The World on My Table – May ’15

Most board games are one-shots: whether they take 15 minutes or 5 hours, each play is a self-contained thing. And that’s fine. In fact, it’s sometimes a strength. One of the reasons I no longer devote so much time to video games is the inertia dilemma: single-player video games have long stories, from 20 hours for an action title to potentially 100 hours for an RPG.

That’s fine as long as you’re putting in around 5 hours of playtime per week. But if you stop playing a game, for whatever reason, it can be difficult to pick back up again. You’ve forgotten the subtleties of the plot, so revelations lack their intended impact. You’ve forgotten how to perform that one flip-dodge-slash maneuver. You’ve forgotten where the riddle at the center of the fire temple told you to go next. You’ve forgotten what L1 does, and then you’ve accidentally consumed all your super-rare omega-potions. Most of all, you’re just no longer invested. You’re tempted to just begin the game again, but inevitably, another interruption will occur.

The one-off nature of board games avoids that dilemma (though there is still the problem of forgetting the “controls” after a long time away). It also allows these games to introduce a lot more depth and variability than most video games allow: because a single play takes a fraction of the time, the replay value has to come from elsewhere.

Sometimes, though, you want to have your cake and eat it too. That’s where campaign games come in. While the term has different meanings in different contexts, I typically define “campaign games” as any board game meant to be played over multiple sessions, with each session tackling a self-contained scenario, adding up to a single overarching narrative. I played several of them this month, so let me show you what I mean:

The Campaign Games on My Table

Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition

It’s ironic that one of the most popular and recognizable campaign-driven board games today started out without any campaign at all. The first edition of Descent: Journeys in the Dark, designed by Kevin Wilson, was a tactical fantasy dungeon crawler set in the world of Terrinoth, setting of Fantasy Flight Games’ Runebound line of products. Many of the second edition’s features were already there: treasure, special abilities, tactical combat, line of sight, a modular map, and an ever-expanding pool of monster figures for the Overlord player to field in his crusade of darkness against the hero team. The detailed plastic figures tied to each new hero and monster guaranteed a nearly endless supply of fast-selling expansions, but only one of them, released at the very end of the game’s life cycle, put these elements together into a story-driven campaign. This was Descent: The Road to Legend.

The designers of the second edition had two main goals: to streamline the sometimes fiddly or unbalanced mechanics and, more importantly, to fully incorporate a branching, story-driven campaign into the basic fabric of the game from the very start. Descent 2E‘s base game box contained a fully fleshed-out campaign including 20 possible quests. Because the outcome of “Act I” quests influence which “Act II” quests will be playable, a single runthrough of this campaign will only cover 8-9 of the quests, leading to massive replay value. Not only that, but each expansion (aside from the “hero and monster packs”) added an additional mini-campaign, usually 3 quests long, or a full-sized alternative campaign. There’s even an expansion that recombines the base game components into an entirely new set of quests.

Along with this campaign structure comes everything you might expect from a fantasy RPG campaign. The heroes and the Overlord collect XP after each quest, which they can spend on new abilities (new tricks and traps for the Overlord, new skills for the heroes, with each of the 8 hero classes attached to a unique skill tree). Heroes can even sell loot they found during the quest to buy new equipment at shops. All this, alongside a story that’s constantly reacting to the heroes’ successes and failures, makes this the RPG-in-a-board-game experience.

That said, I’m not sure it’s the one for me. I prefer cooperative games that can also be played solo, and Descent‘s antagonism just doesn’t fit my lifestyle. You can apply one of several fanmade variants to automate the Overlord in escape, turning it into a proper co-op, but it still feels a bit like playing both sides of a chess match. The leveling-up aspect is handled so well that I’d love to pick up an expansion or two for the new classes they introduce, but not if I won’t be able to enjoy the attached campaign. I’ll withhold judgment until I’ve tried Forgotten Souls, the first of Fantasy Flight’s official co-op expansions for the game (which, unfortunately, lose the campaign element, reverting to the original dungeon-crawl formula, although they still allow for leveling up and purchasing equipment in-game).

 

The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game

It isn’t much of one, at least at first, but the Lord of the Rings Living Card Game does indeed feature a story-driven campaign. The big difference between this one and Descent is that the outcome of one quest has no bearing on the outcome of the next–they’re tied together by story, but not by mechanics.

This expandable card game (think Magic: The Gathering without the blind-buy element) has been out for a long while, so it’s built up an enormous back catalog of expansion content, all (or most) of which link together into an epic storyline telling the previously undisclosed events between Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday party and Frodo’s departure from Bag End with the ring of power. These expansions come in cycles, each of which begins with a deluxe expansion containing 3 new scenarios and continues with 6 single-scenario adventure packs. A single cycle tells a more-or-less self-contained story.

My advice for any new players is to pick a cycle, any one, and follow it from start to end. Aside from narrative, the cycles contain player cards (like almost all expandable card games, you get to construct your own deck in LotR) that work well together and build on a few common themes. Alternately, you can follow the path of one of the Saga expansion cycles, which retell the events of the books rather than this new side-narrative.

I’ve been working my way through the very first cycle, Shadows of Mirkwood, which mostly takes players to locations and situations familiar from The Hobbit as they search the lands around Mirkwood for traces of Gollum. It begins with a hunt for clues (half-eaten cats, fish heads and whatnot) up and down the banks of the Anduin river. After an encounter with three trolls at the Carrock, the party takes a detour to aid a wounded eagle (with the help of Radagast the Brown), gets lost in the hills of Emyn Muil, finally corners Gollum in the Dead Marshes, then drags him kicking and screaming back through the spider-infested Mirkwood.

Though these scenarios do have a minor ongoing narrative, I’ve been enhancing the campaign feel by slowly “unlocking” the new player cards only after I’ve defeated the scenario they came with. A little delayed gratification offers a big payoff when you finally search through the new cards, picturing how they’ll enhance your deck. I’m working on one based on Eagle allies, most of whom are found in the Mirkwood cycle.

 

Assault on Doomrock

Okay, okay, this isn’t technically a campaign game, but like Descent‘s co-op expansions, it gives players the experience of developing your characters over a single play session. In fact, one game of Doomrock has all of the RPG-style bells and whistles that an entire campaign of Descent has: treasure, shops, leveling up, and traveling between locations on their way to fight progressively harder bad guys.

When I say “progressively harder,” I mean they go from nearly impossible to actually impossible. This game is for masochists only. It’s the Ninja Gaiden of board games–or, for the newer gamers, it’s the Dark Souls/Bloodborne of board games. Like those notorious video games, though, Doomrock‘s encounters have patterns you can learn, and even though it often feels like you’d need insane luck to survive even the first encounter, you find yourself doing a little bit better each time you play. Like, you kill 4 exploding tomatoes instead of 3 before they crush you in a zesty sauce of vegetative defeat.

It’s a title all fans of innovation, RPGs and cooperative adventure games should consider picking up, and I wholly encourage you to secure a copy of the second edition from the Kickstarter campaign described below. It’s split into an adventure phase, where the party travels between location, explores, shops, and undertakes quests; and the encounter phase, when the heroes and enemies duke it out with special attacks and spells. Each phase is a little abstract–no map, no miniatures–and requires absolute perfection to succeed. My only complaint is that the game is relatively expensive for the physical materials that come in the box–the price of supporting indie ingenuity, I suppose.

 

The World Beyond

Remember earlier, when I mentioned a Kickstarter campaign for a second edition of Assault on Doomrock? Well, it will last until June 15, and you should definitely jump on board. In addition to a revised printing of the base game, the Kickstarter is funding the first expansion, Assault on Doomrock: Doompocalypse, which adds more of everything nice (heroes, locations, events, encounters, items, skills) in addition to one major new feature: terrain. Use the advantage of high ground, send your mule to kick the goblins into the bonfire, and try not to be shoved into a beartrap. Plus, one of the new encounters is a “Shark Tornado.” How is that not an instant buy?

As usual, there are a ton of cooperative games with plastic miniatures that are well outside of my price range, but you might want to check them out. Too many cool-looking ones to go into any detail, but here’s lineup: JRPG-inspired Middara, German import The Dwarves, Defenders of the Realm reimagining Defenders of the Last Stand, post-apocalyptic Blackout: Journey into Darkness, and Mad Max-inspired Salvation Road. I’m not necessarily endorsing any of these titles, so don’t blame me when you get your next bank statement.

If co-op games aren’t your thing, check out Asmadi Games’ campaign for Mottainai, the new game by Carl Chudyk, who designed some of my absolute favorite competitive games: Innovation, Glory to Rome, Red7, and Impulse, to name a few. Mottainai is a sort of reimagining of his original hit, Glory to Rome, with a semi-abstract Japanese theme. A 2-3 player game costs only $12, or $20 to support 4-5 players. If you miss the June 4 deadline, contact Asmadi Games directly to see if they’ll let you jump on late.

The other big piece of gaming news this month is that the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio, will be taking place from June 3 to June 7. Will you be there?

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