Saturday, December 28, 2019

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.

Saturday, December 21, 2019

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).

Saturday, December 7, 2019

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.

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

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.