Medium games – Page 2 – Random Geek Child

Hearthstone: Battlegrounds

Last week, I talked about the first Hearthstone game mode, and I promised more. So here’s part two: Battlegrounds!

Battlegrounds is an 8-player competition where you each pick one of two Heroes (randomly pulled from a broader lineup), start with three Gold, and instead of using your own card collection, you have to buy minions from Bartender Bob. Unless your ability says otherwise, minions cost three Gold apiece, refreshing the selection costs one, and the cost of upgrading your Tavern Tier decreases by one each turn. There are six Tavern Tiers. As you upgrade through them, you unlock higher Tier minions, usually with better abilities. In both traditional and Battlegrounds, you may only have seven minions on your Board at a time; in Battlegrounds, minions sell for one Gold (with exceptions). If you acquire three of the same minion, they combine into a Golden minion with an improved ability, and playing it lets you Discover (pick between three cards) a minion from the Tavern Tier above yours! Each turn, your board of minions will go up against another player’s, attacking mostly at random (except where abilities like Taunt dictate otherwise). If you have minions left after your opponent’s have all been defeated, each surviving minion’s Tavern Tier is added to your own, and the sum is dealt as damage to your opponent. Unlike in traditional Hearthstone, the minions that died last turn also return to your board! This gives you a lot of opportunity to build them up; my favorite minion type for this is Mechs, to which Magnetic minions can bond, allowing you to not only increase their Attack and Health, but also give them additional abilities! Only five of the ten minion types are used in each game, though, so you have to get comfortable with multiple strategies.

Battlegrounds characters start with different amounts of Armor on top of their 30 Health, likely to counterbalance their various abilities, but just like in traditional Hearthstone, when you run out of Health you’re out. If there’s an odd number of players left, the NPC Kel’Thuzad will reanimate someone’s board so that everyone still have a match. The last player standing wins! Battlegrounds takes longer than traditional Heathstone, because while the duration of each turn is set, there is no Fatigue mechanic to limit the length of the game. However, because each turn is a set length, usually much longer than I need to make my decisions, I’ve found Battlegrounds is useful for when I want to work on something in small doses. I can take my turn, get something done, and then take a break while I take my next turn!

This week, they also came out with the Anomalies update, giving each game a special rule like “Only Mechs are in the Tavern” (a favorite of mine) or “Tavern Tier 7 exists. Start with 10 extra Armor.” As you might imagine, these massively impact your strategy, up to and including which Hero you pick!

The cherry on top is Bartender Bob himself. He talks. Sometimes it’s in response to actions or transitions, like “Don’t tell the others – I’m rooting for you” at the start of a combat, and sometimes he’s just making conversation, which is when he’s at his funniest. Some of my favorites include “”Oh, I’ve dealt with the League of Evil. Terrible people. But good tippers!” and “All the best minions come here. I’ve got the spicy pretzel mustard.” There is so much to be said for this game, and still this NPC is genuinely one of my favorite parts.

Don’t Kill Doctor Lucky!

I want him dead, but more importantly I want to be the one to do it! Aaand that right there is the premise of the game Kill Doctor Lucky. Everyone is in Doctor Lucky’s Estate and, with the exception of Doctor Lucky, everyone wants to kill him, and so will foil anyone else’s attempts to do him in first.

Because it’s from Cheapass Games, the board doesn’t come with character tokens, so you’ll have to provide your own. In the pictures below, the centipede is Doctor Lucky. (Also, this is a three-player minimum game, so please ignore the fact that we only played with two.)

Everyone except Doctor Lucky starts in the Drawing Room, labeled with a 0. The Doctor’s starting position is determined randomly by cards. Gameplay is fairly simple – players may either move one space and, if the room they land in has a name, draw a card, or they may use Move and Room cards to move more than that, move Doctor Lucky, and/or attempt a murder. To try to kill Doctor Lucky, you must be alone with him in a room where nobody else has line of sight. Line of sight is determined by drawing a straight line between the doorways so, for instance, anyone in the Winter Garden can see into the Green House, Piazza, and Carriage House, and the latter three can also see into the Hedge Maze, but because of the way the doors are aligned, the Winter Garden does not have line of sight into the Hedge Maze.

If you successfully isolate Doctor Lucky, you may attempt to kill him. Either you’re using your hands for a value of one, or you can play a weapon for its murder value instead! Some weapons are worth more points in corresponding places. Like the Shoe Horn in the photo below, which would normally have been worth two points, but because the attempt took place in the Lancaster Room, it was worth seven!

At this point, the other players go around in order and choose whether or not to play Failure cards. For an attempt to fail, the collective Failure value must equal or exceed the value of the weapon! With the appropriate amount of players, this also incites a bit of gambling on whether you think the other players can foil it without you having to expend cards. I’ve seen games end quickly because of that gambit.

Provided Doctor Lucky isn’t dead and the game isn’t over, your turn ends with Doctor Lucky moving into the next numbered room along his path. Usually play passes clockwise. However, if Doctor Lucky’s movement brings him into a room with a player in it, play immediately skips to that person’s turn. Depending on where the Doctor starts and what everyone else is doing, it is entirely possible for one player to have taken three turns before another takes their first.

Dorkstock runs a life-size Kill Doctor Lucky at GameholeCon, and – having been suckered into being Doctor Lucky before – my personal interpretation is that the Doctor is so oblivious to everyone trying to kill them because they’re busy reading. I too may not notice a cannon going off near my head if I had my nose buried in a book!

Time to Face The Reckoners!

Actually, time to be the Reckoners! The Reckoners board game is based off the Brandon Sanderson series of the same name, following a group of rebels (the Reckoners) as they challenge superpowered megalomaniacs like the Epic Steelheart. Appropriately, it’s a cooperative game, featuring a team of 1-6 players coordinating to defeat Steelheart before he wipes out the population.

That’s more complicated than it sounds, naturally. Steelheart has a lot of lackeys hanging about the city making life difficult, and whenever you defeat one, another takes their place. You have to defeat them, though, as left unchecked these Epics will devastate both the population and your efforts at defeating their boss.

The short version is this: players each have a character ability and dice, and each turn everyone rolls up to three times to determine their actions for the round. These include wiping out Enforcement (which accelerate the rate at which Epics grow more destructive), containing Epic abilities (the ways that they’re destructive), researching Epics’ weaknesses (to lower their health or, if they have a prime invincibility, to render them mortal), attacking Epics, and acquiring Plan Tokens or money. Plan Tokens act as wild dice, and dice in general are also used to move between parts of the city and take down barricades. The Reckoners will take their actions, cash in the rewards for any Epics they’ve killed, and purchase nifty gadgets to make their jobs easier. The Epics, in turn, will repopulate the vacant City Districts and activate their abilities, including Steelheart’s, who then moves to a random location. This is especially inconvenient, as you have to be in the same City District as an Epic to affect them. Steelheart also has a prime invincibility, so you have to research his weakness before you can deal him any damage.

The first time we played this, it wound up being a slow and calculated damage race between Steelheart’s health and the remaining population, won only barely. The second and third times, the damage part proved to be our strength. It helped that we played with Megan, whose character ability is turning one containment die into three attacks, and helped even more when we got her an Equipment Card that turned one anti-Enforcement die into three containments. In the picture below, she had the potential to do twenty-seven damage in one turn, or more if she used her Plan Tokens. Yeah… Steelheart didn’t stand a chance.

If you can’t tell by the fact that I’ve played it repeatedly, I adore this game. I loved the books, and to see them adapted so well into a board game I can play with my fellow fans is perpetually exciting! It’s heavy in both strategy and luck, and no matter what difficulty you play it at, a plan well-executed is always something to celebrate.

Articulate! And Quickly

Articulate! is a party game one might call the word version of Charades. Someone is trying to convey the word on the card they drew, while someone else is trying to guess it. The difference is that in Articulate! the person conveying the word is doing so with… more words!

Play starts when the timer is upended. There are six categories on each card, and the active player will attempt to describe the word from the category their team’s token is on – for example, the Start space is Object – without using any form of the word itself. If their team guesses it, they get to draw another, and so forth until the timer runs out. They may also pass on one card per turn, unless they’re playing with house rules like we were; in our case it was twice. Occasionally, instead of categories a space corresponds to the spade symbol, which appears next to one random word on each card. I gather the official rules have special mechanics around this, but again, we were playing with house rules. We also didn’t use the spinner.

Once the timer runs out, the team counts how many cards they got right and moves their token that many spaces on the board. This determines what their category is next time! We found that the Person and World categories were UK-biased, so the others were easier for Mom and I to score high on. Especially Nature! Regardless of where you’re from, though, this is one of those games where the better you know your teammates, the more likely you are to do well. Especially if you can use shared fandoms to your advantage!

Victory, unsurprisingly, involves reaching the Finish space.

I also just discovered that Drumond Park (the company behind Articulate!) have all the cards for free on their website so that folks can play remotely! How cool is that?!

Rummikub

I gather Rummikub has many variants, but I’m only going to comment on the version I’ve played, for obvious practical reasons. If any of you play by different rules, though, I’d love to hear about it!

The version I’ve played goes like this: everyone draws 14 tiles at random out of the bag, and lays them out on their tray, where only they can see. Your goal is to make sets of 3 or more tiles, in either a consecutive run of the same color, or multiple colors of the same number. The tile selection is effectively two decks of standard playing cards, so there’s two of 1-13, in each of the four colors. There are also two wild tiles, that can be used in place of anything! The goal is to be the first player to empty your tray of tiles.

For your first play, you need to have 30 points of tiles, determined by adding their face values. If you can’t play, you draw another tile from the bag instead; in this fashion, you may find yourself with 26 tiles before you can actually play anything, draw that higher value tile you needed and suddenly clear out half of them! Getting on the board late, then, is not the game-defining disadvantage that it is in so many other games.

Once you’ve made that first play, you no longer have to hit a certain point threshold to play your tiles. Furthermore, you can now use the tiles other people have played to complete your sets, so long as the set they played remains complete! For instance, in the picture, I could take the red 3 from the far right set (which, having 4, 5, and 6, is still a valid run), swap it for the wild tile in the middle, and use it to make a run with… my blue 9 and 10, my yellow 5 and 6, my black 3 and 4, or my black 11 and 13. Or my black and red 13’s… Wild tiles bring a whole host of opportunities! You don’t have to make a new set, either; if you have a stray tile or three that fit an existing line-up, you can just add them on!

All of which is to say, Rummikub requires a lot of strategy and split concentration, to follow the ever-shifting layout of the board, your own tiles, and how to use both to maximum advantage. For a game with such simple mechanics, it’s certainly a challenge!

Quick, Get Them Out of Cryo!

In Cryo, your colony ship has crash-landed on a frozen world, and your only hope is to wake your crew from cryostasis and relocate underground… before the sun sets, and the surface temperature drops from “inhospitable” to “certain death.” Under those circumstances, I expected this to be a cooperative game, but the ship was felled by anonymous sabotage and the crew has split into factions, each only looking out for their own. Which seems massively inefficient when everyone has the same goal right now, that being “don’t die,” but fear makes people irrational enough that I suppose the story checks out.

As for the mechanics, I was definitely impressed! Each player has their own platform for their faction’s materials, which they get by deploying and recalling drones to and from the shared board. To deploy, they take one drone from their platform and place it on an unobstructed dock, which lets them take one of that dock’s adjacent actions. There are many of these, scattered between the four sections of the ship, but the most important are Stasis Control, Resource Space, and Launch. Stasis Control lets you trade up to three organic materials for an equal number of your crew pods, which move from the stasis chambers on the ship segment to the safety of your platform. Launch – the one dock that can hold any number of drones – is how you transport crew pods from your platform to the underground caves, and Resource Space gives you a resource tile to either redeem for that benefit or place in a slot on your platform.

Those slots on your platform are important because of your other choice of action, to recall. When you do this, all of your drones on the board return to open docks on your platform. Each dock has an associated action. These start the game incomplete, with costs and/or rewards undefined. That’s what the resource tiles are for! Once all of an action’s slots are filled, you can activate it whenever you land a drone there, provided you have the resources to pay the cost. Some tiles even have two benefits, or a choice between two benefits, both of which are especially useful to keep!

One of these benefits is the option of drawing or playing a card. The cards are one of my favorite aspects of this game, because they can each be used in not one, not two, but three different ways! Four, actually, if you count scrapping them for materials. Equipping the card as an upgrade acts as a permanent effect, like Automation in the picture, which lets you take an additional platform action when you recall without having to land a drone there. Upgrades are at the top of each card. On the left is a mission, which gives you additional means of scoring points, and the body of the card is a vehicle. Vehicles are necessary to use the Launch dock, and each have a maximum number of crew pods they can store/carry. Some also have special effects! I think it’s pretty ingenious how they laid out the cards to have several mechanics each, and how they line up with the slots of the platform!

The other effect of recalling is resolving incidents, which serve as the ticking clock towards sunset. Each ship section has one face-up incident token; the active player will choose one to resolve. For most of the game, there are only two options: looting and sabotage. Looting gives you an immediate benefit, whether that’s materials, energy, or card actions. Sabotage destroys all crew pods in the lowest-numbered stasis chamber that hasn’t yet been destroyed. In the picture above, all four tokens are sabotage, so the next person to recall had no choice. But because section one of Engineering was already vacated, the explosion went off safely and no crew members were harmed! The last token to refill an incident space is sunset, the resolution of which ends the game.

The other way to end the game is if all of a player’s crew pods are in caverns or destroyed. Either way, it’s time for scoring! Each player scores points for crew pods in caverns and on their platform, upgrades and vehicles, mission conditions, and who has the most crew pods in each cavern. The player with the most points wins!

Cryo has a lot of moving parts, but because the overarching turn mechanics are simple and the board is well laid out, it isn’t overwhelming or hard to keep track of actions. Keeping track of what you have left to do is harder, but it’s definitely worth it!

According to the website, there are also solo rules.

The Captain is Dead?!

The Captain is Dead is a cooperative board game reminiscent of Star Trek, in which characters of various color-coded skillsets work together to fend off an alien attack and repair the Jump Drive of their starship.

Characters start in the rooms of the ship that correspond to their skillsets. For example, the Teleporter Chief starts in Engineering. Each room (except the hallways) has Systems that provide useful bonuses while operational but can be damaged by Alerts. Alerts represent the damage done by the alien ship and are drawn after each player’s turn; if External Scanners are operational, you have the benefit of getting to see the next couple in advance before they hit! Some of the more inconvenient Alerts are Anomalies, which stay in play and have a continued effect until you research them away: Alien Ships, which join the one attacking you and amplify damages; and Hostile Aliens, which invade the ship and limit movement. And of course, many Alerts knock Systems offline.

Systems are repaired by a combination of Skill cards and actions. Each character has a set number of actions per turn, a rank to determine turn order, and a special ability – the first game, I played the Cyborg, who’s immune to Anomalies. Some of them also have Skill discounts. The Admiral, for example, has 2 Command discounts, so when that player would need to spend Command cards, they subtract 2 from the cost. This kind of spending also applies to Battle Plans and Upgrades. The former is a single-use advantage obtained in the War Room, while the latter are new Systems that can be researched and installed in the Science Lab. These especially are massive game changers! Our favorite was Epinephrine Ventilation, which gives everyone an extra action.

The victory condition is simple: repair the Jump Drive! Unfortunately, there are many ways to lose before you can. If you take damage that would lower your shields past 0%, have to add more Hostile Aliens to your ship than there are Hostile Aliens left, or have to draw an Alert when there are none left to play, the game is over and the crew has lost. In our first game, the one in the photo, we were so focused on fixing Systems we lost track of the Hostile Aliens and were overrun! The second game, though, we managed to get two Upgrades installed early, and rode that advantage to victory. It all depends on your characters and the cards!

Livin’ That Redneck Life

Let me start by noting that I usually ignore the recommended age for games, but the 13+ suggestion for this game – and by extension this post – is reasonable. The humor is a bit off-color, and if your preteens start asking about – or already understand – the Moonshine Chart results, it’s not my fault.

That all said… Redneck Life! Because somebody looked at the Game of Life and decided this version needed to happen. For any of you who aren’t familiar with Life, the basic premise is that you roll, move, resolve the text of the space you land on, and you’re trying to have as much money as possible by the end of the game. Or, in Redneck Life, the most teeth left. In this variation, you start the game with no money, but you also don’t need to have money to purchase things; you may instead choose to take red Check ‘N Scrams, worth $100 of debt each. At the end, every $100 you have can be put into buying new teeth to replace the ones you’ve lost, while every $100 of remaining debt is another tooth gone.

Like in Life, there are a few Stop spaces you’ll land on no matter what you rolled. At the first Stop, you’ll roll for the school grade you completed (and its corresponding career, i.e. if you dropped out after 7th grade you’re a taxidermist) and buy a rig, which will have to fit however many young’ens you accrue, or else you’ll have to buy another. I’ve found it’s cheaper to buy high capacity vehicles to begin with, since you can’t sell them back to the Rig Rodeo if your family outgrows the car. At the other Stops, you will inevitably get married and buy a house, get divorced, and marry again. You’ll have at least one red-headed step kid named “Darryl,” and you could just as easily have six, in which case we like to spell them all differently, just for giggles. There was one game I finished with eleven young’ens total, so like I said, get a big car!

There are many other entertaining features, like the Tobacco and Moonshine Charts, Go Redneckin’ cards, and the hilarious names that abound (my favorites being “Denise” and “DeNephew”), but I’ll let you discover them for yourselves, if you’re so inclined. It’s good for a laugh! Just, as I said, not entirely child appropriate. Rest assured that we had no idea my grandma owned this game until all of her grandkids were old enough to play.

Geez, those are some Loaded Questions!

The game Loaded Questions comes from the same creators as The Worst-Case Scenario Card Game, with a similar concept. When the question is posed, however, instead of everyone guessing how the active player will respond, everyone else responds and the active player has to guess which responses belong to whom!

It goes like this: each card has four categories. When you roll and move, the space you land on will determine which category you read off, unless you land on the wild space and get to choose your own. That question, whatever it is, is what your fellow players will be answering. For instance, in the photo below I picked the No-Brainers category, so the question posed was “What’s the best song you don’t currently have in your music collection?”

When everyone has written their answers, their sheets are handed to the previous roller, who shuffles them and reads them off. The current player will then decide who they think wrote each answer. For each correct match, they get to move forward an additional space! I especially like this game because it can be challenging even among close friends. In a lot of games like these, familiarity is an unmitigable advantage, but what I’ve found with Loaded Questions is like-mindedness just results in extremely similar answers, which makes them difficult to correctly attribute.

The objective is to reach the end of the board, and match at least three players’ answers correctly once you’re there. I’m not sure why that’s a fixed number, as it seems to me that it should vary depending on your number of players… but aside from that the mechanics are sound, the questions are fun, and we had a blast!

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

Those famous last words are, as it turns out, an excellent basis for a card game. The Worst-Case Scenario Card Game, to be exact. This game is all about comparing hypothetical bad scenarios and trying to guess how your opponents will rate them from 1 (bad) to 5 (the worst). Since many of these scenarios can kill you, the player to go first is whoever has the worst survival skills.

The active player, entitled “The Victim,” starts their turn by spinning the Victim Wheel – this will affect scoring later. Next, they’ll draw 5 scenario cards from the deck and lay them out face-up in the middle of the play area. For instance, your five scenarios might be “only eat one food for the rest of your life,” “wake up to find tarantulas in your bed,” “snowmobile off a 100-foot drop,” “recurring nightmares for weeks,” and “exposed to high amounts of radiation.” At this point, everyone will grab their numbered chips – color-coded by player, with X’s on the backs – and The Victim will rank the disasters by which they deem the worst, while everyone else will rank the disasters by what they think The Victim deems the worse. This is very much a “how well do you know your friends?” type of game, and it would probably be morbidly fascinating to play with people you don’t know. Yet. Because all good friendships start with uncovering one’s deepest fears, right?

…Alright, maybe not. Regardless, each player places their chips X-side up next to the corresponding cards, ideally with The Victim’s chips on the far side from everyone else’s. Once everyone has placed their chips, The Victim will go through one card at a time, first revealing everyone else’s rankings, then their own. The goal is to match numbers with The Victim! For each successful match, a player gains one point… unless the Victim Wheel landed on Score Your Chips!, in which case each match is worth the number of the rank. Other Victim Wheel effects include Double Up! (all players double their points for the round) and Bad Is Good! (players who match The Victim’s #1 chip get a 1-point bonus). The Victim’s score for the round equals whichever other player scored the highest, including bonuses, and a score sheet is included in the box. In a 3, 4, or 6 player game, there are 12 rounds, while in a 5 player game there are 10, so everyone gets an equal amount of turns being The Victim. And whoever has the most points at the end wins!

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