Hex,Dice,Fire!

Here we are again with a new review of a fresh new game from Mayfair Games (@mayfairgames-blog), the highly acclaimed boardgame company. The game we’ll review today is Caverna: Cave vs Cave, the smaller cousin of Uwe Rosenberg’s Caverna (which is the author of both games). This game is part of the Mayfair’s ‘Two Players’ games line and comes after some good titles like: Agricola All Animals Big and Small, Le Havre Inland Port, Patchwork and so on. 

Let’s see what this game can offer in this brief review, cause I bet you’re really curious. 

The Materials

All that you need to play this title is inside a small and portable box, which is illustrated (as the rest of the game) by Klemens Franz, one of the most important and appreciated artists of German themed boardgames. Although the box is small, inside you’ll find plenty of high quality materials, made of thick cardboard: player’s boards and main board (both foldable), cavern tiles and action tiles. The resources trackers are colourful veggiemeeples made of wood, familiar to those who already have other Rosenberg’s titles. The rulebook is adequately short and full of examples and clarifications. Whats else? For its price, there’s a lot of stuff!

The Game

The game is played over a series of rounds. In each round the players will alternate by taking actions (2 actions for the first 4 round; 3 actions for the following 4 round and 4 actions in the last round). These actions, are shown by randomly positioned tiles on a little and long board. As the game progresses, new action tiles will be discovered, with a mechanism similar to Caverna and Agricola’s one. Each player has a little personal board with his cave depicted on. That cave has room for many facedown tiles that must be excavated by the players in order to be revealed. These are mainly ‘rooms’ for the players caves, that can be built in later rounds with the corresponding build action. To build rooms and to excavate (two of the most important actions) players need food and building resourced that they should obtain - in their turns - by selecting the correct action tile. Some of these actions tiles will help the players to activate some of the Orange rooms they’ve built in previous turns. Usually, Orange rooms give the player who uses them: resources (stone or wood), gold, food (grain or vegetables) or excavation bonuses. There are also Blue rooms that are always active and always give bonuses but these rooms can be built only if there are more Orange rooms in your cave. There are walls configurations (for example: the room must be placed in a free space, with a wall on top and one on the bottom) on the room tiles, that must be respected when the room is built.  At the end of the game, the player whose cave has the most valuable rooms (in terms of VP shown on them) and who has more gold than his opponent, wins the match!

What I think of the game?

Here we are again with a new review for our followers. Today we chose Agricola Family Edition (for 1-4 players) the recent remix of the basic Agricola from Uwe Rosenberg made to help younger gamers and families to approach to the world of boardgaming. This edition, produced by Mayfair Games - which is a leader company in the euro-themed boardgaming universe - is rich in materials and has a really cheap price. Let’s take a look at the box and its components first and then we’ll proceed to the gameplay!

What’s in the box?

Inside a relatively small box with a bucolic illustration which fits the theme perfectly, there’s a huge quantity of wooden tokens, veggiemeeples & animeeples, tiles and a solid puzzled board. Along wih these pieces, you’ll find a full colour rulebook with many helpful examples and some plastic bag to store everything. The overall quality is great: solid pieces and cardboard, funny and comic-like illustrations and practical design. It’s clearly not a work done with hurry and this pleased me, especially regarding the game mechanics.

The Game

Many of you already know Agricola. It is probably one of the most important and famous boardgame in the euro genre. The goal of the game is to build the perfect farm by managing animals and agriculture, never forgetting to feed your farmers from the oldest to the younger ones. In this version, the goal is identical but some changes have been made to make the game shorter and easier to play. Agricola Family Edition uses a board that changes configuration, based on the number of players. The board holds the resources available each turn, the actions and a turn tracker which has two functions: it shows the unlocked actions turn-by-turn and incates the harvest phase. Each player starts the game with two farmers (two actions, one with each farmer) and a house tile with two wooden rooms, used to hold the farmers. Each game turn, players select their favourite actions on the board with their farmers, going clockwise around the table until all the farmers have been used. Once a player occupies an action space with his farmer, that action can’t be used anymore until the next game turn. There are many actions and strategies, but the most useful are: collecting resources (wood, reed, bricks, grain,food); collecting animals (sheeps, pigs, cattle); building fenced pastures to hold the animals; sowing and planting in the fields; building rooms and making love; upgrade their fireplace and/or their working places. These elements allow the player to litterally ‘live’ inside a farm and take part in its evolution, but living a farmer’s life it’s not that easy. The other players/farmers will compete with you and the main rule of the game is ‘be first and take the best, be second and you’ll better take a rest’. Being first, early-bird, is really important cause you’ll have the first choice on the actions spaces and the resources. Being last means not winning at all.  Sometimes during the game there are also some Harvest phases. These are good moments of the game, cause you’ll see the grain grow and the animals make babies (one for each couple). But these are also bad moments cause you’ll have to feed your farmers family with food. When a player can’t feed one or more of his farmers, he becomes poor and must take a -3 VP counter as penalty for each farmers he didn’t feed.  This means that each move is strategical and if you forget to grant yourself a sure a amount of food you’ll probably lose the game.  The game ends after 14 turns and players count their VPs total. VPs are gained from animals, harvested grain, brick rooms, members of the farmer’s family, buildings built, number of tiles in your farm. The higher total wins the game!

What I think of the game

Today our review is dedicated to one of the latest products from Mayfair Games, which is  Bärenpark, a nice, logic and fast boardgame for 2 to 4 players. The aim of the game is to build the best Bear Park (that’s the meaning of the game’s title) by matching the correct park areas shapes in the building sites you’ll receive during the game. It’s pretty similar to a Tetris game and far from what you could think, it’s absolutely not that easy. Let’s see what’s inside the game box and then let’s take a look at the game mechanics.

The materials

Despite of his small dimensions, the box of this game is really really heavy. It contains only cardboard sheets full of tokens and park areas. The illustrations have been realized by Franz Klemens, one of the best and most appreciated contemporary illustrators, famous for Agricola, Oh My Goods, Ora et Labora and so on. I really like the colourful pieces full of details and I like the fact that they’re amazingly resistant. The rulebook is brief, functional, with plenty of examples and images. You’ll put the game on the table in few minutes, I ensure you! Complexively, the quality is high as the quantity of components.

The Game

Bärenpark works perfectly with any number of players but I think it gives the best with two players. The setup is really simple: there’s a board on which you’ll need to place the game pieces (based on the number of players); there are building sites (one for each player) and - only if you’re playing the with the advanced rules - there are some achievements that players struggle to accomplish during the game. After the setup, the order of play is determined and the first player receives a park area of 1 space, while the second, the third and the fourth players will receive respectively a park area of 2,3,4 spaces. These park areas are Polyominoes: 

Polyominoes are “plane geometric figures formed by joining one or more equal squares edge to edge. They are polyforms whose cells are squares ” (from Wikipedia). These game pieces are joined toghter cover the building sites and the icon printed on them. Each building site has a 4x4 squared grid. Each turn, a player must place a park area on is building site or pass and take a Green Space park area. Each time a player covers one or more icon on his building site with a polyomino he performs the corresponding actions. Some actions allow the player to take specific park spaces while other grant them a the expansion of the park with new building sites. Every park area polyomino has a value written on it: this value is considered at the end of the game to check the victory point total. Each building site has a hole that can’t be covered with a park area polyomino: these holes are covered - only once a building site is completely covered by park areas - with Bear statues. Players must play fast and furious to cover their building site cause the faster they are, the most valuable Bear statues they’ll receive. The game ends once a player has completely covered 4 building sites. This triggers a last turn for everyone and then the players proceed with the scoring. The advanced rules add to the game the achievements, which really boost the gameplay. Some of these ask the players to cover their sites with specific polyominoes or with a specific animal cages. Obviously, as for the Bear Statues, the fastest player gets the most valuable achievements.

What I think

Bärenpark is a challenging title for families, couples and casual gamers groups. It gives exactly what it promises: fun, a bit of thinking, visuo-spacial training and a lot of replayabiliy. It is an abstract game and so the theme isn’t very linked to it. Instead of bears, there could have been fruits and vegetables, bookcases or anything else. That’s not really a problem cause whether there’s a them or another, the game could function anyway. Every play is different from the next because of the infinite combinations and possibilities given by the polyominoes placement. The game time is brief: 30 minutes in 2 players and a maximum of 45-60 min in 3 and 4 players. There are no dead times, cause every player can only perform a single action each turn. I would suggest the game to newbies of the hobby, couples in search of light but challengin game, families with kids and casual boardgamers. I would not suggest it to people who want games where the theme is highly linked to the gameplay, to gamers who want a hard-competitive title or to lovers of party games.  If you’ve enjoyed Patchwork from Uwe Rosenberg, you’ll see this game as a sort of Advanced Patchwork, less penalizing and with more possibilities and achievements.

Thanks for reading this review, for more info, visit Mayfair’s website:

Today we’ll look at the new game Final Act from the newly born company Tyto Games, from which we have already reviewed Elementos, their first abstract boardgame. This company never stops surprising me with their games. The products are well designed and components are really amazing. Final Act is a confrontational two player boardgame which takes place in a Middle-East theatre of war, during a tank battle in the desert. The war is just the theme, cause the game is not what you usually call a Wargame.

Let’s look at the components and then at the gameplay!

The Components

From the box to the last wooden piece, Final Act is a pleasure for the sight. Inside the relatively small game box, with an evocative war painting, you’ll find plenty of components: a resistant big board with a squared grid superimposed, two realistic tank screens (one for each player) on which 14 command dials (2 for each tank in the game) are disposed, two cotton bags containing the same amount of pieces for each player which are: 7 wooden tanks, 7 wooden bombs, 7 wooden fire token, a cardboard swamp and minefield, and 3 thick wooden berms. There are also some stickers to identify the tanks and the bombs once they’re on the board and the last component is a small and clear rulebook. My vote is 10/10, cause the materials are simply perfect, impressive and resistant!

The Game

The idea of the game is really simple and takes me back to when I was I child playing Battleship. Infact, the game works similarily to a Battleship game: you must secretly determine on your hidden screen the direction of the tank’s movement and the ‘bet’ on the enemy movement by placing bombs on the spaces you think is going to move to. After that, each player reveals their screens and move the tanks accordingly to their dials. If when moving, a tank ends on the space where the enemy has placed a bomb, that tank takes a hit. For the first hit, the tank goes on fire but still moves and fires. After the second hit the tank explodes and is out of the game. The game ends as soon as on player arrives with his tank on the last line of defense of his enemy. The gamplay is dinamic and pretty fast, except for the movement determination phase, when each player has to secretly move his dials. There are two dials for each tank: the first one allows a tank to move in one of 6 possible directions while the second dial is used to rotate - to the left or to the right - the cannon. Each tank has a range of fire of 7 squares and a maximum width of 7 squares. It covers only the squares in front of him, but there are two exceptions: if a tank is on the berm, it has a range of +1 square; if a tank is behind the berm, his range can be totally or partially obstructed. The swamp is a terrain feature that blocks the tank movement while the minefield gives a hit to the tank who moves on it. Although the aim of each player is to reach the last line of defence of the enemy, it is not always wise to advance straight-forward. Infact, by doing this, a player’s movement can be more predictable and tanks can be easily destroyed soon. Sometimes it’s good to make a strategic retreat or an evasive manoeuvre that the enemy doesn’t expect. In the desert it’s hard to take cover!

What I think of this game

I’m a great fan of wargames and historical themed boardgames and I must admit that this one gives me only the basic war flavour. There’s no realistic historical setting and I think it was specific choice of the creators. Apart from that, the mechanics are really psicological: bluffs, previsions, logical thinking and visuospatial perception make this game really intriguing and not as simple as you could think at first sight. It’s deeply strategical and there are no chance or die rolls to save you if you make the wrong move or you don’t reflect on what you’ve to do. Final Act has a specific target of players from what I’ve seen: it’s good for chess players, abstract gamers, tank lovers, families, two player games’ lovers and casual boardgamers. The components as said are really impressive and they’re worth the price of the game. There are more expensive games with nothgin inside of them, so this one it’s really a good deal. The game time indicated on the box can be applied to successive plays, cause the first game can even last one hour and a half. If this review has given you the curiosity to try Final Act, don’t hesitate and jump on Amazon to gift yourself a copy of it! See you in the next review!

Some games are better than others - just to quote Morrisey from The Smiths. Elementos it’s a clear example of an original abstract game which is surely more intriguing, challenging and aestetically better than most of the games belonging to the same genre. 

I was one of the first to obtain a copy of it in Italy, from the new company Tyto Games which is also famous for its upcoming title “Final Act”, totally different from Elementos. Infact, Final Act is a revolutionary Tank Battle game with amazing materials and graphics. Soon, there will be a review of it on this blog, so stay tuned!

Speaking about Elementos, it is a simple to learn and hard to master little portable game, entirely made of wood. Small enough to be carried in a bag and big enough to hold inside everything you’ll ever need to play it, it’s a good filler which can be played 1vs1 in a breif coffee pause. Let’s see the mechanics and the materials.

Materials & Mechanics

A little wooden box, more long than thick, painted with a squared-grid on both sides serves as game box and game board at the same time. Once opened, there’s a compartment inside to hold the playing pieces in two colours: black and white. For each of the two colours, there’s a fixed assortment of three different double sided disks, totally made of wood. The three different symbols you’ll find painted on them are: Tree, Fire, Water. Yes, these are the Elementos! The main idea of the game is that Fire beats Tree, Tree beats Water and Water beats Fire. That’s how you’ll use your disks, which are placed on the appropriate player’s coloured side during the setup. Along with the disks there are two Sticks (a black one and a white one), which are placed inside the small hole at the centre of a disks (the selected disk is the one placed during the setup sorrounded by the other disks). This Stick is a sort of protection against the other pieces. Each disk, as previously said, is double sided. On a side - for example - there’s a Tree and on the other one there’s Water. Let’s see how the game works!

After the setup, one player starts choosing an action among these: 1) Move a disk from a square to another one, toward the enemy’s side; 2)Flip a disk to the other side, in order to change the Elementos; 3) Move the Stick from a disk to an adjacent other. When the players moves a disk, if he’s adjacent to an enemy piece whose Elementos is the nemesis of his piece, he eats it. Like chess! The objective of the game is to bring one of your disks in the enemy’s side of the board, placing it on a marked square. If it seems too easy to do, I dare you to play a game of Elementos!

Final thoughts on the game

Elementos is really a little jewel in the boardgaming world. It is elegant with its materials and minimal graphics; it is fast and frenetic to play with; it’s a two player game and I love two player games cause you can feel the head to head challenge growing while you play. The strategy is not that predictable as it seems: once you move you can’t go back and you must be sure that your piece is useful on both sides to make tricks against your enemy. If the enemy advances a Water disk near your Fire disk, you can surprise him by flipping the Fire disk to a Tree disk. Now his piece is in danger and he can’t go back! That situations are really unexpectable and hilarious.  The stick is really fundamental to avoid being eaten by the other Elementos disks, but it must be placed strategically and must never be left back. The game can also be used to do small and fast tournaments inside your clubs, and it is perfect for every age. You can teach it to your childrens or to your grandfather and they will enjoy it the same!  What can I say more about Elementos? Go and get it! You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Tyto-Games-Elementos-Board-Game/dp/B019CU3JVA

Among those card games called Deck-building, which are the mostly played in these recent years, some of them are really original while others share the same mechanic as their old father Dominion, without changing much apart from the theme. The game i want to review for you today is Eminent Domain, produced by TMG, which is a sci-fi themed deck-building game for 2 to 4 players. Let’s see what’s in the box and then analyze the game mechanics.

What’s in the box?

The not-so-small box of this game is covered by an evocative deep universe picture which tells you immediately what you’re going to play with. The solid cardboard of the box holds inside the expected quantities of materials: cards (of course), heavy cardboard tokens, a little foldable board to place the cards, some wooden resources disks and and a small box containing plastic spaceships! This last thing really amazed me cause the pieces are really well made and shaped in three different sizes and models. The overall quality of the game is really great, as well as the graphics on the cards (except for the standard planets) and on the box. The rulebook is simple, clear, with lots of examples and gets you into the game really quickly. 

The Game

Eminent Domain can be played with two to four players but it’s definitely a good two player game. Works quick and allows a lot of combos. Once the setup is made, the players have a fixed starting deck with all the possible actions available in the game. These are: Survey, Colonize, Warfare, Produce/Trade, Research. All these actions can be performed in two manners: the first way is playing one of these actions from your hand. In this way you’re allowed to perform the action described on the card. The other manner is choosing and drawing a card from the board in the acquisition phase. In this way, you’re allowed to play the role described on the card. This is the core of the game and the right moment to perform combos. The coolest thing it’s that you can also act in the other player’s turn by performing the same Role they’ve chosen and you can even boost it with cards from your hand, to increase the number of times you can benefit from the effect of the role. There’s always a Leader bonus for the active player who chose the role and the others won’t benefit from it.

Let’s explain the Actions and the Roles of each of these cards in detail.  The Survey action is the main way to draw card, infact it allows you to add two of them from your deck to your hand. The role of Survey card allows you instead to draw Planet cards from the common Planet deck. These planets represent the possible colonies of your space empire or the objectives of your future wars. That’s up to you. Once you draw one or more (boosting the role with cards from your hand) Planet cards, you placed them face down in front of you. These cards will flip to their active side once they’re conquered (with Warfare) or colonized (with Colonization). The Colonization card action allows you to put that card under an face down planet to start colonization. Once there are enough cards (a number defines it) under that Planet card, you can flip it to its active side by using another Colonization card action and the planet will start producing/trading and it’ll give you VP at the end of the game. The Role of the card allows you to increase colonies under the planet or settle it (flip it) as said before. The other way to flip a planet, is to invade it with the Warfare action. This action allows you to take a single plastic spaceship (+1 Strenght) or Attack a planet (if you have the right amount of strenght, equal or more than the planet’s defence). The role of the Warfare card allows you to grow stronger more easily, collecting more spaceships or to attack a planet instead. The Production/Trade card actions are double: you can produce on a single planet a resource or sell a resource from a planet to obtain VP. With the role of this card, you can produce more o sell from more planets. The last is Research action card which allows you to scrap/remove up to 2 cards from your hand or with his role, to acquire one of the available Technology cards only if you’ve satysfied the Technology card’s requirements and costs. These cards will grant you benefit during the game or at the end of it, based on you choices. In a simple introductory game, the Research role is not used and the Technology cards are not availble. The game goes on in this manner, with a player choosing and action and then taking a role, until one player has a given amount of VP or until one or more of the Action card’s stacks is depleted.

Final thoughts

Today we’re going to take a look at another title from Roxley Game Laboratories: Super Motherload, an amazing deck-building/mining game for 2 to 4 players. I’ve already made another review of a Roxley’s game - Steampunk Rally - which can be found here. Now, let’s take a look at the box of the game and then into the game itself. Follow me for another HexDiceFire’s review!

What’s in the box?

I bet you’ve already stopped for a minute admiring this wonderful cover. It looks live a videogame poster and the colour palette it’s really psychedelic! This is the first cool thing of the game while the others are hidden under the lid of the box. Speaking about the box, it’s really small but thick and easy to store on the shelf. Inside, you’ll find really good quality components. The game boards are 4 and double sided; the cards are really well designed, in a standard format; the tiles are thick but easy to punch out from the cardboard sheet; the rulebook it’s colourful and explains everything with clear examples.

The Game

Unlike many others deck-building game, this one will place you in the cockpit of an excavator, ready to discover the best minerals and precious stones under the surface of Mars. The game uses a series of boards - which will be added one after the other - to simulate the depth of player’s drilling activity. Players will use a set of basic action cards, which will be upgraded during the game, to perform 2 actions on each of their turns. The main actions are: 

-Drill: the players combines cards - from their hands - with the Drill icon and with the same colour, to drill under the surface of the planet or to continue a previous tunnel. This is the main action and so the most frequent.

-Draw: the players can draw two cards from their personal deck to improved their drilling possibilities

-Bomb: which works really similar to Drill with the exception that players must also have bomb token (previously obtained) and a bomb pattern on a card. The pattern shows to the player the effect of his bombing activity.

When a player uses Drill, he counts the number of cards with the Drill icon and the same colour and places a Drill pattern token of the same size as the number of cards played. This back tokens simulate the tunnel the player has drilled. If this tunnel covers one or more resources, then the player obtains them and places them immediately as an investment the available cards he wants to buy to improve his deck. These new cards will be purchased only when there are as many resources as the card’s cost. 

During the game, players will also have the possibility to score points with Achievement cards, placed near the board to show to the players the reward obtained for following a particular strategy. The game ends when the players have gone deep enough to reach the end of the fourth board. Then they will sum their points taking them from the cards they bought, the achievements and the artifacts found in your tunnels. The player with most Victory points is declared the best Mars’ Driller!

What I think of the game:

I found this game really challenging and deep, not only for its tunnels. It has a lot of replayability, amazing graphics and it’s hard sometimes to make the best strategy. The system is original and it remembered me of some old mining videogames of my youth. The overall quality of the product it’s great and its value is surely higher than the price of the game. I would reccomend this one to every kind of player: from the casual boardgamer to the card-geek; from the classic thinker of the group to the players who want a one-hour boardgame.  What are you waiting so? 

Nel panorama dei Boardgames è spesso difficile farsi notare per delle idee originali. Il motivo è che per la maggior parte delle volte, semplicemente non ci sono idee originali mentre - per la restante parte - pur essendoci non riescono ad emergere. Per fortuna, grazie a Kickstarter, Facebook ed alle risorse di giovani case di produzione, finiamo per trovare, fra gli scaffali dei negozi specializzati, qualcuna di queste novità.

La Fever Games è una piccola compagnia che è attualmente nota per aver prodotto la versione italiana dell’epico Boss Monster (link alla mia recensione) ed un gioco altrettanto mostruoso di cui parleremo oggi: Epic Resort. 

Epic Resort è un simpatico e cartoonesco boardgame (da 2-4 giocatori) nel quale dobbiamo calarci nei panni di gestori di improbabili villaggi turistici a tema. L’idea è quella di sviluppare le attrazioni contenute all’interno del villaggio turistico per renderle più appetibili ai turisti e per invogliare anche formidabili eroi in grado di proteggere il parco in caso di invasione da parte di mostri.  Tutto alquanto accattivante ma come funziona? Se siete pronti per ricevere la risposta, proseguite nella lettura di questa breve recensione!

Dentro la scatola

Parlando dell’edizione italiana del gioco, edita appunto dalla Fever Games, posso affermare con sicurezza che il prodotto è di buona qualità. La scatola è ricoperta di una stampa su carta lucida, ben diversa dalle solite scatole a cui siamo adusi. Le illustrazioni sono curate e ricordano molto il design dei moderni indie-games per smartphone. Non sono un fan sfegatato di questo tipo di artworks ma devo ammettere che l’impatto visivo è sicuramente efficace. La scatola contiene al suo interno dei vani abbastanza comodi per posizionare le carte, i token ed i meeples che costituiscono i principali materiali di gioco. Carte e le schede non sono molto spesse, probabilmente anche perchè sono veramente moltissime e come sappiamo la stampa è assai costosa già di suo. I meeple purtroppo non sono di qualità come quelli di Carcassonne: quando ho aperto la bustina ne ho trovati diversi sbeccati o più piccoli degli standard. Non che a me faccia così tanto la differenza ma so che esistono molte persone che per un meeple scheggiato farebbero saltare in aria intere case produttrici. I token di cartoncino sono alquanto spessi e facili da estrarre. Non esiste una plancia di gioco, in quanto il gioco si basa esclusivamente sulle carte e sulle schede raffiguranti le attrazioni del vostro resort. In sintesi, l’impatto iniziale è buono ed i piccoli difetti sono compensati notevolmente dal design genere. Per quanto riguarda la traduzione in italiano devo dire che è ineccepibile: scorrevolezza e chiarezza la contraddistinguono, sia nelle carte che nel regolamento. Quest’ultimo sembra più folto del dovuto ma non bisogna spaventarsi: è molto semplice.

Il Gioco

Una volta eseguito il setup, ogni giocatore avrà un resort di partenza composto da due schede attrazione ed un mazzo di carte lavoratori base. Durante il proprio turno, ogni giocatore potrà utilizzare la propria mano di carte per compiere azioni come: assegnare dei lavoratori alle proprie attrazioni per soddisfare la richiesta di manovalanza nell’attrazione; migliorare il proprio pool di carte/lavoratori ‘addestrando’ i lavoratori base e trasformandoli in uno dei lavoratori specializzati disponibile durante la partita; difendersi dall’attacco dei mostri; generare proventi. Esistono due tipi di proventi nel gioco: i soldi e la capacità attrattiva del proprio resort. Più le attrazioni del tuo resort saranno piene di lavoratori e meno saranno soggette a incidenti e quindi a fughe di turisti ma più saranno piene di turisti e meno altri turisti saranno invogliati a visitare il tuo resort (anche se a pieno regime, gli introiti saranno già alti!). Una delle principali task con cui il giocatore deve confrontarsi ogni turno consiste nello scegliere se spendere la risorsa capacità attrattiva o i propri soldi. La risorsa capacità attrattiva gli permetterà di attirare grandi comitive o prodigiosi eroi nel proprio resort, guadagnando così soldi e protezione dai mostri. Se un giocatore invece si concentra sullo spendere soldi potrà acquistare attrazioni sempre più accattivanti e a tema, il che sarà necessario per divertire i turisti ed aumentare i posti disponibili nel resort. Un bilanciamento fra soldi e capacità attrattiva rischia di non permettervi di eccellere nè in un ambito nè nell’altro.  Ogni turno, nella fase in cui si rimpinguano le carte turista (che simulano l’arrivo con le navi di comitive al molo e indicano quanti turisti si potranno attrarre), si correrà il rischio di venire attaccati dai mostri. Questi sono infatti mescolati nel mazzo dei turisti e randomicamente finiscono per devastare attrazioni, mangiare turisti o sconfiggere eroi. I giocatori dovranno proteggersi da questi attacchi utilizzando i propri lavoratori oppure attirando nel proprio resort un possente eroe in grado di metter K.O. il/i mostro/i. 

Considerazioni finali

Epic Resort riesce a divertire nonostante sia alquanto macchinoso per il target a cui vuole rivolgersi. E’ un gioco che strizza l’occhio ai gestionali ma in cui l’alea è onnipresente ed incontrollabile. Il tema è veramente originale ed assai comico, perciò si fa apprezzare da grandi e piccini senza alcun problema. Come già detto, l’artwork è molto curato e l’edizione italiana merita il nostro plauso. Personalmente sono convinto che abbia dei difetti colmabili come l’eccessiva durata del mazzo dei mostri e di conseguenza della partita; la scarsa possibilità di personalizzazione del parco dovuta al blocco degli acquisti ed alla suddivisione in tre livelli delle attrazioni; il deckbuilding-non-deckbuilding (definito Deck-Evolution) che sembra simpatico inizialmente ma che si può trasformare in un frustrante e ripetitivo miglioramento di carte. Per essere un gioco essenzialmente di carte, non sembra un gioco di carte standard. La meccanica in alcuni aspetti mi ha ricordato persino Boss Monster, dove il cattivo deve attirare con i tesori gli eroi nel proprio dungeon per poi ucciderli. Qui, il nostro resort deve attrarre i turisti ma l’obiettivo non è macellarli, bensì farli svagare.  Credo sia un titolo che potrebbe piacere a: comitive caciarone, amanti dell’alea, giocatori occasionali, appassionati di giochi a tema fantasy/cartoonesca, coppie alla ricerca di un gioco godibile e non complesso. Non consiglierei questo gioco MAI a: amanti dei German, wargamers, ameritrashers. Concludo questa recensione suggerendovi di fare un giro sul sito della Fever Games per maggiori informazioni su Epic Resort ed anche su Boss Monster!

Have you ever wondered that boardgaming is something more than a simple hobby? It involves a series of abilities and skills which sometimes your brain already has or that it’ll develop by playing games. This is not a news of course but did you ever think about what happens when you’re playing a game or - for example - what you think you’re doing while you play it? In this article I’d like to share my thoughts about it with you.

1. A World

Wichever is the boardgame you play, it’s like a world that unravels in front of you. It has a set of specific rules that you must accept and follow to gain an entrance ticket into it and I bet you have collected many of these tickets in your gaming nights. Effectively, within the invisible walls of this world, your can bring as many friends as the game states, but once inside the game they could act as enemies or as needful assistants and teammates.  How many times you had the occasion to ‘hate’ your beloved friends for beating you in a game or supporting someone else and not you? How many times you had the occasion to start a friendship with other gamers during a match? That happens beacause we step inside a world of cardboard and pawns a leave behind our known reality and with her, all the problems.

2. Types of gamers

Games have the power to modify or simply bring out people’s characters and sometimes this is the most important social aspect in gaming. This power allows the player to act somehow freely from what he really is. For example: when a shy and taciturn friend of yours plays a wargame and he keeps attacking you and rejoices for his dice rolls with screams and lughs, you won’t probably recognize him as your usual friend. In a similar manner, there are also chatty and annoying friends who become silent when the game starts.  I’m not saying that everyone becomes Mr.Hyde while playing a game. Many gamers are just themselves during the game but something unexpected and unconventional always comes out from them at the end. There are many types of gamers, and I’m sure you can put your mates in some of these categories:

- The Thinker: The German-mathematic calculator Lord. The Alea-killer. The one who plays to win and not to partecipate. When he/she makes a move, the other players rejoice and raise their hands to the sky. Don’t mess with him/her, he/she’s doing math.

- The Noisy: The kind of player you don’t want to sit near you. He/she’s always keeps an eye on your cards and uses the wooden blocks to make pyramids. He/she comments him/herself while making a move and reconsiders it too many time for the others to follow his/her choices.

- The Lucky Guy: This one always knows the result when throwing the dice. He/she just can’t miss a throw and he/she loves playing Ameritrash games. He/she doesn’t have a strategy in his/her head, but at the end of the game, he/she’s always the winner.

- The Last Comer: He/she is always late when you plan a game. You’ve just finished your explaination of the rules and he/she opens the door shouting: “I’m here!”. This is the moment when you and your friends need to waste precious time to explain the game again.

- The Rules Reminder: The Human Rulebook. He/she remembers every rule of every game and he/she won’t forgive you if you forget an important rule. On the other hand, thanks to this rare beast, we can skip reading rulebooks entrusting him/her.

- No Man: He/she’s the one who doesn’t know what he/she wants to play. He/she simply says NO to every game proposed just to let the other gamers go mad thinking about alternatives. 

- The Enthusiast: This kind of gamer wants to play everything, without ever considering what he/she’s playing. From Monopoly to ASL, from Risk to Brass: he/she wants to play it anyway. If it’s a game, then it needs to be played. It is the right mate to try often new games.

- The One-Shot: When you have this kind of player in your group, it’s really hard concentrating on a game for a long time. This player always needs a new game cause he/she plays games no more than one time each. You’ll probably need a store or the entire BGG archive to satisfy him/her.

Have you recognized some friends of yours among these types of gamers?

3. What happens after a game?

We’ve seen how a boardgame allows you to enter in a new world and how people act in this peculiar world. Now we’ll see what happens at the end of a play. Is a boardgame a satisfying experience, at least as rewarding as you’ve hoped when you started playing it? Satisfation comes with fullfillment of some gamer’s expectations. For example: some gamers wants a game to be deep while some other don’t want it to be demanding and that’s usually the main selection they make when choosing a game to play. But it’s clear that not every game gives the experience requested. You could have chosen a game you thought it was lighter and then discovered how complicated it was. When a boardgame fills your time with joy and happiness or even with challenging tasks, it’s clear it has done its job. The greatest satisfation is when everyone at the table feels like you about the game. There’s a double reward when you’re satisfied of the game you’ve chosen and your friend declare they loved it. 

Summarizing, here’s what a game it’s capable of: Creating a whole new universe with a new set of rules; transforming people’s characters and personalities; gratifying and rewarding players.

Welcome back HexDiceFire’s follwers! Today we’ll take a look at this fantastic game called Steampunk Rally a racing game from 2 to 8 players from Roxley Game Laboratory which will totally blow your mind. Let’s see why in this breathtaking review!

What’s inside the box?

As for every other game we review, we’re going to open this box of wonders to see what’s inside. The box itself is really really thin in measure but as large as many other boardgame boxes. It’s incredible how many things fits inside this game box! I won’t make a list of all the components but I’d like to spend a world on the dice, the cogs and the overall graphics. The dice are 108, a huge bunch of rolling cubes in three different translucent colours (red,blue,yellow); the cogs, which are a sort of resource in the game, are real small metal cogs! Last but not least, the cartoonesque graphic of the game mixed with the steampunk theme give this title a vintage retrò style which can’t be found in other titles. The quality is pretty good and the materials are excellent. The cards are not that thick, so you’ll probably need to protect them. Many ziplocks are provided to keep everything organized inside the box. Great debut.

The Game

Steampunk Rally is not just a racing game with a steampunk atmosphere and style. It’s a draft card game, it’s a building game, it’s a dice rolling game and also a game of the goose. The thing is that all these different mechanics have been mixed together to make this title unique and really challenging. The idea of the game is that you’re a famous scientist who’s taking part in a race with other great inventors. In order to win this competition, you’ll have to build the fastest, strongest and most cool machine you’ll ever imagine and then push the pedal toward the finishing line.

After the setup, each player should have an inventor and the corresponding starting parts of his machine. These are two cards who can be joined together to form a first sketch of the machine you’re bringing into this race. Once everyone has built his first project the game can start. In the first phase, players must execute a draft with cards taken from 4 separate decks. Three of these decks contain machine parts and the last one contains events. Each time a player selects a card during this draft he immediately plays it (unless stated otherwise). If it’s a machine part he can build it, if it’s an event he can execute it if conditions are met. Both machine parts and events can be sold to obtain resources indicated in upper right corner of the card (usually dice or cogs).  A machine part is a card with powers and actions activated by dice. 

In the image above, there’s an example of a complex invention made of machine parts cards. All these parts have: one or more connectors to link with other machine parts; a name; some square coloured boxes (red,blue,yellow) which will hold the dice when used during the game; the actions the machine part grants once it has been activated. Machine parts, as said before, are activated during the Race Phase by using dice. Let’s spend a word on dice and cogs, the resources of the game. Usually dice can be obtained by discarding in the Draft Phase one or more card. Dice are rolled during the Race Phase and spent on machine parts to use actions and bonuses. Each machine parts has room for a specifical number and type of die. If there’s room (on a machin part) for three yellow dice and you’ve got three yellow die, you can roll them and choose which and how many of them to place on the machine part. Then you will sum the results of the dice and divide that number for the number shown on the little die depicted on the card. The result tells you how many time you can perform the action of that specifical machine part. Usually the action obtained this way are Moving (on the race track), Repairing (any damage on the damage gauge of your inventor), gaining cogs and dice or even taking damage. When you move on the race track you can overtake the other players but you must be wise when you push the pedal or you’ll overload you machine parts and burn your invention during the race. The Cogs help you upkeeping your strange invention by unblocking dice on machine parts (infact, once a dice is places on a machine part, it can be unblocked by spending cogs in the Vent Phase), or re-rolling one or more dice during the Race Phase. If your invention has taken during the Race Phase, more damage than Repair points obtained (for example, the Damage gauge is below zero), the player must remove machine parts equal to -x where -x is the number shown the Damage gauge. After losing the chosen machine parts, if the inventor has lost even his cockpit, then he’s exploded. The player puts his inventor in last place behind the previous last player and starts building his invention in the next Draft Phase. Once a player/inventor crosses the finishing line, then there’s one last turn for everybody to push his invention to the limit in order to finish the race with a good position.

What I think of this game

Steampunk Rally is surely more than a funny game. It’s a game where strategy, luck, calculation and timing should be taken seriously. The Draft is one of the most important phases, cause if you take too many machine parts you won’t receive dice to activate them and if you sell all your cards for dice and cogs, your invention won’t be upgraded. Cogs are fundamental to unlock the dice from your machine parts, so they should be used with parsimony. If you don’t have them, your invention will easily fall apart at the first obstacle and you’ll be stuck in the middle of nowhere for a lot of time. Speaking of the complexity, I wouldn’t suggest this game to beginners. It is a game that needs some previous introduction to boardgaming mechanics: if you’ve played 7 Wonders, Kingsburg and some other worker placement game, you’ll be enough skilled to appreciate this title. If you don’t, well you’ll probably have to start somewhere else before getting into Steampunk Rally, cause it’s not that immediate.  I’ve enjoyed many plays with my gaming groups and all of them loved the theme, the graphics, the enormous quantity of dice and available inventors to choose from, each one different from the other. Steampunk Rally has the cloth to be a classic, medium-complexity boardgame. Each one should buy a copy of that. It’s pure adrenaline, simultaneous, innovative and the theme suits the mechanics perfectly. The quality of the product is great and the price is adequate. Don’t miss this if you have large gaming companies, a game cafè or simply a large family of passionate boardgamers. Don’t buy it if you hate dice rolling or racing games and even if you’re not trustful person when you play boardgames, cause most of the phases are done simoultaneously and you can’t control all your opponent’s actions. Thanks for reading this review and if you want to learn more about the game you can watch this funny and accurate tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=654&v=FIYcKIFsNK8

If you’re a videogamer or simply a passionate card-gamer who loves nerd themes, then you should probably read this review, which is about a terrific dungeon building card game produced by Brotherwise Games named Boss Monster. This title works perfectly for 2 to 4 players and it can be played in about 30-45 minutes, depending on who you’re playing it with! If you’re enough curious to know what this game is about in detail, then follow me into this brief review!

What’s in the box?

Boss Monster has one of the most beautiful boxes a card-game has ever had. Its design resembles a Nintendo cartdrige from the 90′s and the pixelated art on the front cover immediately gives the idea of the game: you’re not the Hero this time, but the final Boss of a dungeon delving game in which you’re going to be the architect of your dungeon. Inside this cool box, you’ll find five decks and a rulebook. Speaking of the decks, their quality is really good cause the cards are easy to shuffle and resistant, but as I always say: “It’s better to protect them!”. The art is perfect even on the cards of course! All the heroes and bosses of the this game are original creations of the artists and not a mere reproduction of old characters of old videogames! We’ll look at the decks in the next chapter. The rulebook is not short but really easy to read and clear. It contains a lot of examples and illustrations. You should be able to play the game in few minutes of reading. There’s also a synthetic version of the rules, which introduces you to the main concepts of the game and allows you to play your first match.

The Game

A typical game of Boss Monster includes you and one or more friends playing the role of evil bosses whose only purpose is to build the most dangerous and cruelest dungeon ever created, in order to attract Heroes, kill them and collect their souls. Yeah, cool, but how does it works?

At the start of each game, after the setup is done, every player should have one Boss card and 6 cards in his hand (4 Room cards and 2 Spell cards). The Boss card tells which Monster you’re actually playing during this game. Each of the available Boss cards in the base game have an XP value (used to determine the order of play), an image of the Monster, a Level Up power (which is a one-shot event each player could use with their Boss Monster once his dungeon has 5 rooms) and a Treasury Icon (the more of one of four types, the more likely a specific hero will visit your dungeon).

(some of the Boss cards)

(the Room cards)

Once every player has revealed his Boss card, he places in the rightmost space available on the table, to make room for upcoming cards which he will build on the left of the Boss. The Room cards are used to extend your dungeon with two types of dangers: Traps or Monsters. Each Room card contains and image of the room, a power, one or more Treasure Icons and a black heart, used to show how many lives a hero loses when he enters the room. There are Normal Rooms and Advanced Rooms. Needless to say, Advanced Rooms are more powerful than Normal ones and they have better chances to kill the Heroes. The only problem is that Advanced Rooms can be built only on Normal Rooms with at least one Treasure Icon in Common. There are four Treasure icons in the game: Sword, Book, Relic and Swag. Each newly built room adds one or more treasures to your dungeon.  Each turn, when it’s time for the Heroes to decide in which dungeon to delve in, each hero goes to the dungeon which contains most treasure of the type he’s searching. For example:

(some Heroes)

The Mage here above, has a Book icon, so he will go in the dungeon of the player who has most books icons. The Thief wants some Swag, so he will delve in the depth of the dungeon of the player who has most swag icons. Heroes arrive every turn in ‘Town’ (the center of the table), based on the number of players: 2 heroes with two players, 3 heroes with 3 players...and so on. A Hero card can be Ordinary or Epic. The silver-ordinary heroes usually have low life values (the number in the red heart), they hit the Boss only one time (the blood drop) if they don’t die before in his dungeon and they’re worth one Soul ( = points for the Boss). Epic-golden heroes, have high life values, they hit the Boss two times, but they’re worth two Souls.  These Epic heroes arrive only after all the Ordinary ones have been drawn. There are also Spell cards, which are like events or boosters that every player can play on himself or on another player. Some of these spells are playable in the Building phase of a turn. Some other spells can be played only during the Hero phase of a turn.

Each turn has the same sequence: first of all, each player draws a new card from the shared Room deck. Then, depending on the number of players, the Heroes come in Town from their deck. Player now may choose a Room card and keep it secret in front of themselves. Once each player has chosen or not a Room card, then these Room cards can be revealed and built in their own dungeons. Some of the Rooms have a power who activates immediately while some other Rooms have everlasting powers until they’re destroyed. After that, in the Hero phase, Heroes choose their dungeons (like described before). When a Hero enters a dungeon, the owner of the dungeon must inflict to the hero the amount of damage shown on every room. If the hero dies before entering the Boss’ Room, then he becomes a Soul (so a point for the Boss). If the hero survives to the dangers of the dungeon’s rooms, then he inflicts one or two wounds to the Boss before disappearing. The game ends when a player scores 10 Souls or if only one Boss is alive (each Boss has 5 wounds maximum).

What I think of this game

I think Boss Monster is going to take place in the Olympus of the Card Games. This is a great title for all ages, simple to learn, great to play with, good for tournaments and competitions, graphically amazing and with a considerable longevity. I want to recommend this one to all the guys like me who lived the Nintendo and Sega era, with 8 and 16 bit games. I want to recommend it also to those players who want a different style of game from Magic or Deck-buildings. The strategical aspects of Boss Monsters are many: you must choose the best room from those you have in hand ; you must not collect too many different treasure icon cause only focusing on one of them can attract Heroes to your dungeon (= the only way to make points); you must not forget to look at every other player’s moves; you should constantly destroy and re-build your dungeon improving the rooms and advancing the old ones to be competitive.  This is a huge fun in a small pixelated world. This is a must buy. HexDiceFire approved!

Yesterday we decided to try this new Kickstarter’s game called “Kill the King” designed by Petter Shanke Olsen. The project is actually running on Kickstarter, so if you decide to back it after you read this review, click here.

Kill the king is a siege-wargame, in which a player has to defend the king inside the castle and the opponent has to rush with his troops through the gates of the manor to behead the monarch. You think it’s simple? Well you’re wrong! Follow me in this brief introduction to the main game.

Components?

I can’t talk about the components and the box cause I received only a print-n-play version of the game, with good quality counters (but not definitive) and a thin paper map, which had a great graphic printed on it! There were some missing counters, like an attacker’s archer and the leader’s counter for the defender. Also there was no turn track marker and no destroyed walls counters. But I managed to play the game anyway! I bet the final work will be great and you can notice that from these photos of the prototype!

(This is the standard game army set-up, following the one on the rulebook. Set-up indicates only which troops you should use, not their starting positions. Those are up to you and your opponent!)

Playin’ the game

There are two main options to play Kill the King! : one is the short game which lasts only six turns and it’s called Attack & Defend, while the other is the standard Kill the King main game, which lasts for 11 turns and allows the player to spend ‘virtual coins’ to buy their armies. For our first game we decided to follow the set-up suggested by the rulebook, but I think the great thing is building your army based on your personal strategy. Each unit has a ‘coin’ cost and while the attacker has 90 ‘coins’ to build his army, the defender has only 45 ‘coins’ cause he obtains defence benefits from the castle.  Once the armies have been built, the players deploy their troops behind a screen (the box of the game) hidden from the opponent. After this step, the attacker begins his frist turn, moving and eventually attacking.

There are different types of units in the game and each of these is important in some particular moments of the game. For example: the catapults, are slow and can only fire if they don’t move. The attacker should use them at the start to demolish castle walls and free the bastions. In later turns the catapults are pretty useless, considering they also have no defence. Archers are good ranged troops to cover the advancing of cavalry and infantry or as defence over the castle walls. Swordsman are the best unit of the game cause they have a medium attack and medium defence value. Spearman are not that versatile, but they’re good at defending the King inside the castle or at killing the cavarly with a good dice roll. Cavarly is a valuable piece cause it moves really fast among the battlefield and can be used - once a wall or the main gate are down - by the attacker to enter the castle and kill the monarch.  There’s also a Battering Ram, which is used by the attacker to demolish the main gate easily and should be manned by an infantry troop. There’s also a Leader, which may be chosen among four types of available, everyone with special characteristics.

Every troop has a particular way to attack the enemy. The Swordsman and Cavalry only attack the enemy in their front side (the facing of an arrow determines the facing of a unit, which is important for attack and defence purposes). The Spearman attacks two subsequent enemies in front of him; the Archer has a range of 4 but can’t attack anyone in melee or adjacent to him; the Catapult can shoot minimum at range 3 and maximum at range 6 a devastating blow which affects the hit space and spaces hortogonally adjacent to it. These troops have also defence values based on the side they’re hit by the enemy. Usually the front is the stronger and the rear is the weakest. Some units have also zero as defence value, so if they’re hit, they’ll die.

To make an attack, the player rolls a die and checks on the unit’s diagram if the number rolled is a hit. For example, an infantry Swordsman gives a hit if he rolls 1-3 on a d6. Then if the defending opponent has, for example, and Archer facing the attacker, he will save himself only on a roll of 1 on a d6. If a unit takes a hit and fails to defend himself, then it’s gone and out of the game.

The walls and the gates, as well as the King’s door, have a defence value. When they’re hit, the ‘save’ themselves with a roll of 1-4 for the wall, 1-3 for the main gate and 1-2 two for the King’s door! “C’mon king, time to go!”

(”Noooo! We failed! The King can’t be killed!”)

What I think of the game

Kill the King is really a fun, simple and innovative game. It has many interesting features, like army-building (which is a thing I love!), an epic siege mode, the possibility to use two copies of the game to create a GigaMode version with two defenders inside the castle and two attackers.  It is perfect for those who love simple wargames or they’ve never tried one; it is good for kids to learn the basics of strategical planning; it is perfect to recreate little medieval battles or even imagine King’s Arthur armies fighting against Mordred! One thing I must say about the game: the attacker should take his Leader inside the castle before the sixth turn. If he can’t accomplish this mission, then 5 enemy cavalry units will appear at his back, ready to attack. I failed with my Leader, so these cavalry units appeared and my opponent used these to literally ‘eat’ my pieces outside the castle (Catapults and Archers). I want to tell to the author that maybe these reinforcement should be less or should enter two turns later or the attacker won’t make it in his first games. Except from this aspect, I think you should take your money and buy yourself a copy of this great game. I can’t wait to play it again and I just can’t wait for the final version of the game!

KILL THE KING!  (Hex Dice Fire salutes you with this song!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3ZfrCPKEqM

Today’s review is about a new two player card game produced by Mayfair Games: Fight for Olympus. This game has been designed by Matthias Cramer and beatifully illustrated by Javier Gonzàlez Cava. If you love ancient greek mythology and you’re also a skilled card-gamer, then you can’t miss this one and you should follow me in this brief review of the game!

What’s inside the box

Fight for Olympus comes in a small box, pretty similar to Patchwork’s box, but big enough to hold a deck of 120 cards, a long foldable and resistant board, and some wooden markers to keep track of damage, victory points and special resources during the game. The quality is great, expecially for the board and for the overall graphical work on the box, board and cards. The wooden tokens are generic ones, not that different from standard ones you usually find in german-games. The cards are not so resistant but not thin. You’ll need to protect them with sleeves cause you’re going to play this game really often! I ensure you.

The Game

I’m a huge fan of card game, expecially deck-building and 1vs1 games. This is not a deck-building but it is a two player game of confrontation, fightings with epic characters. In this game, players will fight deploying in Troy, Delphi and Olympus a series of famous character belonging from Greek Mythology, like Odysseus, Achilles, Euridyce, Medea, Argo and so on. The objective of the game is: to fill each space of the board on your side (1 space in Troy, 2 in Delphi and 3 in Olympus) with your characters or to place the victory point marker on your side of the board at the 7th space or to resist until the deck is depleted, hoping to have more victory point than your opponent. The mechanism used to deploy these character’s cards, is pretty simple. Each card has a colour (Red, Blue, Yellow and Green which are the ‘resource’s colours’ used in the game) and a price you must pay to play it. Usually this cost is expressed with coloured squares. For example: to play Palamedes, you must pay a Green resource and a Blue resource. But how can you pay these resources? It’s pretty simple, you’ll have to discard cards of that colour from your hand. This hand managment mechanism, which resembles the one you find in Race for the Galaxy when you have to pay for planets or developments, forces the player to choose the right moment to play a card and to save resources for later turns.Infact each player starts the game with a hand of six cards which may contain a mix of Heroes, Heroines, Soldiers and Equipments and he can play any number of these if he’s able to pay for them. Hopefully each turn he will draw two cards to refill his hand but sometimes these are not enough, even to play a single card!

Once a player decides to play one or more card from his hand, he will have to select a space on his side of the board on which he will deploy the/se card/s. As said before, spaces available on the board are 7 for each player: 1 for Troy, 2 for Delphi and 3 for Olympus. These spaces are important only when the characters deployed attack. If one of your character is in Troy and on the other side there’s no defending character, then you can draw a card as reward. If one or more of your characters are in Delphi and there are no defending characters on the other side, then you’ll obtain a bonus resource (wooden marker) of one colour from those available on the board (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, used as one-shot discounts to pay for cards). If one or more of your characters are in Olympus and there are no defending characters on the other side, you’ll gain Victory Points and adjust the VP marker accordingly, toward your side.

In each of the previous cases, if you find defending characters on the other side, YOUR CHARACTERS ONLY attack them. The defenders don’t strike back. If they die, they go in the discard pile. If they’re still alive, you’ll mark their wounds with wooden discs. The attack is simple. Each card has an Attack value and Defense value. So you deal an amount of damage equale to the Attack value of your character. Once the Defense value is reached, that character is dead.

Speaking of the different kind of cards contained in the main deck ( from which the players draw their starting hands and refill each turn) there are three types of them:

1. Heroes and Heroines:

These are the most powerful cards you’ll use during the game. As the game evolves, these will be the necessary characters to defeat your opponent. Usually they cost a lot of resources to be played but they carry great effects and an adequate combination of Attack and Defense values. These heroes and heroines provide a Jolly resource used when you pay to deploy other cards.

2. Soldiers: 

These are cannon fodder to block empty spaces on your side, usually at no cost. Soldiers can’t receive equipment and usually have low Att/Def values.

3. Equipment:

These are useful bonuses you can attach to heroes and heroines in order to let them gain more Att/Def for as long as they remain alive.

Heroes and Heroines cards have also an effect which can be:

- A one-shot effect used only when the card is deployed. - An effect which is enabled only when that card attacks. - An effect which lasts until the card is in play.

During the game these effect will add some wind of change to the brutality of attacks by healing wounds, saving characters from dying, allowing you or your opponent to drawn more or less cards and so on.

What I think 

The game I’m going to review today is a terrific card game, from 1 to 5 players,  from Upper Deck company: Legendary Encounters - An Alien Deck-building game. Yes, it’s really legendary and it’s about the Alien movie series. I bet that if you’re reading this review you’re probably an Alien fan or a deck-building lover, but if you’re none of them, well let me say that this game could intrigue anyway. 

The Box

Sometimes good games have really awful covers, cause company don’t invest much on graphic design. This it’s definitely a great game with astounding art, like every other game of Legendary system from Upper Deck Entertainment. You can see it by yourself just looking at this creepy green and black Gigeresque cover, which introduce you in this fearful voyage through deep space. The box itself is really really heavy and medium sized, surely bigger than any other deck-building game’s box. The quality is really good and inside you’ll find a treasure of 600 cards, plenty of dividers to organize the cards and a huge and soft playmat of indescribable beauty (at least for those who love comics and Alien’s cruelest scenes). The rulebook is little but long enough to include everything you need to study the game and to choose the best scenario for your first plays. There are a lot of variants and possibility to mix the sets included in this game with other Legendary series’ decks, like Marvel, Predator and more!

(the Playmat)

The Game

In Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck-building game, you’re part of a team which is cooperating to defeat the Alien menace. The coolest thing is that you can join your favourite characters and play your role in each of four Alien movies! That’s simply amazing! Once you decide to play, you’ll have to decide which movie you’d like to fight in. There are specific sets of cards which the rulebook instructs you to take to create a deck containing cards from an Alien movie. Then every player must select a role card (for example: Engineer, Gunner, Syntetic, Priest, Medic...) and the equivalent Avatar, the card on which the HP points and a role-specific power are shown. This card is always in front of the player, the role card insted is shuffled inside a 12 cards starting deck, made of Grunts (Attack Cards) and Specialists (Credit cards). Each player will receive this starting deck, role card and avatar card. Each movie’s deck has a specific Location card (the ship on which everything takes place, like Nostromo from Alien 1), a Barracks’ deck composed by Characters from the selected movie (this deck is a sort of maket with useful cards the players buy to boost their starting decks), three specific objectives numbered from 1 to 3 which the players must resolve in order to win the game and a Hive deck from which the Aliens and other menaces come out. All these decks are placed on the playmat in the corresponding spaces, along with the Strike Deck (from which the Hits received by the players are randomly drawn), the Sergeant Deck (a set of upgraded Credit cards with mixed symbols on them) and the Hatchery Deck (a fixed deck containing Facehuggers).

Once the set-up is done, the turn starts with a random player, which draws six cards from his starting deck. The fist thing a player must do is to place a new Hive card in the Complex (we’ll speak about that in the Attack section below) Then, he can use his hand of cards in some different ways:

Credits cards are used to buy one or more cards from the Barracks or Sergeant Decks. There always 5 Barracks cards available in the HQ, so if a player buys one from there, a new card is drawn in substitution. Once a card is bought, it is placed in the discard pile of the active player.

Attack cards are used to scan one or more of the 5 rooms of the Complex or to fight revealed enemies . The Complex is the space in which every player turns a new card from Hive deck is placed covered on the rightmost space. If there’s already a card there, it is pushed in the next empty space of the Complex to the left. When a Hive card is pushed out of the leftmost Complex space, it is revealed (if it was covered) and placed in the Combat zone. To prevent this wave of Hive cards, player should Scan the Complex with their Attack cards (for example: to scan the leftmost space of the Complex a player has to use 2 Attack resources; to scan the rightmost space he has to use 5 Attack resources) in order to reveal the enemy or the event card and face it. Enemies can be killed with Attack cards, using the Attack resources on them only when they are revealed either in the Complex or in the Combat Zone. If they’re receive an amount of damage equal or higher then their printed value, they are killed and placed in the Dead Enemies zone. If they’re in the Combat zone and they’re not killed at the end of a player’s turn, these enemies give one random Strike card to the active player. These cards have random damage amounts printed on them. If this amount is equal or higher than the player’s Avatar life, the player is killed and out of the game.

Cooperate is a feature that helps players to help each other by playing a card in front of the active player with Cooperate printed on it. If the active player has a copy of one or more of these cards, then he gets the benefits of the cards lent by his team.

There are also powerful combo which take place each time a players plays on or more cards from his hands with a specific symbol and a power related to it. Usually these combos grant the player more Attack resources or more Money or the possibility to draw more cards during his turn. Some other cards have events which will resolve at certain times during the game, under specific conditions.

Speaking of the Hive deck, this contains 3 micro decks of increasing difficulty, composed by Enemies, Events and Hazards plus some Drone cards that modulates the game based on the number of players. Enemies are really hard to be killed; events make players lives really horrible, slowing their mission; hazards are (luckily) only 3 and are devastating moments for the players.

Once a player has finished spending his resources Scanning, Fighting and Buying, the player on his left draws another Hive card and the play goes on. Until you die (no, seriously, you won’t last long dear player!).

What I think of the game

I love Alien series and I love deck-building games. I don’t love cooperative games cause usually the experienced players order to the newbies what to do and the gameplay is really flatlined. This one defines what a cooperative game must be: tense, exciting, team working with a suffered victory. The turns are fast, the search for enemies is always hard and it gets harder every turn, with frustrating enemy powers which inhibit the player’s turn or damage them till death. Objectives’ resolution is the only way to escape from the nightmare but you must always balance your choices: should I buy more characters from the barracks? Should I scan first and then try to fight the enemy? And if I get an event instead of a monster? Should I pass and buy nothing to leave the deck thin? These and other options will make you crazy (in a good way) and when you feel the end is coming, you and your dying team are happy anyway, cause you’ve played a great card game based on an epic movie.

Here we are again for another HexDiceFire’s Review of the Day dear followers! Today I’ve chose to review an American Civil War themed light wargame from Columbia Games, the well known wargame company which made blocks system famous. The game is Shenandoah: Jackson’s Valley Campaign, and it’s played from 1 to 2 players. This wargame depicts the epic campaign of Stonewall Jackson’s CSA army led against three Unionist armies in 1862. The game gives the players the opportunity to revive those ferocious battles following history’s flow or to change the outcome of this scenario, leading your armies in a possible world where Unionist defeat Jackson. It’s all up to you. Let’s look at the box and then at the game in this brief review.

The Box

This wargame comes in a typical box from Columbia Games. They respect a standard that never changes and that makes their boxes really cool to be collected on shelves, cause they resemble books. The paint on the cover it’s really evocative and perfect in the overall design.  Inside the box there are a lot of wooden block in blue (USA) and gray (CSA) along with the stickers you’ll need to stick on them, which are nicely printed and really clear. The only thing I didn’t like was CSA sticker’s background colour which was light brown. I think it could have been better a grey background like the block’s colour but that’s not a great problem, only a matter of tastes. The resistant mounted map is really bigger than I expected and it’s graphically really essential. The artwork on it gives clear info about cities, locations and connections but it’s mostly monochromatic. I appreciated it in any case cause it helps concentrating on the unit without being distracted by a bizarre colour palette (like the ones in old Victory Games, remember?). I reccomend to the producer a smaller wooden cube to keep track of gaming turns, which I noticed it’s not included. The dice are enough for each of the players, so you won’t need to share common dice for the entire match. The rules are really easy to read and to understand, so that makes this game really great cause you can decide to play it only after half an hour of reading.  The last things you’ll find in this wonder-box, are two Unit Displays to organize your armies before setting up the game.

The Game

Shenandoah is medium-light wargame, where players get turns activating their HQ, moving units and fighting in a really particular way. Each army has cubes in their colours that must be placed in their starting cities. Some other cubes are left apart as reserves and enter the game in the following turns only if the owner decides to use them. Once the setup is done, each player should have all their units hidden from other, like in the old classic Stratego by Milton-Bradley, father of wargames’ Fog of War mechanic. The units must be revealed to the enemy only when a battle begins and in no other way during the entire game. Types of units resemble those involved in the Civil War: Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery. Each of these units has a symbol to distinguish it from another one; a letter, useful for set-up and HQ dependency; a strenght factor(1 to 4 with numbers printed in sequence, one for each side of the block) and a letter in couple with a number (the letter defines the quality of the troop, from A which is the best and fires first to C which is poor and fires lastly; the number tells you the maximum number to score a hit with that unit, using a D6 die). When a unit gets a hit, it must be reduced turning the block so that a lower number is visible on the upper side. 

In the example up here, Csa units with Jackson are defending from Banks’ units. Csa units have 1 strenght each, the number on the upper side. Unionist have two 1, a 3 and a 0 (they’re upside down). If Jackson takes one hit, it must be rotated to show the 0 factor in place of 1. A unit which has only a single strenght factor, like these two Csa Regiments, must be destroyed if it takes a hit. The strenght factor tells the player how many D6 dice he must roll when firing with that unit. The battle lasts for 3 rounds and when the fourth begins, the attacker must retreat if he didn’t destroy all enemy pieces. There are also exceptions for Cavalry or for Artillery and there also reinforcement units, in the cities adjacent to the city where the battle is fought, which can join - in later rounds - the fight. Terrains have effect on movements and stacking limits, but they’re easy to remind, so you won’t go mad seaching modifiers on big tables. The fundamental thing in this game is the Supply. Units must trace a continuous line to a Supply Base/City of their colour. South has a very limited supply and North is able to move more freely without risking a total supplies’ cut. Supply points decrease as long as the enemy block on or more of your Supply Base/City. These points are needful to reinforce HQ (without them you won’t move or battle with any unit) which use their Strenght Factor to activate units around them. Supply point can also be spent to reinforce the strenght of one or more combat unit. This is the most strategical factor of the game, so the player must use them wisely. Reinforcements (the units left apart after the setup) are simple units with low values, used as substitutions. Each player can bring of of these units from his display to the field, attaching it to a brigade with the same letter (f.e. Artillery ‘N’ goes with other ‘N’ units and it is activated by a ‘N’ HQ). This is the core of the game, now let’s talk about what I think of it.

(Paolo - Union Player, is watching his display to select a reinforncement unit)

My opinions on the game

Here we are again for another review from HexDiceFire. Today we’re going to take a look inside a universe, the Discworld universe, created by Terry Pratchett. You’ve probably heard about it if you’re a fantasy enthusiast but if you’ve never met Mr. Pratchett in your life (literarily talking!) I reccomend to give it a try reading one of his books!

Inside this strange and wonderful universe, Mayfair Games decided to produce a pair of titles: the first one is Discworld and the other one, the subject of this review, is The Witches. They have been both designed by one of the greatest euro-games author, which is Martin Wallace.

I’m a great fan of Pratchett’s stories so I found that these games were the best gaming adaption of the Discworld’s book and it was like a cardboard journey into my dreams playing these titles. That’s why I decided to share my point of view about The Witches, the most recent title, from 1 to 4 players. Let’s see what’s inside this game’s box.

The Box

There’s a thing I’d like to say about the artwork of this title. It’s simply amazing. From the cover to the board, passing through the cards, everything it’s done with more than artistic touch. There’s passion in this work, that’s why both The Witches and Discworld seemed to me like a tribute to Pratchett done with the heart. The box comes in a regular size with the witches we’re going to interpret on the cover. They address their threatening look to the owner of the game, but they’re more funny than scary as you can see. Inside the box there are many things: a deck of action cards, four hats in four colours (used to represent the withches/players in the game), two six-side die with the face of a ugly witch on one side, the big and detailed cardboard map of Lancre’s county, character’s playmats (one for each player) and a bunch of resistant tokens for different purposes.  Everything is made to last, except for the card which can be ruined with repeated use if not protected by sleeves. You can store the different components easily cause small plastic bags are provided and there’s room to place everything.

(some example tokens from the game)

The Game

Once the setup has been followed you’ll have each player with a character sheet in front of him, their hand of cards, and a witch hat - representing his character - in a location on the board. The main idea of the game is that you and your friends are cooperative and competitive witches, flying over the county, from a location to another, to resolve people’s everyday problems with your ‘magic’ powers. Among these problems there are for example, sick farmer’s pigs, pregnant girls, kid’s fever. These are simple problems (green tokens) for the witches, that’s why there are also harder problems (violet tokens) which are less but more challenging. Among these there are a Vampire family, the Elves, some monster and other evil characters. Most of them must be faced or sooner or later the entire county could fall in panic. So, said that, how do you resolve a problem on the board?  Each turn a player gets to action to use. The main action is moving, from a location to an adjacent one on the board and then resolve a problem is there’s a problem counter on the location. The other action is taking a Tea and happens only if you land on a space occupied by another witch. This could be useful during the game in order to remove hateful counters called “Cackle counters”. These terrible Cackle counters give you -1 point each turn, if you’re the only one to have the most of them. Another good action is flying but it can be performed only by those who have the right card in hand with a broom symbol on it. If a witch flies, she can move from a space to any other space on the board. When a problem is the same space as your witch, you’ll have to deal with the problem. Sometimes those problem counters are already revealed (the easy ones), but if you enter a space with a violet face down counter, it’ll be a hard problem ready to annoy you. To face a problem you’ll have to determine its strenght, which is always printed on the counter. To this strenght you must add a +2 modifier if there’s a panic counter in the space. Then you roll two of the four dice and sum up the results. Then you can play cards from your hands to add a +1 to the die for each symbol on the cards (except from the brooms which are only used to escape or fly). If you want you can withdraw from this problem space using a broom and retreating without penalties. If you decided to play +1 cards from your hand, once you’ve finished you must roll the remaining two dice. Now you must sum togheter all four dice plus the cards to obtain your total strenght. If that total is equal or higher to the problem’s strenght, you resolved this. If it’s lower than the problem’s strenght, then you’ve failed and you must retreat leaving the problem in that location. When rolling the dice, if you roll the witch face on one or more die, then you get one Cackle counter for each of that faces. The game proceeds with this flow: each turn a players draws a card and places a new problem on the board. If the location is already occupied by a problem, the player must place there a Panic counter and then draw another card for the new location. Then the player has his two actions along with any event card he wants to play from his hand. Once he has finished he draws a full hand and must pass to another player. How does the game ends? Well, once the problems piles run out of tokens and the witches have been skillful in avoiding Panic counters to clump over the board, then the game ends. Every witch sums the strenght factor of their resolved problems and subtracts each -1 token received during the game. The one with the higher total is the winner. If at any time during the game, the last Panic counter has been placed on the board, then the players have failed. Also if there are too many elves’  hard problems on the board the game ends with a defeat for everyone.

Do I like this game?

The Witches is a funny and tricky cooperative game. We played it several times and half the times we failed miserably. There’s plenty of alea and luck and while for most of the people an uncontrollable game like this could be a hell, for me it’s just fun. I already said how much i love the art and the theme but I also want to say that the mechanincs suit very well the Discworld’s logic, which is very caothic! It’s mainly a dice rolling game, where the cards are more a support than the key to win the game (differently from Discworld the Boardgame). It’s easy to learn, easy to teach but not easy to win.  I will definitely reccomend this game to every Pratchett’s fan, cause yes, this is a must have. Absolutely. I also reccomend it to those who love the randomness at the table and those who don’t take things too seriously. The game is also suitable for the young and for families and it is a sure entertainment, at least for an hour. It’s really not a game for the alea-haters and for those who don’t like fantasy themed boardgames. A few number of person fortunately! There are no dead times during the games, cause it’s all so dynamic and fast that a player can’t waste too much time thinking what he has to do. This is a good point cause I really hate games (like german, yes) in which you’ll have to stay there and yawn constantly. HexDiceFire give a thumb up to The Witches and invites you to give it a try and let us now what you think. Thanks for reading.

Yesterday, as every Tuesday, I met my friends at “Casus Belli”, the wargaming club where we usually hold our sessions of gaming and reunions.  One our group, Paolo, proposed us to play a classic wargame called “Albert Nofi’s -The Great War” in a re-designed version from One Small Step Games. I’m not a great lover of WWI games, except for Paths of Glory (Gmt Games), one of the most important card-driven in wargaming history. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a try. It wasn’t a good idea. Let’s see why! The counters

Paolo unpunched the counters and sorted them following the colours.  The problem was that the colours were so bad that we couldn’t help him a lot in organizing the counters. Some of them were similar; other were totally different from the usual colour palette used in almost every wargame. Have you ever seen a Red Italian counter? Or a White Great Britain counter? The other problem was the nationalities’ abbreviations. GR for Germans? GK for Greeks? And last but not least: Turkey (in grey and pink) instead of Ottoman Empire? What the hell, I say! 

Let’s read what Wikipedia says about Turkey: The Turkish War of Independence (1919 to 1922), initiated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his colleagues in Anatolia, resulted in the establishment of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923, with Atatürk as its first president.

So, why decide to put Turkey during WWI, when Turkey was a consequence of the Ottoman Empire’s fall? Don’t know the reasons and I’m not sure I want to know them.

The map

Do you remember the old Avalon Hill’s Civilization map? Yes the one with areas and segments everywhere!

Cool, now let’s look the awful work done to create areas in The Great War and let’s check, just for fun, similiarities.

This one is simply one of the worst maps I’ve ever seen. I can tollerate the old work done at Avalon Hill studios decades ago for the classic Civilization, but this 2016 map it’s simply unacceptable. What is this map doing? Is it proned? Is it anemic? And this was also a restyle of the old one!  Go home map, you’re drunk.

The Game

Once we finshed the setup of a 5 months scenario (there are several scenarios included but also a complete campaign), we chose nationalities and began the game. Paolo and Antonio played the Central Powers. Me, Mauro and Roberto played the Allies. The unit were pretty simple on the counters: Armies, Corps and Naval Units. They had no reduced values on the back but an entrenched status. The only units with a reduced side were the Naval Units which had to absorb damage in some cases. The ground combat was pretty simple: resolved with odds and a D6 roll on a table. The results were really strange and sometimes frustrating. Imagine to attack with a odd of 4:1 in your favour and receive the same amount of damage than the enemy on a roll of 3 on 6. Not so realistic and rewarding. The last strange feature I want to talk about, is the damage, which is not applied directly on the ground units involved in the combat but on a resource track, reducing the resources amount according to the loss number. Attacking in this game affect mainly this pool of resource points which are used to deploy new units on the field, to absorb damage and to execute some actions during your turn. These points are also worth Victory Points at the end of the game to gain a Marginal victory with your faction. Once a nations runs out of these points it must lose units on the field and soon be defeated. Although it’s an interesting way of managing the war, it’s surely not a thing I want to find in a wargame. Resources can be an additional feature for Supply and Strategic Redeployment, but not the core of the entire game.  Sure, that’s only my taste and my opinion but we shared this idea at the table, along with other problems we encountered.

The rules were terribly unclear and the tables sometimes vague.  There were no counters to track the Turn, the Year and the Control counters to mark conquered spaces.