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.

Dave Reviews: UberLand

MegaLand

I was going to title this with 'Uber' and then whatever the German is for land, but it's just "land". So, we're off to a grand start.

MegaLand is, at its core, a press-your-luck game with mechanics that will be familiar to deck builder fans, even though there's no deck to build. It's also very easy to learn (maybe too easy). You play the role of what is, effectively, a video game character, starting with four health and needing to collect treasure by exploring places with loads of terrible monsters. Each monster will do one, two, or three damage to your character; the game is very explicit about how many of each card, including the ones that don't hurt you, is in the deck. In other words, each round is designed for you to count cards and determine what the best play is based on the odds.

After each draw, you decide if you want to stay in or take your treasures and run. If you leave, you get what you've collected; if you stay and get KO'd, you only get one (unless you buy effects that let you keep or take more). Part of the challenge is not just collecting more treasure, but collecting the right treasure. If you want to buy cards that give you points (technically coins, but you don't buy anything with them) and other abilities, you need sets of different treasure types; if you want to buy more health, you need sets of the same treasure type. The challenge in buying more expensive cards is thus amplified, since it gets harder and harder to collect treasures you don't already have, a challenge mitigated by the fact you can store one treasure on each card you've bought along the way. As with the monster deck, game is explicit about how many of each treasure is in the treasure deck—it's printed on each card—but the deck is sizable and makes card counting very difficult.

The abilities are varied but easy to understand. Some of them also require you to strategize in a certain way or have a certain read on your opponents. For example, one card lets you draw an extra treasure from the deck if you're KO'd. If you buy a few of those, it can be more valuable to risk a KO, or even push on when a KO is guaranteed, if you don't have a usable set of cards and drawing more might let you buy what you need. Another gives you bonus points if an opponent is KO'd, which is great if your opponents go for a self-KO strategy or simply take too many risks, but is a bit of a waste if they play safely.

On the downside, there are cards which give you guaranteed points every night (end of round). They instantly put the game on a timer, and if one person gets one ahead of everyone else, the other players are immediately playing catch-up the rest of the way. They're not a guaranteed win, but really, the timer aspect is the part that damages the fun. Most of the cards score points anyway. Why is it necessary to let people get freebies? When somebody has a lead, there's a certain enjoyable tension in wondering if they'll get those last few points they need to win, or if you might have a chance to catch up. The nightly point cards take that away. And, because of the treasure system, if three players each gather four treasures in the first round, it's quite possible only one of them will have the right treasures to buy a guaranteed point card.

It's really unfortunate, because the only other real criticism is that there was room for this game to have a few more cards and a few more good choices for what to buy. Right now, the game plays so fast, sharp people can do the math and either pull their character or press their luck in a couple of seconds. There's potential here to give players something that will make them slow down and think a bit, at least sometimes, about what they want to buy. That's not a game-breaking problem, though; all it does is reduce replayability. The timer cards may not be game-breaking, per se, but they put a major damper on the experience.

It's still not bad, still worth trying. If you're a fan, awesome. If you end up feeling similarly to what I've described, play again without the automatic point cards, see if you like it any better.

Score: $3.25 out of $5.00.