kkbrown

This is such a great game for people who are not board-gamers, and still tons of fun for people who are more serious. I absolutely love this game. I’m not letting it break into the 9s because it lacks a good scale of complexity and difficulty, but it is so much fun for beginners.

You start in a central room in a cursed temple and have 10 minutes to escape. You are constantly rolling dice to try to take actions in order to explore rooms, activate gems, and complete other actions. It is tons of fun and insanely wild. Everyone is just frantically rolling their dice to try to accomplish their objectives, then someone gets stuck and you need to rush to rescue them. SO MUCH FUN!

It is not complex. There are very few rules to master, and there is almost no grand strategic thinking. Just think about it like this:

You are dashing archaeologists. You have found some rare wonder in a hidden temple and you (in typical western imperialist fashion) callously remove it in order to add it to the collection of your local university that will ensure you get tenure. Upon stealing the wonder, the temple begins to groan, and you have ten minutes to escape. Are you going to spend 20 minutes min-maxing your possible strategies? **** no. You’re going to run as fast as you can, seeking to get whatever you need as frantically as possible in order to escape.

That’s how this game plays out. Tons of fun.

Ghost Stories is an incredibly difficult game. It is by far the most challenging co-op I’ve ever played, hands down. Pandemic, amped up to the max, is a cake walk through a primrose path in which the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings lovely Disney music as you eat birthday cake. That’s how easy Pandemic is when compared to Ghost Stories. There is a constant, unceasing cacophony of brutal banshees, ghosts, zombies, harlots, and demons swarming the gates of your poor village.

If you need a game that has an optimal strategy where you have a guaranteed path to win, don’t pick up this game. You will lose most of the time, and there is nothing you can do. The waves are just too much. But you can optimize your strategy at the margins, and this will allow you to win those games within that VERY narrow margin and give you a million thrills a minute.

The theme comes through, but not in an individual sense (the monsters are unique in their names and qualities, but completely interchangeable). Rather, you think about yourselves as defenders of the walls against a horde of enemies. Who will die? Who will take the hit points? Who will get the rewards? These decisions will push you to the edge, and it will provide hours of entertainment.

Don’t let my low rating of the Components and Ease of Learning scare you away from this game, it is amazing. Let me quickly discuss the negative features of the game, followed with a glowing review of what makes this game amazing.

The cards that come with the game are (mostly) of adequate quality. The artwork is fine, the design is adequate, but nothing is too breathtaking. The tokens and map tiles, however, are substantially worse. They look like extremely dated fantasy art, the details are not great, and the designs are quite lame.

Finally, to cap off my whining about the components, are the very poor quality of the miniatures. They are almost pathetic. Their detail is terrible, with no additional painting than a few base color. The design of the models is abysmal. The dragon’s snout is insanely long, and he looks like some strange mix of a crocodile, snake, and dragon. The male warriors are slightly better, but the elf’s hair is cheesy and the knight’s topper on his helm is laughably outsized. The female mage is no better.

These complaints are generalizable against most Wizkids games. Their components are just not the quality of Fantasy Flight, or Cool Mini or Not.

Even though its components are not the highest quality, I cannot recommend Mage Knight enough for those looking for an incredible adventure experience. You take a hero over several rounds, fighting monsters, mages, and other enemies as you level up in the hopes of becoming powerful enough to accomplish a particular objective. No two games are the same because you will be leveling up differently, fighting a different combination of monsters, and hopefully trying out new scenarios.

Depending on your particular style of gameplay, you can either focus on gaining a powerful army of units, or you can instead just beef yourself up and be an unstoppable one-mage hurricane of destruction. The variety and diversity of possible gameplay experiences makes each game unique, and rewards different strategies if well-planned.

While the rules are tough to get your head around initially, they are intuitive and fit together well.

I would not recommend playing with more than 3 players, and really think this is best with 1-2 players. Turns can take a long time, and you really want to minimize the down time in order to keep the sense of adventure going.

Seasons: Path of Destiny, adds a new dynamic to your Seasons game, along with a host of diverse items, familiars, enchantments, modifications, and other cards.

The primary feature of the expansion is the Destiny dice, which gives players the options to employ a certain enchantment in order to roll the dice as an alternative method to get crystals.

If you are a big fan of Seasons, you will love this expansion and will enjoy the new options available.

Let me preface my review by saying that I was very excited for Specter Ops. I have been wanting to acquire a hidden movement game for some time, and this looked like the perfect addition to my collection. As soon as it arrived at my local store, I went and picked it up, paying full MSRP. I did so because, despite being a huge fan of the perennial gale of creative destruction, I am a big fan of my local store and the services it provides, and I don’t mind paying $15 extra to support them.

So, I paid $52 soon after release, then went home to break it open. Imagine my disappointment when I opened up the box to find 8 extremely soft plastic miniatures, a few cheap cards, two dozen tokens, and a board. That’s it. Nothing is high quality, except for the board. I was pretty bummed out. For some reason, I thought that everything was going to be a bit cooler and higher quality, and that there would be more components available.

The game itself is fun. It’s a good take on the genre, and it provides for lots of cool abilities that make for dynamic and interesting play. It is also broadly accessible. You don’t need to be a hardcore gamer to enjoy Specter Ops, but you will enjoy it even if you are a bit more serious.