pookie

Being a city planner in Tokyo must be a thankless task. After all, every few months, the city and its infrastructure gets stomped, disintegrated with blasts of radioactive breath, pulverised with claws and tails, and otherwise converted from town planner’s big dream of city life into dusty piles of rubble. The culprits are Kaiju – big monsters, of which *zilla is the most famous. Of course, all this is beneath of the notice of the monsters – well, they are big monsters – as King of Tokyo proves.

This is a light dice and resource management game in which between two and six Kaiju battle each other to be the one and only “King of Tokyo.” They include a big ape – “The King”, a giant humanoid crab – “Kraken”, a large lizard – “Gigazaur”, a colossal alien robot – “Alienoid”, an ernormous draconic robot – “Meka Dragon”, and a lapine “Cyber-Bunny”. Suitable for players aged eight and up, the game is quick to teach, looks good, and plays in half an hour or so.

Designed by Richard Garfield – the designer of Magic the Gathering and RoboRally – and published by Iello Games, King of Tokyo consists of a card and a standee for each of the Kaiju; a set of eight custom dice; sixty-six Power Cards; a pile of Power Cubes; plus a board and the rulebook. The latter represents the city of Tokyo and is marked with two spaces, one labelled Tokyo City, the other Tokyo Bay. The space labelled Tokyo Bay only comes into play when there are five or more players. The Kaiju boards are marked with two dials, one for Victory Points, the other for the Kaiju’s Health. The Power Cards grant a Kaiju special powers or bonuses, some of which are discarded after use, whilst others are permanent. Sample permanent powers include Fire Breathing” which lets a Kaiju blast his neighbours with fire each time he inflicts damage, whilst “Giant Brain” allows a Kaiju to reroll the dice four times instead of three. Sample discard powers include “Frenzy” which lets a Kaiju take another turn immediately after his current one, whilst he gains two Victory Points and heals three damage taken with “Nuclear Power Station.” Each Power Card has a cost which is paid in Power Cubes. Some of these Power Cards possess corresponding tokens indicating their use.

At the heart of the game are the dice. There are six of these, in black marked with a lurid green with the numbers one through three, plus a heart, a lightning bolt, and a claw. In addition to these six standard dice, there are another two dice, these in lurid green, but marked in black with the same numbers and symbols. These green dice become available when a Kaiju purchases certain cards.

On his turn a Kaiju rolls the six standard dice. He can roll each die a further two times if he does not like the result, but must keep the rolls after that. For every set of three of the same number, a Kaiju gains Victory Points – more if he rolls sets with more of the same number of them. For each Claw rolled, a Kaiju inflicts a point of Damage; for each Heart rolled he heals a point of his Health; and for each Lightning Bolt, he gains a Power Cube. Power Cubes can be spent to purchase Power Cards.

How a Kaiju inflicts Damage on his fellow Kaiju is where King of Tokyo gets interesting. A Kaiju outside of Tokyo can attack and inflict Damage on the Kaiju who is in Tokyo, but the Kaiju who is in Tokyo can attack and inflict Damage on the Kaiju who are not in Tokyo. Thus the Kaiju who is in Tokyo is likely to be attacked again and again – and worse, he cannot heal himself through the use of dice. So what then, is the advantage of remaining in Tokyo? A Kaiju gains Victory Points by being in Tokyo, but he can leave any time that he takes Damage, his attacker taking his place in Tokyo.

King of Tokyo is won either by amassing twenty Victory Points or being the last Kaiju standing.

Essentially, King of Tokyo is especially luck based, and at first glance appears to involve very little in the way of tactics or decision making. True, there is little in the way of a tactical element to the game – does a Kaiju attack or not? The game does involve more in the way of decision making though, and it all comes down to the dice rolls and whether or not a Kaiju can roll the symbols on the dice that he wants, or as the game proceeds… needs. During the opening stage of the game, a Kaiju will want to inflict as many Claws as he can to inflict as much Damage as possible on his fellow Kaiju, to gain as many Victory Points as possible, and to gain sufficient Power Cubes to gain those all-important Power Cards. As the game progresses and a Kaiju suffers Damage, then he will want to roll Hearts in order to regain Health. Of course, this is what a Kaiju might want to roll on the dice, what he actually rolls and decides to keep is another matter…

King of Tokyo is a simple, throwaway filler of a game. It is easy to learn and play, and it is a fun family game with an obviously joyous love of its theme that shines through in its components and “beat ‘em up” style of play. As much as will enjoy that theme, more serious gamers will quickly become aware of the game’s flaws. First, as much as it is a game designed for between two and six kaiju, it plays poorly with two and it really only plays well when there are four or more involved. Second, the game always comes down to a battle between two Kaiju as it is a knock-out game. Once a Kaiju has been knocked out, he cannot re-join the game and so has to wait for the game to end with nothing to do except cheer for one Kaiju or another. Third, the powers on the Power Cards are far from balanced, and since this is a luck-based game, getting the right combination of Power Cards can make a Kaiju nigh unstoppable…

Ultimately, whether you like King of Tokyo comes down to whether or not you like the theme enough to compensate for the luck factor. If so, then the game is fun, it is easy to teach, and a joyously silly filler thriller.

You have a kitten. You leave the room. The kitten follows you because you are not in the same room. You come back into the room and close the door behind you. The kitten miaows because you shut it out and not because it was kurious. You open a kupboard. The kitten climbs in because it can. You shut the kupboard. The kitten miaows to be let out because you shut it in the kupboard and not because it was kurious. You take a bath. The kitten jumps up on the side of the bath and almost falls in. The kitten looks at you because it is your fault and not because it was kurious.

As the saying goes, “Kuriousity Killed the Kitten.”

The Kitten Killing Kuriousity is the subject of the possibly tastelessly titled kard game, Kittens in a Blender. Published by Closet Nerd Games, it is a light, silly, simple kard game designed for two to four players aged eight and over. Both the title and the theme of the kard game are both its selling point and its downfall. After all, would you play a kard game in which you try to send your rivals’ kittens to the blender whilst trying to save your own from the whirring blades that can only give you a fur-fang feline smoothie? The problem is the kuriousity of kittens – they will klamber onto anything and that includes the kitchen work surfaces where there are innumerable dangerous appliances, one of them a lidless blender into which the kurious kittens will inevitably klimb. All that it takes is one kurious kitten to lay a fluffy paw upon the switch and MIAO-whirr!-SCRUNCH!!

Which sounds like a hideously tasteless theme for a kard game.

Then again, this is just a kard game and Kittens in a Blender is a great title.

The game consists of one-hundred-and-ten full-kolour kards, two large full-kolour kards, the rules sheet and both the lid and tray of the box that Kittens in a Blender comes in. One of the large kards is The Blender and is placed in the lid of the game box, whilst the other large kard is The Box, which is placed in the tray that the game came in. The rest of the kards konsist of four sets of Kitten kards, each set a different kolour. Each set konsists of sixteen kitten kards and each kitten is given a name, and looks ever so, ever so kute. The remaining kards konsist of the following:

“Kitties on the Move,” which allow a player to move between one and three kittens.
“Blend,” which turns The Blender on, blending all kittens in The Blender, but saving all kittens in The Box and sending all kittens on The Kounter to The Blender (though not blending them… yet!).
“Blend/Pulse” works like “Blend,” but can also be used to stop another player using a “Blend” card.
“Dog’s in the Kitchen” forces players to swap hands.
“Kittens in the Blender” moves all kittens in The Box and in The Kounter into The Blender.
“These Kittens in the Blender” works like “Kittens in the Blender,” but only affects kittens of one kolour.
“Kittens on the Kounter” moves all kittens in The Blender and in The Box onto The Kounter.
“Kittens in the Box” moves all kittens in The Blender and on The Kounter into The Box.

The game starts with The Blender and The Box being placed on the table with a gap between them known as The Kounter. Each player picks a kolour of kittens, his aim being to get as many of that set into The Box and safety as he can whilst sending his rival’s kittens into The Blender. If there are less than four players, then the sets of kittens not in play are removed from the deck. Every player then receives a hand of six kards.

On a turn, a player plays two of his kards, in any order, follows any instructions on them and then draws back up to six. Any player can play any kard, including kitten kards belong to his rivals – these kittens are destined for The Blender. Play continues until all sixteen of the “Blend” and “Blend/Pulse” kards have been played. Then all of the surviving kittens for each player are counted and skored two points apiece. Similarly all of the kittens that were blended – how exactly you can tell one blended kitten from another is not explained – and a point is deducted from a player’s skore for each of his kittens that got blended. The player with the highest skore is the winner.

Objectives and tactics are twofold. Get your kittens into The Box, either from your hand, The Kounter, or The Blender. Get their kittens into The Blender, either from your hand, The Kounter, or The Box. Once there are enough of your kittens in The Box and their kittens in The Blender, play “Blend” or “Blend/Pulse” kard – your kittens will be safe and go towards your end game skore, whilst theirs just need ice to be a feline frappe and deduct from their skores at the end of the game.

Physically, Kittens in a Blender is an attractive kard game. The kards are bright, breezy, and every one of the kittens on the sixty-four kitten kards is kute. Really kute. The rules are simple and easy to pick up. It could do with another set of kittens and kards to bring up to a maximum of six players, but then we are still waiting for a six-player full game of Ticket to Ride, so there is the possibility.

All right, so the idea behind Kittens in a Blender is a bit tasteless. Ket over it. Ket over yourself. It is just a game and no kittens are actually hurt during play. There is no “Live Action” version of this game. Seriously.

Konsole yourself with the fact that Kittens in a Blender is a not a kreat game. It is too light, too silly, too throwaway. It is though, a fun and silly well done filler of a game, one that can be fitted in between more serious games with kreater depth. We all need a filler game if not a klowder of them. Kittens in a Blender is a kute addition to your filler game klowder.

Plus Kittens in a Blender is a really kreat title.

The year is AD 64. A great fire has struck Rome and at Nero’s command the city must be rebuilt. A number of young Patricians have come forward to answer the imperial call, hoping to win influence and a fortune in helping the Emperor. As their influence grows, they will be able to command Architects and Craftsmen who will rebuild Rome for them, Labourers who will gather the materials needed to rebuild Rome’s finest buildings, the Legions to take materials for their building efforts, Merchants to sell the hoarded materials that will ensure their wealth, and Patrons who will gather more Clientele who will also serve as Architects, Craftsmen, Labourers, Legionaries, and Patrons for each Patrician. All this must be done if a Patrician is rebuild the greatest city in the known world and bring Glory to Rome!

This is premise behind Glory to Rome, a strategy card game published by Cambridge Games. Originally published in 2005, in 2012 it was redesigned with all new artwork and a new box and funded through Kickstarter. Known as the “Black Box” edition, this is the version being reviewed here. Designed to be played by between two and five players, aged twelve and up, it is a card-based city building and resource management game with a novel mechanism. Most of the cards are Order cards that can be used not in one or two different ways, but in four different ways. Each Order card can be built as a building, used as a raw material in the construction of a building, hired as a patron, or sold for its material value. Each Order card can only be used the once, so a player will need to choose carefully if he is to gain the winning benefit from it.

Each Order card is first and foremost a building that a player can construct and then gain the special ability that the building grants. Each Order card is also a material that could be used to construct buildings, though if a player uses it as the material to construct part of another building, he cannot construct the building on the card. There are multiple copies of the buildings in Glory to Rome, so if a card is used for material in another building, another copy might pass into a player’s hand enabling him to try and build it. Each and every building grants its builder a special ability that will help him win the game.

Each Order card is also marked with one, two, or three coins. Once the building on an Order card has been built, these have a dual purpose. First, they indicate the Victory Points scored at game’s end for having constructed the building. Second, they indicate the player’s Influence. By increasing his Influence, a player increases both his capacity to hire more Clients and store material in his Vault.

Lastly, each Order card is marked with one of six Client types and an associated material. These are the grey Architects, which can also serve as Concrete; the green Craftsman, which also serve as Wood; the yellow Labourers, which also work as Rubble; the red Legionaries, which also serve as Brick; the blue Merchants, which also serve as Stone; and the purple Patrons, which also serve as Marble. Each of the six Client types performs a particular role or function in the game. The Architect can lay the foundation of a building or add material to its construction from a player’s Stockpile. The Craftsman can lay the foundation of a building or add material to its construction from a player’s hand of cards. The Labourer takes material from the game’s central pool and adds it to a player’s Stockpile. The Legionary demands material from both the game’s central pool and the hands of neighbouring players. The Merchant allows a player to move material from his Stockpile to his Vault. Lastly, a Patron hires a Client from the game’s central pool and adds it to a player’s Clientele.

So for example, the Market card serves as a Craftsman if used as a Client, as Wood in the construction of a building, but if built does two things. First, its single coin increases both the player’s Victory Point total and his Influence. Second, it grants a special ability, in this case, an increase in size of the player’s Vault above the limit set by his current Influence. Whereas the Archway serves as a Legionary if used as a Client, as Brick for constructing a building, and it increases a player’s Victory Point total and Influence both by two. The special ability that the Archway grants lets a player take material from the central pool of cards instead of his Stockpile.

Glory to Rome consists of three other card types. One is the Jack, a wild card that can be used instead of a Client on an Order card. Another is the Foundation card, which come in the game’s six material types – Brick, Concrete, Marble, Rubble, Stone, and Wood – with a Foundation card being required to be laid before construction can begin on a building. Thus a Wood Foundation card must be laid before construction can be begun on the Market. The last card type is the Merchant Bonus, there being one of these for each material. Each is awarded to the player who the most of the corresponding material in his Vault at game’s end.

In addition to beginning the game with a hand of five Order cards, a player also has a Player Camp heavy card mat. The Player Camp serves as a reference for the players, providing a brief description of what each of the Order cards does when used as Clients. Primarily though, a Player Camp mat is used to organise a player’s cards once they have been played. Order cards are tucked face up under the top of the Player Camp so that only their Influence values are visible; face down under the right hand side in the player’s Vault; face up under the bottom of the Player Camp in the player’s Stockpile; and face up with only the Client type visible under the left hand side of the Player Camp in Clientele section. This neatly organises the cards that a player has so far played. Constructed buildings or buildings under construction are kept separate from each Player Camp. There is also another card mat called the “Rome Demands” which is used with the Legionary Order card.

At its core, Glory to Rome is simple to play. On each turn one player is the Leader (there is a Leader card which is passed round the table as the leadership changes). As Leader a player chooses an Order card from his hand and announces his intention to play its Client as an action. So for example, as Leader, Dave chooses to play the Ludus Magnus card as his Order card and use its Patron action so that he can take an Order card from the pool and add its Client to his Clientele. Now each of Dave’s rivals can do one of two things. If they decide to “Follow” Dave as their Leader, then they must also play an Order card with a Patron action from their hand, play a Jack card from their hand, or Petition. The latter allows a Patrician to play to two or three (depending upon the variant of Glory to Rome being played) identical Client cards of another type to serve as a Jack. So for example, Anthony has neither a Patron card that he can play to follow Dave, nor does he have a Jack, but he does have two Legionary cards that he can play as a Jack.

If a player does not Follow the Leader, can instead “Think.” In which case, he draws cards up to his hand limit, a single card if he has more than his hand limit, or he takes a Jack. If a Leader decides not to lead, but instead to “Think,” he takes a single “Think” action and then the Leadership changes to the next player. Similarly, once everyone has followed a Leader or decided to Think, then the leadership also changes hands.

Normally, only single actions are possible from one turn to the next, but multiple actions become possible when a player has Clients placed in the Clientele section of his Player Camp. Actions for a player’s Clientele can be taken when either the player or another player Leads with the particular Client type. A player can decide to “Think” rather than “Follow” the current Leader and still have his Client take an action as long as the Client matches the Order card played by the Leader. So for example, when Dave used the Patron action of the Ludus Magnus card, he managed to take the Market card from the central Pool and add its Craftsman to his Clientele. On a subsequent turn, he managed to add an Architect to his Clientele, giving him two Clients. On a later turn, Anthony is the Leader and plays a Palisade Order card to make use its Craftsman action. Dave can choose to “Follow” Anthony and play a card that would give him the Craftsman action, so giving him two Craftsman actions – one for the card he is playing and the other for the card he has in his Clientele. Or if he does not have an Order card with a Craftsman, he can “Think,” draw cards or a Jack, and still gain a Craftsman action from the Client because Anthony Lead with a Craftsman.

Once each and every player has played an Order card, that card is not out of the game. Rather it goes into the central pool of cards from which cards are drawn as material, using either the Labourer or Legionary actions (the Legionary action also steals from a player’s neighbours as well as taking from the central pool). To an extent it is possible to deny rival players the materials that they want by not playing certain types of Order cards and thus not discarding them to this pool. Plus it is easy to track what materials that a player wants from the buildings that he has under construction. For example, Dave knows that Anthony requires Concrete because he is building a Vomitorium. As long as Dave or another player does not Lead or Follow with an Architect action, the Concrete that is on all Architect Order cards is not discarded to the pool where Anthony might be able to get it later with a Labourer or Legionary action. Anthony is, instead, forced to rely upon the Architect/Concrete Order cards that he might draw when he “Thinks.”

During the initial stages of the game, constructing buildings will take several turns, as will moving material into a player’s Vault. As a player adds Clients to his Clientele, he increases the number of possible actions that he can conduct on a turn, either as Leader or a follower. Further, completing the construction of buildings not only adds towards a player’s Influence and Victory Point total, they also provide him with a special ability or benefit that will help him on subsequent turns. For example, when constructed, the Circus Maximus doubles the ability of a player’s Clientele by letting each one act twice. Thus each time that Dave uses his Architect or Craftsman clients, they take two actions rather than one. Essentially, the more buildings that a player can construct, the more he is able to do, and what he can do, he is better at.

Glory to Rome ends when the draw pile has been exhausted or there are no Foundation cards available, at which point the player with the most Victory Points wins. Victory Points are scored by constructing buildings and by getting materials into a player’s Vault. Both of these objectives take several actions to complete. To construct a building, a player must use an Architect or a Craftsman action to lay its Foundation card and then add material to the building either from his hand (with a Craftsman action) or from his Stockpile (with an Architect action). Getting material into his Stockpile requires a Labourer action and there has to be the right material available in the central pool. To get material in his Vault, a player must use a Merchant action and the material must come from his Stockpile – so a player needs to decide whether to use a material card in his Stockpile as part of a building or to add directly to his Victory Point total in his Vault.

This is a medium weight, strategic card game with a light theme, one with plenty of replay value because of the variety of buildings and their special abilities available for construction. It offers replay value because although there are only two ways of achieving victory – constructing buildings and squirreling away material in a player’s Vault – there are multiple means to support those two ways, and those means are the special abilities granted by each building. It can be played in in an hour and it fits neatly in a surprisingly small box given the number of components in the game.

Physically, Glory to Rome is well done. The Player Camps and the Rome Demands mats are done in sturdy card. The cards are neatly designed and attractive. The previous edition had cartoon-style illustrations, but the updated “Black Box” edition opts for an elegant art style that echoes that of the classic board game, Civilisation. One issue with the cards is that they do get a lot of handling, so my advice would be to sleeve all of them.

As enjoyable as Glory to Rome is, it is far from perfect. Physically, the cards are not quite sturdy enough for the level of handling that the game calls for – thus the suggestion above to sleeve them. A primary issue is with the rules which are underwritten and thus not easy to learn or comprehend. This has an effect on the teaching of the game because the multiple uses that the Order cards is not easily nor necessarily immediately grasped. Nor is this helped by the numerous special abilities that the buildings on the Order cards grant – reading them slows the game play down and understanding how a special ability works with the game’s mechanics is one further to learning the game. Thus learning to play Glory to Rome is a challenge in itself, but once grasped, the game just motors along. Experienced board game players will have less of a problem, especially if they have played games such as Puerto Rico, San Juan, or Race for the Galaxy.

Once mastered, Glory to Rome is an enjoyable game to play. The game play is simpler than it first looks and it offers plenty of replay value as the number of buildings to construct means that no two games will be alike. Indeed, I enjoyed it so much that after my first play I purchased a copy for myself.

In 1997, West End Games published the Star Wars Introductory Adventure Game. It was the best introduction to the Star Wars d6 RPG that the classic RPG could have been given, and indeed, it remains not only the best introduction to role playing in nearly forty years of the hobby, but also the standard by which all products designed to introduce players to the hobby are measured. Now late in 2012, Fantasy Flight Games published Star Wars: Edge of the Empire – Beginner Game, the introduction to its forthcoming RPG, which is the first of three. It is designed for use by between three and five players, one of whom has to be the GM.

It should be noted that this was not our first exposure to the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game in 2012. The publisher released a “beta” version of the core rules as part of a public play test effort. A full review of that is available to read here. What the Beginner Game does have, which the “beta” did not, is dice. Like the publisher’s version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, this new game uses dice marked with icons appropriate to the setting of the game rather than just standard numbers.

Of course, the box that Beginner Game comes in includes a whole lot more than just the dice. Open up the box and slide out the contents and they are revealed to be a “Read This First” pamphlet, the Adventure Book, a Map Sheet, four Character Folios, a sheet of counters, and the Rulebook. All presented in that specific order with everything being done in full colour on glossy paper and is pleasingly illustrated.

The four-page “Read This First” pamphlet starts with a quick explanation of what a roleplaying game is before presenting a two-page example of play. It uses the four sample characters provided with the Beginner Game as they play through the first scene in the provided scenario. On the back is the introductory text for the scenario, done in the Star Wars classic opening text crawl. Sat underneath the “Read This First” pamphlet is a sheet advertising the forthcoming release of the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game and a link to the Fantasy Flight Games’ website for a scenario, “The Long Arm of the Hutt,” to be downloaded and played after the scenario in the Beginner Game. Extra support for the game also includes two more Character Folios that can be downloaded and used to add more players to the game. They consist of a Human Explorer and a Human technician.

The meat of the Beginner Game starts with the Adventure Book, which is labelled, “Read This Second.” It properly introduces the Beginner Game and its contents, but is solely intended to be read and used by the GM. It is written to help him run between two and four players through the scenario, “Escape from Mos Shuuta.” Over the course of seven short encounters it guides the GM through how to run each of them, how to roll the dice and interpret their results, gives options that the player characters might take, and includes break point when the players gets to spend some of their hard earned Experience Points before the action continues. At each stage it introduces new aspects of the rules all laid out clearly so that the GM can find them as the adventure proceeds. Rounding out the Adventure Book are some tips and advice on being a good GM as well as some ideas for future adventures, both in Mos Shuuta and elsewhere.

As written, “Escape from Mos Shuuta” is designed to be run as it is read. To that end, the scenario structure is kept linear and simple. The GM is even advised to tell his players that they might have missed some clues if they have their characters step ahead of an encounter. As read, it does a good job of presenting the GM with the information that he needs at the right time. Even so, it would probably be worth the prospective GM reading through the Adventure Book in order to be better prepared. An experienced GM will probably have no difficulty in running “Escape from Mos Shuuta” as written.

In keeping with Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game, “Escape from Mos Shuuta” is set on the Outer Rim at the furthest extent of the Galactic Empire’s reach, a region that is home to scum and villainy as well as explorers and colonists, all with concerns beyond the rule of law or the rule of tyranny. Specifically, it takes place in Mos Shuuta, a spaceport in the midst of the Dune Sea on Tatooine. The four player characters, each of whom is employed by, if not indebted to, the local crime boss, Teemo the Hutt, have decided to make a run for it. For this they a need a spaceship and it so happens that one has just docked…

The A3-sized Map Sheet is double-sided. On the one side is the deck plans of the Krayt Fang, a YT-1300 Light Freighter and the docking bay where the player characters find it in the scenario. On the other side is a map of Mos Shuuta, the setting for the scenario; plus plans of a cantina and the spaceport control, both locations in Mos Shuuta.

Each of the four Character Folios runs to eight pages in length. Besides presenting a character and its accompanying character sheet, each Character Folio explains the elements of a character sheet, advancing the character, and the available Talents. Together with the skills available, there is plenty for a player to spend his character’s Experience Points on. The four characters included in the Beginner Game are a Wookie Hired Gun, a droid Colonist, human Smuggler, and a Twi’lek Bounty Hunter, each with their own background story on the last page of their respective Character Folios. In each case, this background is specifically tied into the opening events of “Escape from Mos Shuuta.” Plus, there is a counter for each of the characters included in the counter sheet along with counters for the various NPCs and vehicles encountered over the course of the adventure, “Escape from Mos Shuuta.”

Rounding out the Beginner Box is the Rulebook, which is marked “Read This Book Last.” Expanding upon the rules presented in the Adventure Book, the Rulebook covers all of the action presented in “Escape from Mos Shuuta” and more. Besides all of the extra detail and explanation, it adds support with more gear and equipment, starships and vehicles, and adversaries.

So how do the rules work in the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game? Essentially it uses a dice pool mechanic with a player required to assemble a pool drawn from the RPG’s six dice types. The eight-sided Ability dice, the twelve-sided Proficiency dice, and the six-sided Boost dice are positive dice, whilst the eight-sided Difficulty dice, the twelve-sided Challenge dice, and the six-sided Setback dice are negative dice. The Ability dice represent a character’s base skill or aptitude, the Proficiency dice his innate ability and training, whilst Boost dice are benefits granted from the situation. The Difficulty dice represent the task’s inherent complexity, the Challenge dice more extreme adversity; and Setback dice obstacles that come from the situation. The positive dice are marked with Success, Advantage, and Triumph symbols, all of which a player wants to roll, as opposed to the Failure, Threat, and Despair symbols on the negative dice, which he does not.

When rolled, the opposing symbols on the dice cancel each other out, but a player only needs to roll a single Success to succeed at a task. At its heart though, the dice mechanic in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire is orientated towards a narrative outcome rather than a simple binary yes/no outcome. Thus the symbols rolled will actually tell the story of the outcome. For example, a character might roll a simple number of Successes; no Successes, but an Advantage or two; or a number of Failures and several Triumphs; and so on. How these outcomes are interpreted perhaps represents the most challenging aspect of the game, especially for those players new to roleplaying.

The Star Wars: Edge of the Empire – Beginner Game comes with fourteen dice. These consist of three Ability dice, two Proficiency dice, two Boost dice, three Difficulty dice, a single Challenge die, and two Setback dice. The last and fourteenth die is the twelve-sided Force die. This is solely used to generate Destiny Points in the Beginner Game, which both the players and the GM can spend to upgrade the dice types in their pools. An Ability die to a Proficiency die for a player character, a Difficulty die to a Challenge die for the GM’s NPCs. Destiny Points do a lot more in the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game, but common to both the full roleplaying game and the Beginner Game, Destiny Points have a dark side and a light side. The player characters use the light side, whilst the GM uses the dark side, and cleverly, when a Destiny Point is used by one side, it flips so that it can be used by the other side. Thus, when a player uses a light side Destiny Point, it switches to a dark side that only the GM can use. Several Destiny Points are included as counters in the Beginner Game.

There is no doubt that the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire – Beginner Game comes nicely appointed. It is also written and overall, a pleasing package. For the experienced roleplayer or GM, it is easy to open up a copy of the Beginner Game and get playing after a relatively short period of preparation. It will be even easier if the GM has read the Rulebook that comes with the Beginner Game, or indeed read either the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game beta or the forthcoming full version of the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game.

It is not though, as well an appointed introduction to roleplaying Star Wars as was West End Games’ Star Wars Introductory Adventure Game. That was as much a utility package as it was an introduction and to that end included more adventures, more support, and more hand outs. Times change though, and so production values, for the production values in the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire – Beginner Game are much higher, with better art and a stronger themed layout.

Yet whilst it appears to include everything that a GM and his players needs to play, there are two issues with the Beginner Game. The first is minor; the second is more of an issue. The first is that it feels concise, as if it could have included something more. The emptiness of the box that the Beginner Game comes in only contributes to that feeling, and perhaps the inclusion of a second scenario would gone some way to negating this feeling. The second is an issue for the player coming to the Beginner Game for the first time. He is just not quite as well served as the GM. Other introductory boxed sets for other RPGs, including the one for the d6 Star Wars, have provided a player with a means of learning the rules and the mechanics, usually some kind of solo adventure. Now each Character Folio does include an explanation of the dice symbols and it does indicate which types of dice have to be rolled with each skill check, but it does not explain how a dice pool is rolled and how its results are interpreted. This is perhaps the biggest omission in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire – Beginner Game.

Despite this omission, the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire – Beginner Game is everything that a prospective Star Wars roleplayer would want. It includes the rules, an adventure, characters, maps to play on, and perhaps most importantly of all, the dice! Not just a solid introduction to the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game, but a good introduction to the roleplaying hobby too.

Most space combat games have ships going blaster-to-blaster with each other. Battlestations does that, and also does a lot more. A hybrid between the board and roleplaying game, in Battlestations players create characters that man a single vessel. They control her helm, shoot her weapons, operate Teleporters, Tractor beams, and scanners for Targeting Locks and ECM, but when the ship is boarded or damaged, can leave their stations and rush to repel the invaders or repair the ship. All the while, the ship zooms through space!

Battlestations comes richly appointed. Besides the 112-page rulebook, the box contains 48 Starship Modules; eight hex maps with either a reference Play Aid or a Ship Control Card on the reverse; plus a profusion of counters and markers. All of which comes in thick die cut cardboard and in vibrant full colour. Only the game’s character stand-ups let the components down, being small and light. The rulebook is very well written, easy to understand, and its cartoon illustrations match Battlestations’ space opera-like frantic feel. The strong roleplaying element requires one player to be the referee.

Starships are comprised of Modules, each 3½-inch square and marked with a five-by-five square grid. They come in ten types: Cannon, Engine, Helm, Hull Stabiliser, Hyperdrive, Life Support, Missile Bay, Science Bay, Teleporter, and Tractor beam, each performing one or more functions. In battle live crew or bots man them, and without them a Module cannot function. Starship design is standardised using the same Modules, but laid out differently by the game’s six races. For example, a Scout has a Cannon, Helm, Hyperdrive, Life Support, Missile Bay, and three Engine Modules, and if a U.R.E.F. (Universal Republic Expeditionary Force) vessel, has a Science Bay. Several designs are given, from the humble scout to the powerful dreadnought, plus outposts, shuttles, and freighters.

Characters are simply defined by race, profession, and skills. There are six races and five broad skills (Athletics, Combat, Engineering, Piloting, and Science), one of which is a character’s profession and determines a character’s role aboard ship. An Engineer allocates power, carries out upgrades and repairs, while a Pilot will fly the ship. A character also has a Luck stat, spent on dice re-rolls, and special abilities, one from his race and another from the long list included. Optional rules add psionics.

Battlestations’ mechanics are simple. Roll two dice, add the appropriate skill to beat a target number. Luck, a character’s Profession, and some special abilities allow re-rolls. Personal combat is kept simple and deadly, two Blaster hits or knife wounds will kill most starting characters. The U.R.E.F. keeps a back-up clone should a character die.

Battlestations is played in missions, with two dozen included in the rulebook. Each begins with the players’ ship, initially a Scout, warping in, and upgrades conducted on personnel equipment, ship’s bots, or Modules. After a mission, players can repair, improve and even upgrade their ship, revive dead crew, and gain experience to improve their characters.

A mission is played out in rounds, divided into phases. A round starts with Power Generation and allocation by the Engineer. Then over the six phases, this Power is expended. By the Pilot to manoeuvre the ship and keep it from going Out of Control, the Marine to fire the cannon, the Scientist to maintain the shields, and so on. A mission becomes frantic if the ship is damaged or boarded, as characters rush to deal with the damage or boarders. Most Modules can be used once per round, and are easy to damage. While Shields reduce damage, damage increases the likelihood of ships exploding, missiles in particular.

Battlestations includes a setting, sketched out in two pages. This is the Universal Republic, which directs the U.R.E.F. to keep the peace and admit new cultures to the Republic. The timeline suggests a brewing civil war over continued Human cultural and political imperialism.

Battlestations has a Star Trek-like feel, but is definitely space opera. Its slick design gives lots of in-game options, plus the missions provide hours of play, with expansions promised. Above all, Battlestations is frantic and fun to play, combat is perilous, but offset by a high luck factor. All eased by clear simple design and fine components.

First published 1996, Fluxx is both a card game and a state in which the card game exists. Published by Looney Labs, it is a game about matching conditional states which through the course of the game can flux and change. It is a chaotic game, one in which both the rules and the conditions to win can alter from one card play to the next. The play of Fluxx starts of simple. A player can Draw one card, Play one card. After that, cards can quickly alter the number of cards that a player can Draw, can Play, and even hold in his Hand. Each player’s aim is to get cards called Keepers down onto the table. If these Keepers match those on the Goal on the table, then the player wins. Of course, a player’s Keepers can change as easily as the Goal. Nothing is permanent in a Fluxx game, and that lack of permanency means that sometimes a player can win when it is not his turn because his Keepers meet the condition of the Goal.

The state of the game is one of constant evolution, the current version of the base game being Fluxx 5.0, with there being another ten themed variants available, from Zombie Fluxx and Pirate Fluxx to Martian Fluxx and Monty Python Fluxx to the very latest variant, Cthulhu Fluxx. Designed by Keith Baker – who designed Atlas Games’ Origins Award winning Gloom and its variant Cthulhu Gloom – Cthulhu Fluxx brings the Mythos of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft to cosmic state of Fluxx and infuses it with a dark chaos. In doing so, it brings the Creeper mechanic – first seen in Zombie Fluxx – to bear as never before and adds new mechanics to the game that simulate the madness and chaos that ensues when the forces of the Mythos grow stronger and threaten the insanities of those that attempt to thwart it. The effect of the Creepers and the new mechanics is that it is entirely possible for there not to be a winner. Purely in keeping with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, the “forces” of the Mythos can triumph over mankind and doom us all to our inevitable fate… Perhaps though, the human spirit will prevail and stave off these revelations as to the true nature of the universe.

Much of the game’s flavour and theme shows in the choice of Keepers that the players are trying to match with the Goals and thus win Cthulhu Fluxx. The designer draws on innumerable Lovecraft tales as inspiration for the game’s cards. For example, Keepers include “The Dreamlands,” “The Poet,” “The Necronomicon,” “The Cat,” “Innsmouth,” and “The Reanimator” and more. Some Keepers have special abilities, like “The Reanimator” being able to steal “The Body” Creeper if it is in play. The Goals include “Pickman’s Model” which requires the “Ghoul” and “Artist” Keepers to win; “Herbert West: Reanimator!” will want “The Body” and “The Reanimator” to win; and “Penguin Therapy” needs the “Sanitorium” and “Penguins” Keepers to win. Already the inspirations for cards – Pickman’s Model, Herbert West: Reanimator! , and At the Mountains of Madness – should be obvious to most devote and part of the pleasure in playing the game lies in identifying the inspiration and to a certain extent playing along to the narrative of the particular inspiration.

What stands in the way of both Keepers and Goals for each player is not just his rivals, but two other types of cards – the Creeper and the Ungoal. First seen in Zombie Fluxx, Creepers come out of a player’s hand as soon as he draws them to sit on the table and prevent him from winning. In Cthulhu Fluxx, Creepers are can be as much Mythos entities such as Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth as they can states like Madness and Metamorphosis. Whilst Creepers prevent you from winning, the Creepers that represent a state, actually inflict that state on a Keeper by attaching themselves to it and negating any special ability that the Keeper might have. So for example, “Nightmares” attaches itself to a Keeper that has an Investigator Icon on it like “The Reanimator,” negating its ability to steal “The Body” Creeper if it is in play. Creepers remain on the table until they can be got rid of, which is not easy. When a Creeper is attached to a Keeper, both cards stay together until both are discarded.

Despite this, Creepers are not wholly negative. Some Goals have to be met by playing Creepers and Keepers. For example, the “Herbert West: Reanimator!” Goal requires the “The Reanimator” Keeper and “The Body” Creeper to be all in play to win for that Goal.

Ungoals represent the forces of the Mythos – or in this case, Cthulhu Fluxx – beating the players and winning the game. For example, under the terms of “The Call of Cthulhu” Ungoal, Cthulhu Fluxx wins if there are six or more Doom Icons in play and the “Cthulhu” Creeper card is also in play. This of course is bad. It is of course, doubly bad because the “Cthulhu” Creeper card actually adds three Doom Icons all by itself!

Cthulhu Fluxx also has two other types of card. Surprise cards can be played when it is not a player’s turn or when it is. For example, the “Secret Cultist” can win the game for a player or it can hinder him. When played during his turn, it reveals the player as a secret cultist and forces him to lose his next turn. If played when the conditions of an Ungoal are met and the game is ended and lost by the players, then it reveals the player as a secret cultist, who as a devotee of the Old Ones actually wins the game rather than Cthulhu Fluxx itself. The last card type is the Meta Rule, which is only added with everyone’s consent. There is only one included in Cthulhu Fluxx, “Cult Clash,” which adds a final winning condition if an Ungoal loses everyone the game. The player with the most Doom Icons actually wins, unless another player can play the “Secret Cultist” Surprise card and trump everyone in the “Who is the Most Evil” stakes.

Like other Fluxx titles, Cthulhu Fluxx is all about meeting a certain condition if a player is to win. Of course, this is never easy, because not only can the conditions change from one turn to the next – and even within a turn, but so can the means of meeting them. As has been hinted at, Cthulhu Fluxx increases the array of conditions beyond the matching of Keeper and Creeper cards with a Goal card by adding Icons. These are the magnifying glass shaped Investigator Icons, the hour-glass shaped Doom Icons, and the hour-glass on its side, Anti-Doom Icons. Investigator Icons are found certain Keeper cards; Doom Icons on Creeper cards and Keeper cards; and Anti-Doom Icons on Keeper cards. Of course Doom and Anti-Doom Icons cancel each other out when determining the total number of Doom Icons are in play for purposes of meeting the conditions of an Ungoal.

The need to play both Keepers and Creepers in order to meet a Goal card’s conditions has a further negative effect in that both can add Doom Icons to the game and increase the Doom count towards any possible Ungoal. For example, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” requires the “Innsmouth” Keeper and either the “Federal Agents” Keeper or the “Metamorphosis” Creeper to win. Yet both the “Innsmouth” Keeper and the “Metamorphosis” Creeper cards add Doom Icons to the count.

Mechanically, the play of Cthulhu Fluxx is simple. Every player receives three cards and when it is his turn he follows the Basic Rule card of drawing one card, playing one card. If he has any Creeper cards at any time, these must be played on the table, invariably increasing the Doom count. If a player draws and plays a Creeper card, he gets to draw a card again to his hand replacing the Creeper just played. New Rule cards will change the number of cards that can be drawn, played, or held, while Action cards give him extra things that a player can do immediately. Action, Keeper, Goal, and Ungoal cards are played in the hope that in doing so a player will get nearer to winning, although often, the current rules on the New Rule cards in play will force a player to play them despite the fact that he might want to save them for a later turn. Or they might force him to discard them.

Fluxx is all about change and adapting to that change.

Cthulhu Fluxx is all about change and chaos and adapting to that change and chaos.

Yet as player moves cards in and out of his hand, he needs to read those cards, more so than most Fluxx games. The number of possible conditions that can win a game in Cthulhu Fluxx is greater than normal Fluxx because of the need to track the Doom and Anti-Doom Icons, making this a more conditionally complex game. Compared to standard Fluxx, this is a much more complex game.

Physically, as with all of the Fluxx games, Cthulhu Fluxx is well produced, the art is good – in fact it is better than many other Fluxx titles as their art can be cartoon-like – and the rules are solidly explained. Additionally the cards feel good in the hand and do stand up to being handled.

Standard Fluxx, is well, Fluxx. It is a game about change and to an extent, chaos. Unlike many of the other variants, Cthulhu Fluxx succeeds in exacerbating that chaos in a pleasingly fitting fashion. It brings a complexity and a theme that fits the game mechanics, and in doing so, brings it a depth and a seriousness – all relative, granted – that other Fluxx games lack. More demanding, more complex, more chaotic, more Cthulhu, Cthulhu Fluxx is not your fluffy Fluxx of old.

As the owners of the great Avalon Hill brand, it is no surprise that the board games published by Wizards of the Coast to date have fallen into the “Ameritrash” category. To label them as such is not denigrate them, for their emphasis has been highly developed themes, characters, heroes, or factions with individually defined abilities, combined with player-to-player conflict and a high level of luck. The publisher’s latest title has proved to be anything but an “Ameritrash” board game, but is instead a classic style “Eurogame,” which means relatively simple rules, a short playing time, a degree of abstraction rather than simulation, player interaction, player competition rather than player combat, and attractive physical components. What is more, this is a game based on Dungeons & Dragons, and specifically on the Forgotten Realms setting. Its title is Lords of Waterdeep.

Most Dungeons & Dragons board games deal with the themes inherent in those two words – “dungeons” and “dragons.” So they focus on delving into dungeons, facing dragons, and so on. Not so, Lords of Waterdeep. It is set in Waterdeep, the City of Splendors, the most resplendent jewel in the Forgotten Realms and a den of political intrigue and shady back-alley dealings where powerful, but masked lords vie for control of the city through of the region’s organisations that include the City Guard, the Harpers, the Knights of the Shield, the Red Sashes, and the Silverstars. They send out their Agents to acquire Buildings and access to better resources; gain Gold to make the many purchases necessary to ensure their rise to power; the means to Intrigue with their fellow Lords; and hire Adventurers whom they can send out on missions or Quests that once completed with spread their influence and gain them true power.

Designed for play by between two and five participants, aged twelve and over, once learned, Lords of Waterdeep can be played in an hour, no matter what the number of players. The box contains a game board, a rule book, five player mats, one hundred Adventurer cubes, one-hundred-and-twenty-one Intrigue, Quest, and Role cards, thirty-three wooden pieces that include the game’s various Agents and the score markers, and one-hundred-and-seventy card tokens that include the Building tiles and Building control markers, and plenty of Gold. All of which fits easily and neatly into the game’s insert tray that holds all of the game’s components almost perfectly.

Lords of Waterdeep’s game board measures 20” by 26” and depicts the city port of Waterdeep in Faerûn. Besides the Victory Point track around its edge and the spaces for the Intrigue and Quest cards, most of board has spaces for various Buildings that include Aurora’s Realms Shop, Castle Waterdeep, and Waterdeep Harbour as well as empty spaces where the players can put up Buildings of their own. Each of the Buildings provides a specific benefit. For example, the Aurora’s Realms Shop gives four Gold; the Builder’s Hall lets a player purchase an Advanced Building and bring it into play; Waterdeep Harbour allows a player to use an Intrigue card; the open-air stadium that is the Field of Triumph is where you can hire Fighters; new Quests are available to take at Cliffwatch Inn; and taking control of Castle Waterdeep lets you go first on the next round and draw an Intrigue card.

Besides the nine Basic Buildings marked on the board, Lords of Waterdeep includes twenty-four Advanced Buildings. These work in a similar fashion to the Basic Buildings, but the benefits provided by each are usually better. For example, when a player visits the Smuggler’s Dock, he can spend two Gold in order to hire four Adventurers, although only Clerics and Fighters; The Waymoot accumulates Victory Points that any player can visit and collect; and when at The Palace of Waterdeep, a player can direct the Ambassador at the beginning of the next round – and the Ambassador always acts before anyone else can take their turn. A side benefit to owning an Advanced Building is that when another player uses it, the owner gains a small benefit. For example, when another player uses the Smuggler’s Dock, its owner receives two Gold, and with The Waymoot or The Palace of Waterdeep, he receives two Victory Points.

Like the game board, the twenty-four page rulebook is done in full colour. It is well written, with quite a lot of information that includes plenty of examples. There is also a reasonable amount of background information too; enough that fans of the Forgotten Realms will appreciate the references, but not enough to overwhelm the casual player who does not roleplay. Overall, the rule book requires a careful read, but the rules themselves are fairly easy to grasp.

There is a player mat colour coded to each of the game’s five organisations – the City Guard, the Harpers, the Knights of the Shield, the Red Sashes, and the Silverstars. Each mat has spaces for his Agent Pool and other resources, plus his Completed Quests, as well as indications around the side to place his Active Quests, Completed Plot Quests, and his Lord of Waterdeep card.

The game’s one-hundred Adventurer cubes are divided into four colours – white, orange, black, and purple – representing Clerics, Fighters, Rogues, and Wizards respectively. These are the game’s primary resources, which along with Gold, are what a player will need to complete Quests.

At the heart of Lords of Waterdeep, and what the players are trying to complete, are its Quests, represented by the Quest cards. There are sixty of these and they come in five types – Arcane, Commerce, Piety, Subterfuge, and Warfare. Each Quest card gives the requirements necessary to complete and the rewards it grants when completed. For example, the “Domestic Owlbears” Arcana Quest card requires one white and two purple – or one Cleric and two Wizard cubes, and rewards the completing player with eight Victory Points, one Fighter or orange cube, and two Gold. A second type of Quest card is the Plot Quest card, which when completed gives an extra reward throughout the rest of the game. For example, the Skulduggery “Install a Spy in Castle Waterdeep Castle” Plot Quest card requires four Rogue or black cubes and four Gold to complete, and when done do so, not only rewards a player with eight Victory Points, but for every subsequent Skulduggery Quest completed, rewards him with another two Victory Points.

The cards that the players will use throughout the game are the Intrigue cards. These tend to grant a player extra Adventurers or extra Gold, or penalise rival players. For example, the “Spread the Wealth” Intrigue card gives both its player four Gold and another player of choice, two Gold; whilst the “Assassination” Intrigue card forces every other player to discard a Rogue or black cube from his tavern on his player mat. If a player cannot discard a Rogue, he must pay two Gold to the player who put the Intrigue card into play. Another type of Intrigue card is the Mandatory Quest which when given to another player forces him to complete that Quest before any of the others before him. For example, the “Stamp Out Cultists” Mandatory Quest Intrigue card forces a Lord to expend a Cleric, a Fighter, and a Rogue cube to complete it before moving onto his other Quests. Sadly, he only receives two Victory Points for completing it.

The first card though, that each player will receive is a Lord of Waterdeep card. Each one of these depicts one of the members of the secret council that governs the city, along with their name, some flavour text, and an effect that in providing a benefit at the end of the game will influence a player’s actions during the game. For example, Nymara Scheiron gives a player an extra four Victory Points at the end of the game for each Commerce and Skulduggery Quest completed, whereas Larissa Neathal gives six Victory Points for each Advanced Building she controls at the end of the game.

At the start of the game, each player receives a player mat, the Building control markers, and Agents, all of the same colour. The number of Agents received varies according to the number of players. With fewer players, each player receives more Agents; with more players, they receive less. This is the game’s core balancing mechanic. However many Agents a player starts with, every player receives a further Agent at the start of the second half of the game. Each player receives two Quest cards, two Intrigue cards, and a single Lord of Waterdeep card. This last card is kept hidden until the end of the game when everyone works out their final score. Lastly each player receives some Gold, the amount varying according to play order. The player who goes receives just four Gold, the next five, then six, and so on until the fifth player – if there is one – receives eight Gold. This is the game’s second balancing mechanic.

The game is played over the course eight Rounds. In each Round, the players take it in turn to assign a single Agent and then if they can, complete a Quest. Each Agent is assigned to a space on the board in an available Building or Advanced Building space. When he does, the Agent gives the player the benefit from that Building. Most Buildings have a single space, so that once an Agent has been assigned there, no Agent can be sent there to make use of its benefit, though some Intrigue cards allow a player to assign an Agent to an already occupied building. Thus if a player wants to purchase and construct an Advanced Building, he must assign an Agent to the “Builder’s Hall” before anyone else, or wait until the next Round. In which case, he probably wants to assign an Agent to Castle Waterdeep gain the opportunity to go first at the start of the next Round. Otherwise, a player must assign an Agent to another Building.

Two Buildings – Cliffwatch Inn and Waterdeep Harbour – have multiple spaces, so that more than one Agent can be assigned there, even by the same player. The former is the source for new Quest cards, while the latter allows a player to use an Intrigue card. Once an Agent is assigned, if a player has sufficient Adventurers, and sometimes Gold, to complete the requirements given on a Quest card, he can complete it and score Victory Points for doing so.

Lastly, and after all of the Agents have been assigned, any player with an Agent assigned to Waterdeep Harbour can reassign that Agent to any remaining unoccupied Building. This rewards the player for his cunning in sending an Agent to Waterdeep Harbour and playing an Intrigue card. The Round is over, everyone receives their Agents back, and a new Round begins until all eight have been played. At game’s end everyone counts up the Victory Points gained form completed Quest cards, plus unassigned Adventurers and unspent Gold, and the person with the most is the winner.

Lords of Waterdeep plays at reasonable pace, once the rules have been grasped, and offers a decent amount of game play and replay given how simple the rules really are and how light the game is. This is helped by the variety available in the Quest and Intrigue cards, but mostly in the Advanced Building cards. With twenty-four available, it is unlikely that all of them will come into play.

In terms of game play, Lords of Waterdeep rewards careful planning. Each player needs to be looking at what he needs to complete the Quests that he has in front of him. Of course, he also needs to get to the Buildings that he wants, but with rivals competing for the same space, this is not possible, so a player should also try and get the best out the available Buildings that he can. This can be alleviated if a player goes first, but in general, the closer a player is to going first the better. There is also some advantage in purchasing and constructing the Advanced Buildings as they provide further spaces where an Agent can be assigned. Further, if another player uses one, then the owning player also gains a small, but sometimes important benefit.

All of the Buildings in Lords of Waterdeep can play an important role during the game, but three tend to be more favoured than the others. They are the Builder’s Hall, because it allows Advanced Buildings to be purchased and constructed; Waterdeep Harbour, not just because an Intrigue card can be played, but also because an Agent assigned there can be reassigned; and lastly, Castle Waterdeep as it grants a player an Intrigue card and means that he can go first in the next Round.

Agents though, are in short supply, even after the extra one is gained at the start of the game’s second half. This means that the players must assign them with care so as not to waste their action.

Physically, Lords of Waterdeep is very nicely put together. All of the playing pieces have been done in wood and the rest of the pieces in sturdy card, though the Intrigue, Quest, and Lord of Waterdeep cards have been done slightly too thin a cardstock. The rulebook itself is bright and attractive and easy to read. For an American game, the look and feel of Lords of Waterdeep is anything but that.

In terms of theme, the grimy fantasy of the Waterdeep of the Forgotten Realms does not feel pasted on, a common complaint with this type of game. This is not to say that the mechanics behind the rules of Lords of Waterdeep could not be taken and have a new theme applied to them. It would take some effort, but in the meantime, the Dungeons & Dragons theme is applied with great care, and it is a theme that avoids many of Dungeons & Dragons’ clichés, primarily because it removes the concept of going on adventures and down dungeons. This is done by placing the players in the role of hiring the adventuring parties rather than being part of them – as in so many other games.

What is telling about Lords of Waterdeep is that Wizards of the Coast describe the format of this game as being “Non-traditional.” This is an odd claim for the publisher to make. Lords of Waterdeep is not a Non-traditional game. It is more or less, a traditional Eurogame, with worker placement and resource management mechanics similar to those found in well-known Eurogames such as Agricola, Caylus, and Puerto Rico, amongst many others. All games and mechanics that the designers at Wizards of the Coast and in particular, the designers of Lords of Waterdeep will be familiar with to some degree. The only way in which Lords of Waterdeep is Non-traditional is that it is not a classic American or Ameritrash design, and to describe it as “Non-traditional” is to belittle both this design and Eurogames in general. Certainly, it shows a wilfil ignorance upon the part of the publisher.

Although its various bits and pieces and possibly the business of the rulebook make Lords of Waterdeep look more intimidating than it really is, Lords of Waterdeep is really a medium to light Eurogame that is just a step on or two up from introductory games such as Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride. Certainly, it is much lighter and less complex than similar games such as Caylus and Agricola. Similarly, the game’s Dungeons & Dragons theme might be off-putting, but it never imposes itself on the game or its players. What is pleasing about the game is that the designers have achieved a balance between the theme and the mechanics that will attract both Eurogame players and players of Dungeons & Dragons players, but whilst both will be attracted to the game, Lords of Waterdeep is still more Eurogame than a Dungeons & Dragons game. Above all, Lords of Waterdeep is an enjoyable, decently themed Eurogame that uses familiar – almost traditional – mechanics to good effect.

There comes a time when a good Viking has had his fill of the sea, of visiting foreign lands for a little rape and pillage, and of Spam and parrots. When that happens, he settles down to become a good farmer and make the most of the rich meadowlands that lie between the mountains and turbulent waters of the fjords of Scandinavia.

This is the theme of Fjorde, a Carcassonne-like game from Hans im Glück in which two players work to open up the lands along the fjord and secure the most strategic spots to establish their farms. From these, each farmer can develop and expand his fields, claiming land with the aim being to have the most fields at game’s end.

This is a tile-laying game, area-control consisting of forty landscape tiles, plus four farms and twenty field markers split between two colours. All of these components are high quality, the wooden being either dark or light, and the tiles in thick card. They are hexagonal in shape, and depict three types of terrain. The blue of the sea, the green of the meadowlands, and the black of the mountains.

Fjorde is played in three rounds, each consisting of two stages. The first stage is Discovery, with players taking it in turn to lay tiles starting out from the three starting tiles, each indicated by their dark backs. Tiles must be played so that two sides must connect and match the tiles it is laid against. If a drawn tile cannot be placed, it is put aside until it can be put down on a subsequent turn. A new tile is drawn and placed instead. Once a player has placed a tile, he can also put a farm on the newly placed tile, though only on the meadowland section of the tile.

The Discovery stage lasts until as many tiles as possible have been placed. It is possible to leave gaps or lochs in the layout, but this and having tiles left over is infrequent. The second stage is Land Claim in which the players cultivate their farms. Beginning with the player that laid the penultimate tile, the players take it in turns putting down field markers. These can only be put down on empty meadowland that is adjacent to a farm or existing field marker of the same colour. This continues until all of the field markers have been placed. Both players count the number of markers and the scores noted. Another two rounds are played with the highest of the total points across the three rounds determining the winner.

Fjorde has a nice tactile feel to it, much like the publisher’s Carcassonne. Similarly, the laying of the tiles has a jigsaw-like quality. Tactically, game play centres on the placement of fields and farms to block and deny your opponent access to fresh meadowland. In this, players need to make best use of the terrain as they add new tiles. One tactic is to try and create choke points – between the mountains and the sea – upon which a player can place his farms and from there expand his fields and block access to for his opponent.

Simple and enjoyable, Fjorde can be played in half the listed time, and also be seen as pleasing, but quick alternative to Carcassonne. That said, it does not bear a great deal of replay as it perhaps a little too light. To counter that, it would be interesting to see an expansion for the game that adds more tiles and playing pieces, first to allow for more variety, and second, to add more players.

If you play board games, owning a good smart phone or a tablet is an excellent device to add to your games collection. Although neither will replace the social aspects of playing a board game nor the pleasure of handling a game’s physical components, a good version of a board game adapted to either device will capture exactly the feel and tactics of its play whilst handling the game’s mechanics. Such a good version should also offer solo play as well as play against other opponents, or if a co-operative game, allow the participants to play together. The version of Rio Grande Games’ Carcassonne adapted by exozet games is excellent example of the former, whilst Elder Sign: Omens is an excellent example of the latter. It is available on the Android and iOS platforms, this review having been done on an Android tablet.

As the title suggests, Elder Sign: Omens is the electronic adaptation of Elder Sign, the third co-operative board game of Lovecraftian investigative horror published by Fantasy Flight Games. Where Elder Sign has up to eight investigators exploring Arkham Museum to prevent the strange goings on that herald the coming of an Ancient One such as Azathoth, Cthulhu, or Yog-Sothoth, Elder Sign: Omens has a team of up to four investigators exploring Arkham Museum to prevent the strange goings on that herald the coming of the Ancient One known as Azathoth.

The game has the intrepid investigators visiting the various parts of the museum, some of which might lead to other dimensions, and casting glyphs that will counter or stop the strange goings on in each location. The investigators will each have their own special ability that will help them in this casting as various spells, items, and clues that in turn enable then investigators to hold onto glyphs between castings, add more glyphs, and re-cast the gylphs. If successful, the investigators can gain more spells, items, and clues as well as the all-important Elder Signs that they need to accumulate in order to prevent the coming of Azathoth. If unsuccessful, the investigators can suffer deleterious effects to their health and sanity; have monsters appear particular locations that need to be dealt with before the tasks there can be attempted; and let Azathoth gain more of the Doom Tokens that mean that the Outer * is closer to Earth.

Elder Sign: Omens begins by asking the players to assemble an investigation team, either by selecting from one of the sixteen available or by taking a random team. Each of the investigators is illustrated and is accompanied by a description of his or her ability. For example, Harvey Walters can alter Terror glyphs to Lore glyphs, whilst Carolyn Fern is a Psychologist who can help restore her own Sanity or that of another investigator. From there, the investigators can proceed to the Museum itself, shown by a map upon which are marked the first of the game’s many bizarre incidents. These can be scrolled through and examined before going there, enabling the players to make a choice as to which ones they tackle.<

At each incident, an investigator will be confronted by one or more tasks. Sometimes these have to be done in a certain order, but most can be completed in any order. Either way, only a single task can be completed with a single casting of glyphs. These are cast to match the symbols on each task, the glyphs either being used to match the symbols or re-cast to get the ones needed. Re-casting the glyphs is usually done at the cost of losing a glyph on the next casting. Consistent quickly leads to the investigator failing to deal with the incident and suffering various effects as described above.

The players need to accumulate fourteen Elder Signs if they are to prevent the coming of Azathoth, who only needs to gain twelve Doom Signs. This is not an easy task, especially if monsters appear that make tasks more difficult or even prevent glyphs from being cast until they are dealt with. In addition to the growing number of Doom Tokens, a sense of urgency is built into the game with a clock that regularly strikes midnight and heralds further terrible effects such as more monsters appearing or Azathoth acquiring yet more Doom Tokens. The players’ choice of investigators will ease or hinder this task, with investigators who can re-cast glyphs tending to be easier to use, if not being more useful. With sixteen investigators to choose from, Elder Sign: Omens has the capacity for the players to experiment to get the right combination of investigators that they are happy to explore the museum with.

Physically, Elder Sign: Omens is very well presented. The artwork, much of it seen in previous games of Lovecraftian investigative horror from Fantasy Flight Games, is used to great effect with some of it animated as certain events occur. In fact, on a tablet device, the artwork is better presented than in the actual Elder Sign board game, where the artwork, although very good, is too small to be really appreciated. Elder Sign: Omens also handles the physical mechanics of the game, such as the clock striking midnight and the appearance of new incidents, with a pleasing deftness that makes the game flow uninterrupted. Together, the removal of these mechanical processes away from the players’ gaze and the removal of the clutter of components that can be an issue in Fantasy Flight Games titles, combined with the use of the map to guide the investigators around the museum serve to give Elder Sign: Omens something akin to a narrative flow, which unfortunately, is somewhat lacking in the board game itself.

If anyone has played the Elder Sign board game, they will notice certain differences between it and Elder Sign: Omens. Most obvious is that fact in casting the glyphs to attempt tasks, the players are not actually rolling dice as they are in the board game, but the removal of the dice gives the play of the game much more an immediacy. The other noticeable differences between Elder Sign and Elder Sign: Omens are that only the one Ancient One is ever faced in the current version of Elder Sign: Omens and that it is not possible for the investigators to have Allies in Elder Sign: Omens as they can in Elder Sign. Neither of these should be seen as actual omissions, but rather as a streamlining that eases the flow of the game.

The final major difference is that in Elder Sign it only matters whether the investigators prevented Azathoth from coming to Earth or not, whereas in Elder Sign: Omens, not only does that matter, but so does how well they did. At the end of each game, the performance of the investigators, and thus the players, is scored. The game keeps a record of the scores, so everyone can check to see how well they have done.

For anyone new to the game, Elder Sign: Omens comes complete with a tutorial that guides you through the game with the aid of a nicely ominous voiceover – this voiceover also narrates various events throughout the game. To chilling effect. The tutorial itself needs careful attention to fully grasp how the game is played, and is probably worth watching again after at least one full play through of the game. Fortunately, the tutorials can be reset to watch again. Overall though, anyone who has played Elder Sign will have an easier time in playing Elder Sign: Omens than someone who has not.

As a playing experience, Elder Sign: Omens is an excellent solo experience. It also plays well with two participants, their discussing various courses of action and deciding what each investigator will do and what each will do with their glyphs. With more players, the game slows a little essentially because everyone is sat around a small screen and the decision making process takes a little longer. Nevertheless, having the tablet makes the game feel faster and slicker, as well containing everything needed in one easy to hold package.

This last weekend I was lucky enough to try two games, both of which are semi co-operative. The first was Locke & Key: The Game, Cryptozoic Entertainment’s card game based on the Locke & Key comic book series written by author, Joe Hill. The other was The Resistance: A Game of Secret Identities, Deduction, and Deception, a social game for larger groups published by Indie Boards and Cards. That I played it twice in an afternoon of trying little games is indicative of which one of the two that I preferred. This though, will not stop me returning to review Locke & Key: The Game at some point.

The Resistance is a game of deduction set in the near future when a group of resistance fighters have banded together to bring down a powerful, but corrupt government. Members of the resistance believe that if they are to succeed, the Empire must fall. They are nearing that final objective, and need only to strike at five key bases. If three of these bases can be taken, Imperial strength will be broken, the people will be freed, and the Empire will collapse. Unfortunately for the members of the resistance, the Empire has infiltrated the subversive organisation with spies ready to sabotage the resistance’s efforts. It only takes one spy to pass information to his government masters and prevent one of the resistance’s missions from succeeding. Although the resistance suspects that one or more of its members are spies in the employ of the government, it does not know the true allegiance of every one of its members. So any leader sending members of the resistance out on a mission will have to choose carefully, and learn from the success or failure of the mission as to whose allegiance lies where…

Designed to be played by between five and ten participants, The Resistance shares many features with social games like Werewolf and Mafia, but in either case, it plays quicker, a game rarely lasting longer than thirty minutes, and nor it does involve players being eliminated from the game. It is also more focused, involving just the five missions. All the resistance has to do is successfully pull off three of these missions, whilst the spies need to betray three of the missions.

The game comes in a small box. Inside are several sets of cards, three sets of wooden counters, and a small card board. The cards consist of a Leader Card, plus Identity, Team, Vote, and Mission Cards. The Identity Cards determine which of the players are loyal members of the resistance and which of them are spies; the Team Cards are used to indicate which of the players are going on a mission; the Vote Cards to determine if a proposed team for a mission is acceptable; and the Mission Cards are used to determine the success or failure of a mission. The Leader Card indicates which player currently has the task of nominating the members of a Team that will go on the mission. The game’s board shows how many players of the resistance are actually spies and how many members need to go on each of the five missions. Using the counters, it also tracks the number of successful or failed missions, and the number of failed votes for the nominating a Team for a mission.

At game’s start, each player is dealt an Identity Card. On its reverse, it shows either a person wearing blue, in which case that player is a loyal member of the resistance; or it shows a person in red, which means that he is a spy working for the government. The number of spies will vary according to the number of players. It is never less than two, but in larger groups, it can be as many as three or four. A player’s Identity Card is never revealed, but before play begins, the spies reveal themselves to each other so that they can work together to undermine the efforts of the resistance. Everyone also receives a pair of Vote Cards, one for “Yes” and one for “No.”

Then the first Leader is randomly selected and given the Leader Card. It is his job to nominate the players who are going on the next mission. The number needed for each mission varies according to the number of people playing, but it always starts out at either two or three and grows. So in a five player game, the first and third missions only require two participants, but the others need three. In an eight or nine player game, the first mission needs three participants, the second and third needs four, and the fourth and fifth needs five. What this mechanic does is force the need to find the spies quickly as the requirement for more players increases the possibility that one or more spies will be included on the Team for that mission.

Once nominated, everyone gets to vote on the make-up of the Team. This is done by playing the Vote Cards, either a “Yes” or a “No” card. If the Vote passes, then the Team goes on the mission. If it fails, then the Leader Card is passed to the left and the new Leader gets to nominate the members of a Team for the current mission. If the Vote for a Team fails five times, there is too much dissent amongst the ranks of the resistance and the spies are deemed to have successfully prevented the mission from going ahead.

Should a Team be successfully Voted for, it goes on the mission. Each player on the mission now has the chance to determine its outcome. He receives two Mission Cards, one indicating a Success, the other a Failure. He will secretly play one of these two cards onto a mission pile. If he is a loyal member of the resistance, he must play a Success. If he is a spy, then he can choose to play either a Success or a Failure card. Once everyone on the mission has played a Mission Card, they are all revealed and the mission’s outcome is determined. If they are revealed to be all Success cards, then the mission has succeeded. If only one of them is a Failure Card, the mission has not been a success.

This continues until either the resistance has successfully completed three missions or the spies have successfully stopped three missions. The Resistance is as mechanically simple as that.

Yet, The Resistance is much more than this. Both sides are up against the time limit of five missions. Failure is an option in the game – certainly early on. Failure for the members of the resistance hopefully enables them to identity the spies, but failure for the spies enables them to hide their identities. Neither side can afford to fail more than twice of course… Whilst the primary means of working out who the spies are is deducing who played the Failure cards on a mission, a secondary means is by watching how the players vote for members of a Team.

In addition to the deduction, there is nothing to stop the players from accusing each other of being a spy. This can because one player has an idea that another really is a spy, or it could actually be a spy sowing dissension. In fact, table talk of this kind should be encouraged, and it really works if all of the players participate. Nor is there any reason to stick to the game’s futuristic flavour. Any conflict can be used as a source of flavour when playing The Resistance, whether that is Communist revolutionaries against the military junta of a Banana Republic or the Rebel Alliance against the Empire in Star Wars.

The Resistance is simple. It is quick. It is fun. It is easy to teach. It is a good group game, working well with gamers as well as non-gamers, both of whom will be able to grasp the rules and the theme of the game easily and quickly. The social dynamics will take a little longer, but for the most part, the participants are going to be supplying those themselves. It perhaps works best with six or seven players rather than five, or eight or more. At five players it is easier to identify the spies, whilst at eight players, it becomes harder, and the spies also need more than the one Failure to be played for each mission for it to fail. The Resistance: A Game of Secret Identities, Deduction, and Deception is an excellent social game, a good filler, and just working out who the spies are can be frustratingly fraught!

Sometimes a game just lands in your lap. In my case it was a copy of Zeus on the Loose: A Card Game of Mythic Proportions, a new card counting game from Gamewright. I was on Twitter and Coiled Spring announced a simple competition for the game and I won. Once it dropped through my letterbox, I opened it up and read through the rules, ready to take it along to Afternoon Play, a regular monthly boardgame meet at a coffee shop in the city centre of Birmingham. I got the game out and we played it a couple of times in between longer games, in this case Ghost Story (a very difficult co-operative game about Chinese monks ridding a town of ghosts and monsters), Railways of the World: The Card Game (laying tracks, connecting cities, and transporting goods using cards rather than lengths of track), and Red Empire (my favourite game of Soviet Politburo Politics). It was agreed that it was indeed a nice little filler. So I will probably take it along next time.

The idea in Zeus on the Loose is that the Greek * has gone missing from Mount Olympic and it up to you to grab him and return him to the summit. This is done by playing numbered cards – bringing the card total to a multiple of ten (ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and so on) means that can grab Zeus and getting to the summit (represented by the card total getting to a hundred or more) with him in tow will win a player the round. In addition, Zeus’ fellow *s – Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Artemis, Athena, Hera, Hermes, and Poseidon – will sometimes help you out in your efforts over your competitors. The winner of each round is awarded a letter. The first letter won by a player is a “Z.” On later rounds a player will be awarded the letter “E,” and then a “U,” and then an “S” for winning. The first player to win enough rounds to spell out “ZEUS” wins the game.

Designed for two to five players aged eight and up, Zeus on the Loose consists of sixty cards, a Zeus figure, and a foldout rules leaflet. Two thirds of the cards are numbered between one and ten, whilst the remaining cards depict the various *s and their special abilities. Each player starts with a hand of four cards and can only play one card per turn, which is placed face up on Mount Olympus card pile. If a numbered card the new number is added to the total of the cards so far, the players keeping a running total from turn to turn.

If a player brings the current total to a multiple of ten, he gets to grab Zeus and place the Zeus figure in front of him. If when a player puts a number down and another player has the same number on a card in his hand, he can immediately take his turn by playing the card in his hand. Sometimes this means that other players will miss their turns because turn order continues normally from the interrupting player. For example, the turn order consists of Dan, Geoff, and Paul. If Dan plays a seven card and Paul has a seven card in his hand, he can immediately play it with play order continuing normally – that is, to Dan rather than Geoff who misses his turn.

Alternatively, a player can play a * card. There are eight types of these, each of which provides a particular effect. These either alter the current total value of Mount Olympus, let the player steal Zeus from another player, or a combination of both. Lastly, a player has to draw his hand back up to four cards at the end of his turn or he must play with fewer cards until the end of his next turn.

Physically, Zeus on the Loose, is very nicely put together. The number cards are clear and simple, whilst the * cards are done in an attractive cartoon style. The rules leaflet is easy to read and in addition to the rules, contains a description of each of the Greek *s that appear in the game.

Like many games from Gamewright, Zeus on the Loose has a strong educational aspect. The most obvious one being the arithmetic necessary to play, but there is also the information about the Greek pantheon in the rules and what it teaches about game play – that you need to pay attention to play well. Otherwise, a player will find himself losing turns as his competitors steal turns from him.

As intended, Zeus on the Loose is a well-designed educational game. Its designers have got the age range about right, making the game suitable for the classroom or for families with children of that age group. Adults will find the game play a little limited, more so if they are practised gamers. Nevertheless, Zeus on the Loose: A Card Game of Mythic Proportions is a nice little game that great for families and great as a gift for families.

Come the end of a hard day’s adventuring and every good hero will want to gather at The Hero’s Return and boast of the fantastic deeds that he performed that day. You are not a hero, but as a regular at The Hero’s Return, you like to get drunk and regale your equally drunken and equally unheroic friends of the great feats you certainly did not do that day. Sometimes your friends believe you, other times they call you “Liar” and tell you what really happened. This is the set up for Braggart – A game of heroes, lies, and unfortunate fish, a humorous card game that won the UK Games Expo award best card game in 2011.

Published by Spiral Galaxy Games, Braggart is designed for two to six wannabe heroes, and ten and up, and consists of one hundred and twenty full colour cards divided into five types. These are six Summary cards, a My Round card, ninety-two Boast cards, ten Liar! cards, and eleven Ploy cards. The Boast cards are further divided into four types – blue bordered Scene cards, green bordered Deed cards, red bordered Foe cards, and red bordered Result cards. The Boast cards each have a Brag Value at the top, a Victory Point value at the bottom, and a slightly cartoonish illustration with a short piece of text underneath. The black bordered Liar! cards are accusatory and force a bighead to change the details of his Boast, whilst the purple bordered Ploy let a show-off steal cards from a rival or change the cards in his hand.

The aim of Braggart is to score the most Victory Points at game’s end. This is done by creating the biggest Boast in a round as determined by the highest total Brag Value of each player’s Boast. At its most basic, a Boast consists of a single Deed card and a single Foe card. Optionally, a single Scene card and a single Result card can be added to a Boast, but either way, the Boast cards must be in the following order: Scene, Deed, Foe, and Result. This is so that the text on the cards forms a complete sentence. For example, the text from the following cards, “While wearing nothing more than my boots and a smile…” (Scene card), “I woke up next to…” (Deed card), “…a rogue magician of dubious morals” (Foe card), and “…and now barmaids all over town are unable to resist me!” (Result card) when read together forms a whole sentence.

The game starts with each player receiving a hand of four cards and is played in a series of rounds until the deck is exhausted and the game ends. Each round consists of two phases, a Draft Phase and a Boast Phase. In the Draft Phase a number of cards equal to the number of players is drawn from the deck and laid out face up where everyone can see them. Starting with the player with the My Round card in front him, everyone takes one of these face-up cards each.

In the Boast phase, a player has a number of options. He can “Go to the Bar” and draw three more cards in the hopes of gaining to a maximum hand size of eight, thus ending his turn. Or he can he play any number of Ploy cards to take cards from his fellow braggers before actually making a Boast. This consists of placing a single Deed card and a single Foe card with a single Scene card and a single Result card as optional extras, down on the table face-up and reading out the cards in as heroic or as boastful a fashion as possible. In response, the other blowhards round the table can call the swellhead out on the details of his deed by calling him a “Liar!” or an “Outrageous Liar!” and playing the appropriate cards. With these cards the accuser can replace one or two of the Boast cards in the windbag’s Boast with Boast cards of his own, the aim being to force the blusterer to reveal what really happened and reduce the Brag Value of his Boast.

For example, Anthony plays a seven-point Scene card, a four-point Deed card, an eight-point Foe card, and a six-point Result card. All together this has a Brag Value of twenty-five and reads as follows: “While possessed by the spirit of a long dead warlord…” “I opened a crate and was surprised to find…” “…a necromancer and her legions of the *ed” “…and now a painting of these exploits hangs above the King’s fireplace!”. Naturally, Anthony reads this out in as heroic a voice as possible and looks around the table to see if any will challenge him as to the veracity of his claims.

With a cry of “Liar!” and a point of his finger, Dave to his left plays a “Liar!” card on Anthony’s Boast and replaces his seven-point Scene card with a four-point Scene card from his hand. Similarly, Michelle calls Anthony an “Outrageous Liar!” and replaces two of his Boast cards with a three-point Deed card and a two-point Foe card so that Anthony’s Boast now reads “In the Queen’s bedchamber…” “I was beaten and robbed by…” “…the vicious village cat” “…and now a painting of these exploits hangs above the King’s fireplace!” and has a Brag Value of fifteen rather than twenty-five. Of course, Anthony is still expected to read out his amended, but now a bit more truthful Boast, in as a heroic a voice as possible.

A round ends once every player has managed to either “Go to the Bar” or make a Boast. The player who made the Boast with the highest Brag Value wins the round and gets to keep all of the cards from his Boast in his score pile for game’s end. Any other player who managed to make a Boast gets to keep one of the cards from his Boast to add to his score pile. All other cards from played Boasts are discarded. Then a new round begins with the My Round card going to the player who scored the least or nothing in the previous round. The game continues round by round until the deck is exhausted and then everyone totes up the Victory Points scored from their Brags. The winner – the player with the highest total – is awarded the title of Lord Braggart.

Braggart is not a game that calls for much in the way of tactics. After all, all that a player is trying to do is get his best Boast out on the table whilst ensuring that his rivals make poorer Boasts by calling them Liars. The only real tactic is watching the cards that each player draws in the Draft phase, whether that is high value Boast Cards to play Liar! Cards on them or Liar! Cards to avoid having them played on your Boast. After that though, it is simply a matter of doing the dirty on the other players. For the most part, this is a random card game and the players have to make the best of their hands.

Lastly, there is the matter of the game’s full title: Braggart – A game of heroes, lies, and unfortunate fish. The “heroes” and “lies” aspects are obvious, but the “unfortunate fish”? Well, there is a single Foe Card worth exactly a Brag Value and a Victory Point total of one for which text on the card reads, “…an unfortunate trout.” This is not the only Foe Card of this value in the game, but when this is played in the designer’s own playing group, it is known as being “trouted”!

Braggart is a fun, silly, take that style game that serves as a good filler to play whilst waiting for more players or a longer game to start. It should appeal to gamers who like to tell a story, even if only very silly stories and it will really appeal to gamers who have played fantasy roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons. It is also a suitably light game to play socially, be that with a drink in your hand or not, though it would be fitting as you do “Go to the Bar” in the game! Every gamer should have a selection of filler games and Braggart – A game of heroes, lies, and unfortunate fish is an entertaining game that deserves to be in your selection.

The focus of so many exotic curios and occult artefacts at the museum is the cause of a new threat to Arkham. They weaken the barriers to the beyond, letting Gates open and monsters in, and laying a path for an Ancient One to make its way to Earth and lay waste to mankind. Only a number of dedicated investigators have the knowledge and will, and perhaps the allies and the tools, if not necessarily the time, to locate a sufficient number of Elder Signs that will seal the portals and prevent the arrival of the Ancient One. This is the set up for Elder Sign, the latest board game from the designers of Arkham Horror that uses the same art work and trade dress as seen in both Arkham Horror and the recently released Mansions of Madness.

Fantasy Flight Game’s third board game of facing Lovecraftian horror, Elder Sign is, like Arkham Horror, a co-operative game designed to be played by between one and eight players, with a playing time of between one and two hours. The co-operative element means that the opponents faced by players are not each other, but by the game itself and its mechanics. It also means that there is a time component to Elder Sign, not only in terms of a time limit before the Ancient One arrives, but also in terms of events (of a random nature) that occur regularly throughout the game’s play. In order to counter the effects of these events, and eventually, the arrival of the Ancient One, the Investigators will explore the Museum and have Adventures within its confines, the aim being to marshal the resources necessary to save the world.

Elder Sign is comprised of several sets of large and small cards, various tokens and counters, a card clock, and a set of customised dice. The large cards are divided between decks of Investigators, Adventures, and Ancient Ones, whilst the small cards are divided between decks of Common and Unique items, Spells, and Allies – all beneficial to the Investigators, whilst Mythos cards describe the events and effects that occur every time that the clock strikes Midnight and linger until the clock strikes Midnight again.

There are sixteen individual Investigators to choose from. Each one gives an Investigator his maximum Sanity and Stamina, his Starting Items, and a special ability. For example, Dexter Drake is a magician who whenever he gains a Spell card during play, he always gains an extra one, whilst Gloria Goldberg is an author whose Psychic Sensitivity grants her extra dice to roll when visiting Other World Adventure Cards.

During a game, the Investigators will face one of eight Ancient Ones. They include Azathoth, Cthulhu, Hastur, Ithaqua, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Yig, and Yog-Sothoth. Each one gives the number of Elder Signs needed to prevent it from being awoken, which occurs when the Doom Track on the card is filled; a special ability that applies throughout a game; a means of Attack once it is awoken; and a Combat Task that must be completed by the Investigators to weaken and eventually banish it from the Earth. So for example, for Cthulhu, the Special Ability is “Dreams of Madness,” which reduces every Investigator’s maximum Sanity and Stamina by one. Thirteen Elder Signs are needed to banish this Ancient One, but it only needs eleven tokens for the Doom Track to be filled and Cthulhu to be woken up. When Cthulhu does Attack, it reduces each Investigator’s Sanity or Stamina by one and adds another token to his Doom Track. The latter is a problem because in order to defeat an awoken Ancient One, the Investigators have to remove all of the tokens from the Doom Track. To remove a Token, an Investigator has to roll the given Combat Task.

Each Adventure Card has a title, a Trophy value, some flavour text, a set of Tasks that need to be completed if an Investigator is to succeed at the Adventure itself, and a set of Penalties for if an Investigator fails to complete the Adventure and a set of Rewards if he does. Some Adventure Cards also have a Terror effect that occurs if an Investigator does not complete a Task on each roll and some stipulate that their Tasks have to be done in order rather than the order of a player’s choosing. Most of the Adventure Cards take place in the Museum such as “Remains of the High Priest” and “The Gift Shop,” but others take place off world, like “The Dreamlands” and “The City of the Great Race.” In general, the Rewards and Penalties for the Other World Adventure cards are greater and they are also harder to complete.

Penalties on an Adventure Card can deduct Sanity and Stamina from an Investigator, cause a Monster to appear, advance the Clock, or add another Doom Token to the Doom Track on the Ancient One Card. Rewards can grant Items, Spells, and Allies as well as Elder Signs and Clue Tokens. They can also open Gates to Other World Adventure Cards. Not all of the Rewards are good – sometimes they are mix of the good and the bad.

The small cards represent Common and Unique items, Spells, and Allies as well as Mythos effects. They add extra dice to a Task attempt or alter dice rolls; enable an Investigator to restore Sanity or Stamina; or in the case of some Spells, let an Investigator store dice results between attempts at a Task. Allies grant another special ability, such as Richard Upton Pickman’s being able to change results on the dice in a certain fashion. Each Mythos card has two effects. The first occurs as soon as it is drawn, whilst the second lasts until the next Mythos card is drawn. For example, immediate effect of “The Stars Align…” is to add a Doom token to the Doom Track, whilst the lingering effect, “…Before Reason Fails,” lets the Tasks on Adventure Cards be done in any order, even if they stipulate that they must be done in order.

The game includes Sanity, Stamina, Investigator, Clue (these allow re-rolls of the dice), Elder Sign and Doom Tokens. There are also Monster Markers, little card strips that when summoned can replace Tasks on an Adventure Card to make them more difficult to complete. Each Monster Marker has a piece of flavour text on the reverse and a Trophy value.

The final components are the card Clock, used to measure the passing of time and determine when new Mythos cards are drawn; the Museum Entrance card; and the dice. The Museum Entrance card represents somewhere where an Investigator can go to “Receive First Aid,” “Search the Lost & Found,” or “Buy A Souvenir.” This usually requires an Investigator to expend Trophy points won by completing Adventure Cards or defeating Monsters, or to expend various tokens or items.

The dice are the heart of the game, rolled by an Investigator to try and match the symbols listed for each Task on the Adventure cards. They come in three colours. The six green dice are the most common and all of them are usually rolled when a Task is attempted. The yellow dice gives better results than a green die whilst the red dice gives better results than the yellow die. It usually takes the expenditure of a Common Item card to add the Yellow die to a player’s roll and the expenditure of a Unique Item card to add the red die. There is only the one yellow and one red die in the game.

Game set up is quick and simple. Each player selects an Investigator and receives its starting items. An Ancient One is chosen and placed on the table where everyone can see it along with the Clock – which is set at midnight, the Museum Entrance card, and six Adventure Cards. The first Mythos card is drawn and takes effect.

On his a turn, a player sends his Investigator to the chosen Adventure Card. He takes up the green dice and the yellow or red die if he decides to use an Item or has a Special Ability. The Tasks are arranged on each Adventure Card in lines and with each roll of the dice, a player must match the symbols on a single line with those on the dice. He can only attempt to match the symbols on one line at a time and if he does, he places those dice on the symbols on the card. He can then go on to roll for the Tasks on the other lines. If he fails to roll the right symbols for a line, he can continue rolling, but must discard a die each time he fails to match the symbols. On some Adventure Cards, there is a Terror effect for failing to match any symbols and rolling a Terror on the dice. If the player completes all of the Tasks, he receives all of the rewards at the bottom of the Adventure Card. He also receives the Adventure Card to keep as a Trophy which can be spent at the Museum Entrance for various effects. If he does not complete any of them, he suffers the penalties also given at the bottom of the Adventure Card.

Alternatively, a player could have sent his Investigator to the Museum Entrance. As soon as a player’s turn is over the Clock is advanced one quarter of the way round its face. When the Clock reaches Midnight a new Mythos Card is drawn and its effects applied. Since the two effects on the Mythos Cards vary greatly, often the players will find themselves hoping for one with less dangerous effects. So drawing one every fourth turn is another way in which Elder Sign can turn up the tension.

Our sample Adventure Card is “Lights Out.” Harvey Walters’ player decides that the reward of an Elder Sign is worth going for. The individual Tasks on each line are not difficult in themselves, but the Arrow symbol beside them means that they have to be done in order. Harvey has at his disposal one Unique Item – a copy of “Cultes des Ghoules” that lets him add the red die to a Task attempt, and one Spell card, the spell “Flesh Ward,” which lets him store a die roll between attempts. Harvey decides that he will use both, meaning that he rolls both the green and the red dice.

On the first roll, Harvey gets the results of 1 Clue, 2 Clue, Scroll, Scroll, Skull, and Tentacle on the green dice. On the red die, he gets the Wild Card symbol, which can be used to match any other symbol. The 1 Clue and 2 Clue symbols are enough to complete the Task on the first line and places those dice on the Adventure Card. He takes the red die and stores it on the Spell Card. This leaves him with just four green dice to roll.

On the second roll, Harvey needs two Skulls, but is unlucky and gets neither. He is forced to discard one of the green dice leaving him with three to roll. He gets 1 Clue, 3 Clue, and a Skull. He needs another Skull, so uses the Wild Card symbol on the red die that he stored earlier to match the symbols needed to complete the Task. This leaves him with just two dice and needing two Scrolls to complete the third Task and the whole Adventure Card. He rolls a Scroll and a Tentacle. Ordinarily this would not be enough, but Harvey’s Special Ability allows him to change a single Tentacle result on the dice to a Scroll, and as soon as he does he has completed all of the Tasks and the Adventure Card.

As a reward, he gains an Elder Sign and a Spell Card plus the Adventure Card to spend as a Trophy. A new Adventure Card is then added. If he failed, he would have lost two Stamina and added another Token to the Doom Track on the Ancient One’s card.

When the Doom Track is fully filled on the Ancient One’s card, it awakes and comes to Earth. At that point every Investigator has to face it, battling to remove the Doom Tokens from the Track. This uses the same dice mechanics as for the Tasks on the Adventure Cards.

Should either the Sanity or Stamina of an Investigator be reduced to zero, he deemed to have been devoured! His player must start afresh with a new Investigator, including new Starting Items. He loses those previously held by the now devoured Investigator. If an Investigator is devoured by the awakened Ancient One, no new Investigator can join the fight against him.

Winning a game of Elder Sign is not easy, but it is made all the harder when certain Adventure and Mythos Cards and Monsters appear that have the Locked Die icon on them. These temporarily remove a die that matches the colour on the icon from the game, thus reducing the number of dice each player has to roll on his turn until the Adventure Card or the Monster that has confiscated the die has been dealt with, or the effects of the Mythos Card have been replaced with a new one when the Clock strikes Midnight. Fortunately, in addition to using Investigator Special Abilities and the various Spell and Item Cards to give themselves an advantage, players can do things. First, Clue Tokens allow players to re-roll dice. Second, they can Focus a die – saving a die result for a subsequent Task, but at the cost of discarding another die, or Assist another player on the same Adventure Card – giving them a die result that they can use on their turn in attempting the Tasks on that Adventure Card. The downside to this is that it reduces the number of dice every player has to roll until the Assisted player’s turn.

Physically, Elder Sign is up to Fantasy Flight Games’ usual standards. Everything is of a high quality as you would expect, and the illustrations, all of which will be familiar to players of Arkham Horror and Mansions of Madness, are excellent. The rulebook is perhaps a little succinct at twelve pages, with some more examples of play being needed to better get the play of the game across. If there is an issue with the components, it is that some of the components are just a little too small for easy handling and thus some of the artwork’s effectiveness is lost.

Elder Sign is described as a co-operative dice game, but whilst the dice rolling lies at the heart of mechanics and game resolution, the game is really a “co-operative dice and decision” game. The players have to decide where their Investigators have to go and which Adventure Cards they should attempt to resolve, this decision usually being influenced by the number of Elder Signs available as Rewards on the current Adventure Cards or the Adventure Cards or Monsters with the locked dice on them. Of course, sometimes a player will attempt to resolve an Adventure Card for the Item and Spell Cards that it would reward him. They also need to decide how to apply their dice rolls, and in all of this, a player is free to solicit advice from the other players. This then, is the game’s “co-operative” element.

In comparison with Fantasy Flight Games’ other titles of Lovecraftian investigative horror, Elder Sign is simpler, more direct, and quicker to play. It is less location focused than either Arkham Horror or Mansions of Madness, so it has less of a narrative structure to it, but because a player is rolling the dice multiple times during his turn, it actually feels like you are doing more than in either of those games, especially in Mansions of Madness where a player’s actions feel severely limited.

The combined effect of the reduced narrative structure in comparison to Fantasy Flight Games’ other Lovecraftian board games and the focus on the dice rolling to resolve the Adventure Cards is to make Elder Sign feel mechanical in play. It is possible that much of the game’s flavour and colour could fade into the background if the players do focus too much on the dice and the mechanics. That said, this is not necessarily an issue for the more casual player.

With eight Ancient Ones to face and forty-eight Adventure and eight Other World Adventure Cards, and sixteen Investigators to play, the core set for Elder Sign offers plenty of replay value. Plus, the format is ripe for expansion. The actual downtime between turns is not necessarily high, but of course with more players there is a slightly longer wait. When it is a player’s turn, the rolling of the dice to resolve the Tasks of an Adventure Card can be quite tense, which just adds to the atmosphere and feel of the game seen in the art.

Above all, Elder Sign captures much of the tension and atmosphere of fighting desperately against the Mythos. That it does so in such a self-contained and time constrained manner is a sign of a good design, at the heart of which is the clever, tension inducing dice rolling. Not too complex for the casual player, but still evocative for the Lovecraft devotee.

In the last five years, the co-operative board game has become a familiar design, one that has regularly made it onto the tables of many gaming groups. Pandemic from Z-Man Games is perhaps the best known design, exemplifying the need for the players to work together in order to prevent the game’s mechanics from defeating them, and titles such as Fantasy Flight’s Red November and the more recent Flash Point: Fire Rescue from Indie Boards & Cards. Another type of the co-operative board game is the semi-co-operative design, one that adds the element of treachery by having player take the role of a traitor trying to undermine the efforts of the other players. It is best typified by Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game and Shadows Over Camelot, both from Fantasy Flight Games, both games that begin with randomly determining which of the players is trying to betray the others. These are now joined by another design, one that goes a step further by having the treacherous player not only working to undermine the efforts of the others, but also attempting to infect them too! The design is Panic Station.

Published by Stronghold Games, Panic Station is set in the year 2220. Contact has been lost with the mining station, Recon-6, and also with the platoon of soldiers that was sent into investigate. Now a special unit of heavily trained Troopers from the Extermination Corps has been assigned to determine what happened, each Trooper being assigned a bio-mechanical Android that only he can control through telepathic means. Despite their training and their equipment, the Troopers were unprepared for what they found – a parasite impervious to their bullets and capable of infecting both themselves and their accompanying Androids. Fortunately, the research staff at Recon-6 had developed ammunition that would the parasite bugs and discovered that the Hive is vulnerable to heat. Now all the Troopers and Androids have to do is scavenge enough bullets to hold off the bugs and enough gasoline to fuel the flamethrowers that will burn out the Hive. Standing against them though, is not only the ever present threat of the bugs, but also the fact that one of their number has already been infected and both he and his Android plans to infect everyone else in order to stop the Hive from being burned!

Designed for between four and six players, Panic Station is a semi-co-operative paranoia-driven board game that can be played through in about an hour. Each player controls one Trooper, armed with a flamethrower, and an Android, armed with a handgun. Both are telepathically linked. Play will see them progressing through the Recon-6 base, its layout randomly determined each time the game is played, scavenging for equipment and swapping equipment, whilst also fighting and avoiding the parasite bugs that scurry around in the darkness. If the Hive can be located and an Android can burn it out with three cans of gasoline, then the players will have won the game.

Unfortunately, one of the players begins the game having been infected by the Hive and as the Host he must keep his status a secret whilst trying to infect or kill the other Troopers and Androids. Infect enough of them and he can prevent the Hive from being burnt out, and so win the game. Only by keeping a careful watch on his fellow players can a player determine which of them of them is the Host or has become infected, although with a heat scan later in the game, it is possible to ascertain the number of players who have been infected.

Coming in sturdy tin, Panic Station consists of two decks of cards – the forty-six card Search Deck and the twenty card Exploration Deck; twelve Character Cards, two for each player, consisting of a Trooper and an Android in matching colours; twelve Check Cards, one positive and one negative, for each player; twelve Wooden Character Discs, two for each player, consisting of a Trooper and an Android in matching colours; ten Wooden Parasite Discs, consisting of five grey Parasites and five black Parasites; eighteen Infect Cards, consisting of six sets of three cards, a set for each player; a Heat-Check Board, a four-sided die, and a full colour rulebook. Of these, the Search Deck contains all of the items that can be found during searches, these include Heavy Guns, Bullets, Armour, Grenades, Fuel Canisters, Keycards (for getting through locked doors), Body Scanners to determine if another player is infected, Energy Boosts to give a player more Action Points, First Aid Kits for healing, Target Scopes that can be fitted to guns to allow attacks into adjacent rooms, and Combat Knives that allow close up attacks. The Exploration Deck forms the locations that the Troopers and Androids will explore. The Check Cards are used during heat scans to detect the presence of infected individuals in conjunction with the Heat-Check Board. All of these components are of a high quality and very attractive.

At game’s start, each player receives the Character Discs and the Character Cards for his Trooper and his Android; two Check Cards, one positive and one negative; and three Infection Cards. All in the same colour. The top of the Search Deck is seeded with a mix of Fuel Canister cards and random Search Cards as well as the Host Card, and each player receives two cards from the Search Deck. Together with his Infect Cards, these two Search Cards make up a player’s hand. It is possible that one of the drawn Search Cards is the Host Card, which would indicate that the player is the treacherous Host and now has the aim of stopping the other players. If the Host Card is not drawn, then it will probably be drawn within a turn or two. The Exploration Deck is also seeded with the Hive card in the bottom three cards of the deck and the Terminal Room in the lower half of the deck. This ensures that one of the last rooms to be found is the players’ objective. Lastly, the Reactor Room card is placed at the centre of the table. It is marked by the numbers one to four to indicate the cardinal directions, these are the directions that the Parasites will randomly move in at the beginning of each round. The Reactor Room is where the Troopers and the Androids will enter Recon-6 to begin their search for the Hive.

Panic Station is played as a series of rounds each consisting of two phases. The first of these is the Parasite Phase in which all of the Parasites on the board attempt to move and then attack any Troopers or Androids in the same room after they have attempted to move. The direction moved is determined by a throw of the die and consulting the numbers on the Reaction Room card. Attacks by the Grey Parasites inflict a point of damage and two points if they are Black Parasites. This damage cannot be prevented unless a character is wearing Armour. At the end of the Parasite Phase, a marker, known as the Parasite Marker, is passed to the next player on the left to indicate when the next Parasite Phase starts.

The Parasite Phase is followed by the Team Phase. Beginning by the player who just passed the Parasite Phase to the left, each player can have his Trooper and his Android act using their combined Action Points. This actually means that the player who just passed the Parasite Phase acts twice before there is another Parasite Phase. The number of Action Points that a player starts with between his Trooper and Android starts at four, but will go down if either is wounded or killed. He can spend these to Explore – add a single location drawn from the Exploration Deck next to his location; Move to an adjacent location if he can – some locations have Security Doors that need to be unlocked, but do have viewports that allow him to look into an adjacent room, whilst others contain two locations instead of one; Fire Guns, either to kill a Parasite or a possibly infected Trooper or Android; Search a location to draw from the Search Deck; Activate Computer Terminal for various effects; Heal in the Sick Bay – up to two Wounds per turn between a player’s Trooper and Android; or to Use Item.

A player can Search, Move, Fire Guns, or Use Item as many times per turn as he has Action Points, but can only Explore, Activate Computer Terminal, or Heal in the Sick Bay once per turn. Of these actions, Fire Guns requires the use of Ammunition and this must be found using a Search action. It takes a single bullet to kill a Grey Parasite and two to kill a Black Parasite. Use Item allows a player to use any of the items he has found with a Search and has in his hand. A Search action allows a player to draw a card from the Search Deck. When a player does an Activate Computer Terminal, he can perform a Perform Heat Scan to see how many of his fellow players are infected; Open All Security Doors until the beginning of the next Parasite Phase; or to Reveal Location, adding a new location anywhere on the map of Recon-6.

Each location card is doubled-sided, and the same on both sides. When first placed, a location card is placed so that the black icon on it is face up. When it is searched or the ability of the room is used, like the Activate Computer Terminal, the location card is flipped so that its red icon is face up. This means that when the room is searched again or its ability used again, a Parasite is attracted by the activity and appears in an adjacent location, ready to move on the next Parasite Phase. There are only five Grey Parasites, and once they are all out on the map, the Black Parasites appear. They take two bullets or two attacks with the Knife to kill, and inflict two Wounds when they attack during the Parasite Phase.

A Heat Scan, performed either with an Activate Computer Terminal action or as soon as the Hive Card is drawn from the Exploration Deck, involves everyone submitting their Check Cards into the correct slot on the Heat-Check Board. One slot is for the players’ true infection statuses, the other is not. This is done with the Check Cards face down and the cards in each slot are then shuffled, all so that it is not clear who played what Check Card into what slot. Then the Check Cards in the actual status slot are revealed, allowing all of the players to know how many of their number is infected, but not who… Afterwards, everyone gets their Check Cards back.

The question is, how does the Host infect another player? It comes down to fact that whenever one player moves either his Trooper or his Android into a location – though not the Reactor Room where everyone starts from – and there is a Trooper or Android already there under the control of another player, he must either attack him or trade with him. The former requires a weapon and ammunition – or the knife, but a trade can be done with any item. Each trade though, is done closed, in that neither participant knows what he is going to receive in return. This means that if the Host or another player who has already been infected can pass another player one of his Infect Cards, then the receiving player is now infected and can attempt to infect others using his Infect Cards. When a Trooper is infected, it also means that the Android he controls is infected, and vice versa. An infected player can only infect others using his Infect Cards, the ones that match the colour of his Trooper and Android. A player cannot use his Infect Cards in a Trade until he is infected, and then only three times because he begins the game with three Infect Cards.

It possible to block an infect attempt in a Trade. This is done by trading away of his Fuel Canisters, which burns away the incoming infection. It also means that the player one less Fuel Canister in the knowledge that he needs three for his Trooper to burn out the Hive. In process though, he finds out who is infected and there is nothing to stop him from denouncing the infected loudly and accusingly.

The humans win if an uninfected Trooper can enter the Hive and use three Fuel Canisters to burn it out. The Parasite wins if all of the Troopers and Androids are infected, as revealed by a Heat Scan, except that is, for the last Trooper and Android infected. They lose… The Parasite also wins if there is only one human player left and there are no Fuel Canisters to use on the Hive, or if all of the Troopers are killed, as the Androids cannot use the flamethrowers on the Hive. Dead players always lose…

Panic Station is a cleverly designed game. It has a great theme, essentially, a combination of John Carpenter’s The Thing with Pandemic. In fact, the theme is effectively implemented, and it does get very tense as the humans try and locate the Hive whilst also searching for enough resources to have sufficient Fuel Canisters to burn it out. All this and the Parasites are coming out of the ducting attracted by the humans’ frantic efforts to find the Fuel Canisters. Of course, the Parasites are the least of the humans’ worries. One of them is a Host and is trying to infect them! And the only way to get infected is through trading, which is also the main means of acquiring Fuel Canisters. The other way, of course, is searching rooms, and that attracts the attention of the Parasite bugs.

Yet Panic Station is game with a few problems. The first one is that the game is hard to teach as the rules in the tin are not as clear as they could be. This has been fixed in part with the free release of a second edition of the rules that anyone can download, but this still does not wholly fix the problem. The Trade rules are particularly awkward to teach, not just in terms of the how, but also the why. This is true of the game in general and there is a lot to explain in order to get the game’s theme across.

The second problem is how the theme has implemented in terms of the rules. It feels counter intuitive to have the Troopers and the Androids use different weapons and not be allowed to use both. Similarly, it feels counter intuitive to have a Trooper be infected by the Host and then have his accompanied Android also be infected at the same time, no matter how far they are apart on the board. It feels counter intuitive to have a Trooper and an Android pairing share the same equipment, no matter how far they are apart on the board. The presence of these limitations seems to be there to enforce the rules and the tension, and not the theme. To some they will get in the way of the play of the game.

Get past these problems though, and it will probably take more than a single play to do so, and then Panic Station sets everything up for an hour’s tense game play. Tense because of the paranoia of not knowing who to trust, but knowing that you have to co-operate in order to defeat a foe that is trying to betray you and eat you! The game’s theme should also encourage plenty of table talk – especially if the players have seen the right movies and can quote from them, Aliens being as good as the aforementioned John Carpenter’s The Thing – and if played right, this should only enhance both the paranoia and the play. If you are in the right mood and enjoy roleplaying the theme, then Panic Station is a welcome addition to the semi-co-operative family of board games.

In 2010, I wrote the White Box Fever series of reviews that in turned looked at the then available titles that would serve as an introductions to our hobby and to fantasy roleplaying. In turn, I reviewed Wizards of the Coast’s 2008 Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Starter Set for Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, Fiery Dragon’s Tunnels & Trolls v7.5, Swords & Wizardry: White Box Edition from Brave Half Publishing, Wizards of the Coast’s Castle Ravenloft Board Game, James Raggi IV’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, and Ancient Odysseys: Treasure Awaits! An Introductory Roleplaying Game from Precis Intermedia. The purpose of this? All as a lead in to a review of the Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game Starter Set, the very first release in Dungeons & Dragons Essentials line that was Wizards of the Coast’s re-launch of Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition. Yet when it came to fantasy roleplaying, there was one title missing from this series – the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

The reason for that is simple. At the time of the launch of the “Red Box” styled Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game Starter Set, there was no introductory set for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Now there is, and of all of the available introductory sets for fantasy roleplaying game, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box is the heaviest, the most attractive, the most well put together, and the most expensive of them all. This set is designed for use by between two and five players aged thirteen and up, and take their adventurers from fist to fifth levels.

Opening up the box reveals two sealed packets, the first containing a set of polyhedral dice, the second a set of twenty stands for use with the eighty counters included further into the box. Below this sits the “Welcome to a World of Adventure” sheet that guides the player through the rest of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box. This sheet asks what role the reader wants to take – solo player, playing as part of a group, or Game Master and then directs them to the appropriate starting point. For example, if the reader wants to get started without the need to read the rules, then he is directed to the “HERO’S HANDBOOK” and play through the adventure that teaches him the game.

Underneath is there are four expanded and pre-generated character sheets, one for each of the Classes given in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box. Each sheet explains what the Class is good at, describes each of the elements on the sheet and how they work in the rules, and gives some background on the pre-generated character. The four include a Human Fighter, an Elf Rogue, a Human Wizard, and a Human Cleric. The four are reasonable creations, although it is a pity that no Dwarf character is included in the four.

The game is explained in two rule books. The first of these is the sixty-four page Hero’s Handbook, the second the ninety-six page Game Master’s Guide. Both of these slim volumes are cleanly laid out and very nicely illustrated. They are also easy to use, each including not just an index, but also several pages of references at the rear of the book.

Rounding out the contents of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box are a double-sided Flip-Mat and a set of counters each of which can slot into the plastic stands provided. One side of the Flip-Mat displays a map of “Black Fang’s Dungeon,” the adventure described in the Game Master’s Guide, whilst the other side simply contains a plain grid pattern. Both dry-erase and wet-erase write pens can be used with the Flip-Mat. Lastly, the eighty full colour card counters are easy to punch and depict both the characters that the players can make using the rules in the Hero’s Handbook and the monsters in the Game Master’s Guide. A nice touch is that every combination of Class and Race possible using the rules in the Hero’s Handbook is covered in the counter mix. So, for the Cleric, there is a Human Cleric, an Elf Cleric, and a Dwarf Cleric, one male and one female for each Race. The last item in the box is a flyer for the next step to take once the GM and players want to go beyond the contents of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box.

Open up the Hero’s Handbook and the reader is quickly thrown into “Skeleton King’s Crypt,” a short twenty-three entry solo adventure that guides a character into a small underground complex that is thought to be one of the many sources of monsters that threaten the town of Sandpoint. It is a simple affair that easily demonstrates how the rules work. What it is not is a demonstration of how the different characters, or rather how the different Classes work, something that Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game Starter Set demonstrated very effectively, though it should be pointed out the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box does a better job of creating character generation than Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game Starter Set did.

After an all too short explanation of what a Roleplaying Game is followed by a similarly short example of play, the Hero’s Handbook gets down to the basics of how the game is played (mechanically, this would be roll a twenty-sided die, add any bonuses from the attributes, skills, or saving throws that apply and get as high a result as possible) and then onto character generation. Here is where the design of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box really begins to shine – and all it takes is cross-referencing. For example, letters corresponding to the sections and their explanations on the four expanded pre-generated character sheets as well as on the sections on the standard character sheets correspond to the relevant sections throughout the character creation process in the Hero’s Handbook.

By working through the corresponding sections, a player can quickly create a character. Each section gives aspects that a player needs to note down on the character sheet, most of them mandatory, some of them giving the player several options to choose from. For example, a Wizard must choose his Arcane School. If he chooses the Evocation School learns attack rather than defence or trickery spells and can cast the spell Burning Hands one per day and Force Missile several times a day. The Hero’s Handbook gives just the Universalist and the Illusion Schools in addition to the Evocation School. In comparison to earlier versions of Dungeons & Dragons, one pleasing aspect of the spellcasting Classes in Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is that they get features that they can do all of the time. For example, the Wizard can freely cast the Cantrips Detect Magic, Mage Hand, Ray of Frost, and Read Magic without using up a spell as he would in other RPGs that feature Vancian magic. The Cleric has similar features, but they are called Orisons rather than Cantrips.

To offset the lack of Dwarf characters amongst the given pregenerated quartet, our sample character is a Dwarf, and rather than the traditional Fighter, this one is a Cleric. He is devoted to Gorum, * of Strength and Battle. Had there been a Dwarven * given in the Hero’s Handbook…

Holmin Quarrysmasher
Class: Cleric Level: 1 Race: Dwarf
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Strength: 14 Constitution: 16 Dexterity: 13
Intelligence: 13 Wisdom: 19 Charisma: 7
Armour Class: +5 Speed: 20
Hit Points: 8 Surges: 13
Fortitude: +2 Reflex: +0 Will: +2
Attack Bonus: +1
Racial Traits: Dark Vision (60 Feet), Hatred (+1 VS. Goblins and Orcs), Hardy (+2 VS. Poison and Spells), Weapon Familiarity (Battleaxes & Warhammers)
Class Features: Channel Energy (11/times per day) for damaging the undead and healing
Feats: Weapon Focus (Longsword)
Deity: Gorum, * of Strength & Battle (grants Battle Rage 20/times per day; Strength Surge 20/times per day)
Orisons: Detect Magic, Light, Read Magic, Stabilise
Prepared Spells: Cure Light Wounds, Divine Favour
Skills: Diplomacy, Heal 5, Knowledge (Arcana), Knowledge (History), Knowledge (Religion) 5, Sense Motive, Spellcraft 5
Equipment: Longsword, Scale Armour, backpack, adventurer’s kit, sling, sling bullets (10), candles (10), 60gp

All four of the Classes provide everything that a player needs to know make his character second, third, fourth, and fifth level. Again these guidelines are easy to work through and apply to a character sheet. Equally, the guidelines to completing a character are easy to work through, being organised by Class and giving several suggestions as to what a player should select from the following lists of Skills, Feats, and Equipment. One issue is that the number of Feats is limited, especially if the character is a spellcaster. A nice touch is that every single piece of equipment is accompanied by an illustration.

The Hero’s Handbook is rounded out with an explanation of how the game is played. The rules cover everything that a player needs to know in terms of exploration and combat. In keeping with the rest of the volume they are an easy read, and the rules are themselves supported with a glossary of terms and a Combat Reference Guide, the latter on the back cover of the Hero’s Handbook.

Just like the Hero’s Handbook, the Game Master’s Guide gets down to the play of the game straight away. “Black Fang’s Dungeon” is just ten entries long, and although only a basic scenario, it presents a good mix of encounters. Not just combat, but also traps and puzzles as well as a little roleplaying. As written, the GM could begin running this with fifteen or so minutes’ worth of preparation – the same time that the players would need to devote to reading and understanding their character sheets. For anyone new to roleplaying, there is probably a good session or two’s worth of play in the scenario.

If the GM has more time, then the following section on Gamemastering is worth reading as preparation for running the scenario. The remainder of the Game Master’s Guide is devoted to “Building an Adventure.” The advice is good, explaining how the GM should start with the story and build up from there. Some of it is geared towards the GM creating the “Ruins of Raven’s Watch,” the first dungeon of own design, for which a map and some background is provided. To support the advice, the Game Master’s Guide explores how different environments, from the dungeon and the forest to the desert and the city, can be used to enhance a game, coupling each different environment with a lengthy list of monsters that could be encountered within each setting. In terms of rewards, hundreds of magical items are not only described, but also illustrated, these ranging from simple scrolls and potions to wondrous items like Bandages of Rapid Recovery and Slippers of Spider Climbing.

Some forty monsters and enemies are described in the Game Master’s Guide. They range from the lowly Dire Rats, Goblins, Orcs, and Skeletons, each with a Challenge Rating of 1/3, up to creatures with a Challenge Rating of 7, such as the Ghost and the Medusa. Top of the heap though, at least in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box, is the fiercesome Black Dragon, with its Challenge Rating of 8. All of these are represented by the counters also found in the box. Rounding out the Game Master’s Guide is a description of Sandpoint, the coastal town introduced in Pathfinder #1—Rise of the Runelords Chapter 1: “Burnt Offerings”, the inaugural entry in Paizo Publishing’s Adventure Path series, which the player characters can use as their base of operations.

It should be made clear that the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box does not present a full version of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. It is a streamlined version of the game, which shows in the limited choice of character Classes, Races, Skills, Options, Feats, and spells, as well as simplified combat rules – no rules for “Attacks of Opportunity” or the capacity for characters to “Take 10” or “Take 20” for example. None of these omissions should be counted against the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box as it is designed to introduce new players without burdening them with the complexity to be found in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game or facing the daunting prospect of opening up what is a weighty tome.

There are only just a few issues with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box. Ideally, the dice should not have been one colour, but each in the set a different colour to help easy identification and use during the game. The given example of play included in the Hero’s Handbook could have been longer and thus done a done a better job of showing how the game is played. The box could also have done with another scenario. The one in the Game Master’s Guide does a good job of presenting an introductory adventure, but it lacks the sophistication to be found in the scenarios available from Paizo Publishing for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. A more sophisticated adventure would also have presented the GM with an example when it comes to writing his own in addition to giving more of a challenge to the players.

As much as the red box styling and the Larry Elmore artwork of Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game Starter Set delivers a one-two punch to the nostalgia nerve point, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box honestly delivers so much more. And, not just because it allows characters to go from first to fifth level. It provides more options, more ideas, and more for both the GM and the players to play and work with. You simply get more for your money!

The other thing that the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box has over the Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game Starter Set is that despite the name change, it will still be familiar to anyone returning to the fantasy roleplaying fold after being away for a while. After all, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is a direct descendant of Dungeons & Dragons, and even if this Beginner Box is essentially the “Basic” Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, it still makes it very easy for anyone familiar with Dungeons & Dragons to pick this up and start playing.

Of course, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box is really aimed at the new player. Any new player who opens this box will find an attractive set of contents that present the game’s rules in an easy to read and learn fashion, all accompanied by artwork that exemplifies the feel and action that those rules want to impart. The truth is, out of all of the introductory fantasy roleplaying games currently available, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box is the most comprehensive, the most accessible, and the most enjoyable. And an excellent introduction to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game to boot.

Hot on the heels of one expansion for Ticket to Ride, Days of Wonder brings us another. First Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia and now Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India, the second in the series that provides the Ticket to Ride fan with more pairs of maps to explore and play on. The maps themselves each come on a double-sided boards and are accompanied by new tweaks to the core rules that provide new challenges and playing experiences. Like the first Map Collection, it requires the Train Cards and Trains from either Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride Europe to play. Where Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia had a theme – both of its maps present different ways in which to play the game over the continent of Asia, Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India does not have a theme. Yes, one of its maps depicts India, but the other it depicts Switzerland, and that might be a bit of problem.

The problem with Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India is that its Switzerland map is not new, but instead a reprint of Ticket to Ride Switzerland which appeared in 2007 before quickly going out of print and becoming just a little collectible. Now if you are a Ticket to Ride devotee and do not own Ticket to Ride Switzerland, then its inclusion in Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India is to be welcomed. If you happen to already own a copy of Ticket to Ride Switzerland, then in buying Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India, you in effect buying something that you already have in order to gain access to the board that you do not have. Or indeed, effectively doubling the price you pay for the India map.

In addition, its inclusion means that I have to review Ticket to Ride Switzerland once again. Now, having just written a review of it, I am not going to do a full review again, but rather an overview and a summary. The Switzerland map is the first two to three player variant for Ticket to Ride that makes extensive use of tunnels and adds a new type of route card that connects cities to Switzerland’s neighbouring countries or Switzerland’s neighbouring countries to each other. The map’s routes are tight with high scoring opportunities being offered through Destination Tickets that replicate parts of longer Destination Tickets. Now, the Switzerland map is not the most popular of maps with many Ticket to Ride devotees. Some consider this map to be broken.

They could not be more wrong if they tried. The aspect of the replicated Destination Tickets is a design feature. It is not a flaw. The Switzerland map is designed with a focus on Destination Tickets. It presents a challenging playing experience that plays well with either two players or three and I recommend it. In the meantime, check out my full review of Ticket to Ride Switzerland on its own page.

So that leaves the India map for which Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India is named. Where Ticket to Ride has for the most part thematically set in the 1890s, the theme being inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, the India map moves the game on another decade or so from the end of the Victorian era onto the end of the Edwardian period. The year is 1911 and in playing the India map, the players are undertaking a Grand Tour of the subcontinent.

The India map is designed for between two and four players. The map, like the map in Ticket to Ride Nordic Countries, is vertical rather than horizontal. The area encompasses the whole of British India, including areas that are now Pakistan and Bangladesh. The island of Ceylon – now Sri Lanka – sits off the Subcontinent’s South East coast, but is not part of the map’s playing routes. The India map, unlike the maps in Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia, does not introduce any new types of routes. Instead it keeps things very simple with its standard routes supported by a quintet of ferry routes as seen in Ticket to Ride Europe and Ticket to Ride Nordic Countries amongst others.

Indeed, the India map introduces just the single new mechanic: the Grand Tour of India bonus. This awards a player a bonus for building continuous routes between the cities on his Destination Tickets. For each Destination Ticket whose cities are connected by two or more continuous paths of the player’s Trains the player is granted a Grand Tour bonus. This bonus rises as more of player’s Destination Tickets are connected by continuous paths, up to a total of five when a player will be awarded forty points!

Essentially, players on the India map are trying to build Mandalas – “Circles” in Sanskrit – as well as completing their Destination Tickets. This takes careful planning upon the part of the players and in comparison with some Ticket to Ride maps, the India map is prone to players spending no little time mulling over their Destination Tickets before play actually starts as they try and work out what routes and Mandalas they can complete. Of course, this is further hampered by everyone trying to work where their Destination Tickets start and finish, but then Ticket to Ride has always been a fun way of introducing players to foreign and sometimes, historical geography.

In play, claiming routes and building Mandalas will be hampered by your fellow players. The author of the India map advises players to claim routes early and be careful about colour Train Cards that they draw. Good advice for any Ticket to Ride map, but on the India map, there is a plethora of short coloured routes that need to be claimed to complete Destination Tickets and if necessary, Mandalas. During play it is not only easy to find your much needed routes claimed by the other players, but also to find access to cities blocked by the other players. Both of these sometimes frustrating elements are exacerbated depending upon the number of players. They are not so vexing with two players as they do not need to be quite so competitive over the claiming of routes, nor as maddening with four players, because then the map’s double routes are open and can be claimed. Yet with three players, the map’s double routes remain closed and the competition for routes is much, much harder.

The building of Mandalas though, offers a new path to victory in Ticket to Ride. It is possible to score a lot of points at game’s end if a player has created several Mandalas. If a player attempts to score points by this means, it pays to focus on the shorter Destination Tickets as these are easier to complete than the more likely to be blocked longer Destination Tickets. Alternatively, a player can still opt to focus on completing Destination Tickets, and there a lot of them provided for the India map. At game’s end, a ten-point Indian Express bonus is awarded to the player or players who have created the Longest Continuous Path on the board.

As with Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia, the new mechanics given in Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India can be applied to other maps available for Ticket to Ride. Not those in the Switzerland map, as these require an alternate type of Destination Ticket, but the new rules for the India map could be applied to other maps. Offhand, the Mandala mechanic would probably work with the Switzerland map and the map from Ticket to Ride Nordic Countries.

Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India is difficult to recommend. Not because of the quality and design of the maps themselves, but because it includes the Switzerland map. If you already have the Switzerland map, then it is an expensive purchase, even though the quality of the map and its cards has been improved for this expansion. If you want another challenging map, and do not mind purchasing a map that you already have, then the India map offers that. It is challenging because of the tight layout of the routes on the map and the lack of short double routes in addition to the difficulty of the new scoring method with the Mandalas.

If you do not own the Switzerland map, then Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India is another excellent purchase. It offers two good maps, both of which work well with smaller groups of players and which offer challenging and competitive play. Neither of the two maps is suited for players unfamiliar with the game, but for Ticket to Ride veterans, Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India offers new complexities and new challenges.

When it comes to Gateway Games – the games that you can get out and play with family and friends with aim of offering a play experience beyond the dreariness of Cluedo, Monopoly, and Scrabble – there is a trinity of titles that every gamer should have at least one of, if not all three. They are, in order of publication, The Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and the relatively more recent Ticket to Ride. Yet whilst the latter two support a reasonable number of players – between two and five, The Settlers of Catan handles either three or four, no more, no less. In order to expand the game and add more players, The Settlers of Catan needs The Settlers of Catan – 5-6 Player Extension.

As its title suggests, The Settlers of Catan – 5-6 Player Extension allows a fifth or sixth player to The Settlers of Catan. It does so by providing the wooden pieces for the two new players; new terrain hexes – including a second Desert or an extra home to the Robber Baron; new resource cards; new Development Cards; two “Building Costs” reference cards; and twenty-eight numbered tokens – with which to mark the terrain hexes; and the rules. Essentially everything to expand your Settlers of Catan game from four to five and six players, including what they can harvest, what they can build, and the extra terrain they can build across.

The only change to the rules between The Settlers of Catan and The Settlers of Catan – 5-6 Player Extension is that the players get an extra action, one that they can do between everyone else’s turns. This extra action is building. Simply, a player can build in between his opponent’s turns, though this must be done in player order around the table.

This change is necessary because otherwise, whilst a player awaits his next turn, he can quickly accumulate a handful of resource cards as his opponents roll the numbers on the hexes that he has his towns and cities alongside, so generating resources. This would not be a problem were it not for the fact that there is every chance of a seven being rolled on the game’s two six-sided dice, thus bringing the robber baron into play and forcing every player to discard half of the resource cards in his hand.

So far, so good. For what you have with The Settlers of Catan – 5-6 Player Extension is the perfectly serviceable means to expand the base game, with little change in the rules or mechanics. If you have played the basic game, then playing with this expansion is neither challenging nor does it present very much more of a challenge than is present in the basic game.

What challenges that The Settlers of Catan – 5-6 Player Extension does present come in the form of more competition for the locations that will bear desirable resources (does The Settlers of Catan have anything else?); the opportunities to build the Longest Road (well, the island of Catan just got bigger, so the Longest Road can now be a whole lot longer); and more opportunities for trade. That said, even with the rule about players being able to build between turns, one of the things that The Settlers of Catan – 5-6 Player Extension does add to the game is time. Not just in terms of overall playing time, but also in terms of waiting time between a player’s turn because there are more players who want to trade and then everyone will want their opportunity to build between turns.

Ultimately, there are faster and easier Gateway Games for five players. Not for six players though. The Settlers of Catan – 5-6 Player Extension does add that option, and it does it reasonably well. True, the joins between the base game and the expansion do show in their ability to slow game play down, but if you can overlook this, The Settlers of Catan – 5-6 Player Extension extends a classic as best it can.

2011 was a good year for Ticket to Ride, the introductory railway themed board game from Days of Wonder that won the Spiel des Jahres and the Origins Award for Best Board Game in 2004, as well as the 2005 Diana Jones award. In its closing months, the publisher inaugurated a new line of expansions in the form of the Map Collection series. Each title in the series features two new maps – on a double-sided map board – as well as new tweaks to the core rules that provide new challenges and playing experiences. The first of these is Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia, and it was quickly followed by Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India, each of which requires the use of the Train Cards and Trains from Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride Europe to play. It is the first of these, Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia, which is being reviewed here.

So in keeping with the series, Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia contains two maps. The first of these is the Team Asia map, which introduces two elements that sell the Map Collection. One is team play, the other is the addition of another player, increasing the number of maximum players in Ticket to Ride from five to six, but requiring four or six players only. The second map, the Silk Road themed Legendary Asia, is more of a traditional affair designed for two to five players that harks back to Ticket to Ride Europe, but which adds a tweak of its very own. Team Asia was designed by Alan R. Moon, who also designed Ticket to Ride, whilst Legendary Asia was François Valentyne’s entry in a competition to design and have published a new map for Ticket to Ride.

Each of the entries in the Map Collection series comes in a two-inch deep album sized box. Inside Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia can be found the new double-sided map, forty-five Trains (nine for each of the Train colours to be found in Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride Europe), thirty-six Destination Tickets for Legendary Asia, sixty Destination Tickets for Team Asia, six wooden card holders, and two full-colour rule books. There is one each for Team Asia and Legendary Asia, and both are twelve pages long with the rules for each map being just a page long and given in ten languages. All of these components are nicely done and nicely packaged in the box with the two maps, one per side, being very attractive. If there is an issue with either map, it is that neither clearly state which variant they are for. Whilst the graphics for each map and accompanying Destination Tickets are similar, so is the geographical region that both maps cover, and it would have been simple enough for the designers to put the name of the variant on its map. This would make game choice and set up just that little more easier, and that much quicker.

Of course, there is the usual problem of learning the geography to be found in Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia, but there is plenty of similarity between the two maps in this expansion, and anyway, not only do the mini-maps on the Destination Tickets help, but learning about geography as basic as this and whilst playing Ticket to Ride, is after all, fun.

The changes in the Legendary Asia variant begins with its Destination Tickets. There are thirty-six of these, of which six are Long Route Tickets, such as Moscow to Calcutta and Khabarovsk to Karachi, that are worth sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen points. At game’s start, each player receives a single Long Route and three normal Destination Tickets of which he must keep at least two. Later in the game he can choose to draw three Destination Tickets of which he must keep at least one.

Opening up the map for Legendary Asia and it looks not unlike the map for Ticket to Ride Europe. There several ferry Routes which require the expenditure of wild or Locomotive Cards to complete in addition to the usual Train Cards, but there are also several where the one or two spaces on a Route are marked with an “X” such as between Kathmandu and Mandalay, a two-space Route with an “X” on both spaces. These are Mountain Routes, which when claimed, require a player to not only expend the Train Cards of the appropriate colour, but for each “X” on the Route, to also expend one of his Trains! This represents the wear and tear on the trains that traverse these Routes and is not as bad as it sounds, because for each Train discarded, he scores an additional two points. So to claim the purple Kathmandu-Mandalay Route, a player has to discard two purple Train Cards and two of his Trains, but scores two points for the Route claimed and another four points for the Trains discarded.

In addition some double Routes, such as that between Perm and Omsk has one Route that does not require the discarding of a Train Card and one that does. In other words, one Route does not go through the mountains. In most, but not all cases, the non-Mountain Route is a grey Route, meaning that any Train Card colour can be used to complete them.

The effect of the Mountain Routes is twofold. First, it increases the completion value of some of the map’s shorter Routes. Compare a three-space Route, like that between Moscow and Astrakhan, which would score a player a simple four points for completing, and the two-space Mountain Route between Agra and Kathmandu which has one space with an “X” and which would score a player a total of four points to complete, two points for the Route itself and another two for the Train discarded. Second, the expenditure of Trains to complete Mountain Routes can be used to speed play towards the moment when a player has four Trains or less and thus trigger the game’s round of last turns.

The other additional rule in Legendary Asia is that of the Asian Explorer Bonus. This is awarded for the highest number of cities connected rather than the Longest Route as on many other Ticket to Ride maps. This encourages the creation of a network of Routes rather a single long Route and emphasises the value of the shorter Routes as they are generally easier to connect to and thus create a network with.

Overall, Legendary Asia feels like a traditional Ticket to Ride board. It offers a new map, but not a radically different playing experience. It is the easiest to adapt to, and in terms of complexity, sits nicely alongside Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride Europe.

Team Asia though, is a different experience. It offers complexity via a radical means of play that also restricts the number of players. It is played with teams of two players, with space for either two teams or three teams. Which means that there must be a minimum of four players if there are two teams playing, and a maximum of six players if three teams are playing. During the game the members of a team have to sit together with two of the wooden cardholders sat in front of them. These cardholders are used to store the team’s shared Destination Tickets and Train Cards, this sharing being the only means that the members of a team can communicate. In other words, during play, a team cannot talk about the Destination Tickets that either has to complete nor about what Routes that either wants to complete.

At game start, each team receives its cardholders and a total of fifty-four Trains in the same colour, the extra ones being provided with Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia. The Trains are divided equally between the two members of a team so that they have a pool of twenty-seven each. During play, a player will draw only from his supply of Trains and just like standard Ticket to Ride, when their combined supply of Trains reaches four or less, the end game rules are triggered in which everyone has one last turn, including his teammate. So a player has to keep an eye on his supply of Trains as well as those belong to everyone else, including that of his teammate.

Then the secrecy begins. Each player receives four Train Cards as normal and a total of five Destination Tickets, of which he must keep three. Out of the kept Destination Tickets, a player must take one and simultaneously with his teammate reveal it and place it in one of the shared cardholders. When a player later draws additional Destination Tickets, he must not only keep one of the new Tickets, but also place one of the Tickets in his team’s cardholder used for their Tickets. Similarly, when a player draws Train Cards, he draws two as normal, but one of them has to go into his team’s cardholder used for the Train Cards. This must be done as they are drawn – a player cannot draw two and decide which of these Train Cards to share.

One additional option that a player has during play is that he can choose to share two of the Destination Tickets in his hand with his teammate by placing them in their shared cardholder. Whilst this can be helpful, it does deny that player the opportunity to pick up new Train Cards or claim a Route.

During the game, play order is by team. Both players on a team will take their turn one after another, then the players on the next team will have their go, and so on. Players in a team always take their turns in the same order.

At game’s end, the members of a team scores together. A ten point Asian Express bonus is awarded to the team with the Longest Continuous Path on the board whilst a ten point Globetrotter bonus is awarded to the team who has completed the most Destination Tickets.

Looking at the Team Asia map, it looks quite open, if not similar to the layout of the Ticket to Ride map of the USA with its long Routes over the top in the North, and shorter Routes to East and South. Three triple Routes run the length of the Chinese coast. In a two-team game, two of these triple Routes can be claimed, possibly by both players on a team, thus wholly blocking that Route to the other team. The map also contain two unnamed destinations – they cannot be cities as neither is named – that are black instead of the grey of the map’s actual cities. Being close to Kathmandu and Lhasa, they are probably the peaks of Everest and K2 in the Himalayas.

The other addition to the Team Asia board is not a new type of Route, but a variant upon a type of Route – the Tunnel. On maps with Tunnels, such as Ticket to Ride Switzerland and Ticket to Ride Nordic Countries, if player wants to claim a Tunnel Route he has to draw three more Train Cards from off the top of the draw deck, and if any of the drawn cards match the colour of the Route, that player must pay an extra Train Card for each extra drawn. If he cannot, he forfeits that turn. In Team Asia, the number of extra Train Cards varies, being determined by the number of the Route. For example, the yellow Route between Lhasa and Cawnpore is one space long, but is marked with a six, meaning that it requires a player to draw another six Train Cards and hope that he does not draw any yellow Train Cards and so have to pay extra Trains Cards. As with Ticket to Ride Switzerland and Ticket to Ride Nordic Countries, a player could also use Locomotive Cards to complete a Tunnel Route in this fashion. Overall, this makes Tunnels a much riskier affair and more difficult to complete.

In purely mechanical terms, Team Asia is not a complex addition to the Ticket to Ride family. In play style, it is much more complex, not just for the fact that the players within a team have to keep quiet about strategy, but also for the fact that Team Asia is not a five, or indeed, a six-player board. Rather, it is a two or three player board that it is as tight as Ticket to Ride Switzerland and Ticket to Ride Nordic Countries before it, though with more trains between the members of a team than is the norm.

Another factor in Team Asia that is similar to Ticket to Ride Switzerland is the high number of Destination Tickets. There are sixty in this set, and like Ticket to Ride Switzerland, once a player has completed his current Destination Tickets, there is the chance that a player will draw new Destination Tickets that he has already completed. It should be made clear that this is not as extreme as in Ticket to Ride Switzerland, which many players of Ticket to Ride consider to be broken for this reason. In our playing experience, this is less of an issue in Team Asia as there is less replication of Routes.

Team Asia feels almost, but not quite as tight as the other two or three player options, Ticket to Ride Switzerland and Ticket to Ride Nordic Countries because its tight play is offset by the higher number of Trains that each team begins play with. The co-operative, though silent play, adds another level of enjoyable challenge to the game and means that this variant requires a bit more thought than is the norm with Ticket to Ride. The means of adding a sixth player is innovative for Ticket to Ride, and the fact that it involves team play means that it still leaves room for someone to design a Ticket to Ride board for use with six players rather than three teams of two. Similarly, the addition of Team Play raises the question of how many other Ticket to Ride maps would its rules work with, something for the game’s fans to experiment with.

For years now, Ticket to Ride has not been receiving the support that it should have been. It did not need dice or a card game variant, nor did it need kaiju themed bits of plastic that were never in keeping with the line’s late nineteenth century, early twentieth century style. What it needed was new maps. Ticket to Ride is a train game. A very light train game it must be said, but train games are all about connecting Routes to new places, whether familiar or exotic. Every single other train game series does this and it works because gamers like new maps and the new challenges that they present. It has been three years since the release of a new map expansion in the form of the two-three player base game, Ticket to Ride Nordic Countries. It has been four years since the release of Ticket to Ride Switerland, the map expansion that sets the pattern for the Map Collection series, which appears in Map Collection Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India.

Hurrah! And “Hurrah!” again, because the wait has been worth it. Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia is an excellent expansion that really does add to the Ticket to Ride family. The Team Asia gives a clever means of adding a sixth player to Ticket to Ride combined with a nice hidden objective dynamic between the members of each team. Despite it being a four or six player game, the organisation into team actually turns it into a tight two or three player board. Lastly, the six wooden card holders are nice additions can actually be used in Ticket to Ride game to hold and organise each player’s cards. The Legendary Asia is a more traditional board that offers less radical play than in Team Asia and is the easier option to get out and play. Together, Legendary Asia and Team Asia combine to make Map Collection Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia a great start to a new series of expansions and a cleverly designed challenge for the Ticket to Ride fan.

Every so often there comes along a game that acquires the status of being the new “hotness,” a game that has acquired such a cachet all by word of mouth. The latest title to do so is the board game 7 Wonders. Released by the French publisher, Asmodée Éditions, this card/board game hybrid has the distinction of being the winner of the first “Kennerspiel des Jahres” award. This is a companion honour to the “Spiel des Jahres,” the German “Game of the Year” award, and roughly translates as “Connoisseur-Enthusiast Game of the Year.” So what has got everyone, including a committee of German board game critics, so excited by 7 Wonders?

Designed to be played by three to seven players – though a two-player variant is included in the rules – 7 Wonders is a card drafting, resource management, simultaneous play card game with a Civilisation theme that can be played in thirty minutes from start to finish. All of which is done without the use of maps or extensive conflict, the heavy reliance on cards serving to simplify and ease the handling of elements that might otherwise be relatively complex in other games. The aim of game is to score the most points and 7 Wonders provides multiple means of scoring so that a player can win by being the greatest cultural, economic, military, or scientific power, or a combination of all of these.

Each player controls an ancient civilisation attempting to prove itself to be the greatest by building one of the great wonders such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, or the Pyramids of Giza. Every civilisation is represented by a rectangular board. An icon in the top left hand corner indicates the resources generated each turn, while three boxes along the bottom mark the three stages of the civilisation’s wonder. Completing each stage grants a benefit to the player, usually Gold that can be spent or saved, or Victory Points that go towards a player’s total at game’s end. Other Civilisation Boards grant simple scientific or military benefits, but some allow a card to be played for free or a card to be played from the discard pile. Every Civilisation Board is double-sided, marked (A) and (B). The (B) side is harder to complete then the (A) side.

The cards in 7 Wonders come in seven types. Brown cards provide basic resources like brick, ore, stone, and wood, whilst Grey cards give the advanced resources of cloth, glass, and paper. Red cards are military facilities and fortifications, whilst Yellow cards are economic, either generating an array resources or making them cheaper to buy from your neighbours, or simply granting a civilisation more Gold. Blue cards are cultural, representing buildings such as alters, baths, palaces, and theatres. Each is worth a straight Victory Point value at the end of the game. Green cards are scientific and marked with one of three symbols. At game’s end the number of Green cards with the same symbol that a player has before him is squared and the total added to his final score. Points are scored for sets with one of each symbol that a player has. Lastly, the Purple cards are Guilds that each score in particular ways. For example, the Strategist’s Guild grants a Victory Point for every defeat inflicted upon your neighbours, whilst the Philosopher’s Guild gives Victory Points for every Green or science card that your neighbours have played.

The cards are also divided into one of three Ages – I, II, and III, each more advanced than the previous one. The third Age is the most advanced and is the only one in which the Purple or guilds cards appear.

At heart, play in 7 Wonders is very simple. It is played in three rounds or Ages. At the beginning of each Age, each player receives a hand of seven cards. Simultaneously, every player selects one card and plays it at the same time. When done, a player passes his hand to his neighbour, while receiving a new hand from his other neighbour. Everyone selects a new card and again, passes on the hand. This is done until each player has played six cards in each Age. The seventh card is discarded. At the end of an Age, military conflicts are resolved. This involves each player comparing the size of his military – shown on the Red cards – against that of his neighbours’, with the winner gaining Victory Tokens and the loser, Defeat Tokens. Both Tokens contribute to a player’s Victory Point total at game’s end. This all happens once for each of the three Ages at the end of which Victory Points are totalled and a winner declared.

On each turn a player takes his chosen card and does one of three things with it. He either brings it into play, if necessary checking that he has access to the necessary resources, either on the cards before him or from his neighbours’ cards. If gained from a neighbour, these resources have to be purchased with Gold. Every player starts with three Gold, but can gain more from playing certain cards or from sales made to neighbours. Such sales are automatic and cannot be stopped. Some cards are free to play, either because they are a basic type or a player has a card in front of him that allows him to play the new card for free. Instead of bringing a card into play, a player can discard it from the game in return for three Gold. Lastly, if he has access to the necessary resources, a player can build the next stage of his civilisation’s Wonder, indicating that it has been built by sliding it under the bottom of the Civilisation Board where the stage is marked.

In playing a card a player has three things to consider. If he plays the card will it grant him the resources necessary to build his civilisation’s Wonder? If short of Gold, can he discard it for more? If he does not play it or discard it, will it benefit another player? For example, if you have played a lot Blue or cultural cards and the Magistrates’ Guild, one of the Purple guild cards, comes into your hand, you might want to play it, discard it, or use it to build a stage of your Wonder in order to prevent a neighbour from playing it. If he does, you know that it will score him a point for each of the Blue cards that you have played. It should be noted though, that sometimes a player will have little choice in what he can play, and his choice will be reduced as an Age progresses, and more and more cards are played, thus lowering the hand size. Essentially, a player is always attempting to make the best of his current and immediate situation, or rather of his current and immediate hand of cards.

The first interesting point about 7 Wonders is that you only ever interact with your direct neighbours although every player’s Victory Point total is compared at game’s end. The second is that often a Civilisation Board will influence a player’s strategy. For example, if the stages of a Wonder on a Civilisation Board grant a scientific bonus, then a player might want to play Green or science cards. The third is that the game plays slightly different the more players that there are. With fewer players, the hands of cards in each Age will come through a player’s hand more than once. While with seven players, each hand of cards will be seen by a player just the once. The clever thing is that 7 Wonders scales, the number of players determining the number of cards to be added to the game, but every player always starts each Age with a hand of seven cards.

The fourth interesting point about 7 Wonders is that there is no one way in which to win. I have won by acquiring lots and lots of Gold; by having the most successful military – although the maximum number of Victory Points to be gained this way is limited; by having the most cultural Victory Points from Blue cards; and by scoring Victory Points from others via the Purple or guilds cards. No card type is necessarily more valuable than any other, although the Purple or guilds cards and the Green or science cards can score a player lots of Victory Points. For example, I have seen my friend Dave score a total of forty-eight points from Green or science cards – which is a lot. (This was done with three Green cards for each symbol, for a total of nine cards. For each set of three symbols the same he scored nine points – for a total of twenty-seven points, plus for each complete set comprised of one of each of the three symbols, he scored an additional seven points. Altogether, forty-eight points. Again, a lot of points). The fifth interesting point about the game is that it is difficult to see exactly who is winning until scoring happens at the end of the game, although it is obvious who is doing well in each area.

Physically, 7 Wonders is very well done. The Civilisation Boards are of sturdy card with excellent artwork that matches the theme, while the various card tokens are clearly marked and easy to handle. The cards are all attractive and of a slightly larger size, so are easy to read. It should be noted that this means that slightly larger card sleeves are required to protect the cards. This is recommended because the cards will get a lot of handling. The cards are also illustrated with suitable art that matches the theme. The rules booklet is actually as large as the box and is not only easy to read, but also well laid out with plenty of examples.

Since my friend Dave bought a copy we have played lots and lots of games of 7 Wonders. After all, it is easy to do given that once a game has got going, it only lasts thirty minutes. Trying it with new players has never failed to leave them intrigued and wanting to play more, a situation that I found myself in upon the first few plays. I even went through a stage of disliking the game, but actually still being intrigued enough to keep playing. Now I find it an easy game to play and do so at some pace. If there is an issue to the game it lies in the difficulty of teaching it to new players. Not that the basic rules are difficult to grasp, but what it is difficult is gaining an understanding of how the cards interact and work with each other. On our initial play throughs this meant that games were lasting more than an hour, but with practice and an understanding of the game’s card interaction this dropped to the listed playing time of thirty minutes or less. Plus we have guided a group of seven players, only three of which have played it before, through a game in an hour.

Once the hurdle of grasping how the cards work is passed, then 7 Wonders turns out to be an excellent game, one that it is going to receive a number of expansions, with the first of these, 7 Wonders: Leaders already being available. Rare is a game that offers this level of complexity for its suggested range of players, in particular seven players. It offers thoughtful play and thoughtful replay value, and while competitive is rarely adversarial. 7 Wonders manages to achieve a nice balance between the light filler game and the massive Civilisation style game without bogging a player down in a welter of options.

In many reviews an RPG’s designer rarely gets a mention, and even if when he does, it invariably comes a long way into the review and even then not by name. His contribution usually gets mentioned in passing or obliquely, but for this review I am going to mention a name. Matt Heerdt. It is not a name that I have encountered before, though it has to be said that I rarely check those details, and to be honest, that is unlikely to change. Nevertheless, that name is Matt Heerdt. His design for Cosmic Patrol, the latest RPG from Catalyst GameLabs of which he is also the author, captures its genre to perfection with just seventeen words and one image. Done in a simple two tone design, the front cover looks exactly the manual that every good Cosmic Patrol cadet should have in his locker, whilst the back cover looks exactly like a recruiting poster for the Cosmic Patrol. It is also beautifully simple.

Anyway, Cosmic Patrol, of which Matt Heerdt is also the author. Thirty years ago in the Pre-Cosmic Era, the Earth was hit by the fragments of a comet that upon impact disgorged a horde of alien “lizardmen” known as the “Uth.” It took a united effort to wipe out the rampaging raiders who in their wake left not only a united Earth, but also a cache of advanced, disparate, but stolen technology. In order to both study this and protect the Earth from further cosmic threats, the united world government forms scientific space program known as the “Cosmic Patrol.” Within a decade, Cosmic Patrol expeditions to Mars and Venus discover humans on both worlds; within two decades, the governments of Earth, Mars, and Venus would agree to form a single organisation known as the Great Union; and within three decades, Cosmic Patrol rocketships, equipped with the revolutionary “Fractum Drive” would not only explore the outer reaches of our Solar System, but also far out into the cosmos itself, quickly discovering an on-going intergalactic war whose sides it cannot quite yet determine.

This is the setting for Cosmic Patrol, a story-telling RPG of “Rockets and Rayguns!” set in a retro future based on the Golden Age of science fiction. Inspired by the covers of classic science fiction pulp magazines, the works of E.E. “Doc” Smith, Harry Harrison, Robert Heinlein, and Philip Francis Nolan, and classic science fiction radio series like X Minus One and Dimension X, Cosmic Patrol with its mantra of “Rockets • Rayguns • Robots” is not the Buck Rogers RPG, but it could be. Nor is it the Flash Gordon RPG or the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet RPG, but again, it could be. As the Grand Union’s first and last line of defence against a dangerous galaxy, the players take the roles of Patrolmen of the Cosmic Patrol crewing rocketships that set out to explore the galaxy, investigating its strange phenomena, and responding to emergencies as necessary. They could be cocky, stalwart heroes from Earth; Red Amazon warriors from Mars armed with their infamous red steel axes; or high thinking Venusian scientists, but whatever their origins, they are not only members of the Grand Union, but as members of the Cosmic Patrol, they are its first line of defence against the universe.

Cosmic Patrol is played in a series of Mission Briefs, each beamed to the characters’ rocketship from Cosmic Patrol headquarters. It might be that a ship has gone missing in the asteroid belt or that a survey team is under attack on the surface of Venus, but in game terms each Misssion Brief consists of a setting and one or more scenes that present the patrolmen with a series of enemies and obstacles. Each scene is further down into a number of turns, the number of turns depending upon the number of players. This is because each player will undertake the role of the Lead Narrator once during a scene. As Lead Narrator, a player not serves as the GM and presents the NPCs and environment just as you would expect in most RPGs, he also ensures that each of the characters has a chance to act in the turn. In serving as the Lead Narrator, a player does not ignore his own Patrolman, but allows him to act, though he always goes last in a turn. This completes the turn and narration passes to the next player, who then becomes the Lead Narrator and sets the scene for the new turn.

Narration can be taken from events in previous Turns, but also from “cues,” little suggestions and descriptions that the Lead Narrator can take inspiration from. Cues are given for Mission Briefs as well as Patrolmen and NPCs of all stripes. Narration can also to an extent be co-operative in that a player can turn to his fellows if he is bereft of inspiration and ask for advice. If a player wants to grab the narration then he can spend a Plot Point, which can also be expended by a player to modify dice rolls – either way, regain health points, and of course, to add a plot twist! The role of Lead Narrator also has its own pool of Plot Points, which passes from player to player as the role does. A Lead Narrator can only spend Plot Points to aid the NPCs and add plot twists, but not to impede the Patrolmen. Players earn their Plot Points through good narration, whilst the Lead Narrator earns one whenever a player expends one.

Player character actions that require dice come in two types. A Challenge handles actions against an inanimate object, while a Test is against another person, be it another player character or an NPC. To undertake a Test or Challenge a character adds the results of a twelve-sided die, an appropriate attribute die, plus modifiers to beat a target roll determined by a twenty-sided die. The modifiers are set by the Lead Narrator. For example, “in a blizzard” (-1), “Experienced” (+1), “the right tools” (+1), “already performed a scan” (+1), and so on, which with the character below having to perform emergency field surgery on an important NPC, might give the result of D12 + Medicine D10 + modifiers of +2 against the Lead Narrator’s roll of a D20. The end result of 1 (D12) + 6 (D10) +2 versus 4 (D20) means that the character has succeeded.

Character creation involves assigning various dice types to four attributes – Brawn, Brains, Charisma, and Combat; a Special Die or a D10 to something that the character is particularly good at; and determining his Luck. The latter is not a Die type, but a number between one and twelve, which when rolled on any die during any test or challenge means that a character always succeeds. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of character generation in Cosmic Patrol is the creation of a Patrolman’s Cues, and Disposition. The first are prompts from which a player can draw inspiration when it comes to his narration, whilst the latter more describe his manner. “Doc” Mulligan only has thirteen Cues, leaving room for a player or Lead Narrator to add more. This Patrolman also has Tags, essentially descriptors that give the Lead Narrator the gist of the character were he to be used as an NPC.

REGINALD MULLIGAN/ROCKETSHIP DOCTOR
VITAL FACTORS
Name: Reginald “Doc” Mulligan Age: 29
Homeworld: Earth Rank: Doctor
Tags: > Earthman > Friendly > Curmudgeon
> Brilliant > Medicine > Manners > Scottish
Brawn: D6 Brains: D8 Charisma: D10 Combat: D8 Medicine D10 (SPECIAL) Luck: 11
Armour: 17
Health: 3/3/3/2/1
Equipment: antique Webley Revolver, Install MK. VII anatomical scanner, classic doctor’s black bag, and bottle of 13 year old single malt
Cues: Och no! I am just a country doctor; Quiet! I’m trying to think!; This thing isn’t even a sasanach – I need time to analyse it; I’ll drink to that; Yes Ma’am; There are things that an Autosurgeon will not repair; This might not be a single malt, but she’ll do; My word as a gentleman; Captain, you just can’t blow it to bits; It’s a man’s place to grumble – it proves he’s alive; As my old aunt Jenny would say…; By Jupiter’s Trojans!
Disposition: Trustworthy, Ever the Gentleman, Exasperated at the lack of scientific training in the Patrol, Cautious

The setting for Cosmic Patrol is sketched in broad detail from the inner most worlds of the Solar System to the Outer Planets and beyond into the Deep Black with its Coalsack Dead Zone, some twenty astrons in diameter; the Eiger Empire with its army of triple-eyed clones; and the rumoured meddling of the cosmic beings that the Patrol has named the Metatherions. Whilst there are mysteries and intrigues galore to be placed by the Lead Narrator and unravelled by the player Patrolmen, there is still room aplenty for those and more within the Solar System itself. To support the setting, the Lead Narrator is given an array of pre-generated characters, some of whom can be used as player characters, the rest being a set of entertaining NPCs that should keep a game going for a while. An octet of Mission Briefings of increasing difficulty is certainly more than enough to get a game and thus a season of Cosmic Patrol going. Rounding out the book is a good, though unexplored, bibliography of suggested reading and viewing.

Perhaps if Cosmic Patrol as a game has a weakness, it is that the advice for the GM or Lead Narrator is underwritten. Which in what has leanings towards being a storytelling game, does seem odd. Yet whilst those leanings are present, this is not an RPG that focuses like so many storytelling RPGs on handing the players narration rights in order to tell a particular type of story. Nor should that be taken as a criticism of that type of game. Rather, Cosmic Patrol is all about a lightness of touch that encourages the players to work together to tell of adventures of “derring do” against a backdrop of Golden Age Science Fiction. It does include suggestions as to how it could be run using a single Lead Narrator, but to be fair, the narration duties in Cosmic Patrol are far from onerous, especially given how those duties are about everyone taking responsibility for telling a good story.

As has already been pointed out, physically, Cosmic Patrol is well done. The book is cleanly laid out and the artwork thoroughly excellent. The lack of an index is irksome.

Cosmic Patrol has three paragraphs devoted to the Theremin. That is enough for me to recommend this RPG. The fact that this game made me want to read some of the fiction suggested in the bibliography is also indicative of how much I like Cosmic Patrol, despite the fact that the book I re-read after some thirty years was Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet, which is not in the bibliography. Having re-read it, I would suggest that it should be. In truth, I have wanted a good Golden Age Science Fiction RPG for a long time. Cosmic Patrol is not that RPG – it is better. Rather Cosmic Patrol captures its genre of Golden Age Science Fiction to not just perfection; it does so with charm and gusto.

Rory’s Story Cubes is a set of dice that, as the game’s title suggests, can be used to tell stories. Created by The Creativity Hub and published most places by Gamewright, the set is designed to spur a roller’s imagination by giving him a set of elements to include in his story. As a game, it is at best “rules lite,” coming more with guidelines than actual rules, such that it might be better classed as a tool or a toy.

Rory’s Story Cubes comes in a sturdy little box that opens up to reveal nine cubes or dice. Each die is a chunky 19mm to a side and contains six images, such as an “Apple,” an “Evil Shadow,” a “House,” a “Lightning Strike,” a “Lock,” a “Parachute,” a “Question Mark,” a “Tower,” and a “Wand.” None of the symbols are replicated, so with nine dice in the set, there are a total of fifty-four symbols to roll, which promises several million different combinations. The idea is to do “Once Upon a time” with these symbols, incorporating them into a story as the roller fancies. So for example, I roll an “Abacus,” “Flames,” “Happiness,” a “Magnifying Glass,” a “Mobile Telephone,” a “Parachute,” “Sleeping,” a “Tepee,” and a “Tower.” So my story might go like this…

Once upon a time, there lived a man called Dave, who could never get a full night’s sleep. He had a really dull job that involved him using an “Abacus” and never gave him time to examine how dull his life was. News that his life was to change came with a call on his “Mobile Telephone” and a dull monotone voice explaining how both the job and the ivory “Tower” of a life he had built around his job had gone up in “Flames.” This gave him the opportunity to examine his life using a “Magnifying Glass” and thus decide to use a “Parachute” to jump from the top of the “Tower.” Dave did. Now Dave does not have an “Abacus,” a dull job, a “Mobile Telephone,” or the need to visit an ivory “Tower.” Instead, every night he can be found “Sleeping” in a “Teepee.” Dave has found “Happiness.”

Now doubtless, you can do better. And you are welcome to try with your own set of Rory’s Story Cubes. How you do that is entirely up to you, as the extent of the rules in the “game” merely suggest that the stories can either be told solitaire or co-operatively. The problem with this is that it means that as a game, Rory’s Story Cubes lacks the structure that would make it game, because this is essentially not only “use the dice to make up the stories you want,” but also “make up the rules to how you tell those stories.” Arguably then, not sufficient enough to make it a game given its need for further input from the participants. Plus, the clue is in the title – Rory’s Story Cubes, not Rory’s Story Dice. After all, “Dice” infers a game, whereas “Cubes” do not.

As a tool or a toy, Rory’s Story Cubes is much better. The images on the dice are large, friendly, and universal. Although due to their size, the dice feel a bit too much to all together fit in the hand, they possess a satisfying weight and heft. They would work well as an educational tool, whether that is in an education establishment, or simply as a means to spur your child’s imagination and thinking.

There is much to like about Rory’s Story Cubes. The dice are themselves physically pleasing and the concept sound. More rules would have made them even more pleasing, but as long as the users or players are happy to agree on the rules as to how they can tell their stories, then they are ready to roll their imaginations with Rory’s Story Cubes.

Over the past few years, there has been a trend in board games wherein the players have not been competing against each other, but instead co-operate together against the game itself. For fans of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham Horror can be included amongst their number, alongside such other titles as Space Alert, Shadows Over Camelot, Red November, and Battlestar Galactica. It should be pointed out though, that both Shadows Over Camelot and Battlestar Galactica add in an element of treachery with at least one player being a traitor. The game I am going to review though, is purely co-operative and lacks that traitorous element – unless of course, you happen to purchase the expansion – but be warned, in playing you do hold the fate of humanity in your hands and that fate is *ed difficult to avoid. The game in question is Z-Man Games’ Pandemic.

Designed for two to four players aged ten and up, in Pandemic the players take the role of specialists working for the CDC or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Federal Agency tasked with dealing with health, safety, and research as well as having to combat the outbreak of various virulent diseases. At the start of any game of Pandemic, the specialists will be faced with the outbreak of not one, but four diseases across the globe. They have an hour’s worth of nerve wracking game play in which to not only find cures for all four diseases, but also to prevent mankind from being overwhelmed by any one of them and thus wiped out. They will need to husband their resources, conduct enough research, and get to the right cities to treat the victims and so contain any further outbreaks if they are to win and mankind is to survive. There is only one way to win Pandemic – find a cure for all four diseases, but multiple ways in which to lose. It is a hard, sometimes a very hard game to win, but all too easy to loose…

Inside Pandemic’s surprisingly small box can be found a board, ninety-six wooden cubes, five pawns, six wooden Research Stations, six card markers, over one hundred cards, plus the eight-page rulebook. Everything is done in full colour with sturdy wooden pieces and hard wearing cards. The board itself depicts the Earth marked with the major cities of world and the routes between them. The cities are divided between four colour-coded zones: blue (North America and Europe), black (Eurasia, India, and North Africa), red (Asia and Australia), and yellow (Hispanic America and Sub-Saharan Africa). The board also has room for the game’s two decks of cards and its various markers. The six markers are divided four cure markers – one for each of the game’s four diseases, and one each to indicate the Infection Rate and the number of Outbreaks.

The cards are primarily divided between two decks, one of Infection Cards and one of Player Cards. For each of the cities on the board there is corresponding card in both decks, but where the Infection Deck only has cards that show a city, the Player Deck also contains special cards (which give the players a one time advantage when played) and Infection Cards (which indicate a new occurrence of a disease and increase the number of infection cards drawn). Each of the five Role Cards grants a player an extra ability that allows him to break the game’s basic rules. For example, the Medic role card lets a player treat all of the disease cubes of one colour in a city as a single action, rather than having to expend an action to cure a single disease cube. The other roles include the Dispatcher (who can move the other players around the board), the Operations Manager (who can build Research Stations wherever he is), the Researcher (who can freely give cards to another player when they are in the same city), and the Scientist (who needs fewer cards to cure a disease).
Lastly, there are four Reference Cards – these list possible player actions, and of course, the disease cubes. These are divided between the four colours – blue, black, red, and yellow – that match the coloured zones on the board. A disease of one colour will only appear in its matching zone unless an outbreak occurs and it infects a city in an adjacent zone.

Game set up takes a little doing. Each player randomly selects his Role and receives two Player Cards. The remainder of the Player Deck is seeded with Epidemic Cards, the number setting the difficulty for the game, five being average difficulty. Everyone starts play in Atlanta – the headquarters for the CDC – along with a single Research Station. Nine Infection Cards are drawn and each of the cities that they show is seeded with disease cubes. These nine cards are reshuffled and placed back on top of the Infection Deck. This is an important feature of the game, previously drawn Infection Cards being reshuffled and placed back on top of the Infection Deck each time an Epidemic Card is drawn from the Player Deck, indicative of the fact that once a city has been infected, that it can be re-infected.

Each player’s turn has three phases. In the first phase, he can act, having four action points to spend on movement, on treating diseases, on building Research Stations, or on the special actions listed on his Role Card. In moving, he can simply move from one city to the next or use a Player Card to move to or from the city given on that card. In doing so, he discards the card in question. To treat a disease, a player uses up one action and removes one disease cube from the city he is in. A player needs to have the Player Card for the city that he is in if he wants to build a Research Station there, discarding the card in the process. A player can give a Player Card to another player, but to do so both players have to be in the city marked on the card. Lastly, a player can cure a disease simply by discarding five Player Cards of the same colour whilst at a Research Station – or four cards if the player is the Scientist.

The draw phase follows this, a player simply drawing two new Player Cards. A turn ends with the Infection Phase, in which a number of cards equal to the Infection Rate are draw and single disease cubes added to the cities shown on the cards. At the beginning of the game the Infection Rate is just two, but this will increase up to three and then four as Epidemic Cards are drawn from the Player Deck. The maximum number of disease cubes of any one colour allowed on a city is three. If a disease cube is added to city that already has three – which will happen because cities are likely to be re-infected – an Outbreak proper occurs there. The Outbreak Track goes up by one and each city linked to the Outbreak location is infected by a single disease cube. In the process, it is possible to infect an adjacent city that already has three disease cubes on it and set off a chain reaction…

If an Epidemic Card was drawn during the draw phase, its effects take place before the Infection Phase. It moves the Infection Marker up by one and adds three disease cubes to a new city drawn from the bottom of the Infection Deck. This new Infection Card is added to the discard pile of Infection Cards which is shuffled and placed back on top of the Infection Deck. The Infection Phase continues as normal, except for the fact that cities already infected are likely to be infected again!

So how do you win? Simply by finding cures for all four diseases.

So one way to win, but three ways to lose. A game of Pandemic can be lost if the Outbreak Tracker goes up too high; if the Player Deck is exhausted; or if all of the disease cubes of one colour are out on the board.

If that all sounds very mechanical, then it is. In fact, Pandemic has to be very mechanical because the game has to run itself while the players try and stop this process. And stopping that process takes no little thought and no little effort, which is of course, is made easier because a player is encouraged to seek the advice of his fellow players who are expected to suggest his next best course of action.

Even at best and with that advice, the players are fighting a losing battle. They can never quite get on top of the diseases before an Epidemic Card is drawn and cities begin being re-infected. This leads to a certain amount of Infection Card counting, the players trying to balance their actions between the location of the Disease Cubes already on the board and the Infection Cards that have yet to be drawn. This is because the top cards of Infection Deck are going to be drawn and then refreshed when an Epidemic Card is drawn, giving the opportunity for the players to learn those top cards. The other balancing act is between trying to treat diseases and collecting enough Player Cards, the latter made more difficult because a player can only hold seven Player Cards in his hand.
Of course, once you have managed to cure a disease, everything gets slightly easier. It becomes easier to treat, more so if you have the Medic in play, who no longer has to act to treat, merely pass through a city infected by that disease. If the players manage to develop a cure for a disease and remove all of its cubes from the board, it is eradicated and will not appear again. So any Infection Cards drawn of that colour have no effect. Eradicating a disease is admirable, but rarely is it worth the effort – there being too much else to do.

Despite all of this difficulty, Pandemic is still a good game. Game play is very tense, but also very quick because you do not have that all much to do on your turn. Plus, when it is not your turn, you are still kept busy, discussing with everyone what both you and they should be doing. In fact the game is so quick that it is usually completed in less than an hour. One downside is that the discussion between players can be dominated by a single player, especially if the other players are not as experienced with the game. This lessens though the more times that it is played. The other downside is that it is so very difficult. Of course, the difficulty can be decreased by reducing the number of Epidemic Cards that can be drawn, but once you have beaten the game at one difficulty, you will only want to try at a greater difficulty. The big plus though, comes when you do succeed. The feeling of having beaten all four diseases and saved mankind is not only fantastic, it is also a relief.

I will go further than saying that Pandemic is a good game – it is a great game, a classic even. It is not difficult to learn or hard to play, but is difficult to master or rather beat the game itself. It also keeps everyone involved and it demands that you play intelligently. Pandemic is just simply and frustratingly brilliant.

The latest game from Steve Jackson Games is insanely silly, and that is the point. Cthulhu Dice – or rather Cthulhu “Die” because you only get the single die, but then how can “Cthulhu Die” since he is both alien and immortal – is a dice game in which the aim is to drive your fellow servants of Cthulhu completely mad. It is a game about losing Sanity, sometimes gaining Sanity, and when the tentacles are really on the line, summoning Great Cthulhu himself. This is really bad for everyone!

Designed for two to six players aged ten and up, Cthulhu Dice comes as a blister pack containing one large “Cthulhu Die,” a ziplock bag containing eighteen green glass beads or Sanity Tokens, and a full colour rules sheet. The “Cthulhu Die” is actually a twelve-sided die that is marked with various symbols. Most of these are Tentacle and Yellow Sign symbols, with the rest being made up of single Cthulhu, Elder Sign, and Eye symbols. The “Cthulhu Die” is available in various colours, including some glow-in-the-dark variants that are exclusive to Warehouse 23, but being traditional, I chose the green die (and will probably buy the purple die for a certain perky Goth that I live with).

Game set up is simple. Each servant of Cthulhu receives three Sanity Tokens. Then the servants take it in turns to be the Caster, choosing a victim from amongst their fellow servants to curse, with the victim allowed to counter cast against the Caster who then becomes the victim. Once this Casting exchange has been completed, the next servant of Cthulhu is given the opportunity to target a fellow cultist.

To target or curse a victim, all the Caster has to do is roll the Cthulhu Die, apply the effects of the symbol rolled. The true nature of the metaphysical universe means that casting Mythos spells or at least summoning Mythos entities can have fickle outcomes or at least wildly misunderstood ones. Most of the results on Cthulhu Dice – represented by the Yellow Sign and Tentacle symbols – have the Caster stealing Sanity from the victim and keeping it or stealing Sanity from the victim and giving it to Cthulhu, in which case the Sanity Token is placed in a pile in the middle of the table. The more rarely rolled symbols result in the Caster gaining Sanity from Cthulhu (yes, really!), in the Caster picking the symbol of his choice, or horror of horrors, in the successful summoning of Cthulhu. In which case, everyone loses a Sanity Token to the Great Old One.

If as a result of all of this die rolling, a servant of Cthulhu loses all of his Sanity Tokens he goes Mad. A Mad Servant of Cthulhu cannot lose any more Sanity nor can he gain any unless he rolls the Elder Sign symbol. Even then, he is not exactly sane. After all, not only has gone insane after prolonged exposure to the Mythos, but even after regaining a semblance of humanity, he is still willing to dabble in things that Man Was Not Meant To Know. That really is madness…

Play proceeds like this until there is just the one just about sane servant of Cthulhu left. In other words, the one servant of Cthulhu who has not gone mad. He wins the game. It is entirely possible for everyone to go Mad, though this happens rarely. Anyway, if everyone goes Mad, it is Cthulhu who wins rather than one of his servants. Which he will anyway, come the End Times and it is just the meddling of his servants that hastened his victory…

All of which takes about five minutes to play. During which time, none of the players have done anything more than choose a victim, roll a big fat die, and hope for a really nasty outcome. Which is odd, because Cthulhu Dice is a “take that” style of game, and you would expect to have more choice in the game than you actually do. In fact the only choice available in the game is in choosing your victim with perhaps a slim chance of the servant of Cthulhu rolling an “Eye” symbol and getting to select the symbol and its effects that he wants. Nevertheless, Cthulhu Dice is fun. It can got out of its pack and the rules read through in about a minute with another minute needed to teach your fellow servants of Cthulhu.

Although Cthulhu Dice is designed for two to six players, the game has a problem that it shares with various others in that the two-player option is just not as fun as it is with more than two players. The two-player variant suggests that each player control more than one servant of Cthulhu with players taking alternate turns rather than rolling in for each servant of Cthulhu. I suspect that the primary reason for the two-player variant not being as fun is that it lacks the player interaction and the table talk that you get with more servants of Cthulhu.

Obviously, Cthulhu Dice is very pocket friendly, both in terms of actually fitting in your pocket and in terms of being friendly to your wallet. That said, I would have liked it to have been even more pocket friendly. Carrying the Cthulhu Die, the rules sheet, and the eighteen Sanity Tokens in the ziplock bag is not the best option as there is likely to be wear and tear on all three just through this carrying. For a few dollars more, what I would have liked to have been given is a cloth bag to store all three components in, perhaps marked with a Cthulhu symbol? Does this mean that there is room for a deluxe version of the game?

If you put aside the fact that it is possible to gain Sanity from Cthulhu, then Cthulhu Dice succinctly models the Sanity loss that we know and love all so well from Call of Cthulhu. Of course, in being so absolutely succinct it loses all of those fruity, soggy, squidgy, and squishy bits you get in between the Sanity loss in Call of Cthulhu, but in so cutting to the chase Cthulhu Dice becomes an excellent filler game. There is nothing wrong in that, because Cthulhu Dice is silly, insane fun, and who would not appreciate five minutes of that?

Originally released in 2007, Ticket to Ride: Switzerland was the first expansion for Ticket to Ride that was not a full game all by itself. Previously available only as part of the Ticket to Ride: The Computer Game, it provided a whole new board or country to play across. Most importantly, it required a full set of Train Cards, scoring markers, and Train pieces from Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride: Europe is needed to play. The cards from Ticket to Ride: 1910 can also be used, but the Train pieces will have come from somewhere else. Because its distribution of Train Cards is different, Ticket to Ride: Märklin is not considered compatible with Ticket to Ride: Switzerland. So what do you get with this board? Simply, the board, the rules, and a new set of Destination Tickets.

What really set Ticket to Ride: Switzerland apart – and still does – is that it is designed for either two or three players only. Which was long before Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries. Of course, in addition, Ticket to Ride: Switzerland adds a new type of Destination Ticket and a new way to play the Locomotive (or wild) Train Cards, all tied into the numerous tunnel routes which were first seen in Ticket to Ride: Europe.

Yet the first thing you notice about this expansion is the board. It a gorgeous piece of work, depicting Switzerland and its cities and routes, surrounded by the nations of Deutschland, Österreich, Italia, and France. These are not mere window dressing, but destinations in themselves that the players can connect to by claiming routes across their respective borders. The new cards are as equally nice, although everything does feel a little too like a chocolate box.

The simplest new rule for Ticket to Ride: Switzerland is a reduction in the number of Train pieces each player starts the game with – forty instead of the usual forty-five. A player also receives more Destination Tickets – five as opposed to three. Of these he must keep two. Any rejected Destination Tickets, including those rejected after drawing more during play are discarded from the game completely, thus making it possible to run out of Destination Tickets during a game.

Of the forty-six Destination Tickets, thirty-four connect two cities. The remaining twelve connect a city to another country or one country to another. The points scored for either of these new types of Destination Tickets varies and depends upon the country connected to. For example, completing the Zürich-to-country Destination Ticket scores a player just three points if he claims a route connecting to Deutschland, seven points to either France or Österreich, but eleven points if claims a route between Zürich and Italia. If a player does not connect either destination then he loses only the lowest point value for that Destination card, so in the previous example, only three points. Harder and longer routes of course, score more points, but these new city-to-country and country-to-country Destination Tickets make it easier for a player to score points, especially later in the game when a player draws extra Destination Tickets.

The way in which the Locomotive Train (or wild) cards are used in Ticket to Ride: Switzerland is radically different to that of the standard game. In ordinary Ticket to Ride, only one face-up Locomotive card can be drawn per turn and it is the only card that can be drawn on a turn. Here they are drawn as standard cards, so two Locomotive Cards can be picked up on a turn. Once in a player’s hand, Locomotive Cards can only be played to claim tunnel routes, either using all Locomotive Cards or combining with Train Cards matching the tunnel’s colour.

The last rule previously appeared in Ticket to Ride: Europe and concerns the tunnel routes, which are clearly marked with dots along their sides. To claim a tunnel route a player first pays the correct number of Train Cards, either in the matching colour, in Locomotive Cards, or a mix of both. He then draws the top three cards from the draw pile. For each of these three that match the colour of the cards used to claim the route, the player must an extra Train card of that colour. If the player has no extra cards of this colour, he receives his original cards back and his turn ends. He or another player can claim this tunnel route on subsequent turns, but either is still subject to what is the chance of having to pay a tunnel tax.

The first challenge with playing this expansion is answering the question, “Where the heck is…?” After all, Swiss geography is not going to be familiar to everyone and learning the routes is a whole new challenge by itself. Looking at the board it is clear that this geography is dominated by tunnels (well, this is Switzerland), mostly in the South and East. About a quarter of the tunnels are grey, meaning that any colour can be used to claim them, and the majority of grey routes are tunnels.

The second challenge is one that only happens in Ticket to Ride with five or six players – competing for routes. In a game with two or three players, there is usually very little competition and the game can feel as if everyone is playing alone. Not so with Ticket to Ride: Switzerland, where there are not only fewer routes, but everyone has fewer Trains to place. Within the borders of Switzerland each city is usually connected by at least three routes, but most routes are quite short so it is easy to block access or at least force a player to find another route. This is slightly offset by the city-to-country and country-to-country Destination Tickets which provide multiple choices in terms of routes and scoring.

Initially, a game of Ticket to Ride: Switzerland lasts about an hour, but with practice our games now last less than this. What we did find is that routes were harder to claim and that there was more competition for them, and because Locomotive Cards are no longer available for use as wild cards (except in tunnels), we accumulated fistfuls of Train Cards as we waited to get the ones we needed. In fact, we wanted a means of displaying Train Cards as easily they are in the computer game, ideally some sort of display tray. The other issue we have is one of packaging. The new slimmer box is a great idea, but there is actually very little room in the bottom of the box for the new Destination Tickets. The need for components from another game in the series also adds to the set up time, but this is a minor inconvenience.

There are two problems with Ticket to Ride: Switzerland. The first is minor, and a matter of geography. Any player receiving Destination Tickets following the board’s North-South axis and thus crossing the Alps via the many tunnels will find this game much more challenging. Of course, a player is free to discard these Destination Tickets and pick up new ones. The second is more of problem. It is possible for a player to complete the routes on his Destination Tickets and then when he takes new ones to find that the routes on these have already been completed or partially completed by the player. Essentially, this is free points for the player with no effort upon his part, and often, this can be done turn after turn by a player and this can be a game winning tactic with Ticket to Ride: Switzerland. For some players this might not be within the spirit of the Ticket to Ride family, and to be fair, this is not an unreasonable point of view.

Given how tight the routes are on Ticket to Ride: Switzerland, my partner and I found it to be play a good, competitive two-player game. This is where this expansion primarily succeeds – making the smaller and shorter game more competitive and more of a challenge. The other area where it succeeds is in format, offering a new play area without making the purchaser buy a whole new version of Ticket to Ride. In fact, my partner commented on this at the time and suggested that it would be even better if future expansions in this format could have a double sided board and offer two countries to compete over. After all, other train games have done it. There are of course, problems with such a format, in particular the need for two sets of Destination Tickets, but it is an idea…

Packaged in a flat album-sized box, Ticket to Ride: Switzerland set the format for a pair of releases for Ticket to Ride in late 2011 – Map Collection, Vol. 1 – Ticket to Ride Asia and Vol. 2 – Ticket to Ride India. Indeed, the latter includes the Ticket to Ride: Switzerland board, itself long out of print, much in demand, and its second hand price often reflecting that. Fortunately, both volumes of the Map Collection come in deeper boxes and thus avoid the packaging error of Ticket to Ride: Switzerland. That said, whilst the re-release of Ticket to Ride: Switzerland is far from unwelcome, it is annoying that in order to get the India board, it necessary to buy it again.

The tightness of the routes and the new country-to-country and city-to-country Destination Cards make Ticket to Ride: Switzerland a challenging and interesting board. It offers all of the competition previously only found in a four or five player game of Ticket to Ride, but just for two or three players. The board itself is stunning and the routes it gives the players to take make for what is arguably the most efficient Ticket to Ride expansion to date.

Just when we had one dice game from Steve Jackson Games, another follows closely on its heels. Thus following on from Cthulhu Dice, we have Zombie Dice. This though, is not a “take that” game, but a “push your luck” game. Its rules are just as simple and easy to learn, it plays almost as fast, but it comes better packaged with its own means of storage. Designed for two or more players, aged ten and up, in Zombie Dice you are a zombie out for braiiinnsss…

The game comes in a short thick tube that also doubles as the rolling cup. Inside can be found the rules leaflet which takes a minute to read and just as long to teach – we had a quick game whilst Dave set up Battlestar Galactica for a two hour marathon. Also inside the tube are thirteen six-sided dice. These come in three colours and are marked with three symbols: “Brain,” “Shotgun (Blast),” and “Footprints.” Each die represents a human victim. Some dice represent harder victims and have more “Shotgun (Blast)” than “Brain” symbols on them – these are the red dice. The green dice have more “Brain” than “Shotgun (Blast)” symbols on and indicate easier victims. The yellow dice are more balanced, but all dice have two “Footprint” symbols.

When rolled the “Brain” symbol indicates the successful munching of a victim’s noggin. The “Shotgun (Blast)” indicates that he fought back and the “Footprints” that he got away from a zombie’s clutches.

On his turn a zombie rolls all thirteen dice in the cup and draws the first of three dice. He rolls these and puts aside any that roll “Brain” or “Shotgun (Blast)” symbols. If any “Footprints” symbols are rolled, the zombie he can top these dice back up to a total of three and re-roll them. He can keep doing this until he accumulates three “Shotgun (Blast)” symbols, in which case he is driven off and his turn is over. Accumulating three “Shotgun (Blast)” symbols also means that the zombie loses all of the “Brain” symbols rolled on his turn and he scores nothing! If after any dice have been rolled and counted and the zombie has less than three “Shotgun (Blast)” symbols before him, he can choose to end his turn and add any “Brain” symbols rolled to his total. Play passes to the next zombie with all of the dice returned to the cup.

Once a zombie has accumulated a score of thirteen brains, he wins.

Zombie Dice is not entirely luck based as a zombie can decide when to stop rolling, based on either his number of “Shotgun (Blast)” symbols or the dice colours already rolled. It does lack mechanical interaction, but the personal interaction comes from watching or egging your fellow zombies in to pushing their luck and rolling more dice. From its rules Zombie Dice is obviously simple enough, but that it is more fun the rules suggest is a surprise. Zombie Dice is a fun filler.

Carcassonne: Abbey & Mayor is the fifth expansion for Carcassonne, the Spiel des Jahres award winning game based on the Roman and Medieval architecture of the town of the same name in South Western France. Players take turns to place tiles to recreate this architecture, building cities, cloisters, farms, and roads, and claiming with their followers or “meeples” (as they have become known) to score points. The previous expansions have added meeples for a sixth player, numerous new means of scoring, several attempts to diffuse the core game’s one weakness (that by careful placing of Farmer meeples, a player will invariably win the game), and given the players lots of new tiles to place. Carcassonne is an area control game in which the areas are built in a jigsaw puzzle fashion that many find appealing.

The four additions in Carcassonne: Abbey & Mayor are situational — they only come into play when certain situations arise on a player’s turn. The Abbey fills in a hole, the Mayor is placed in an empty city, the Barn on a field junction, and the Wagon on an incomplete feature. When they do come into play, each in its own way is quite powerful, the Barn more so, which restores much of the balance if and when it can come into play. In addition, these additions are not as fiddly as those of the previous expansions — The Princess & The Dragon and The Tower, nor do they run counter to the core game’s medieval theme. Overall, Carcassonne: Abbey & Mayor gives the players powerful new options that will happily sit alongside the core game and its first two expansions, making it the expansion to have after Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders.

Carcassonne — The Princess & The Dragon is the third boxed expansion for the game, after Inns & Cathedrals and Builders & Traders. As the title suggests, it adds an element of fantasy to the game, with the city beset by a dragon, volcanoes, magical portals, an amorous princess, and a protective fairy. Besides the cute wooden dragon and fairy pieces, the expansion includes thirty new tiles, which are mostly mixed in as usual.

The first new tile is the Volcano, which does not have a follower placed on it, but the Dragon. When a Volcano is first drawn, the Dragon tiles are then added to the tile mix. The Dragon is moved to the next Volcano tile when it is placed. The Dragon tiles are each marked with a Dragon icon, and when one is placed, the Dragon immediately launches itself into the air and goes hunting. From its current location the players take it in turn to move the Dragon one tile each until the beast has moved a total of six. If the Dragon flies over a tile with a follower, it feeds on him and the follower is returned to his player. The only tile that the Dragon will not visit is one protected by the Fairy.

The Princess tiles each add to a city and when placed, target a Knight present in the city. He is removed to attend to the Princess’ whims and returned to his player. The Magical Portal tile lets a player place a follower on it or any previously placed tile. It must otherwise adhere to normal tile placement rules, but does allow a player to return a follower to a location it was previously removed from!

The Fairy piece only comes into play when a player does not put a follower down on a new tile. Instead, he can move and place the Fairy on any tile where he already has a follower, thus protecting the follower from the predations of the Dragon. In addition, the player scores a point if the Fairy is still there on the next and subsequent turns. Bonus points are scored if the Fairy is present when the feature that the follower is on, is completed and scored.

Of course, you can easily ignore all of these new rules and just add the thirty tiles into the mix. In that case, enjoy, as new tiles are always a good thing in Carcassonne. But two of the tiles are different enough to affect the ordinary play of the game. One adds a tunnel, letting a road run under a city, whilst the second locates a cloister within the walls of a city. With this, the player chooses to place his follower on either the city or the cloister.

Previous expansions have concentrated upon giving new methods of scoring within the game’s historical context. Carcassonne — The Princess & The Dragon instead focuses upon removing followers (and thus opportunities to score) from the game, the Princess specifically from cities, and the Dragon from anywhere it can reach. The point is, where followers were perfectly safe in Carcassonne, with this expansion, they are no longer.

Unfortunately the overall effect is very pendulum-like in a two-player game, and the addition of more players is necessary break up the action/reaction nature of these new rules. This is their only real downside, apart from the fantasy elements that might not appeal to the purists. Otherwise Carcassonne — The Princess & The Dragon is a solid expansion for what is still the perfect introduction to Eurogames.

One of the most hotly anticipated games in 2010 was Forbidden Island from Game Wright – anticipated because it had been designed by Matt Leacock, the highly regarded designer of the equally highly regarded co-operative board game, Pandemic. For fans of that board game’s desperate attempt to stave off the spread of four deadly diseases, the news was and still is good. Forbidden Island is another co-operative board game, another desperate race against time rather than your fellow players, and another tense, taut playing experience. The enemy are not four deadly diseases, but the rising tides that ebb and flow, threatening to sink the island before a band of plucky explorers can land, rescue its hidden treasures, and get back to safety…

This is a game designed for two to four players, aged ten and up that can be completed in under thirty minutes. It is easy to learn – for our first game we got everything out and were playing in five minutes – and fans of the designer’s classic Pandemic will recognise certain similarities.

The first thing that strikes you about Forbidden Island is that it comes in a tin. Inside the deep tin can be found fifty-eight cards, twenty-four Island Tiles, six wooden pawns, four Treasure pieces, a Water Meter, a Water Level Marker, and an eight page Rules Booklet. The cards are divided between a twenty-eight Treasure Card deck, a twenty-four Flood Card deck, and six Adventurer cards. The red-backed Treasure Cards are divided between depictions of the game’s four Treasures, Waters Rise! cards, and various special cards. Each of the cards in the Flood Deck corresponds to one of the twenty-four Island Tiles. These Island Tiles depict locations such as Breakers Bridge, the Cliffs of Abandon, the Coral Palace, and Fools’ Landing, where the helipad is located. Each Island Tile is double-sided, showing a location in full, fantastic colour on one side, and a pale version with a blue wash on the reverse. When this pale version is face up, it indicates that the location is flooded and is in danger of sinking.

The six Adventurer cards each double as a quick reference card and each has a special ability. For example, as the Messenger a player can give a Treasure Card to another player anywhere on the island, while the Engineer can shore up two adjacent flooded Island Tiles instead of one as an action.

The Water Meter shows Forbidden Island’s rising waters in terms of the number of Island Tiles that are flipped over at the end of each player’s turn, from two rising up to five. A marker is clipped onto the Water Meter, and this marker will rise up the Meter and through the numbers until it hits the skull and crossbones at the top. When this happens, the game is over. The marker only rises when a Waters Rise! is drawn at the end of a player’s turn. There are just three of these cards in the Treasure Deck, but as the game proceeds, the players will exhaust and reshuffle the Treasure Deck several times.

Lastly, there are the four Treasures. Each of these – the Earth Stone, the Statue of the Wind, the Crystal of Fire, and the Ocean’s Chalice – is done in very tactile and appropriate plastic. For example, the Crystal of Fire is done in translucent flame red plastic.

To set up a game of Forbidden Island, the Island Tiles are laid out face up in a roughly crossed shape pattern, one each of the Treasures is placed at a corner of the island, and each player receives two Treasure Cards and an Explorer Card. Their corresponding pawns are placed on the marked Island Tiles. The top six cards from the Flood Deck are drawn and turned over to form the Flood Discard Pile, with each of the Island Tiles that correspond to the cards drawn being turned over to show their flooded side. Lastly, the marker is set on the Water Meter at a starting point that ranges from Novice up to Legendary. The higher the starting point on the Water Meter the closer the marker is to the skull and crossbones and the game ending in failure.

On his turn a player can take just three actions. He can move orthogonally – up, down, left, or right, but not diagonally (unless he is the Explorer) – to an adjacent Island Tile; he can shore an orthogonally adjacent flooded Island Tile or the flooded Island Tile that he is on – this flips the tile over so that it shows its non flooded side; he can give a Treasure Card to a player if they are on the same Island Tile; or he can capture one of the four Treasures by discarding four matching Treasure Cards on one of the two Island Tiles where that Treasure can be found. Doing any of these takes one action.

At the end of his turn a player draws two more Treasure Cards, with the maximum he is allowed to have in his hand being five. He also draws a number of Flood Cards as indicated on the Water Meter. For each Flood Card drawn, the corresponding Island Tile is flipped over. If the Island Tile has already been flipped and shows its Flooded side face up, it sinks into the abyss and creates a watery chasm that cannot be crossed – unless you are playing the Diver. Both this Island Tile and its Flood Card are removed from play. Any player caught on an Island Tile lost this way immediately swims to an adjacent Island Tile.

If a Waters Rise! card is drawn from the Treasure Deck, the marker is raised by one notch on the Water Meter. Over time this will increase the number of Flood Cards drawn at the end of each turn. The Flood Discard Pile is shuffled, put back on top of the Flood Pile, and Flood Cards are drawn as normal.

So how do you win a game of Forbidden Island? Simply by collecting all four of the Treasures, getting every player to the Fools’ Landing Island Tile, and then using a Helicopter Life card – one of the few special cards from the Treasure Deck – to get everyone off the island. The point is, everyone wins.

So, one way to win then, how do you lose? By lots of ways. If both of the Island Tiles where a Treasure can found are lost to the abyss or if the Fools’ Landing Island Tile sinks, preventing everyone from getting off Forbidden Island. If an Island Tile sinks and a player cannot swim to an adjacent Island Tile or if the marker on the Water Meter reaches the skull and crossbones. The point is, everyone loses.

The time between a game starts and when it ends – either with a win or a loss, a player will be very busy. Primarily, he will be rushing around Forbidden Island to shore up Island Tile after Island Tile, the danger being that if too many Island Tiles are lost to the watery abyss it restricts everyone’s movement and reduces the number of Island Tiles where the Treasures can be found. Secondly, he will be collecting Treasure Cards enough to collect one or more of the Treasures. In between all of this, his fellow players will be advising and suggesting on his best course of action, usually based upon the special ability granted to the player by his Adventurer Card or where a player needs to get to in order give a Treasure Card to another player or to receive a Treasure Card from player in his turn.

I found a demo copy of Forbidden Island at UK Games Expo ’10 – where it would win an award for Best Family Game – grabbed it and quickly rounded up three other players, cracked open the game, and was playing in five minutes. We lost. On Novice level. On the second try, we won. I resolved to purchase a copy the following day when it was launched. In discussing the game, we agreed that the game felt very much like Pandemic, the comparisons being impossible not to draw. It has the same strong co-operative play element; it has the same deck refreshing element that sees the same cards appearing again and again – but on Forbidden Island they are Flood Cards rather than Infection Cards as in Pandemic; and it has same tense atmosphere in play as the players try to stave off the rising waters. It also feels like a scaled down Pandemic, with a player having three actions per turn rather than four and having to collect four Treasure Cards per Treasure rather than five City Cards per disease as in Pandemic.

Yet despite the tense nature of the game play, Forbidden Island is not as doom laden. Its theme is more upbeat, more adventurous, and without the fate of the world being at stake. With its excellent artwork and the fantastic nature of the names given to the Island Tiles, Forbidden Island is more like playing a desperate adventure movie.

If there is an issue with Forbidden Island, it is in that having played Pandemic, the comparisons leave you slightly dissatisfied. This is due to this new game not having quite the same depth of play that Pandemic offers, making Forbidden Island not quite as appealing to the dedicated games player. For all its scaling down and simpler rules, Forbidden Island is not necessarily easy to win, and the dedicated games player should consider adjusting the starting difficulty upwards to Elite or Legendary. To be fair though, Forbidden Island is not Pandemic and is not meant to be a replacement or a variant, instead being a family game that can enjoyed by younger players and serious gamers alike. In fact, it actually serves as a fantastic introduction to the concept of the co-operative play. That it plays in a similar fashion just shows us how good the underlying mechanics are in Forbidden Island’s older and more polished, more intricate forebear.

Which all means that Forbidden Island is not just another fine entry to the growing family of co-operative board games, but an excellent introduction to that family. As an introduction to co-operative game play and as a family game, Forbidden Island is clever, sophisticated, and a great new gateway game into the hobby.

Back in 2005, Tsuro: The Game of the Path was an odd release. It was the first board game to come from WizKids, a company better known for its CMGs or Collectible Miniatures Games such as MechWarrior: Dark Age and Heroclix, and their CSGs or Constructable Strategy Games like Pirates of the Caribbean and Rocketmen: Axis of Evil. Tsuro: The Game of the Pathwas a step away from all that, a complete and self-contained game that matched the European model in terms of quality, and matched its simplicity of concept with a simplicity of play. For a while it has been out of print, but now it has a new publisher.

The concept is that the Dragon and the Phoenix share the guardianship of the paths of life, maintaining a careful equilibrium between the two forces of luck and destiny. Only by finding a balance between the two, can you find the path to enlightenment. In Tsuro, this is reflected in the players having to find their way across the board, but curiously not to the other side. Indeed, a player does not want to find a path to the other or edge of the board, but rather he wants his opponents to do so. This will lose them the game, and if he can force this to happen by putting a path in front of them in front of an opponent — which he must take — then so much the better.

What strikes you first about Tsuro are the quality of its components, and the obvious thought that has gone into both its look and feel, all done in rich earthy shades of brown and following an Oriental theme. The rules are beautifully presented on a fold out card sheet, a cover sheet sits below that on top of the fully mounted board, and below that are the nicely shaped playing markers, and the glossy, hardy tiles. The only downside to the components are the plainly presented rules given in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and the playing markers. These eight, each in a different colour and with a dragon motif stamped into them, are of cheap plastic. They just do not feel as if they match the quality of the rest of the game.

The board consists of a six-by-six grid of 2½-inch squares, the same size as the tiles. Each of the edge squares is marked with a pair of starting marks on the very edge. These starting marks align with the lines or paths that run across the tiles. Each tile is marked with four of these lines running to the sides of a tile to create a total of eight entry and exit points. Although the paths cross, they never connect across a tile, only from one tile to the next. The effect, as the tiles are laid out on the board, is to create a series of separate paths, on which the players will never meet unless their paths are connected. It is important to note that each of the 35 tiles is different, but that they can all be laid out on the board to create a variety of paths and patterns. The 36th tile is an exception. The Dragon tile is used to indicate who draws the first after the draw pile is reshuffled.

Designed for two to eight players, a game begins with each player placing his marker on a starting mark and receiving a hand of three tiles. On his turn, a player selects one of these three and puts the tile down on a square next to his marker so that it increases the length of the path his marker is on. He then moves his marker along the new section of path to its open end. If another player has his marker on a path that is connected to and extended by the addition of this newly placed tile, then the marker is also moved along the path to its open end. In doing so, should a player’s marker be connected to a path that leads all the way off the board, then he must still follow it to the end. When his marker leaves the board, a player also leaves the game. The aim of the game then, is to force your opponents’ markers off the board, whilst you try to stay on.

And that really is it. To win you must be the last player with a marker on the board. It is possible to have two winners, but only if everyone else has been eliminated and all of the tiles have been placed. There are enough tiles to fill the board bar a single square. Players can also be eliminated simultaneously, when their respective paths are connected, forcing their markers to follow each other’s path back to the starting point and off the board. Of course, a player does not have to play a tile that will force him from the board unless no other move is possible, but when players’ paths grow closer, it is highly probable. It is possible for there to be no winner, having played games in which every player is eliminated on a single turn leaving the board empty. This is more common with only a few players.

Tsuro is both easy to learn and understand. Although two can play, it is definitely a better game the more players are involved as there are more opportunities for rival paths to connect. A greater number of players also increases the playing time, but to no more than half an hour. Nor is it an easy game to win despite the simplicity. Rather it is an easier game to lose than it is to win, and to be fair, Tsuro is very, very light in terms of strategy. Which probably makes it too light for more than an occasional play by the serious gamer, being more of a side dish than a main course, making it better suited to a family audience. Even so, Tsuro: The Game of the Path is an enjoyable attractive game that has been ably executed from concept to completion.

Alhambra is the 2003 winner of the “Spiel des Jahres,” Germany’s top gaming award. Based on the designer’s previous Stimmt So, it is a tile-laying game with resource management aspects. Its theme is simple. In Granada, 1278, each player brings together a team of European and Arabic artisans to build the finest, and largest version of the Alhambra, Spain’s most beautiful palace. Of course, they want to be paid in their native currencies.

Designed for two to six players aged eight and up, Alhambra’s components are all high quality. The Starter Tiles are marked with the famous Lion Fountain, while the Building Tiles are marked with various gardens, manors, mezzanines, pavilions, royal chambers, and towers, plus a number indicating their cost. The Money Deck is divided between four color-coded currencies: blue colored Denars, green Dirhams, orange Ducats, and yellow Florins. The Tile Reserve boards show the Scoring Cards’ information and give space to hold tiles in reserve.

The Building Market board is the game’s heart and is marked with four tile spaces, each adjacent to a symbol for one of the four currencies. After a slightly complex set-up, a player can do one of three things on a turn. He can take Money cards to spend later. He can buy a Building Tile, paying in the correct currency, indicated by the symbol on the Building Market. A purchased tile can be added to the player’s Alhambra, or placed on the Reserve Board. If the “exact” amount is paid for the tile, another turn is gained! A player’s third action is redesigning his Alhambra using his tiles in reserve.

Tiles are placed to according to simple, but strict rules. They must align correctly, and adjoining sides must match, some tile sides having walls. An Alhambra’s design can be as sprawling or as compact as a player wants. Generally, the cheaper the tile, the more difficult it is to place. Scoring takes place when the Scoring cards are drawn and at a game’s end. Points are awarded for having the most of each building type, plus the longest wall. The player with the most points is the winner and has the finest Alhambra.

Alhambra offers simple tactics, but difficult decisions. Does a player buy and lay the tiles needed to score, paying over their value, or take Money Cards to have the exact amount needed to gain extra actions? But buying now may deny a player a decent card that may go to his rival! Dominated by strong random elements of tile and drawing, Alhambra lacks any real interactive element, participants almost playing self-contained puzzle games and coming together only at the Building Market.

Despite a lack an interactive element, Alhambra is still pleasing to play, in turns frustrating and gratifying as fortunes can change within a turn or two. The nicely spaced scoring rounds also allow players to catch up with their rivals. Beautifully and cleverly designed, Alhambra is a light and enjoyable game that is easy to learn and a pleasure to play.

Recently I got the chance to get Apples to Apples out onto the table. I have had a copy for a while after picking it up for a games party that got cancelled; and there is the nub of the issue. Like most of the people that I play boardgames with, I like to have some complexity to a game and I like to have some theme to a game. So it rare that we decide to bring out a party game and I have so few in number that I can count the party games in my collection. For your information, I own copies of Cineplexity, Gambit-7 (the Anglicised version of Wits & Wagers), Who Would Win?, and now, Apples to Apples. Originally published by Out of the Box in 1999, but now published by Mattel –and hey, who would have thought I would be buying a Mattel game at my age? – this game of “hilarious comparisons” has sold millions of copies, been translated into numerous languages and different versions, and proven to be very popular.

Designed for four to ten players, aged twelve and up, Apples to Apples comes in a neat square box that contains a single, double-sided rules sheet, and some eight hundred and forty-six cards. The cards are divided into two coloured types. The first are the six hundred and forty-eight Red Apple Cards and the second, two hundred and sixteen Green Apple Cards. The Red Apple Cards are “noun” cards that represent events, organisations, personal aspects, people, places, times, and things. For example, the “Rock Concert,” “Greenpeace,” “My Street,” “King Arthur,” “Blackpool,” “The 1970s,” and “Leeks.” The Green Apple Cards represent characteristics or descriptive attributes that can be applied to the “noun” or Red Apple Cards, such as “Annoying,” “English,” or “Philosophical.” Each version of Apples to Apples is usually tailored along a theme or a particular culture and language. As can be seen from the list of cards so far, my version of the game is the British Apples to Apples.

Apart from an appropriately coloured apple, there are no illustrations on the cards, but is there some supplementary information. Sometimes this can be silly, such “How many Essex Girls does it take to get an Essex Girl joke…?” on the Essex Girls Red Apple Card, but sometimes this is educational. For example, “From the French caboche, meaning “big head.”” on the Cabbage Red Apple Card. On the Green Apple Card the supplementary information that expands upon the descriptive attribute with three synonyms, such as “frantic, headlong, and reckless” for the “Desperate” Green Apple Card.

The aim of the game is to win a certain number of Green Apple Cards, the number depending upon the number of players – more players lowers the required number. A Green Apple Card is won by getting the current Judge to select the Red Apple Card that you played as being the best match or comparison with the current Green Apple Card.

The game starts with every player receiving a hand of seven Red Apple Cards and one person being chosen to be the Judge. The Judge draws one Green Apple Card and reads it aloud before placing face up on the table where everyone can see it. The other players each choose a Red Apple Card from their hands which they think will best match the descriptive attribute of the Green Apple Card on the table. These cards are placed face down on the table and once everyone has played a card, the Judge picks them up and examines them. He then reads aloud the Red Apple Cards played and decides which one of them is best described by the Green Apple Card he drew. The player of the chosen Red Apple Card wins that round and is awarded the Green Apple Card towards his score. All of the Red Apple Cards are discarded and the next player takes the role of Judge, dealing new Red Apple Cards to bring everyone’s hand back up to seven and then drawing a new Green Apple Card.

So for example, Anthony is the Judge and draws the “Innocent” Green Apple Card. From their hands, Dave, Jeremy, Matt, and Michele play the “Climate Change,” “Elephants,” “Michael Jackson,” and “The Ocean” Red Apple Cards. Anthony chooses “Elephants” as the Red Apple Card that compares best with the “Innocent” Green Apple Card and Michele, who played that card receives the “Innocent” Green Apple Card to add to her score.The Judge is free to select the Red Apple Card of his choice, and can justify it however he wants. Nor does his choice have to be logical or agree with any of the opinion of the other players though they are free to persuade him as to which Red Apple Card to choose. Anthony chose “Elephants” because he believes them to be innocent, but he could have selected “Michael Jackson” because in his opinion, the popstar’s fans believe him to be innocent.

One accepted tactic is called “Playing to the Judge” in which a player puts down the Red Apple Card from hand that he thinks the Judge all but regardless of how relevant the Red Apple Card is. So in the above example, Michele could have played the “Michael Jackson” Red Apple Card because she knows that Anthony is a fan of his music.

Besides the basic play of the game, Apples to Apples includes several other options such as Judging Red Apple Cards that are the opposite to, or least like the Green Apple Card played; having to play a Red Apple Card before the Green Apple Card is played; and even having to play a Red Apple Card that is most like two Green Apple Cards, these being drawn at the beginning of the round as normal. That said, given the number of cards in the box as a whole, getting through those using the standard rules before wanting to move on these variants.

Ultimately, the fun of playing a party game like Apples to Apples comes from the players themselves and their reactions to the card combinations. This also means that because the players have to bring much of themselves to the game, they have to be in the right mood to play Apples to Apples. Whilst it is too light to be a gamer’s game, it can nevertheless be fun and provide a diversion from weightier titles, and even though it is over ten years old, it is a good party game.

What it means for me is that I have another party game in my arsenal for when I need something light and undemanding that non-gamers can and are prepared to play. Of the party games that I own, I prefer Gambit-7 and Who Would Win? over Apples to Apples as there is often more of a challenge to playing either. So Apples to Apples is fun. It might not be the best party game available, but it is a venerable design and if you had to have one party game in collection that everyone could play, Apples to Apples would be a good choice.

The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac is a push your luck, race against the clock, memory based and luck based board game from AEG heavily inspired by the exploits of Indiana Jones. Twelve adventurers have journeyed deep into the South American jungle and now stand at the entrance to the Temple of Chac, the Mayan * of Rain and Thunder. Once inside they have choices aplenty. Do they stop and look for treasure as the walls close in? Do they stop and look for clues that might get them across the lava pit? Do they stop and attempt to unlock the vaults that continue valuable treasure? As the giant rock rolls faster and faster towards them, do they leap into the river and swim in hope that they can get out before being swept into the abyss below? Or do they rush across the rickety bridge and make that final run for the exit before the giant rock reaches the end and seals everyone in? The player will face all of these choices during a game of The Adventurers. With the right decisions and a little bit of luck, an adventurer will get out alive and with some treasure. The wrong choice and bad luck will cast the adventurers to an eternal entombment, or hopefully a quick death…

The Adventurers is played out on a square board that depicts the Temple of Chac. The route from the entrance is linear, beginning in the Walls Room and winding its way past the Lava Room and the minor vaults to the Underground River and the rickety Wooden Bridge, past the main vault, before reaching the exit. Each player controls a pair of adventurers who will enter the Temple one at a time and move towards the exit, making decisions based upon the adventurer’s skill and the number of action points he has from turn to turn. There are six skills in the game: Leap, Linguistics, Lock Picking, Sprint, Stamina, and Swimming. Each of these skills is a one shot affair and are divided between those that can be used in specific circumstances and those that have a general application. Leap, Sprint, and Stamina can be used anywhere, while Linguistics can only be used determine if a glyph indicates an unsafe tile in the Lava Room; Lock Picking to open one of the treasure vaults; and Swimming to get out of the river more easily. In general, the specific a skill’s application, the more likely that it will affect a player’s tactics. For example, a character with the Lock Picking skill is more likely to try opening a treasure vault, while a character with the Swimming skill will probably try to swim the Underground River.

The Adventurers comes with lots of cards, cardboard tiles aplenty, and numerous bits of plastic. There are Treasure Cards for each of the main locations on the board, including the Walls Room, the Lava Room, the Treasure Vaults, and Underground River. Each of the Treasure Cards has a value ranging from one to six. In general, the more difficult a Treasure is to obtain, the higher its value. Some Treasure Cards depict a casket and a die symbol, meaning that their value must be rolled for at the end of the game. There are also the twelve character cards. These depict each of the adventurers in full colour along with an icon indicating his skill, plus charts for determining his Load Level on the back along with his Action Points.

There are two sets of corresponding tiles, the Lava Room Glyph tiles and Glyph Clue tiles. The former are placed Glyph face down on the Lava Room and covered with the Dark Masking Card, a square of black that hides the tiles until someone enters the Lava Room. Four of the Glyph Clue tiles are randomly drawn and placed alongside the Walls Room where they can be examined by an adventurer and committed to memory ready for when he tries to cross the Lava Room. These four Glyph Clue tiles indicate the unsafe tiles in the Lava Room.

The plastic starts with the twelve adventurer pieces. These are sculpted to match the images and are very nicely detailed. Unfortunately, they are all uniformly grey and can be a little difficult to tell apart when placed on the colourful board. The other pieces of plastic include the two walls that will the Walls Room, the Boulder that will chase the adventurers to the exit, and the rickety bridge for the Wooden Bridge. The Boulder is flat bottomed, so it slides rather than rolls, and the Wooden Bridge has several planks that are likely to be knocked loose into the abyss below as a procession of the overly laden adventurers race over it.

The mechanics from turn to turn are relatively simple. Starting with the Dicekeeper, a role that will pass around the table, the players take it in turn to roll for the number of Action Points they have to spend on their turn. To do this, each player rolls five six-sided dice, and for each die that rolls above a threshold determined by his adventurer’s Load Level, he gains an Action Point. For example, if an adventurer is carrying up to three Treasures, his Load Level is two and he has to roll two and over on each die. Carry between four and six Treasures, and the Load Level is three and he has to roll three and over on each die. An Action Point can be spent to move – walk, sprint, leap, or swim – one square; to examine any square for treasure, in the Walls Room, Lava Room, and Underground River; to examine a Glyph tile in the Walls and Lava Rooms; to make a single attempt to unlock a Treasure Vault; and to use any adventurer’s Skill. Once everyone has had their turn, the Dicekeeper draws cards to determine the movement of the Walls in the Walls Room and rolls dice to see if the Boulder moves. It moves one square for each result of three or more rolled. On the first turn, only one die is rolled, but this increases by one die each turn as the Boulder games speed until all five are being rolled at the end of the Dicekeeper’s turn.

In effect, the movement of the Boulder becomes the game’s timekeeper. As it moves faster and faster towards the exit, the Boulder closes in on the adventurers’ tail and they will find themselves having less and less time to act. At best the adventurers can hope for low rolls by the Dicekeeper when rolling for the Boulder movement, but it will definitely catch up with them. If the Boulder catches up with an adventurer, it will kill, as will falling into the lava of the Lava Room or into the abyss that the Underground River flows into, either by being swept in by the river or having the Wooden Bridge collapse under after attempting to carry too much across. It should be noted that an evil adventurer can jump up and down on the Wooden Bridge to make it more dangerous to cross for later adventurers. This can of course, go wrong for the malicious adventurer as the Wooden Bridge collapses under him…

A dead adventurer loses all of his treasure gained so far. If the player still has an adventurer waiting outside, he can enter the Temple of Chac through entrances created by the Boulder passing the Lava Room. As the adventurer is entering further onto into the Temple, there is less opportunity for him to gather treasure and he will need to find his way past the Boulder in front of him. Probably by swimming the Underground River and searching its bed for treasure. If this second adventurer is lost, then his player is out of the game.

The winner is of course, the player who gets one or more of his adventurers out of the Temple with the most treasure as determined by the value of the Treasure cards. It is entirely possible for nobody to get out of the Temple of Chac, and thus for everyone to lose.

For some, The Adventurers will be too much of a luck based game. True, what a player can do from turn to turn is determined by a roll of the dice, but it is up to the player to decide what he does with the results of the dice roll. One issue is the relative complexity of determining the safe Glyph Tiles in the Lava Room. While perfectly in keeping with the game’s theme, it can detract from an otherwise fast paced game and will probably be too complex for younger players. Also, once a player has lost one adventurer, he will find himself playing catch up with his competitors. That said, a game of The Adventurers can be completed in as little as thirty minutes and the likelihood is that you will get another game in before ninety minutes is up.

One factor limiting an adventurer’s choice is the number of players. More players mean more adventurers competing for the options in the Temple of Chac. It also means that the Boulder will move more often…

There is also the matter of cost. Given its plastic components and large number of cards and tiles, The Adventurers is by no means an inexpensive game. It gets even more expensive if the owner decides to add the painted plastic pieces that the publisher also sells. These are very nice though, the full colour adventurers in particular, which make the playing pieces far easier to distinguish than the grey of the set that comes in the game. Nevertheless, the core set feels a little overpriced given the lightness of the game play.

That game play in The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac is strong in terms of theme means that the players will soon find themselves invested in the exploits of their tomb raiding adventurers. It can be a lot of fun to see them pushing their luck in an effort to get that extra piece of treasure. It is even more fun when they fail and fall under the path of the rolling Boulder or burn to a crisp in the Lava Pit. Victory in getting out of the Temple of Chac is ever so sweet…

One of the odder games to be released at Essen in 2010 was SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français) from Winsome Games. The oddity being that Winsome Games [http://www.fyi.net/~winsome/] is best known for developing, publishing, and licensing detailed, historical train games – board games that focus on the building and development of railway networks and the trading in the shares of railway companies. SNCF was anything other than detailed or historical, but was instead a simple track and share game that could be played in thirty minutes. Nevertheless, it offered up careful tactical play and was quickly licensed to Queen Games and released as Paris Connection.

As both titles suggest, Paris Connection is set in France in which the players take the role of investors in the new railway companies that want to connect Paris with the rest of France. Designed for between three and six players, aged ten and over, the aim of the game is to increase the value of shares in one of six railway companies and to hold shares in these companies. Share values are increased by laying track and building connecting routes from Paris across France to her towns and cities. The first clever aspect of the game is that the wooden train pieces that represent the track or routes in the game also represent the shares in the company, so there will come a point at which it is more profitable to own shares in a company rather than build with them. The second clever aspect about the game is that share ownership is hidden throughout the game and only revealed at the very end, though share transactions are done in public.

The game consists of a board depicting a map of France with her various towns and cities. Most towns are worth a single point when scored, but in general, the further a town or city is away from Paris, the more valuable it is to score. Around two sides of the board is a scoring track that runs from one to thirty, showing not a player’s score, but the share values for each company. Besides the main board, there is a small storage board for each of the game’s six sets of share/track pieces. These come in six colours, are done in wood, and are shaped like steam locomotives. There is a card screen for each player behind which he can hide his shares. The last two components are a black cloth bag used to determine random share ownership at the start of a game and two sets of rules. One set of rules is in French, the other in English. Both are double sided, done in full colour with one side explaining how to set the game and the other the game’s actual rules.

Game set up is simple. Each player receives a screen and a train of each colour is placed on the start of the Scoring Track and on the start hexes in Paris. The remaining train pieces of all six colours are placed in the cloth bag and given a good mix. Each player then draws a number of random train pieces from the bag and hides them behind his screen. The number drawn depends on the number of players. The greater the number of players, the fewer the initial number of shares that they can hold at the start of the game and the fewer maximum shares that a player can hold at the end of the game without their scores being penalised.

On his turn, a player has two options. He can either lay track or take shares. To lay track he takes up to five train pieces from any one storage board and places them board so that they are connected to trains of the same colour. To take shares, a player places one the shares he has behind his screen on the storage board that matches its colour and takes two shares of another colour from another storage board. This is only way in which a player can increase the number of shares that he holds.

Play continues until there are only share/track pieces remaining on the single storage board with the remaining share/track pieces either behind the players’ screens or on the board. The other way to end the game is for a player to build into Marseilles. At this point everyone reveals the shares they hold behind their screens and receives points for each share according to its value on the Scoring Track. The player with the highest value share portfolio – after penalties are levied for holding more than the maximum number of shares – is the winner.

Initially, the idea that you are not building your own railway and that you do not own train pieces of a single colour is counter intuitive. In almost every other game, you are building your own railway and you do own all of the train pieces of a single colour. Once past this stumbling block, Paris Connection presents one base tactical question and then a number of smaller questions to a player. That base question is, at what point does it become more valuable to hold multiple shares in a railway network than to extend that network? In other words, at what point do share/track pieces become more valuable as shares than as track?

The subsequent and smaller questions revolve around how does a player affect the share values in the other rail networks? The game is not complicated enough that it includes rules on how to reduce share value, but it is possible to limit the growth in share value. The most obvious means is place the share/track pieces in such a way that they do not connect to any town or city and so do not score any points. Thus a rail network’s share value is not increased for a player’s turn.

The last question that a player needs to address is, how quickly does he need a rail network need to get to Marseilles? It might be that with several high value shares in his portfolio, he might want to end the game early to capitalise on those values. Conversely, the other players might want to lay track in a high value share to both stop it rising in value and it reaching Marseilles, hopefully giving them time to improve other share values and increase their portfolios.

There are three great aspects to Paris Connection. First, there is its simplicity. The rules are not only simple to learn, they are also simple to teach. In fact, the game is simple enough that after a single read through of the rules; a group could get playing, meaning that it is entirely possible to play Paris Connection out of the box. The second great aspect is that the game has almost no randomness to it, and what there is, consists of determining each player’s share portfolio at game’s start. The third great aspect is that this is a Euro Game not for two to five players as many good Euro Games are, but for three to six, and light games for six players are not necessarily all that common.

The production values on Paris Connection are very high. The board is attractively done and clearly laid out. The screens are nice, though prone to falling over. The wooden train-shaped track/share pieces are equally attractive if a little small and perhaps fiddly to handle. The rules sheet is bright and easy to read. Yet these high production values are source of the game’s single real flaw. Paris Connection is not an inexpensive game. In fact it is an expensive game given both how long a play through lasts and how simple it is. It is engaging and enjoyable to play, but it does not offer value for money.

The purchase of the copy of Paris Connection that we have been playing was an impulse buy. The promised lightness of the rules and the upper limit on the number of players were the draw despite the price. Having played it a few times, we have found it to be light and easy, but still offering some tactical choices. Not only is Paris Connection an excellent filler game, it is also a good starter game, a title that can be played and enjoyed with casual games players… that is, if you are happy to overlook the price.