Gamer Reviews

I’ve played tons of games, but very few fully cooperative ones. They don’t seem to be the most popular style of board game – at least among my friends; I’m just going off of personal experience! I am a huge history buff and love any game that has to do with World War II. However, I often wondered was there another angle to play a World War II game and I found it in Operation: Maccabee. Operation: Maccabee is about the horrible acts inflicted by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. This is a topic rarely addressed by lame stream media in a way that is appropriate for children. It can be especially difficult for children to process the information – not just the facts, but the reality of what actually occurred.

First things first I needed to find players who wanted to play a cooperative game and not try to kill me as a goal of winning the game. Being that my friends are all competitive I couldn’t ask them, so I asked my fiancé and her kids if they wanted to play.

With that we opened the game, and we played it that night, although the game is not difficult, it is best to review the rules to get the feel of how the game will flow. The artwork is actually really good, the style of the artwork is realistic and easy on the eye. My favorite part of the artwork would be the texture some of the paintings, the texture of the grenade, on the grenade card, looks like a grenade, the texture of the boots, on the Movement Cards, make them look like combat boots, the wood texture on the Secret Maps card, looks like wood. It is from an artist by the name of Cliff Cramp and in my opinion is a great artist, not too many can pull of textures and make them look realistic.

Rules: Each player leads a squad of commandos to liberate concentration camps and the player who rescues the most prisoners is the winner of the game, it’s that easy. The game comes with everything you need to play: 1 game board; 1 Assault Area, contained in the top of the box; 2 dreidels; 8 USA commandos; 8 UK commandos; 8 USSR commandos; 8 French commandos; 9 Nazi guards; 30 Action Cards; and 11 concentration camp tiles.

Playing this game was great and we all had fun spinning the dreidles and killing Nazi’s. One thing I did like was the use of dreidles instead dice that is a great and innovative way of using Jewish history. They game play is very interesting, it is a two part game, part board game and part dexterity game. The game play starts by spinning the dreidle, with the result of what you spun being the number of movement points you get for your current turn. Depending your movement points can be 4, 3, 1 + Action Card, and 0 with a Possible Nazi Ambush. Nazi Ambush will occur if your marker is in a red hex when you spin the dreidle and get the symbol that gives you a 0 movement, you will also get one of your commandos wounded. The red hex represents Nazi patrols. Movement on the hex board is quite simple, for example entering a forest hex cost 2 movement points, clear terrain hex cost 1 movement point, entering a mountain hex cost 3 movement points, and crossing a river hex cost only 1 movement point, but you need to have a raft action card. The best part about movement points is that if you have wounded commandos you can make your way to a resistance camp and enter it for 1 movement point, and have a chance to heal 1 or 2 of your wounded commandos. Once you make your way to a concentration camp and wish to liberate it from Nazi control, the fun begins by moving to the inside of the lid of the box with the Nazi Guards on them. From there you spin the dreidle to see if you can knock out any of the guards, once the dreidle stops you reference the symbol to see how many more guards you might of knocked out as well. It could be 2, or 1, an action card, or the commando you use might get wounded. The fun part of the game is using the action cards, such as the grenade, where you toss the dreidle like a grenade, or the Sniper card, where you use the dreidle as a sniper bullet. I took the first couple of wings, but once my fiancé and her kids got the feel for the game they caught on quickly and I had a run for my money.

Cons: One of the cons is that the cards are very hard to shuffle, and my copy had a warped hex board, and the pieces are quite small for an adult to handle

Even with those cons, I still recommend this game if you have little ones who want a game that won’t take an hour to set up or 2-3 hours to play. It is also fun for adults as well. This game has won a place in my Top 10 board games of all time!

Guilds of Cadwallon is a light-hearted worker placement / strategy game with a fantasy theme. I went in on the Kickstarter as I am a great fan of Rackham, and Cool Mini or Not tends to produce good quality games so this review is of the Kickstarter edition with the few extra bits that came as stretch goals. The difference between this is that the amount of cards for the ks edition is doubled, and there are 4 additional sets of pawns (different sculpts in 4 new colours), so it can be played by up to 8 players, or on a bigger play area.

Theme
As I mentioned, the game is set in Cadwallon, the Free City (or City of Thieves) in the world of Confrontation and Rag-Narok created by Rackham. I’m not sure if the game was created and then the theme pulled over it or if the game was made specifically for this setting, but they fit well together. Cadwallon is meant to be the one free city on the world of Aarklash where nations live together more or less in peace (well, compared to the war going on outside the walls of the city, that is). People are organised in Guilds and these Guilds fight each other for wealth, prestige and to gain more control of the city. It is an ideal setting for role playing (which is what it was created for), but the simple diceless mechanics of this game seem to work well with it too (opposed to the other board/card games created for this franchise which ended up being completely based on luck, thus trumping all over the supposed intrigue and power play), although not as well represented as it is in Lords of Waterdeep. The personality cards are well known characters of Cadwallon RPG and Confrontation so fans will be happy to see the familiar faces – if not a little disappointed to see the exact same faces again.
Also, having played Cadwallon back in the day I have to say the Guilds are a little off, but this will likely not bother anyone and does not let the game down.

Components
This was a little bit of a let down for me, and the reason for the game rating going down to 6 instead of 7. Having seen Zombicide and the rendered pictures of the pawns (same as on the box and in the official description above) I got very excited. The game uses the little ‘familiar’ models from the Confrontation Game and are shown in vibrant colours. These colours are represented on the cards too. Unfortunately the pawns themselves turned out to be completely different. All the colours seem faded compared to the renders, and I don’t mean it in the usual ‘screen-to-irl’ difference. The blue is very pale, the red is non existent, the orange is maroon, the yellow also looks pale, the gray is black, etc… Not only it is difficult to differentiate between some colours (not much of a problem for the pawns, but it is for the plain flat tokens) but also impossible to relate to the colours on the cards. Again, this is not really game changing, but it definitely ruined my excitement.
Quality wise both the pawns and the tokens (coins) are OK for a board game, but still, the colours…
The cards are nicely printed, but very flimsy. And some of the rule cards have typos on them which is again a bit annoying. The rulebook is small and well laid out, but has quite a few typos. Overall it seems CMoN tried to save on proofing of all the products and got unlucky.
The box is small which is a good thing, but it is only split to 2 sections inside so you will need to keep your zip bags to keep things organised. Luckily I managed to fit all the free kickstarter extras in the box all right, but if you ordered any more add ons you will need a bigger box. This was also available (along with a game board) from CMoN during the KS campaign.

The Game
Guilds of Cadwallon is played on a 3×3-5×5 grid of cards placed on the table. There is no need for a game board, but the optional one avalible during the KS campaign is very nice and could improve game experience. Cards have certain characteristics, depending on what kind of cards they are. Guild cards have guild points and support values, militia cards have ‘negative’ support values, personalities and actions have special effects. The spaces between cards are called boulevards and this is where players place their pawns. The pawns get ‘support’ from adjacent cards on their opposite side and the highest total wins. The object of the game is to capture cards with pawns in a top-trumps kinda way played on this matrix. Captured cards go to the players and get replaced by new ones from the deck. This is very easy to understand after only one played round. An extra twist comes in with personalities and action cards. These can change the way totals are calculated or swap cards on the table, changing the support pawns get. Very easy to get the hang of it and a lot of fun trying to constantly thwart your opponents’ plan to capture certain cards. The game ends when you have not got enough cards left in the deck to replace all the captured cards on board. At this point players add up the total guild points of their captured cards, add any bonuses, and the highest total wins the game, having acquired the most influence over the Free City. Easy to learn and you can dish out a couple of games in an hour which makes this a very good filler game.

Replayability
I can imagine this game getting boring after some time and thus should not be played as the main game. I would compare it to a card game like UNO which you play around for an hour or two if you have nothing better to do, or just have a quick go at it between two bigger games for a change. As a filler game it is great though, and will keep you entertained on those occasions when you haven’t got the time for a big game for years to come.

Last words
I was trying not to compare this to Lords of Waterdeep too much but it is difficult to avoid considering that both of them are euro-games in an RPG’s skin. Luckily the nature of these games is different; while Lords of Waterdeep is a more complex game with more options and longer play, Guilds of Cadwallon is a very simple little game with few components in a small box. Considering the low price I think it is a good buy if you can get over the colours of the game pieces. The small box will not take up much space in your game cupboard so you won’t mind it sitting there for longer between two games, and if you like the artwork of Cadwallon/Confrontation and these kind of games, you will be happy to have it in your collection. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a more serious game with more involved mechanics, this is not for you.

Synopsis:
You are trying to Influence the Guilds of Cadwallon with your Agents to gain more power than anyone else. If you control the Guilds, you control Cadwallon.

Gameplay: Each turn is divided into three phases:
Reveal Phase:
Place District cards in a 3×3 pattern, leaving room to place your Agent tokens, as shown in the picture above.
Dispatch Phase:
Place Agents in the “boulevards” between the cards to Influence as many Districts as possible. You may also play Action cards that affect gameplay in some way.
Control Phase:
Determine who has control based on Support from neighboring Districts and other card effects.

Each District card is either a Guild, Militia (who count against you), Personalities (who influence the game in subtle ways) and other Action cards. Most District cards have an Influence number, which is used in the Control Phase, and some have Guild points, which count towards victory.

The key to winning is to understand Control. When you are determining control, you add the Support value of all Districts adjacent to where you placed Agents. In the picture of the game above, the yellow player is unopposed in the lower right District, and will Control it at the end of the Control phase, removing it from the board.

When you can no longer refill all the Districts, the game ends immediately and the winner is determined by most Guild points.

Thoughts:
This is a fun game, requiring some strategic thinking. The first few Agents placed each turn take the most time, but after that, things move quickly as each player has fewer options. Once you learn the game and understand the Control phase, this is a game that could easily be added to the rotation of most gaming groups.

It’s quick (20-30 mins) and allows up to 8 people to play, although the base game comes with only enough Agents for 4 players. I sponsored this game on Kickstarter, so I have the extra colored tokens for up to 8 players. But it’d be fairly easy to substitute dice or some other kind of token for Agent colors you don’t own.

And like Cranekick, believe it has a lot of potential but lacks a number of mechanics that would allow it to reach that potential.

It does bog down in the final rounds.

I really dislike that you can move all your minions and villain anywhere on the board by paying one small token. It feels…..wrong.

I’ll add another minus: There are just not enough cards, especially Batman cards. The game becomes extremely repetitious because the same cards are played over and over and over again.

Great minis that can also be used in games of HeroClix, which I don’t play. The minions are microscopic, and for people with large hands (like myself) they are somewhat hard to handle. I do like playing the villains, though. But I think I’ll take Crankick’s idea of Risk-esque movement and incorporate it in my next game…..if I can find anyone willing to play it.

I’ll start by saying I’m addicted to deck building games. Dice building games, too, but that’s a different topic. With The Lord of the Rings Deck Building game, a welcome and enjoyable addition to my collection has been purchased.

Using the Penny Arcade engine, which seems to be most well known via the DC Deck Building Game, Cryptozoic has added some welcome mechanics that take LotRDBG into a more breathless realm as added dangers lurk with every reveal of every card. This new mechanic wreaks havoc with the next player, often causing great strife to that player’s strategy, and really adds a sense of dread to the overall game play.

No matter your opinion of DC Deck Builder (I enjoy it as the light filler it is), you owe yourself to play LotRDBG at least a couple of times. It’s familiar, fun, and nasty. What more can you ask of a game?!