that just happen to be gathering to play a boardgame.

Rating: 4.75 out of 5

‘Til Next Time - Happy Gaming
LvT

Filed under: Dungeonquest, Games - Board Games by LordVonTush
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