The World on My Table

While this has been a big month for tabletop game news (much more than I could fit into my roundup), it’s been less kind to my personal tabletop. Other life commitments have cut my total plays to less than half of what I achieved in the previous month. Such is life.

When gaming time is at a premium, what do we play? For me, there are two answers to this. If it’s the end of the work day, with another busy day tomorrow and only a short window for relaxation, I like to stick to what I know. As a result, Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game was my most-played game again this month. This thing just doesn’t quit, and after finally settling on a difficulty tweak that made the game feel just right from beginning to end, I don’t anticipate putting this back in the closet any time soon.

On the weekend, though, when I finally have a day (mostly) free of responsibilities, I like to make the most of the time I have and try to start something new–a new book, a new video game, a Netflix movie, or the ultimate project, learning a new board game.

Learning a new game is a Janus-faced activity for me. On the one hand, this is what I like most about the hobby–discovering how the mechanics of a game slot together in play to create fascinating strategic and thematic moments. Learning a new game is like exploring a cave or walking through an elaborate theme park, and the best moments in gaming often come when you get those “Eureka!” moments and an element of the game you’d never considered before suddenly unfolds into your key to winning. While any game with decent depth and variety will deliver this experience no matter how many times you play, the newer you are to a game, the more of those moments you’ll get (I call it the honeymoon phase).

On the other hand, though, learning a game is a real pain. Unless it’s a Vlaada Chvatil game, actually sitting down and reading the rules is more often a chore than a delight. Then there’s the Learning Game. To stick with the honeymoon metaphor, your first time with any game is going to feel like fumbling around in the dark. You have no idea how to pace yourself, a few mistakes are inevitable, and it always seems to be over just when you were getting into it. But you’ve experienced enough to imagine how great it will be once you’ve gotten the hang of it, and you’re usually ready to go again right away.

I fumbled my way through three new games this month (although in one case, I had to end my first and only game in flagrante delicto).

Assault on Doomrock is a very cool game from Polish publisher Beautiful Disaster Games. It engages in that age-old struggle to design a board game that feels like a role-playing game–not just RPG combat, but the adventuring, exploration, and character building, too. Many designers try, with few successes, but Assault on Doomrock came closer than most. It’s split into two distinct phases. In the Adventuring phase, the party moves around towns, wilderness and mountain areas trying to make their way towards Doomrock and gear up for the next fight. Many (but not all) actions cost Time, and you only have so much of it to spend, so you have to pick your actions carefully. Will you explore your current location’s Secrets, drawing a nice event? Will you fight monsters or perform odd jobs for coin? Try searching for loot? Will you spend your silver on new items or leveling up your party? Because you move as a party during this phase, you’ll need to come to a consensus on how best to prepare for the Battle.

In the Battle phase, you have a (crushingly hard) encounter with one of 9 random enemy groups. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but each encounter plays out very differently and requires different tactics to defeat. Combat is semi-abstract: positioning is important, but it’s freeform, not grid-based. You’re either adjacent to an enemy/fellow hero, or you’re distant from them. It’s also highly strategic, since in this game, you roll the dice before you attack. With up to two rerolls, your goal is to assign as many of your dice as possible to the right abilities (each of which requires a specific number or two to activate). Deciding how to approach each fight requires an intense amount of planning, and it’s not unusual to die to your first encounter. The game’s tough, but like Dark Souls, it’s the kind of difficulty that keeps me coming back for more.

Elder Sign: Gates of Arkham is an expansion for Fantasy Flight Games’ Lovecraftian dice game, Elder Sign. But it’s actually a lot more than that: with completely new decks for the Adventure Cards and Mythos Cards, two new types of assets (Skills and Membership Cards), and several significant new mechanics (Events, Gates, and facedown Adventures), it’s less an expansion and more a complete redesign that just happens to use the dice, characters and monsters from the base game. And that’s something that was desperately needed, since the original Elder Sign was a confusingly flawed game. A lot of people called it “Arkham Horror lite,” but it never really deserved that title…until now.

Finally, Greenland from publisher Sierra Madre Games is a scary complicated historical simulation game about three very different cultures that lived on the barely inhabitable island from the 11th-15th centuries. I’m pretty good at learning new games, even very complicated ones, but this one defeated me. I’m pretty sure I played it, mostly correctly (at least, I played the Beginners’ Game), but after spending several hours to complete the first two turns, I still had no idea what I was doing, strategy-wise. I’ve since watched some gameplay videos on YouTube to help the rules sink in, and I’m ready to tackle it again in April.

The World Beyond

Publisher Cryptozoic Entertainment, who specialize in board and card games based on licensed properties like Adventure Time, The Walking Dead, Penny Arcade, and the Ghostbusters board game (hugely successful on Kickstarter last month), was at the 2015 GAMA Trade Show, showing off some sweet-looking components for their Q3 title Portal: The Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game. They made plenty of other announcements at the show, too, including a Watchmen expansion for their DC Comics Deck-Building Game.

Publisher Days of Wonder announced a cosmetic revision to their popular (and excellent) game Five Tribes: The Djinns of Naqala, set in the mythical Arabia of the 1001 Nights. In all forthcoming printings of the game, and available as a small upgrade kit for existing owners, the Slave cards will be removed from the Merchandise deck and replaced with Fakirs. In the original printing, players could purchase slaves from the marketplace and spend them to enhance certain actions, like erecting buildings and summoning Djinns. While accurate to the great work of literature that inspired the game’s setting, this blunt depiction of slavery offended a lot of players, so the slaves are now fakirs (ascetic holy men), who function exactly the same but without that icky feeling.

IDW Games, the tabletop branch of the indie comic book publisher, announced an Orphan Black card game at GAMA ’15, as covered here. There will also be a Godfather card game coming in August.

On Kickstarter currently, there’s…well, rather a lot of good games, as it turns out. I’m backing several, which will be in their final days when this list goes live. First, there’s Burgle Bros., the cooperative heist game with a retro look by designer Tim Fowers (the guy responsible for the cooperative Chinese restaurant game Wok Star and the Scrabble-inspired deck-building game Paperback). Avoid the guards, get the safe code, and don’t trip the alarms. Mistfall is another cooperative game (you can tell I have a favorite genre) from a Polish designer, Błażej Kubacki. Mistfall is an RPG-inspired card game full of complex, meaningful strategic decisions, and it’s blasting through stretch goals at a phenomenal rate. Finally, I’m on board with Ancient Terrible Things, a pulp horror-inspired dice game from Pleasant Company Games, a South African publisher.

Finally, there are two other cool-looking games that I’m not backing (gotta save some money for rent and food). Posthuman from Mr. B. Games is a (semi-)cooperative game set in a post-apocalyptic future. Similar to The Last of Us, Posthuman is a journey game as your survivors venture across the country in search of a rumored human stronghold. On the way, though, some of you may turn mutant, with a new goal to kill off the unmutated players. Wizard’s Academy is a(nother) cooperative game set in a Hogwarts-like school of magic. As student wizards, you must work together to fix some crisis, usually by casting powerful magic. The only problem is that none of you actually know what any of the magic spells do at the start of the game, and half of them will just make things worse, opening portals to the water dimension or summoning meddlesome imps.

No roundup of tabletop gaming news would be complete without a mention of the upcoming International TableTop Day on April 11. Founded by Wil Wheaton and the Geek & Sundry network, TableTop Day celebrates the joy of getting together with friends around a tabletop. Bulky promo kits are being sent out to participating retailers and venues, containing nerdy limited-edition cards and even entire games from publishers such as Alderac Entertainment Group, Steve Jackson Games, Fantasy Flight Games and Looney Labs. Look for participating venues near you to play some games, meet new people, and pick up some free swag.