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Author: Matt Thrower

Matt is a board gamer who plays video games when he can't find anyone similarly obsessive to play against, which is frequently. The inability to get out and play after the birth of his first child lead him to start writing about games as a substitute for playing them. He founded FortressAT.com and writes there and at NoHighScores.com

Back to basics with X-Wing and Armada

Matt Thrower 2 Comments

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My wardrobe is full of spaceships. So many spaceships that there’s barely room for clothes. Most of them live in an enormous box which crushes my shirts out of all recognition when it’s squeezed in and out for play. It’s a good job I play with spaceships a lot more than I wear shirts.

Having a cupboard crammed with spaceships is awesome, but it’s also a little tiring. Each comes with cardboard and plastic that must be meticulously selected and laid out before playing. That was, up until recently, where most of the game was in x-wing, and that’s sad. What was sadder is how often I’d ruin the suspension of disbelief just to make a better list.

Take Poe Dameron. Poe’s an incredible fighter pilot, and it shows in his skills and abilities. He’s also an incredibly expensive fighter pilot that you’ll want to preserve to cause maximum carnage and deny the enemy victory points. So, given that his ability lets him benefit from focus tokens without spending them, it makes sense to give his ship an astromech droid which can spend the token to regenerate shields. Right?

Of course it does. Poe with R5-P9 is a great combo that I’ve seen used to great effect in many games. It’s also completely and utterly wrong.

You’ve seen The Force Awakens. You know that Poe would never take to space without his beloved BB-8 and focus tokens be dammed. So, with the Force Awakens base set for X-Wing and one each of the existing expansion models, that’s exactly what I did. I flew Poe as he’d want to be flown. With BB-8 on board, a rookie wingman, and nothing else.

They ran into an ambush on the wingman’s training flight. Three members of the First Order’s Omega Squadron and their fearsome ace. Similarly unequipped with any modifications. The TIE f/o’s caught them in an ambush and smashed down the rookie’s shields with a volley of plasma fire, before smartly executing a k-turn and coming back in for the kill.

Poe screwed up. He panicked, and no matter how much he weaved and used BB-8 to barrel roll, he could barely make it into the fight beyond a couple of stray bolts. The rookie, meanwhile, took a deep breath, concentrated on the force and flew straight and true into the heart of the enemy swam.

When the dust cleared, only Omega leader was left flying and the rookie, his hull hanging together with prayers and sticky tape, joined up with Poe and caught the wicked ace in a murderous crossfire. Game over.

It was simple. It was fast. And it was brilliant.

Armada had the same feeling of freshness when it was first released. That’s part of what I liked about it: a rich, epic game that played in a couple of hours and didn’t need lots of pre-prep work. What mattered were the decisions you made on the table, more than the ones you made beforehand. Wave 1 didn’t overburden that dynamic too much, and the game did need a few more ships.

So now we’ve got wave 2 and so far I’ve picked up the rebel releases. How could I not, with Admiral Ackbar coming in the Home One expansion and giving me the chance to shout “it’s a trap” when my fleet came into contact with the enemy? Plus, Home one and the MC30 rebel frigate are sweeting looking models. The Frigate also promises to bring some much-needed black dice firepower to the Rebel side. I still haven’t tamed my inner wargamer enough to resist pre-painted plastics.

Throw in the Rogues and Villains expansion and you’ve got a plethora of ships to play with. And that, for the moment, is all I care about. So I’ve started doing the same there – forgoing lots of detailed upgrades in favour of a fleet commander, a couple of capital ships and a few characters and fighter wings.

It’s hard to leave out Han and the Falcon when you’ve got them in your collection. You can even take the little plastic ship off its stand and perch above the bridge of a Star Destroyer if you’re a real geek.

The first time I ran a list like this was against someone who’d tooled up with upgrades just like usual. Because there’s still not a fleet builder for Armada that actually prints the card effects on the output sheet, it took a while to get set up. I’d seized on the concept of using Garm Bel Iblis and just taking as many ships as I could, to maximise my free tokens. It seemed like a good plan. It wasn’t.

In truth, it was a massacre. I didn’t play well, treating it more like X-Wing and going in all guns blazing than the more thoughtful approach required for Armada, but even so, I don’t think I took out a single Imperial big ship. Upgrades, it seems, are more important in Armada than they are in X-Wing. Which makes the lack of a fully-featured fleet builder all the more annoying.

Such an awful loss was partly down to an unfortunate feature of Armada that I don’t think I’ve spotted before. With the range ruler literally allowing handfuls more dice to be thrown between range steps, tiny distances can make a big difference in the outcome. His Gladiator-class Star Destroyer was in black dice range on a critical turn, and my MC30 wasn’t. If the opposite had been true, it might have been a very different outcome.

Frankly, I stopped playing miniature games to get away from exactly this sort of thing. But I like Armada too much to hold that against it. So next time, I think I might make both lists. Hang the upgrades and just take Akbar and Home One squaring off against some big Star Destroyers and squadrons, just like the denouement of Return of the Jedi. I’ll get to shout “it’s a trap!”, and I’d urge you all to do the same.

Ticket to Ride: United Kingdom & Pennsylvania Review

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I’ve nurtured a long, slow hatred of American cultural imperialism. As a developer, having to spend every working day spelling “colour” wrongly in your code will do that to a man. So, petty as it is, wherever possible, I’ll pick a British version of a thing over an American one. And if a British one doesn’t exist, I’ll seethe quietly while I wait for one.

So it feels like about time that there’s a local version of Ticket to Ride for me. With it being such a great family game, my kids know the routes between Seattle to Atlanta and Essen to Sevastopol better then their own home town. Now they can learn the way around their own country too, with the help of some little plastic trains from either original set.

Or perhaps they can’t. It turns out that this is one of the least family-friendly iterations of the game yet released. Its gimmick is the addition of technology cards, which you buy using locomotive cards as currency. To support this the box has a whole new card deck with extra locos. Plus a new rule that allows you to cash in any four ordinary cards instead of a locomotive. So that’s more rules and a whole slew of new technologies to memorise. No hurdle for hobbyists, but it’s a steep slope for regular family folk.

At the start of the game you can only build poxy 2-space routes in England. If you want to build longer routes, build ferries, build in Ireland, Scotland or Wales you’ll need the appropriate technology to do so. Plus there are more esoteric options, like tech that gives you extra points or lets you cash in less cards for a route.

With all these new options on the table, it looks like a recipe for some new strategies. In reality, however, they function more as limiters. Everyone needs to be able to build longer routes to succeed. It’s hard to imagine doing well without building ferries or outside of England, too. So buying these is a given. As for the other stuff, well, let’s just say I’ve never seen a technology heavy strategy win.

Conversely, there’s a massive ten-space, 40 point route on the board and I’ve never seen anyone claim that and lose. It looks like a bit of a game breaker, although people who’ve grabbed it do tend to fail a few tickets.

In summary, it seems to add extra rules and extra luck of the draw for no particular extra gain. I’ve no problem with the latter, as Ticket to Ride is inherently a luck-heavy game. The former is less forgivable, though. So unless you have a particular geographical bee in your bonnet like me, there’s no real reason to favour the UK map over the vanilla one.

But wait. What’s this? Tucked away on the corner of the cover like an embarrassing elderly relative, there’s a little logo that says “Pennsylvania”. If you rummage in the box there’s a few more cards with funny pictures on. If you flip the board over, there’s another map, another bit of god-damn America.

The new mechanics for this map are a lot more easily digestible. Each time you claim a route, you can grab a stock certificate from one of several rail companies associated with it. At the end of the game, players total up their stocks in each company and get bonus points depending on how many they got. Simple.

Yet what looks like an afterthought turns out to be the better of the two maps. Those stock certificates are mean. They’re kept face down which means you have to try and keep a running tally of what other people are collecting. Unless you’re a human calculator that rapidly becomes impossible. So every selection becomes a cauldron of paranoia, as you wonder whether the card you’re picking is worthless, or a game winner.

Plus, each company operates on a small sub-area of the map. To maximise your points you want to spread widely. So that’s another thing to plan alongside making your tickets and gunning for the longest route. With plenty of blocking opportunities too, the game becomes gloriously brutal. And with both tickets and stock points waiting until the game end, there’s uncertainty right up until the last minute.

So the UK map is only for real Ticket to Ride enthusiasts. But Pennsylvania may be the best variant of the original game I’ve played. It’s almost a shame they made you pay for them both in the same box. Much as I hate to admit it, America wins again.

Codenames Review

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I love me some Vlaada Chvatil. I delight in his imagination and skill in welding together unlikely elements to create brilliant games. He likes pushing dexterity into unlikely place. Or adding depth of strategy to genres and mechanics that have not, traditionally, had much. So it came as something of a surprise to find that his latest game, Codenames, is a simple party game.

Except, of course, this is Vlaada Chvatil. And that means appearances can be deceptive.

The little box is full of double-sided cards printed with single words. Lay twenty five of them out in a five by five grid and divide the players into two teams, each one of which has a spymaster. He knows which eight of those cards will score his team points if they can find them, but he can’t just say which they are. Instead he can only give a one word clue. One word to bring them all. One word to bind them. One word to hopefully indicate as many cards as he can in one go.

It’s easiest to explain with an example. In one game, where I was the spymaster, among the cards my team had to guess were “vet”, “teacher”, “agent”, “spy” and “fireman”. So I said “jobs, five”, with the number indicating how many cards my clue pertains to. Otherwise, had my spies gone over and started guessing the wrong names they’d be handing points to the other team. Or, worse, picking out the hidden assassin card for an instant loss.

One word, five cards. Easy, right? Well, you’d think so. But I’ve given you a poor example in the interests of quickly illustrating what the game is about. Because the reality is that the game is often fiendishly hard. Fiendishly, brow-sweatingly, terrifyingly hard. In my experience finding a single word to tie two cards together is a tough ask. Three is a minor miracle. That five was a one-off, and we won.

What makes it all the more difficult is that if your team picks a word belonging to the opposing crew, you’re hit with a double whammy. Your turn ends and the opposition gets a bonus point. So you must never, ever give a clue that might indicate one of their cards or, worse, the assassin. Easy enough in theory. In practice this is almost impossible.

Say you’ve got “apple”, “sink” and “cook” down. Great, that’s three food-related cards in one go. But there’s also “oil” down there, tagged as an enemy agent. How on earth can you come up with something to link there first three without also risking your team picking the latter too?

These conundrums drive the game. It doesn’t help that your team will instantly turn into dunderheads when you’re the spymaster. Suddenly unable to pick up on even the easiest of your subtle lexical allusions. It can also be slow to try and think of the best clues. There’s an egg timer in the box for good reason.

It’s rare that you can really learn something from a game, let alone one this simple. Yet Codenames illustrates with dreadful ease the vast chasms that exist between the words we speak to one another. The huge gulfs of misunderstanding and confusion into which we often stumble at great cost to our relationships and our jobs. Playing Codenames will make you a better, clearer communicator. That’s a great reason to play it.

Another great reason is that it has vast appeal across groups of gamers and non-gamers alike. That’s because it relies on concepts of language that everyone understands, yet is a real struggle to play well, . It doesn’t even have to be played competitively. With less than four players there’s a co-op variant where you play against the clock, but it upscales to more players perfectly well. You can take it anywhere, play it with anyone, which is a brilliant trait in a party game likely to be owned by gaming geeks.

The one problem that you might find with it goes back to my original example. Remember how I said the four was a one-off? I got that because I was lucky enough to have four cards with a very clear association between them. When I’ve managed to get threes, it’s been the same: down as much to luck and skill. So the difficulty level in the game is very unpredictable. That in itself wouldn’t be an issue except, depending on how the cards fall, it might be that one team has a much easier grid of clues than the other.

It happens more often than you’d want. But on the other hand games only last about fifteen minutes so if you get a one-sided game you just flip the double-sided cards cards and try again. You’ll want to, and so will all the other players too.

Who knows. Maybe it’s just lack of skill that stops me from getting two cards to a clue without a lot of luck. Perhaps I’d better play another game to practice and find out. Perhaps I’d better play another ten.

Bolt Thrower : StarCraft, Civilization, X-Wing, Hard West, Journey

Matt Thrower 1 Comment

It’s been a while since I steered anyone toward my series on tabletop versions of video games over at Gamerati. But since I did one on the StarCraft board game to coincide with the final digital game in that series, Legacy of the Void, I figured it was time for a reminder.

However great the StarCraft board game was, I think it would have been better with looser ties to the source material. It would almost certainly have resulted in a similar game but one which was a lot less complex to digest. In that respect it’s almost the opposite of the Civilization board game which, as I argued in another column, is a quite brilliant reduction of the digital essentials to tabletop format.

The other thing I wanted to talk about this week is lasers. I was playing X-Wing a couple of weeks ago when my opponent pulled out a laser line for checking up on some the firing arcs. It’s a brilliant idea: X-Wing models are so top-heavy, it’s hard to get a ruler in to measure the angles properly without knocking them all over. The laser is more accurate, less clumsy and, best of all, looks awesome in the middle of what’s supposed to be a laser dogfight.

I was so impressed that I wrote a piece about using the device in X-Wing and Armada for the manufacturer. It’s called a Target Lock and, while they’re made in Denmark, you can get them from specialist shops all over the place. So stick one on your Christmas list. I can see it being useful in pretty much any and every miniatures gaming system.

Speaking of Christmas, what I’d like most in the whole world is some more Patreon supporters. But it’s not something I can really put on my Christmas list so I’m putting it here instead.

My video game time recently has been all about Hard West. This has been trailered around as being a “cowboy XCOM”, which it kind of is. But the essential mechanics of XCOM remain easily good enough to power a game. And on top of that, what makes Hard West special is the excellent and imaginative atmosphere and storytelling.

It’s more weird west than wild west, but the supernatural elements are done with subtlety and flair. You do get to flat-out demons in the end, but the narrative along the way is excellent. There are eight campaigns, each of which, in a neat twist, ties in with events or characters from one of the previous stories to make a satisfying whole.

It hasn’t got massive critical acclaim, but I think it’s one of the best things I’ve played this year. Worth the entry price for the experience alone.

I’m also contributing to Pocket Tactics now, which is great as I can’t think of a much better place to explore my crossover of interests. My first piece there was a review of Steam: Rails to Riches, a title I wholly recommend to deep strategy masochists who don’t want to deal with other human beings, even over the internet.

The other big event in gaming is that I finally got to play Journey. It was worth the wait. I feel like I could write essay upon essay about this game. About all the tiny clever design choices that go in conveying emotion to the player. About how you naturally find ways of communicating with your fellow players using only musical notes. About how freedom of movement, or lack thereof, is central to the game’s message and appeal.

But I won’t. I’ll just settle for saying if you haven’t played it, play it. It’s one of the best games of the last decade.

Fury of Dracula 3rd Edition Review

Matt Thrower 1 Comment

The original Fury of Dracula was a seminal game of my childhood. Whisked off the shelf as a curio on a trip to get some gaming miniatures, it quickly became a staple. Van Helsing and his pupils spent hours sweeping Europe, seeking for the Count. Instead they often found feral wolves and savage gypsies as the vampire secretly spun his wicked web of intrigue across the continent.

That copy is tattered now, worn down by love. The chits are soft at the edges, the box battered and the figure of Dr. Seward snapped off at the knees. He still struggled manfully after his quarry, those paired feet creeping into my adult years like the memory of childhood sins. Yet a little of the magic had gone. The game could be frustratingly random, and it needed an aggressive Dracula player to make it work.

A second edition fixed those problems at the cost of bloated rules and play time. It wasn’t a worthy trade off. Worse, the balance had shifted toward the hunters. Dracula was constrained by bizarre rules that made it hard for him to double back on himself, so the hunters had an easier time to box him in. He didn’t seem much of a Prince of Darkness when he couldn’t even cross his own trail to escape.

Here, now, is a third edition. The box cover might a laughable vampire Liberace but I had such hopes for the contents. Somewhere in the fog between the those two flawed editions was an incredible game. A game that smoothly wove deduction and strategy with thrills and theme. I knew that game existed, but I wasn’t sure there was a designer on the planet who could tease it out.

Inside the box, disappointment. There was still a location deck. There was still a six-card trail. Yet promise gleamed at the bottom of the card stack in the form of special power cards. There are several ways now for the Count to confuse his pursuers by moving twice or not moving at all. The best is Misdirect, a new card that not only lets Dracula double back but removes a link in the trail. Many unsuspecting hunters can stumble in the resulting hole in the chain of clues.

This is just the start. It seems that the developers thought the best way to get the best of both previous editions was to re-arm Dracula. Not with greater strength or fangs but with the powers of lies and obfuscation. At each place he visits, Dracula can place an encounter. Some of these are there to hurt the hunters but others exist to thwart or bamboozle them. They can lose turns, get moved away, prevented from searching the town for vampires. One, if allowed to “mature” by spending six turns on the board, even clears out half the card trail, leaving the hunters chasing after ghosts.

I would never have thought that adding misinformation was the way forward for this game. But it works. It works brilliantly. The hunters are grasping at endless tendrils of data with a variety of tools and cards to help them get more. Everything they need is there, but piecing it together demands method and skill. So much so that having one player run all four hunters can be too much to handle, remembering who found what, where. The Count meanwhile is doing everything in his diabolical power to muddy the waters.

Combat has had a major overhaul. Hunters now only fight vampires and Dracula himself. This allows the combat system to be boiled down to simple icon matching with a few special effects. It’s crude but effective, allowing a balance of luck, bluff and skill without slowing down the game. Facing a vampire at night is a stream of hot terror, cards flashing past and damage accumulating at lightning speed.

Dracula felt too weak in the previous edition. Initially, it felt like he’d gone too far the other way in this one. With his newfound combat prowess and slippery box of tricks he ruled our first games like the dark prince he ought to be. It seemed unbalanced, frustrating for the hunters. But it’s a testament to the skill of this design that we wanted to keep searching. Not just for Dracula, but for a way to beat him.

When we found some, it revealed yet more layers of excellence to the game. Dracula can coast against unskilled hunters. They, in turn, have the harder time of it, and never get an easy win. They have to learn to behave like pawns in a chess game. As a group, they can triumph, but only by making individual sacrifices when needed.

When they learn this, games become agonisingly tight. By the end Dracula will have been lost and found repeatedly and Europe will be awash in the blood of hunters. Although the focus seems to have moved away from action to deduction, this edition might actually be the most brutal of the three.

The production evokes a fine sense of gothic grandeur. Yet the real period feel comes from the way that the mechanics evoke the characters of hunters and Dracula alike. The former are puritans, calculating efficiencies, working through probabilities, forming plans to ensnare their quarry. The latter is the very devil. A terrible, charismatic liar who must use all their powers of cunning, bluff and misdirection to put his pursuers off the scent.

This version of the Fury of Dracula is a triumph. It’s become something greater than the sum of its previous editions. Where one was short and the other long, this walks a satisfying line between. Where one was cast as a hunt and the other a chase this can be both. Where one was seen as a combat game and the other a deduction title this can be both. And as the game captures your imagination like the mesmeric eye of the vampire, you can be sure of enough repeat plays to see it in every one of its many guises.