Dave Reviews: D&D The Masquerade

Curse of Strahd

Most D&D players are just that—players. Campaign books are for DMs. So, how well can I review a book without spoiling it?

I don't know, so let's start with the one that has a spoiler on the cover.

Strahd von Zarovich is one of D&D's legendary villains, first appearing in the Ravenloft module published in 1983. He's by far the most famous vampire in D&D lore, and many players will be at least passingly familiar with the name if they see the title of the book. Even if they're not, the cover is kind of a giveaway that this is the villain and he is definitely a vampire. So, if you're planning to run the campaign, be aware that where everything is going to lead will be fairly obvious from the start, unless you go off-book. (For objectivity purposes, this review necessarily does not go off-book, aside from one small comment later on.)

D&D campaigns are frequently about solving a small mystery that leads to a bigger one, and a bigger one still, until major villains are uncovered and thwarted. Without that element of surprise, the tension in CoS needs another trigger, and this is the core of the DM's job—running Strahd von Zarovich in a way appropriate to the campaign. Different DMs will give Strahd different amounts of screen time, but it should be no secret that he's paying attention to what the party is doing. Or, perhaps more haunting, that he could be paying attention, if he so chose. (Spoiler? Mmm... not too much.)

Of course, as a levels 1-10 module, nobody's walking in and kicking Strahd in the teeth. As befits a vampire's realm, gloomy Barovia is full of undead threats and other monsters, like (REDACTED) and (REDACTED), and just wait until you meet (SUPER REDACTED). In addition, there's nothing, least of all the DM, stopping PCs from going and getting themselves in trouble. Some campaign books are printed with a rough flowchart of how the campaign should progress; CoS is about as much of a sandbox as you can get, allowing players to travel wherever they want, as long as they don't get eaten by whatever they find.

How often do things want to eat them, you ask?

Why, that would be a spoiler.

(Not-really-a-spoiler in the form of a rhetorical question: You think a vampire lord doesn't have vampire underlings?)

The campaign atmosphere is very dark. "Gloomy" is a word that will be used often in most games. People go a little batty under these conditions. As a result, the optional madness rules found in the DMG get put to work here. However—and this is more a fair warning to everyone—there's very little detail apart from the base rules in the DMG. That means that if the characters meet anyone with what's considered "indefinite madness", they won't be able to help until they are, at best, level 9, in a campaign that doesn't expect characters to pass level 10. That is to say, not until near the end of the campaign.

Is that a problem? Not in and of itself. To be blunt, CoS is not a campaign where everything is expected to go perfectly. However, if some players are not likely to appreciate over-the-top depictions of mental illness, having such characters be introduced with no real way to help them may not prove to be much fun. Although DMs are prone to changing any campaign to fit the party or what they want to throw at their players, this is an issue worth bringing up here so groups can discuss it and know where everyone stands with throwing "crazy" NPCs into the mix.

Overall, the campaign is well-made, including the clear intent of making things difficult for characters, NPCs that are incredibly memorable when used to their potential, and locations that thoroughly evoke the hopelessness that the land is supposed to create in people. Barovia is not the best locale for a classic heroic fantasy, so make sure you want to play something else or have a group that will enjoy something else. But if this sounds like the kind of campaign you want to be involved with, it probably is.

Score: Ten vampire bites and two chipped fangs.

Dave Reviews: Terraforming Politics

Terraforming Mars: Turmoil

Is Terraforming Mars not complicated enough for you? Welcome to the "biggest & most strategic expansion" for the game, according to its Kickstarter. And according to me. I can verify that it is, shall we say, hearty.

But is that good?

If you look at the box art, with the shiny white room and the dozens of representatives listening to some guy with more charisma than brains flail about and yell, you could be forgiven for thinking, "Where the hell is this supposed to happen? It takes forever to get a city built here." The way I think about it is that, as opposed to Douglas Adams' theory, this is really what happens to middle managers—they get fired into space to act as delegates whose only role is to get bought off by giant corporations.

Because that is, basically, what Turmoil is about. There's a new system of factions, one of which rules each generation. The ruling faction is determined by who has the most delegates, and gives certain bonuses to actions performed during their round in charge. Non-aligned delegates are added to the terraforming committee depending on which global events are drawn or occur, but for the most part delegates come from the players—each player gets one delegate they can place for free as an action (the cost of doing business), and they can purchase more if they want.

Being the first to support a faction gives you the party leader; being the party leader of the faction when they come to power gives you the chairman as well. Having the chairman gives you influence, as does having the party leader and additional delegates in the dominant party (whoever has the most members, which is not the same as the ruling party... politics are complicated). Influence helps you gain extra beneficial effects, or avoid catastrophic effects, from the global events that occur. You see the events coming a couple turns in advance, giving you a chance to plan, but even if no one tries to stop you from buying extra influence, it's not necessarily cheap to gain high influence quickly.

A more cost-effective way to gain influence is to take the party leadership of a faction and then funnel your free delegates into the same faction, which will eventually become dominant. However, if that faction is unlikely to be dominant on a given turn, you need to make sure there's no effect you want your influence to enhance or mitigate in the coming event.

What you'll also find is that, because TM is a game that allows unlimited actions as long as you have them available, the political aspect puts a greater emphasis on having high monetary income. Not only does more money coming in let you buy politicians, the expansion makes your Terraforming Rating drop by one every turn. Thus, everyone is looking for ways to mitigate the income loss, and income boosts are more beneficial in a relative sense than in the base game. In the base game, it was at least theoretically possible to have a level of income that made it so you had a hard time spending all that money; now it's just not going to happen, because you have less money and all these politicians that you can spend it on.

The Kickstarter says this is an expert expansion. That is absolutely correct. However, not only is that true, it's an expansion where you really need to have the rules as understood as possible when you start playing, because trying to figure it out on the fly takes time. The base TM is supposed to be about a two hour game; our first attempt at the expansion, with five players (two new to TM), went four hours without coming close to completion. The snowball effects that carry through to the end were just about to hit, but it still would have taken at least five hours start to finish.

For all that, we still had fun, so if you have an open night with no real concern for game length, go for it. But much of that fun had to do with the fact that Terraforming Mars is a very good game on a base level. This expansion changes the game in a way that some people will find refreshing, but it's really just more involved without being much better or worse.

Score: Twenty-seven purchased delegate seats out of thirty-six.

Dave Reviews: The Third Century

Century: A New World

If I'm going to review the third Century, it might be more interesting to cover the decline of the Roman Empire during that period. Over twenty emperors served in the role in a fifty year span after the death of Alexander Severus. Isn't that cool? Or, you know, historically interesting?

But you're probably not here for that.

Century: A New World is the last game in the Century trilogy. Like Spice Road and Eastern Wonders, it features cube trading as its core mechanic but plays very differently to the others outside of that. It also combines with the other games to make yet more playable games, but that falls outside this review.

In fact, this review will assume a familiarity with at least one of the other Century games on the part of the reader, probably Spice Road. This is because the design of the games becomes more complicated as you go along, and if someone were to be newly introduced to the series, they should absolutely be directed towards Spice Road first. Although the trading options are more diverse, all you need to be concerned with is whether you're trading for the right spices. Eastern Wonders and, now, A New World add more considerations into the mix.

This version of Century has the simplest trades of the three. You can still make multiple trades on a turn if you have the goods for it (e.g. one green for two red can become four green for eight red if you have the green cubes), but the vast majority of trades work in small numbers and without bringing a variety of cubes into the mix. The point cards are also highly simplified, always needing three cubes in some variety to take them.

You have a certain number of villagers (six or seven to start, maxes at twelve), and each trade requires moving a certain number of villagers into a trade slot. If someone else is in a spot you want, you can bump them out by putting in one more villager than they have. This allows you to grab a trade spot you really need, but since the only way to normally get your villagers back is to skip a turn and rest, it's very helpful to the opponent you're bumping out. When you want to score a card, you also need to use however many villagers the slot that card is in requires. This aspect of trade is also quite easy to deal with.

The complications come from the extras attached to the scoring cards. Each one has a bonus ability and a symbol. The bonus ability can let you use one less villager to trade in areas with the attached icon, take an extra cube of a certain type when trading in areas with the attached icon, gain extra villagers, and so on. The symbols are connected to bonus tokens you can optionally from the scoring card slots. These usually require a certain symbol or pair of symbols, and you earn bonus points from each of those you have on your scoring cards at the end of the game. So, when scoring, you're not just looking for points; you're also looking for bonuses that will be especially effective in helping you as the game progresses.

Optimally, players will be able to use similar bonuses to help themselves in a similarly effective way. That is, if you have two bonuses that let you spend one less villager, and I have two bonuses that let me spend one less villager in different locations, we should be about equally able to win as long as we play to these strengths we've earned during the game.

However, it suffers from an imbalance issue. Not a major one, but one that, no matter how long I spend looking it over, I can't figure out their logic. They attached the icons to certain cube colors for the aesthetics—baskets, leaves, and corn are connected to yellow and green, whereas meat, bones, and leather are red and brown—and, in line with the value of those cube combinations, the villagers required for most of the yellow/green nodes max out at two, while the red/brown ones max at three. Thematic, right?

What ends up happening, though, is that if one person gets a -1 villager bonus to the basket spaces, and someone else gets a -1 villager bonus to the bone spaces, the latter player has an advantage. The reason is that while that player will go through their villagers faster (the bone nodes cost two), when they rest, the bone nodes re-open and they can again take advantage of their bonus. The 1-cost basket nodes, on the other hand, remain full, and that player has more turns where their bonus avails them nothing. You also have to unlock one more basket node than bone node for them all to be available.

On top of all that, if the player with the bone bonus receives a second one, now three spaces with a three-villager base cost are only one villager each for him, which is incredibly powerful. The basket bonus player, on the other hand, only benefits from a second -1 bonus in one node, because most of them cost two and you have to use a minimum of one villager.

Maybe this works out better than I realize when everyone is experienced at the game. Maybe it works... in some way I just don't understand. Emerson Matsuuchi did well enough with Spice Road and Eastern Wonders that he deserves some benefit of the doubt, that there's strong logic behind these choices and it wasn't a pure experiment or a design he finalized under deadline pressure.

And it's not like the game is bad; you'll still spend time agonizing over making the right trades, parsing out your moves for maximum effectiveness, and most games will still be fairly close by the end. If you're a big fan of Spice Road and Eastern Wonders, I'm sure you'll enjoy this. It's worth picking up both as a continuation of the series and for the additional combo games you can create with the other games. But if somebody is kind of meh about the first two, this isn't the game that's likely to change their minds.

Score: Seven cubes (three red, two green, two brown) out of ten cargo slots.

Dave Reviews: A Whole New World

Ecos: The First Continent

Did you ever wonder how Pangaea was formed? Read a science book!

I'll wait.

OK. Now, did you ever want to form your own Pangaea? Play this game!

Ecos is the world-buildingest world-building game on the market. When people usually talk about world building, they're referring to the construction of civilizations and backgrounds for broader storytelling, not crafting the land itself. In Ecos, you use hex tiles to build (and alter) the landscape on which the flora and fauna of your world shall grow and thrive (and die, if you wish it).

The hexes work very simply. The game starts with four tiles laid out in a particular pattern (first-timers are suggested to have a grassland and desert together with water on either side, but there are others once you're used to the game). From there, when hexes are placed, they're either grassland, desert, or water, and they can generally be placed anywhere adjacent to at least one other hex. Mountains can be placed on any land tile. Forests can be placed in any grassland, and an extra forest can be placed if there is a mountain on the tile (so grasslands max out at a mountain and two forests, deserts at a mountain and one forest). Animal tokens have icons to indicate where they can go.

The core gameplay loop involves the elements and players' cards. Each player starts with twelve cards, three of which begin face up on the table (the active cards). There's a bag with forty nice, chunky element tiles inside, representing sun, water, and so on. One player pulls an element from the bag; everyone then takes one of their seven energy cubes and places it on a matching symbol on one of their cards. When you have all the element symbols on a card covered by cubes, you use its effect(s). Rather than discard it, though, you rotate it clockwise. Every card has leaves on top, usually more than one; when you rotate it, the next side facing up will have one fewer leaf. In this way, you can keep using a card until it's down to one leaf, at which point you can use it once more, then discard it. Since there's no limit to how many cards you can have active at any given time, this is a clever way to give value to cards with less powerful effects.

But how do you get those cards? And what happens if you can't play one of your cubes?

These issues are where the dial comes in. Every player has a square dial. If you can't play a cube, or don't want to, you rotate the dial clockwise. Once you rotate it twice, you have the option to take a new card. If you pass on that and rotate it a third time, you have the option to either play another card on the table (which gives you more elements to play and/or more options for certain elements) or take another energy cube (which you'll need as you increase your number of active cards). And you want more cards in play; many of them let you add energy cubes of particular elements to other cards, which can let you finish those cards and obtain those effects, creating turns with some serious combo effects. And if you can't use the bonus elements, you get more dial turns, letting you play more cards so you can land combos later.

One player keeps drawing element tiles until they hit a wild. Then, if no one's reached eighty points, the next player draws in the same fashion. With forty tiles and only two wilds, this means one player can draw for quite some time before they have to stop... or only be able to draw a few. In theory, this sounds unfair, since effects are resolved with the Harbinger (tile-drawer) first and then around the table. However, this has little practical effect on the game, since it's quite rare to wind up in a situation where the first person's card dramatically impacts the second's, and even if it does, the second has the option to pull the last-placed cube off and turn their dial instead. At worst this effect might cost a player a couple of points, and with eighty being needed, it's extremely unlikely one person will benefit from this occurrence enough to swing the game unless it was already very close.

Overall, Ecos doesn't try to do too much with its system, and what it does is very clean. Every aspect of the gameplay loop is filled with an option, which means you're never really at the mercy of the system. Your twelve starting cards will carry you either to the end or close, which means it's good that they offer an option to get more, but you can focus on ramping up your capabilities with more active cards and energy cubes rather than trying to get enough cards to stay afloat. That's more fun. The luck factor of elements being pulled from the bag is mitigated by the fact the number of each element type is listed on your dial, and you can make decisions about which cards to play with maximum information about what the odds are of pulling the elements you need, both generally and on the current turn.

It's worth noting that this is not a game that leans heavily into its theme. Some cards let you play animals onto the tiles and move them around, and it can be fun to watch the antelope run once leopards are on the board, but the appearance of specific animals (as well as forests and mountains) is pretty random. You're not building a coherent ecosystem or anything like that; you're playing a game with a planet-building aesthetic. It will be much more of a draw for players who appreciate excellent game systems rather than games which play strongly into their themes.

One other thing: Bonus points for the containers. There are dozens of cubes and over a hundred animal tokens, but the game includes clever cardboard boxes you build when you first open the game that keep everything sorted. It's outstanding, and three years after Histrio came out, I'm still waiting for more games to do players this kind of service.

Score: Ten herbivores out of eleven animals (which makes for one happy predator).

Dave Reviews: Space Battle System #468

Star Realms

I've been told that my reviews are, and I quote, "funnier when (I) lose". I strenuously deny that I review games differently based on my personal results; I am always funny.

To that end, I will now review a game that is good and which I never, ever win.

Star Realms is a deckbuilder with, somewhat obviously, a space warfare setting. Like other deckbuilders, it uses some core mechanics deckbuilding veterans will be used to along with its own twists on the genre.

The familiar: a starting deck of ten cards, eight with money for buying other cards and two with attack so you have a bit of uncertainty early on. A resource for buying cards (trade) and a resource for doing damage to the enemy (attack). Cards of varying price with effects that strengthen as their cost goes up, creating a bit of a luck-based situation if one killer card hits the board and the first person who draws enough money to buy it winds up with a notable advantage.

The main difference: All cards in the deck are one of four colors. These colors are used to trigger team bonuses on a large percentage of cards. Those familiar with Ascension may recall an expansion where each player takes the role of a hero relating to one of the four factions in that game, making the purchase or use of that faction's cards a bit more useful, but in Star Realms this is core to the gameplay loop.

Each color has its own style. Green cards are nearly all attack-focused, with some card draw tied in. Yellow is aggressive with discard effects and decent attack resources, but it offers more gold than green. Red is built around scrapping cards (removing them from your deck). Blue offers the most gold and authority (which is Star Realms' version of hit points, so you can think of it as life gain), and its combos can dominate if given a chance to work, but they take more time than the other colors to get going.

Most modern deckbuilders offer some way to remove starting cards from your deck. How useful this mechanic is varies by the game; in Star Realms, because playing multiple cards of one color is central to winning most of the time, getting rid of non-colored starter cards is a huge benefit. So you want red, right? But the scrap cards come at the expense of having fewer resources than other cards of the same cost, so if you have access to more cards of a different color, it should be fine to get those, right? Well...

In general, you're trying to avoid building a deck with a few of each color. Some cards are individually powerful and don't have a team bonus worked into their design, so if you rely on those, not focusing on a color might be fine. But, when you play a couple of Cutters (two-cost blue cards) and you earn four authority, two trade, and four attack from each one, it feels like you robbed your opponent blind. It feels especially good when you're used to other deckbuilders, where you work to scrape together a few more resources each time through the deck, and here you land a couple cheap cards that work together to bring in a veritable bounty.

The real upshot is that while expensive cards certainly are powerful, and you pretty much always want them, the right set of cheap cards can have powerful effects as well when they work together. More over, because you want combos, there's a certain benefit to buying more cheap cards, since you're more likely to match them in any given hand. And, because so many cards are attack-based, it's less likely for you or your opponent to pile up early trade cards to buy something expensive quickly that might break the game.

There's another difference which explains some of the plethora of attack cards: bases. Once played, they stay on the board until destroyed, and each one requires a certain amount of attack to remove. Some of them, the outposts, must be destroyed for you and your other bases to be attacked at all, meaning they provide a certain amount of effective health each time through the deck, just like cards that give you authority. Other bases can be bypassed, but bases trigger color combos, so unless you're close to beating your opponent, you usually want to destroy the optional ones as well. Bases that stick on the board for more than a turn or two are usually big benefits to your side, which is why they tend not to stick on the board. It's also why blue offers such massive amounts of resources—going hard into blue means you'll be less likely to break bases on any given turn, and your opponent can start to come back with monster combos using the bases they have on the board.

Star Realms one-ups its competition by being, for the most part, balanced. I have learned how to bend my strategy towards each of the colors, and I have been able to lose terribly in every instance. Sometimes I lose to the giant card the opponent landed before me; sometimes I get combo smashed into the dirt. I have lost to small clusters of yellow ships, giant armies of green ships, and red decks that threw half their ships in a junkyard before beating me with the rest. I have lost this game, where each player starts with fifty authority, by 100. I have lost by wide and narrow margins, disastrously and hopelessly, with every gaming trick I know short of actually sleight-of-handing cards out of the deck.

It's, frankly, impressive.

Score: Five blob ships in hand out of six in the deck.

Dave Reviews: Mel Kiper's Dino Derby

Draftosaurus

Draftosaurus is a sweet little dinosaur-based game from the mind of Antoine Bauza, creator of Ghost Stories and Samurai Spirit...

...oh god, what happens to the dinos? What happens to us?!

Although the guy on the cover with the selfie stick definitely deserves to be eaten by the roaring T-Rex behind him, nothing so brutal happens in Draftosaurus. It's just about the simplest game you could imagine with Bauza's name on it, which means it's simple enough until you hit that "oh shit" moment where you realize you have entirely borked your strategy.

Draftosaurus has a game board for each player and a bag of dinos for everyone to use. At the start, everyone gets six dinos, which they keep hidden from everyone else. One player rolls a die to determine where people have to place one of their dinos. The trick is that the player who rolls doesn't have to follow the rule. For example, most of the potential die rolls limit you to placing your dino on one half of the board or the other (they're split in different ways, so there's left half/right half, and also forest/dirt, which comprise different groups of dino pens). The main benefit is obvious, but you can also play around it if you pay attention to when your turn to roll is coming up. If it's at the end of the round, you might be able to play a dino in a spot where only one fits because you'll be able to place the next one anywhere, whereas if someone else was rolling that might be a riskier play.

Once you play a dino, you take all your remaining dinos and pass them to the left, thus the "Draftosaurus" name. Every pen scores points in different ways. True to a Bauza game, your goal is to maximize how many points each dino earns, and all the pens are pretty close in terms of what's possible. The easy pen to fill is the Woody Trio, where you only need three dinos of any type, earns you seven points if you fill it—2.33 points per dino. The Forest of Sameness, on the other hand, requires all dinos to be the same type. (This is harder in some games, depending on the number of players, because that affects how many dinos of each type are used.) If you can fill all six slots, you earn twenty-four points, or four per dino. That's obviously much better, but rarely does it happen. Four will earn twelve points, which is still three per dino, better than the Woody Trio. But if you only land one or two, they're worth less.

Oh, and if you put some in the Woody Trio pen but don't get all three, they're not worth anything. Oops!

Basically, you have to commit to getting as many points as you can in the pens where you put anything, which can of course be thwarted by bad die rolls or other people taking the dinos you need before they can circle the table to you. You have control over your ability to see how many of each dino you start with and how many of each type other players use, so you can figure out which pens you're likely to be able to use well, but there are aspects of luck and people playing keepaway which are out of your control. On the plus side, the game plays very quickly, so if everyone's having fun it's quite easy to play several games if you so choose.

Draftosaurus is perfectly good filler. Few people will come over just to play it, but it's something to throw down while waiting for everyone to get to the house. It's also good for a very casual type of night. Most people can have a few of these in their collections, so if you need a quick and easy game, check it out.

Score: 7/10

Dave Reviews: Dice Gardens

Alhambra: The Dice Game

Alhambra, the base game, is mainly about laying tiles to create a city, keeping one eye towards how it's walled (gotta keep out those pesky bandits) and the other towards the types of tiles, both which you have and which your opponents have. Everything revolves around tiles and the types of money you collect and use to buy those tiles.

Then we have the dice game, which begs the question: If it has no tiles and it has no money, is the game really Alhambra?

So, how does Alhambra with dice work? To its credit, it isn't a 100% different game with the Alhambra label to earn more sales. The colors you're chasing and scoring system are the same—three rounds of scoring with increasing points available each round, and the ability for more players to score some number of points each round. Alhambra players will immediately recognize those aspects. The change, of course, is how you get in position to score those points.

Dice are rolled in a Yahtzee style—roll everything, then choose what you want to reroll, for up to three rolls. You have eight dice, and since Alhambra has six types of buildings, that lines up nicely with using regular dice for this game. Your goal is not just to get as many of one type as you can, but if possible, to do it in as few rolls as you can.

This is where there's a little more strategy than it might first appear. Each combination of dice outcomes and total rolls is represented one time for each color. That is to say, if you land five purple towers on three rolls and put your marker there, no one else can take the 5-3 spot on purple. If someone else gets five towers on three rolls later in the round, they're automatically bumped back to 4-1 (four towers on one roll). If someone is already there, they get bumped back again, and so on.

Dice math being what it is, outcomes in the middle of the range are most common, leading to a different type of risk-reward consideration than dice games tend to have. It becomes a little more like poker—you can know the odds of your next roll, but what will your opponents do? Can you put them in a tough situation? Will they be prone to taking more risks, ones which might short-circuit their chances of winning?

Most of the harder decisions come earlier in the round, before many markers are on the board. One example someone is likely to see is getting five of a building in two rolls. To do that beats the odds, and getting five in one roll is very difficult, so 5-2 is a safe spot to be (especially if no one's ahead of it already). Getting a sixth one is a 50/50 proposition with the three remaining dice, and if you fail, you go to 5-3, which gives someone else a much better chance of getting ahead of you than they would have had otherwise. But getting to six is also quite difficult, and a 50/50 chance of making it is is almost as good as it gets.

Likewise if you land four on the first roll—it's not extremely hard to beat five, but 4-1 might be a safe second place. If you don't need to move as far up the track for that color as possible—if you're already well in front, or can't catch the next person, or just need to play a spoiler—do you stay with that and hope for the best? This especially happens if someone is already in the 5-3 spot, since if you take 4-1, you're extra-protected, but still, five on two rolls is hardly impossible...

This really is the whole game, so if you don't like dice math, you may find the depth of strategy lacking. Your humble reviewer is a fiend for games of not-entirely-chance, so this is admittedly in my wheelhouse. It's not wildly groundbreaking or made with a special kind of genius. But if you see "Alhambra: The Dice Game" on the shelf, and you're a cynical board game veteran, you may well think, eh, just another money grab, when it is in fact a reasonably good game. If you like dice and/or you have more casual friends who might enjoy the Alhambra aesthetic but not the entire kit of regular Alhambra, it's worth a go.

Score: Five winning colors out of six.

Dave Reviews: The Wonder War

Mare Nostrum: Empires

War!
What is it good for?
Bragging to your friends about how you can lead an army of both real and legendary heroes to victory in the battle for the ancient Mediterranean!
Say it again now!

In Mare Nostrum, you control an ancient civilization, ruled by one of its real-life leaders, though in some cases those leaders are dragged substantially out of their time frames to partake in the conflict. Caesar and Cleopatra lived at the same time, obviously, but Hannibal, Pericles, and Hammurabi are dragged from way out of the past. No big deal, though; along the way you'll get to hire heroes like Hercules and Perseus, who didn't actually exist, so it's not like they're pretending this makes sense. This is a title that wants to give you maximum ancient name recognition with your war game, and in that it absolutely succeeds.

Like any good war game, Mare Nostrum is about resources first and armies second. In fact, managing your resources is in many ways the entire game. Every empire starts with access to nine resources, a mix of coins and various commodities. Once resources are collected, whichever empire is the trade leader (Carthage starts in this role) decides how many resources must be traded by each empire, from zero to five. Everyone places that many resources on their player boards, face down; this can include coins, not just commodities. Then everything is flipped up, and the trade leader takes one thing from the person of their choice. Then that person takes an item from someone else, and so on, until all trade commodities are taken. (Two people can only go back and forth one time each, then they must move on to a different person.) If there's a trade imbalance at the end, whoever has an extra good gives one of their choice to whoever is short one, so that everyone has the same number of resources they started with.

Then you spend those resources, and here is where what you picked up matters. Normal units and buildings cost either three or six resources; heroes and wonders start at seven and go up from there. To buy something, you must spend either commodities or coins, and if you spend commodities, they all have to be different. At the end of the buying phase, all your commodities are lost, and you can only keep up to two coins. Therefore, when you trade, you have to keep an eye on what you want to buy and make sure you don't end up with multiples of the same commodity unless you plan on using them in different sets. If you're going to have unspent resources, you want them to be coins; wasting as little as possible is critical to the early game, and only becomes less of a concern later if you take over enough territory that you can outspend your rivals even if you have some unused resources.

There are four different ways to win, all of which require good resource management.

• Build the Pyramids. This requires spending twelve commodities (there are only thirteen types) or twelve coins. Because you can't end up with more resources through trade than you started with, this means you have to gather at least twelve resources on your turn and then get exactly what you need through trade. This is more doable than it seems if your opponents don't notice what you're doing and stop you, or if they attack the nearest neighbor who isn't anywhere near the point of collecting that many resources (TOM).
• Build five heroes or Wonders. You start with one, so you only actually need to build four, but they cost seven, then eight, then nine, then ten resources. In theory you could pick one up on each of the first three turns, but then you would need to expand to have the resources for the last one. That's after your opponents already see you're near victory, so this requires a bit of craftiness. It's more plausible if you have one or more of the heroes/Wonders that let you acquire extra resources or keep unused commodities, but even then it requires that nobody attack while you build no troops or defenses or... anything else, lest you lose some of those resources.
• Hold four capitals or legendary cities. Each empire has reasonable access to one legendary city, but this still requires smashing opponents and likely taking one capital and another legendary city near someone else's territory. If you can build after your opponent and pull together several legions while they have few defenses, this can work, but against someone who is in control of the turn order (the culture leader), or if the culture leader simply doesn't want to give you the chance to run someone over in this way, it's quite difficult. You will lose troops, and troops are costly.
• Holding all three leader titles (military, culture, trade). If you can do this, you're basically dominating the game and can throw resources at whatever you want. It's most likely to happen if you're able to hold a lot of territory—again, requiring numerous resources—but the other victory conditions are somehow stalemated.

Mare Nostrum is not a long game, at least as war games go. If several evenly matched opponents act carefully around each other, cutting off each other's routes of advancement but not willing to really push out of concern that it will give someone else an opening, the game might stretch out, but it's not designed for that to happen. For those who are really into the drawn-out planning of a war machine, it may feel a bit unfulfilling, because the bulk of these forces frequently never see the board. If you're not willing to fight, or at least to build a force that will scare your neighbors out of taking more territory, gathering the resources for a relatively quick Pyramids victory is very doable (especially for Carthage). 

But we're in an era where two hours is a long game to many people, and this is the type of game that might draw them into the idea of something more fleshed out (e.g. Game of Thrones 2E). It's well-built, as long as you understand exactly how it works and make sure everyone knows how to plan their resources (TOM). If you want a war game that doesn't require planning an entire night around getting the people together to play it, this may be a good choice.

Score: Four defeated ancient empires out of five (fifth, of course, is the glorious victor Cleopatra). 

Dave Reviews: Denmark Tetris

Copenhagen

For entirely unknown reasons, my brain laid a bit of music under the name of this game, and now it's an earworm.

Copenhagen! Copenhagen, Copenhagen!

This has nothing to do with the game itself. I just want to see if sharing it will help the sound go away.

Copenhagen is a game about making buildings. Contrary to the box art—the filthy liars—not every block of your buildings will have a window. And why not? Look at the city itself:

Windows! Nothing but windows! Why don't you give us more windows? Yeah, if everything was a window there wouldn't be any gameplay and everyone would have the same score and there wouldn't be any challenge, but it's so purdy!

Alas, we have mostly but not entirely windows in Copenhagen: The Incorrect Game. You have a tall, narrow space in which to construct your building—the dimensions are pretty accurate, at least—and your goal is to entirely fill in rows and columns of the building with no gaps. This isn't too difficult for anyone even passingly familiar with Tetris, and it's made easier by the inclusion of single-square windows that you can place with the bonus actions you earn by covering shields on the board or completing certain rows of the structure. Alternately, if you don't need that terrible crutch, you can earn different types of additional actions that can help tip the balance in your favor.

Constructing the building itself requires pieces, and getting pieces requires cards. A set of seven colored cards awaits your perusal, from which you can take two that are next to each other. Your default extra action lets you take two cards not next to each other, but you can only do that once unless you refresh your extra actions (the third and final option you can take when earning a bonus action). Alternately, you can buy and place one of the building pieces—purchases are made with the cards matching the color of the building piece. If the piece will touch a piece of the same color, it costs one card less. Other than that, the only real placement rule is that the piece has to sit on the ground level or on top of another piece. Balance is irrelevant; you can shove a five-block-long piece where only one block on the far edge supports it. Furthermore, if you have the space, you can build underneath placed tiles (they don't drop from the top like Tetris pieces, regardless of the two games' other similarities).

Scoring is simple: you get one point for a complete row, two if it's all windows. You also get two points for a complete column, four if it's all windows. These are the only ways to score points. The game ends when you hit the mermaid near the bottom of the deck (a nod to the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, which is a nice touch), or when someone reaches twelve.

Here's the thing, because there's always a thing—your building space is nine tiles high and five wide. Therefore, if you notice that fact, it becomes pretty obvious that you want to build up rather than out, since you can get equal points with fewer tiles. Getting the bonus actions from completing certain rows is all well and good, but since you don't need to complete the rows underneath, all you need is to leave a space to build on and save the cards to buy a long piece that will finish the row despite only having, say, two columns going up. Two columns full of windows is eight points; finishing the right rows gives you extra points and extra bonus actions, and unless someone else is pulling off the same strategy, it's probably enough to win.

Because the very long tiles you need to maximize this strategy are in short supply, it's not guaranteed to work, so thankfully knowing this doesn't solve the whole game. You still need to think around what color cards you can get, what your opponents are taking, and how you can beat them to the punch, or if you can find a way to thwart their plans. It's very difficult to stop people from building columns, however, due to the larger number of cheaper, smaller pieces available, so once everyone knows how to play, a victorious strategy is built around the margins rather than being able to take substantially different routes through the game.

Is that a problem? Depends on you. It's not designed to be a heavy game, and sometimes you just want to play something familiar. It's a very good game to introduce to relative board game noobs, who need something more controllable (and probably enjoyable) than Catan but really just want a relatively relaxing experience that still gives their brains some work. It's good for a few plays no matter who you are; beyond that depends on whether Copenhagen speaks to the gaming centers in your brain and the tiny nerds who control them.

Score: Seven windows out of nine building blocks.

Dave Reviews: Fuck Your Goddamned Werewolves

Silver

Ted Alspach makes the Werewolf games. He can do what he wants with werewolves.

How often does "he can do what he wants" turn out well?

That's a dire beginning, so let me be fair up front and say that Silver isn't a bad game. It's a game where the concept is very, "Wait, what?" Then you play it and it's OK.

So, let's begin with the concept. There's a deck of 52 cards with ranks from 0 to 13. There are two zeroes, two thirteens, and four of everything else. The number on the cards could very reasonably represent the strength of the characters, but your goal is to tank your village's score as low as possible, so it needs to mean something else. And it does.

The number on a card represents the number of werewolves that have followed your villager home.

How, exactly, does this situation not end up with all villages scoring zero because everyone gets eaten immediately? Are the werewolves turning into anthropologists, and they're more interested in studying villagers who live in a constant state of terror? Has all the predatory behavior been bred out of them? Is this the game with werewolves that are like real-life raptors, and they're all the size of turkeys?

Anyway, you start a round of Silver with five cards face down in front of you. You get to look at two of them at the start, but different effects you'll encounter let you look at others or turn them face up. All the cards numbered zero through four have abilities that work when they're face up in your village; you want to keep these cards for their low score, but it's for you to judge whether to try and keep them hidden (face down) or turn them up when the opportunity arises for their extra abilities.

You have three options on your turn: draw a card from the deck, pull one out of the discard pile, or call the round early and hope you'll have the lowest score after each of your opponents takes one more turn. Most cards have an ability you can only use when you draw it off the deck (all the cards five through twelve), and it's the most common way to find cards that will let you replace high cards in your village, so this is what you'll do on most turns. If you don't like the ability, you can discard the card without using it, so you're never hosed by pulling a card and having it force you to do something you don't want to do. Because you draw the card face down, you place it in your village face down, even if you replace a card that was face up.

If a low(ish) card hits the discard pile, you can take it off the pile and put it in your village. Again, because you draw it face up, you place it face up, even if the one it's replacing was face down. For this reason, discarding anything 0-4 is rare and usually to be avoided, but occasionally it has to be done. The final option, calling the round early, is risky; you're usually not 100% sure where your opponents are on score, and if anyone's score is lower than yours, you have to add ten to your score (which hurts a lot). On the other hand, no matter your village score, you take no points if you have the lowest, so it's great if you can call it early and it works.

There is one other aspect of calling the vote early: if it works, you get the silver amulet. Winning the amulet in this way means that, until someone else calls a successful vote and takes it away, you can place it on a card and protect it from being looked at or moved. That's pretty good. However, the rules have you do other things with the amulet that make no goddamned sense at all. Why am I putting it on the table near somebody if they can't use it? If the amulet is on your last card—is that the last card in the village, left to right, or the last card I placed? Later in the rules, it clearly states that whoever gets the low score for a round receives the amulet and is the next starting player. That's great, but then, why does it keep saying earlier that the amulet is placed "in front of them near the deck of cards"? Just say they get the damn thing, and the circumstances under which they can use the special ability.

Once you understand how Silver works, it's fine, especially if you enjoy card counting and sussing out what your opponents have with incomplete information. The mechanic of letting you exchange multiple matching villagers for one new one lets you pop off some massive combos if you get the right cards, as long as nobody calls the end of the round before you can get there, and creates some strategy outside of hoping to draw low cards and using the abilities you come across as effectively as you can. The rulebook needs to be set on fire, though.

Score: Nine tiny werewolves out of thirteen.

Dave Reviews: A Year of Trees (and Dickhead Squirrels)

Bosk

I keep wanting to call this game "Bork", and instead of trees I keep seeing this guy in my head:

Ah well. On to the forest.

Bosk is the most peaceful, meditative game about land domination you're likely to find. Each players on the... role?... of a type of tree—maple, oak, etc. It takes place over four seasons; this breaks down into two play rounds and two scoring rounds, making for a pretty quick game. You get eight trees to use in the spring, and eight giant leaves to use in the fall, each with a different numerical value.

The board has a piece of forest divided into eight sections. During spring, players, in turn, place one tree at a time on an intersection among the grid lines that cover the board. Everyone has two trees numbered 1, two numbered 2, and so on up to 4. The summer scoring season involves adding up the value of the trees on each row and each column, and giving points to whoever's in first and in second.

During fall, a wind board comes into play; the leader after the summer season decides which side of the board it goes on, and thus which direction the wind will blow the leaves off the variously numbered trees. Then players play their giant leaves, one per turn. The leaves have the values 2 through 8, and one with a squirrel. Playing a number means you place that many leaves on the ground, scattering them in the direction of the wind. You want your leaves to end up on the top of any piles, but if opponents have their leaves in a space you want, you have to throw out one of the ones you're placing for each opposing leaf you'll be covering up. Squirrels sit on top of piles and act as a top leaf that can't be covered or moved, but you only have one. Finally, in winter, players score points based on who has the most and second most top leaves in each region of the board.

That's the whole game. It's very straightforward, and the design offers a very forest-y feel—the trees are nicely made and take up a good amount of space, and the board is set up so that about one-third of the grid intersections are filled by trees, which gives it the aesthetic of a forest's actual denseness. (You can grow trees in the river, which is... not real common in the wild, but it's doesn't throw off the game's vibe.) You dive very quickly into the strategy of figuring out how to block opponents from taking over certain lines, whether you should challenge them or go for second place points, or just leave particular lines alone so other people can fight for them. Likewise, leaves are very valuable in the second half, and the board gives you plenty of space to spread out... for the most part. But there will usually be pockets where you need to decide if it's worth fighting for control or finding a way to win by simply maxing out the number of leaves you actually place on the board.

If you're looking for a chilled out but not ultra-casual game to satisfy three or four players, Bosk is good. If you want something relaxing for you and your significant other, Bosk... might be good. It really depends on how you value aesthetic and theme versus more engaging gameplay.

The issue is the scoring system. Whoever has the most of a thing (tree value on a line/leaves in a region) gets first-place points. Second place points, though, vary depending on if there's only one person in second or more than one, and that's not adjusted for the number of players. Therefore, in a two-player game, if someone puts down a single point tree or a single leaf, that's enough to score the second place points. It throws the strategy of the game off, since you're not constantly struggling to balance just how much of a presence you need in a given spot. If it doesn't look like you're going to win something, abandon it with the minimum resources expended. The strategy, as it were, is really to bait the other player into overspending resources on areas, since margin of victory on each line/in each region is irrelevant. But that's less fun than trying to win.

Bosk is indicative of early 21st century board gaming in general. It's well-crafted, aesthetically pleasing, solidly designed (no glaring gameplay flaws), will make people happy if it scratches their particular itches on theme or style, but not extraordinary for the era or something that is a near-universal recommendation for board gamers. Play it if you can, buy it if you like the concept, but if it's not something that seems like it's for you, there are other games you can find which will be a better fit.

Score: Vanilla 7.5/10.

Dave Reviews: Three-Quarters of a Good Comic

Nomen Omen

Someday I'll find a comic to review that doesn't do the thing that makes me go RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

This one was so close, too.

Before I go in on this, I want to be clear that I really liked most of Nomen Omen's first issue. I did. It's legitimately good. The story kicks off with, you know, story. Nobody explains anything. The characters are off and running, and they just go until they run into the inciting incident of the rest of the issue (and the series, I suppose, for as long as it goes). Even when it gets weird—and if you didn't think a comic with the name Nomen Omen was going to get weird, I'm a little curious what you did expect—the creators let you sit with the weirdness and wonder what the hell is going on.

The first part of the comic takes place in the past. The next scene is "Today". However, to their credit, they don't just let "Today" hang there and make you figure out approximately when the story is going on. You get real contextual clues so you can determine when the story is actually happening. I'm a fan of that, too. You've got at least four characters who matter running around, you don't know anything more about them than you need, but you know enough to make them worth following.

Then the villain comes in and explains it all.

Now, if you've read it, or if you read it after this, you might very easily say, "I don't know if that's the villain." You'd be doing it, however, on the basis that it seems a little too obvious for that to be the actual villain of the story. This person is very much an antagonist and is very clearly being set up as the villain for now, regardless of whether or not the story hews to that idea forevermore.

If you've read my other (few) comic reviews, you'd also realize that's not the point. The villain (?) is just talking, talking, talking. Explaining through exposition is awful, despite the fact comics seem addicted to doing it, and it's even worse in this case because there's all this exposition and what's going on still isn't particularly well explained. If you're not going to get the point across, make the characters shut up and keep it weird.

This also leads into another crack in the writing. At one point, there's a "so-and-so has been in an accident" phone call. It's a familiar trope, so I don't necessarily fault someone for using it to move a story along. I do, however, fault a writer who uses it when what happened is pretty obviously not an accident in any way, shape, or form. Like I said, the story gets weird, so if I'm trying to figure out what a hospital staffer making that phone call is going to say, there isn't a clear answer. An incident? An attack? What it definitely is not, however, is an accident. But it's a trope, so it gets tossed in. Meh.

And all of this sucks so much because, again, the comic was rolling along quite well most of the way through. There was a piece of poetry that... look, I'm biased. I know some top-percentile poets, and I can't expect comic writers to be on that level. But after knowing those poets, this poetry made me think, maybe not with the poetry? It's not terrible, and I feel like I'm being too harsh picking this out for criticism. It was the only shaky bit before the villain came in, though, so I'm bringing it up.

Here's the thing—I feel like there must be some aspect of the comic business, of selling comic-style stories, that I don't understand. The blurb on Image's website says, in part, "Enter Becky Kumar, a geeky twenty-year-old from New York City who is about to cross the veil between our reality and a realm of otherworldly truths." Becky Kumar, by the end of this issue, should not be alive. You might assume she is just because killing her so fast would seem like very awkward storytelling, but if you look at exactly what happens to her... it's not possible. Yet, if you see the blurb, your expectations of what will come after this issue are entirely different. You know she must, so you'll read the comic in a totally different way.

I like Image. I know they care about telling interesting stories, and more often than not they do a good job of it. This may well become one of them. But how do you tell a story—a serial story, no less—with marketing that can change the entire reading of that story? Marketing that someone can easily miss? And how much of that marketing influenced the writing of the script, or at least where they chose to break between issues? Was my experience of reading this comic partially damaged because I didn't read the marketing until afterwards, and thus was unprepared for something which made no bloody sense at all?

One more time... I did like Nomen Omen. I'll read the second one and see if I can stick with it. I think most people who like weird, world-bending stories will be able to get into this, whether or not I can.

Score: The strangest 8/10.

Dave Reviews: 2012

Tzolk'in

The way the Mayans kept track of years was quite intricate, and also misunderstood dramatically enough to prompt the creation of very subpar cinema. Tzolk'in does the culture a little more justice, at least in terms of making them the basis of enjoyable modern entertainment.

Is that a compliment? Let's... just say it is.

Tzolk'in is a game of eating and waiting. It's weirdly accurate to the Mayan heyday, where everything took forever to accomplish (by our modern standards, and also across every society in the world at that time), and most labor went into making food so nobody as few people as possible starved to death while waiting for anything to happen. Your goal is to gather resources which you can use to create buildings and monuments that will earn you the points you need to win the game, but underscoring all of that is making sure you always have enough food for your villagers when it comes time for them to eat. If you don't, you can beg for food, but that will anger the gods and cost you points, which are as real as those gods.

HEYO!

Pretty much everything happens on three giant dials that connect like gears and turn together as the days pass. Each dial has a bunch of person-sized spaces that villagers fit into; as the dials turn, they move your people from space to space on the resource circles. The farther along they move, the better the resource(s) they'll gather when you finally bring them back home, but in general that means leaving them on the dial for longer before they come back. Alternatively, you can jump them ahead if all the earlier spaces are taken, but then you have to immediately pay food equal to the number of spaces they jump (leaping into the future is hungry work).

One of these resource dials, as you might imagine, focuses on food. But it's not quite so simple as getting on and riding to the food number you want. First, there are trees on top of the food that need to be cleared. That's fine, really, because you need wood, but if you're desperate for food and all the land is still under the trees, you can burn the trees down. The wood is gone, though, and alas, you've angered the gods. In addition, for all but the first couple of resource spaces, there are only four wood/food tile piles; once those are gone, you can no longer use that space to gather resources, making food harder to come by later in the game, when you'll almost always have a larger population to feed.

Fortunately, the farm upgrades that reduce the cost of feeding your villagers aren't too hard to come by. That's a huge deal, considering that you just take the first pile of upgrades, shuffle them together, and flip them face down in a chunk. If farms were too rare, you could end up with games where everyone was struggling just to feed their people, which is a level of realism that tends to make games less fun very quickly. In addition, if your people are permanently fed by farms, you can ignore food, or you can keep collecting it in order to use it to jump ahead of people on various resource dials. Farms in Tzolk'in, as in real life, add flexibility to your society in terms of letting your people live better than a subsistence life.

Tzolk'in is a really good game, amazingly balanced in terms of allowing just about any strategy to win as long as you can be efficient with it. There's probably a way to say "the hell with farms" and make that work, even though I'm not sure what it is—I adore my passive upgrades too much to really go for a plan like that. It will, however, bend some people's heads in half and not let go until they walk away from the table on a promise to sacrifice a dozen virgins to Tzolk'in's dark gods. If everyone really knows how to play, it shouldn't take an excessive amount of time, but the number of games it takes to reach that point is such that you should probably expect it to always take longer than the game's ninety minute estimate.

If it sounds interesting after all this, you should definitely play it. If it doesn't... you'll know. Listen to the voices that warn you away.

Score: Ten crystal skulls out of twelve.

Dave Reviews: Rock 'N' Roll

Shobu

If it's got a Japanese name and it's made for two players, the track record of quality is solid. You've got Onitama, Hanamikoji, and now Shobu, the only one of the three without cards and with polished rocks.

The best way to explain Shobu is this: it looks more complicated than it is, then when you learn how it works, it's more complicated than it looks.

Shobu is played on four, 4x4 wooden boards. Each player (black and white) has four stones lined up on each board. A rope divides the two boards closest to one player from the two boards closest to the other player (horizontally). The four boards are also two different colors, split vertically (ie. one each on either side of the rope). The goal is to knock all of your opponent's pieces off of one of the four boards.

On your turn, you take a passive action and an aggressive action. Your passive action has to take place on one of the boards on your side of the rope. You move one of your stones one or two spaces in any direction (orthogonally or diagonally). You cannot move into a space with one of your opponent's stones, however. Then you replicate the move with a stone on one of the opposite colored boards. It can be any stone, and the board can be on either side of the rope, as long as it's the opposite color. This is the aggressive action, and with this you can shove an opponent's stone. This is how you achieve your win condition—make passive moves that enable aggressive moves which let you shove enemy pieces off the board.

If that explanation was hard to visualize, well, it takes a second to get your head around it when all the boards and pieces are right in front of you. Once you do a couple of legal moves, it's pretty easy to conceptualize how that works, but then you'll make some kind of strategic mistake that you would have never noticed without actually making the mistake (or seeing someone else make it). For example, maybe you decide to make your aggressive moves on your own side of the rope, essentially meaning you focus on moving stones on both boards on your side. It might put your opponent in a difficult position initially, but then most or all of those stones are moved up and now you can't use them to move stones on the other side of the rope forward. There are a decent number of ways for a new player to approach the game that involve shooting themselves in the foot, but it also creates a very obvious learning curve that can be enjoyable to traverse. Likewise, there's so much going on with the possible combinations of passive and aggressive moves that it's very easy for a new player to miss potential critical moves, either advantageous ones for themselves or an opponent's moves they need to avoid.
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So, on the scale of two-player games, how does it rate? The combinations can become complex, but the game itself isn't super-heavy in terms of strategy you need to learn. That's the main benefit to the game, offering both a learning curve and the challenge of your opposition while not requiring that you spend hours mulling over possible tactics in order to maximize your chances of winning. It's also very aesthetically pleasing, On the other hand, its replayability is entirely dependent on how much you enjoy the core game, since the game plays the same way every time. It has no changing factor like Onitama's tactic cards, and there are no variants in the rules.

But the core game is quite good. When you're in the throes of deciding your best move from the two immediately available, then you see three, then six, then eight, you quickly realize you're looking at a game that's done a considerable amount of work with a very limited rule set. Consider this highly recommended for fans of games that rely on the strategy of working against one's opponent rather than the challenge of understanding the game itself, and who enjoy perfecting their play within a single set of rules rather than dealing with small curveballs thrown at them each time they break out the game.

Score: Fourteen shiny rocks out of sixteen.

Dave Reviews: Being Turned Into A Playtesting Newt

The Village Crone

The witches of Wickersby have a nice selection of familiars. Snakes, bats, ravens (ok, crows, but I like ravens better), little critters run around the town stealing away their resources and bringing them back for the witches to use in their spells. So many, in fact, that one wonders why anyone still lives in Wickersby. 

Well... if they didn't, there would be no game. 

And it's that attention to detail that marks The Village Crone.

The Village Crone revolves around two things: collecting spell ingredients and casting spells. Through these two activities, and moving your familiars and the villagers around the board, let you fulfill the witch schemes that score you points. Thirteen points, of course, gives you the win.

There are six boards, each with a different village location, that can be set up in different configurations to change the game a bit each time you play. The Forge, Mill, Farm, and Lord's Manor are where your familiars can collect ingredients (two at the end of each round); the Tithe Barn is where you put one ingredient at the start of each round, unless you have a familiar there; and the Village Green has no specific effect, but it's where your new familiars show up. If someone binds the area, nothing can enter or exit, and so your familiars might be stuck there or not be able to enter the game at all.

The spells you cast are quite stereotypically witchy. You can magically create a romance between two of the villagers, turn them into frogs, summon villagers to certain locations or swap the positions of villagers and familiars, and even counter the spells of other witches. The witch schemes—worth one, two, or three points, and requiring you to meet the same number of objectives in one turn—generally work around these spells. You may be required to summon a given villager to a certain location, make them fall in love with someone, turn them into a frog, etc. One of the entertaining aspects of the game is that the schemes fit the concept of the evil witch well—you might bring two people together, then turn one of them into a frog (or both if they're in love, since they share fates), then bind the area so they can't leave.

In fact, the game's aesthetic is quite good. It has a gloomy feel, though not to the point of being depressing, and the fact they don't go away from what everyone connects with witches isn't a problem. If you expect witches to do hexes and love spells and such, you get that, and it's well done.

The game itself, though, has some real issues. There are numerous games which advertise themselves as being suitable for a wider player count range than is really true, and this is in that category—do not play this with six people, and probably not with five—but the problems run deeper than that. Sure, there's a lot of downtime when the game is big, and that's not fun, but the designers didn't even create enough scheme cards to accommodate the realities of a larger game. With six people, not only are you almost guaranteed to run out of level three schemes, you may come close to running out of schemes entirely unless someone runs away with the game.

Furthermore, although the schemes are very much in line with the theme, and often inherently tell a quick story (which is great), there isn't much variety. To some extent, this is a result of the decision for each scheme to have one requirement for each point being scored. It makes sense, but combined with the "witchy" aspect of the schemes, it limits the number of ways to differentiate them, at least mechanically (ie. a bunch of switch-spell requirements will ask the same thing even if they require different pairs of characters to be switched).

Fixing the issue of repetitive schemes would take a little imagination, so maybe they tried but couldn't find a better method. OK. What I wonder, though, is if they limited the number of scheme cards overall because of the repetition. If that's the case, they screwed themselves twice at once, because including enough scheme cards not only would have allowed a larger game to look like it made sense, but repetition in the schemes may have been more expected. "There are so many schemes, you're going to see them a few times," that kind of thing.

It's unfortunate that the point scoring becomes a problem, because the rest is pretty good. It's complicated trying to make sure you have all the ingredients you need for the plan you want to hatch on your next turn, which can then be changed by someone else frogging/unfrogging/teleporting/enforcing romance in a way that makes you do even more to get your schemes to work. It makes the game take longer than you might want, which is another issue for new players, but it's not bad.

Really, just stick to a three or four player game of this and you should have a reasonably good time. It's quite OK. ...yeah.

Score: Eight frogs out of thirteen.

Dave Reviews: A Comic with Good Art and... Good Art

Pretty Violent

As comic stories go, Pretty Violent has lovely cover art.

Pretty Violent tells the story of Gamma Rae, a would-be superhero who somehow keeps doing the wrong thing. The wrong thing, in this case, is murdering the actual heroes and letting the bad guys get away, at which point she's blamed mercilessly for her error by the populace even as the bad guy starts wreaking havoc.

The selling point, apparently, is that this comic gets very over the top with its blood and swearing in a comical way. And, as a selling point, that's fine. As the selling point? Not so much.

The comic starts with Gamma Rae erring terribly and helping a sneaky villain. This quickly appears to be an excuse to draw the colorful obliteration of lots of bodies. Then that happens again... and again... and it doesn't take long before the question arises: you know this is silly and purposefully out of control, but still, how many issues until they depopulate the whole city? Or will they keep going from place to place, with endless superheroes being destroyed by Gamma Rae's pure incompetence?

Then, at the end... maybe it's not incompetence after all! Oho!

But it's hard to care at that point. You have to really enjoy silly amounts of violent art and swearing for their own sake, because if you took those out, there would be basically nothing to lean on. I'm really trying to meet it the comic where it's trying to be, in a place where story doesn't matter and it's all about spectacle, but even then it wears out quickly.

Meh.

Score: The most meh five out of ten.

Dave Reviews: Caring for Your Burninator

Trogdor!! The Board Game

Trogdor was a man
No wait, he was a Dragon-man
Or maybe he was just a dragon
....
But he was still TROGDOOOOOOOR

Trogdor (!!), otherwise known as Strongbad's Greatest Drawing, is burninating fields and chomping villagers. But, because Strongbad made him, he needs your help to succeed. You and the other players cooperate to guide Trogdor (!!) to a successful burnination of the land around him before he gets chopped and shot to death by knights, archers, and his arch-nemesis, the Troghammer.

Trogdor (!!) is a simple game. Each turn, you have an action card and draw a second, then choose between them. These tell you how many times Trogdor (!!) can move on your turn, and any abilities that will affect your turn. Then Trogdor (!!) acts. He can move, chomp villagers, burninate tiles, burninate villagers who run around burninating tiles, and burninate other villagers if they run into them, who then run around burninating more tiles. After that, movement cards are drawn for the knights and archers, who damage Trogdor (!!) by running into him (knights/Troghammer) or pointing their shooty things at him in a straight line (archers). Each player also has an item card that can be used on their turn and recharged (only on their turn) if certain conditions are met.

After that, it's just a matter of burninating the countryside and obliterating the peasantry. If things start going wrong, the answers are equally simple. Losing health? Chomp villagers! In a dangerous spot? Hide in the mountains! Not close enough to the mountains to hide? ...probably die!

Trogdor (!!) is good if you remember Trogdor (!!) from Homestar Runner, or you like absurd games with enough thinking to make you feel like you're not totally in debt to luck. It's less good if a high degree of luck bothers you, because this is a 5x5 grid with either three or four enemies running around (there's no way to get rid of the knights/archers/Troghammer), who each move four squares after your turn, and you never know what their directions will be. It is extremely difficult to stay safe without hiding in the mountains, so you're either largely guided by the whims of fate or playing so carefully that Trogdor (!!) will be displeased with your strategy.

It is a reasonably good board game that almost no one would care about if not for Trogdor (!!). Let us tremble before his might.

Score: Six burninated peasants out of eight.

Dave Reviews: Party Insanity!

Mountains Of Madness

Yeah man! Let's get the gang together, get a couple cases of Bud, and head down to Antarctica! Woo!

If you're reading board game reviews, chances are you know that Mountains of Madness is a Cthulhu reference. So, what's up with that intro? It's just a funny (arguable) way to lead into a gloomy Lovecraft-style game, something different, right?

Mm.

Here's how the game works: There's a mountain your group needs to climb. At the top is the ancient city that is not only your ultimate goal, but the only way for you to leave. The mountain consists of a pyramid of tiles—two rows of coast tiles, two smaller rows of mountain tiles above that, a few city tiles at the top, and then the "Edge of Madness" from which your plane takes off, if you make it that far. When you move to a tile, you flip it over and play cards which, combined, need to match the target types and value on the tile. Succeed and you get the reward. Fail and suffer the consequences. Partially succeed (each tile has at least two goals) and you'll get both the reward and some consequences.

So far, so Cthulhu. Of course, it's not so simple, and the teamwork aspect is complicated by a few factors. One is that everyone plays their cards face down. Two is that nobody can talk to each other once they start playing cards. Three is that you're working on a thirty second timer to play all the cards (this can be lengthened with leadership tokens, which can create its own hassle). And four is the various forms of madness people suffer during the game.

Madness is a core component. Everyone starts with a basic (level 1) form of madness, and this will nearly always get worse as the game goes along. Depending on the players, some higher level madness will be less problematic than lower level ones, but generally they're more difficult to manage.

Here are a few examples of the madness you might have to play out:

• Speak with an accent
• Drum your fingers on the table
• Describe the value of the cards in your hand via the coinciding month of the year (1 = January, 2 = February, etc)
• Say "you" anytime you want to say "I"
• Don't speak unless you're touching someone else's head

This, good readers, is a party game. Cthulhu madness involves flipping out and dashing naked into the snowy wilderness to be nommed upon by curious penguins. This madness, while arguably a different view into how crazy things can get while traveling the Mountains of Madness, is really the kind of thing you would find in a party game when you combine it with the teamwork of the cards.

If you imagine this as a low-key party game, where people are a few beers in and following personal rules (rather than madness cards) and playing cards with different values of cocktails, hard liquor, etc., rather than crates and weapons, it makes complete sense. Mountains of Madness, on the other hand, twists the concept into three or four knots to make it work with the Cthulhu theme.

Cthulhu sells, so from a business perspective the decision makes sense. Slapping "Mountains of Madness" on the box guarantees ten times the sales as compared to Goofy Party Game #326. But it's severely misleading in terms of what kind of game you're going to get, to the point that even when you take this all into account, the visual theme still screws with the fun of the game itself.

TLDR: Meh.

Score: Craaaaaaaaaaazy Eight (out of fifteen)

Dave Reviews: Point!

Punto

It's... tiny.

That's not much of an intro, but there's not much in this tin. That doesn't mean it's bad; it's just... tiny.

Punto comes in a little tin with a bunch of square tiles. The tiles come in sets of four colors, with one to nine dots on each card. Players draw a tile off the top of their deck and lay it down, in order, until someone has four in a row of their color. The limitations:

• The grid can't get bigger than 6 x 6. The upshot is that if you can't block someone directly, sometimes you can do it by placing a tile where it makes the grid go six wide or long and your opponent can no longer has an empty space for the tile.
• You can place tiles on top of your opponents', but your number has to be higher than the one you're placing it on.

Initially I wanted there to be a mat, something to actually play on, but the shifting dimensions of the board are part of the strategy. Plus, it's really quite impressive to have a very playable game come in such a small package at such a low price (MSRP around $8).

Of course, it has limitations. I imagine they playtested it with players holding all their cards and trying to use their numbers strategically rather than pulling one off the top and hoping they got something useful (or, occasionally, hoping they got a low number because they didn't need a high one at that moment). Maybe they also tried holding a limited number of tiles, say three, and choosing from those, then replacing it at the end of the turn. If that's the case, then the draw mechanic was apparently deemed more fun. I can see that; this is a little pocket game that you bring somewhere as a diversion, not high strategy. As long as you're OK with a couple unlucky draws dooming you, especially in a two-player game, it's fine.

And that's really it. It's fine. The biggest compliment I can pay it is that the designer clearly accomplished his goal of making this a small, cheap, playable game. I've seen many other little games that are the board game equivalent of the candy bars they sell in the supermarket checkout line, and this is better than most. There just isn't much to say about it beyond that.

Score: Siete puntos de diez.

Dave Reviews: Gladiatorial Trumpiness

Gorus Maximus

It's basically Hearts. With... hearts.

Gorus Maximus is a trick-taking game, not about being a gladiator, but about being one of those patriots who run gladiator battles for the pleasure of the populace. (The money is just a bonus.) There are up to five schools of gladiators, each with fighters ranked from 0 to 15. Each player gets a hand of ten cards; this is the whole deck being dealt, and what the deck consists of depends on the number of players in the game.

Each round, one player starts by playing a card. The color of the card becomes both the preferred school and the initiating school. This is where the game gets a little more complicated, and frankly fun, than your average game of Hearts or Spades.

• The preferred school set at the start of the first round remains the preferred school for the whole hand (in theory). The preferred school is the trump school.
• The initiating school is only the initiating school for that round. Once each player puts down a card and the trick is taken, the person who takes the trick starts the next round, and their card sets the new initiating school.
• Players must play a card from the initiating school if they have one.
• The exception to all of the above is that a player may play a card of the same rank as the one played immediately before them in that round. This is a challenge. (For example, if I play the blue 4, the next player can play a green 4, regardless of the initiating school.) A challenge not only lets a player use a different color, it also sets the preferred school for the hand to that color—until another challenge comes, of course.

In theory, players can count how many cards of each suit, and which ones, have been played, just like a good Hearts player would. However, unless it's a full eight-player game, the deck doesn't consist of all the cards of each color, and it doesn't use all of them in order up to a point. In most games, the 0 card and the 4-12 cards are put into the deck. Can those be counted? Sure. But it takes a little getting used to in order to do so proficiently.

In addition, points are scored by the points listed on each gladiator card, and most cards don't score anything. Simple enough, right? Set it up so you catch the point cards. Well... just don't get stuck with one of the cards that take away points. Most games only have one such card—the 8 of each color—but that's a huge hit at -4 when nothing else scores more than two. Expanding the game to six players adds a -2 card, and going to seven adds another -1, so more caution is warranted than simply "don't get the spades".

I've criticized games in the past for allowing too large a player count, and at first I was going to at least partially do so again. Whereas some other games have no business trying to accompany a large group, it makes sense to at least try with something that plays as fast as this, with such a fun (if bloody) theme. It has that drunken party game feel. My critique was going to be that, as with many trick-taking games, catching up is hard if you fall behind, and because it takes three crowd support (three round wins) to end the game, big games can become a slog for someone who's losing. 

But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that's unfair. It does have the potential to suck for that person, yes. But the only way it becomes a major problem is if lots of other people are picking up round wins, which means overall the game is competitive, and that's good. I suppose the warning to offer is that if you're going to want to quit if it looks like you're stuck in a game that you're very unlikely to win, you might want to avoid six-plus player games of this, but that's not enough to really knock the game itself.

In short, this is surprisingly fun, even if you're very neutral about trick-taking games. If you think you can get your Spades-playing grandpa to throw back a shot of whiskey and try something with actual pictures, this could even be a hell of a family bonding experience.

Score: Fourteen blood puddles out of sixteen.