Jay adan

I just got through with my first game of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords (and isn’t that a mouthful of a title) and I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what I liked about this game.

Here’s the thing.

On the one hand, this is sort of a deck builder game. But the deck building is pretty light overall. You’re going to start with either a deck of cards predetermined by your class (assuming you go with the recommended build) or you’re going to build your deck from a small list of cards that you can choose from to begin with. It’s not a large deck and during the course of your first adventure it isn’t likely to change dramatically.

On the other hand, this is a “rpg in a box” style game. That is, it presents a way to do some RPG-style adventures in a way that’s a lot easier to complete than actually playing a roleplaying game. But the problem is that there’s no real roleplaying built into the rules so if you’re going to be playing it in this way you’re going to have to bring a lot to the party yourself.

On paper this doesn’t sound like a particularly interesting game. Choose a location, reveal a card, deal with the card with your cards. Look for villain, close locations until villain has no place left to run. Sounds like advanced Munchkin. Yet somehow this all seemed to gel for us.

I think part of it is that you have to be open to the game. You have to be willing to bring some of your own fun to it. You have to invest yourself in the character your playing so you can be excited when they find a new, cool weapon, or be upset when they lose something important to them. Want to roleplay? You can do that too – even if it isn’t necessary to the game mechanics at all. If you’re open to it even a little bit I think that the mechanics allow you to have a lot of fun with it. “Oh no, I don’t think I can deal with this ghost. I’m going to have to hide. ****! The ghost is back. Wait, didn’t I just find some Holy Water?”

There’s is something that’s hard to put my finger on when I think about why I like this game and I can completely understand people who don’t enjoy it. It’s definitely one of those games that needs the right group. I don’t think that I would enjoy playing it solo. Even so, I really look forward to my future adventures!

I’m going to try to keep this to the high points. There are a number of good breakdowns of the details of the game that I don’t feel like I need to go into it, but let’s talk about what makes Warmachine different.

Unlike many miniatures games that hold on to their roots as military simulations, Warmchine is probably closer in feel to games like Magic: The Gathering. Warmachine isn’t as much about the utilization of firepower and terrain as it is about exploring and exploiting the synergies between the various powers and abilities of your units. Yes, you’re moving around your units and giant walking tanks in order to shoot your buddies models right in their stupid faces, but if you do that without giving strong thought as to how to maximize the effectiveness of your individual units then not only are you not playing the game to its fullest potential, you are likely going to lose.

The rules, on the surface, are pretty straight forward. It doesn’t take long at all to learn the basic dice, movement and shooting mechanics. Unfortunately, like Magic: The Gathering, there’s some fairly serious complexity under the hood. Figuring out actions, special actions, as well as timing of various things can really trip you up at times. It’s one of those games you can end up playing just plain wrong and not know it until you play with a new group. Of course, it’s the depth of the rules that make the game rich and interesting but I suppose that makes it a double-edge sword.

The miniatures definitely have their own style. In my opinion most are good, but not great. Fans of Games Workshop miniatures will miss the overall quality of GWs plastic kits.

Overall, there’s a lot of like with this game. Even when you think you’ve lost it’s always possible to squeeze out a win if your opponent makes a bad decision or the dice don’t go his way. Every game is a nail-biter.

I’ve been playing Space Hulk since it was first released in 1989. I was an avid player of the Warhammer 40k game so it was natural to pick this up too. Of course, once I started playing it I stopped playing 40k for quite a while as I started doing weekly Space Hulk nights instead. It was totally addicting.

Space Hulk is a two-player, grid-based, tactical combat game based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe. One player takes the role of a squad of Space Marine Terminators, the other plays the implacable aliens – the genestealers.

The board is made up of tiles that represent the inside of an ancient starship (a Space Hulk) and are arranged based on the scenario chosen. The space marines will get a specific objective like “recover the object” or “use the flamethrower in a specific room”. They then have to make their way from their entry point(s), through the interior of the ship to their objective. Of course, the genestealers are there to kill all of the space marines – or at least make it impossible for them to complete their objective.

The squad of space marines is kitted out with a variety of weapons and abilities and learning how to best deploy them is the key to victory. For example, the ****** can lay down a lot of death, but it’s limited in use so you want to make sure not to use it unless you REALLY need it. The storm-bolter can fire in two modes, but in one of them you risk the weapon jamming. Again, this should be saved for times when it’s either necessary or when a jam won’t mean certain death.

The genestealers have it a little easier. They are a swarm so the real key for them to win is to use their overwhelming numbers to their advantage. The marines can’t see exactly where they are to start. To begin with they are merely “blips” on their motion detectors (ala the movie ALIENS). The blips can represent 0 to about 4 aliens so there’s a certain amount of bluffing you can do as the genestealers. In the end your goal is to completely overwhelm the space marines, tearing through their armor with your vicious claws and make sure that they don’t return to their ship.

This edition of the game is absolutely stunning. Each one of the miniatures just oozes with character. They assemble easily and paint up well. The tiles are heavy enough to stop bullets and should last a lifetime. There are also other minis to go with specific scenarios (like a chalice, a dead space marines etc.) that also add to the overall impressiveness of this release. The game is getting collectors prices, but in terms of components, it’s worth it.

This is one of my favorite games of all time. It is replayable but not infinitely so. It will take a while before you learn all of the tactics needed to win for the two sides. The learning curve is much easier on the genestealer side, but even that takes a few games of getting torn apart by bolter fire before figuring out the best way to take out the marines. There’s also a fair amount of luck involved. A good strategy will always lose if the dice are against you.

Having said all that, I still think that this is a game that should be a part of every sci-fi gamer’s collection.

First up, I’m not going to describe the mechanics. There are many other good reviews that already do this. I’m going to give you a gut reaction review.

So, I hear people calling this a “light” game but I don’t think it’s that at all. When I think of light games I think about games that require little brain power to play – perhaps while imbibing an adult beverage. That does not describe Hanabi.

With Hanabi, you’re going to want to give the game your full attention the entire time that you play. If you’re forced to focus on anything else you’ll feel the important information slipping away from you every second that you aren’t focusing on the game.

Even when you lose a game of Hanabi there will be a feeling of relief from the tension of the game. It’s that intense.

This is not a light game. It’s a GOOD game… but it’s not light.

This review is for those of you who have played X-Wing but not yet tried Attack Wing.

Clearly, if you like X-Wing then you already like the rules for Attack Wing since they are essentially the same with some minor differences. At first glance it would seem like those differences wouldn’t matter, and yet they do.

One of the main differences is that Captains (pilots) are are separate from their ships. This means that you have that much more freedom when building your forces and can do some fun combinations that always seem to somehow work in the fiction of the game (Captain Picard is somehow the captain of a Romulan Warbird!).

Another change is the fact that many of your upgrades don’t go away when you use them. Photons vs Protons as an example. When you use your photon torpedoes you mark them as disabled. On your next turn you have the opportunity to use your action to re-enable them. This makes the decisions for what to do with your actions every turn that much more important. Good decision points make a good game.

Outside of that, most of the changes are cosmetic, but the ship stats also make the game feel more like the larger ships that they are meant to represent.

In the end WizKids games have done a great job of taking something familiar and making it unique and fully within the theme of what they were trying to convey.

Okay, it’s not all good news. The ships just aren’t anywhere near as nice as the X-Wing models. The upside is that there’s no worry about breaking them. The downside is that, they aren’t any better than just “ok”. I wish that the paint jobs were at least better. How important this is to you will really tell you whether or not you are going to want to buy the game.

I consider myself a miniature gamer first and foremost. So I’m not inclined to like a game that seems like it’s trying to be a replacement for a miniature game. Luckily, that’s not really what this is.

Warhammer: Diskwars is a relatively light strategy game with surprisingly little luck. You use points to build an army of disks that represent your troops. You have semi-randomly determined objectives for your game, then you set up you take turns setting up terrain (and this can greatly affect the game).

At this point the game is a pretty straightforward move and attack style game. Movement is accomplished by “flipping” the disks. That is, if the disk has a movement of 5 you would be able to flip the disk over 5 times in any direction during the course of its move. All other ranges are determined with a range ruler. Disks that end on top of enemy disks are said to be “pinning” those disks and during the combat phase they will deal damage to one-another (no dice rolling for this). Ranged attacks are pretty much the only things that use dice. Magic attacks are automatic damage from range which makes them pretty powerful.

There’s a lot of powers that the disks can have to add variation and depth to the strategies which makes the game very cool. Much more than I can go into here. It’s a game I didn’t expect to like, and yet I do.

Games can take less than an hour which is perfect for a game like this. If it was a longer game I’d rather be playing one of my mini games.