I'd like to give a shout-out to Precis Intermedia who offer paper minis and plastic stands to hold them up (they also offer a range of RPGs).
So, you've seen Jackson's Cardboard Heroes before, and possibly run across PEG's Cardstock Cowboys. Meh, right?
What makes Precis Intermedia such a great option for those making the jump to Cardboard Miniatures is that they can sell them to you like the others do, as sheets of cut-outs in PDF format, or you can pick the miniatures you want and only download them.
So if you need, say, an army of Confederate troopers, perhaps thirty to forty of them, and maybe half a dozen NCOs and an officer, you download the NCOs and the Officer and you also download the trooper in what's called an Army Deal, basically a print of multiples of the same mini on a page.
Let's say you are running a game of Deadlands:Reloaded and you would like for the players to go tactical (as in start a combat on the grid on the table using perhaps the excellent Chessex Battlemat) but then get overrun and caught up in the equivalent of Picket's Charge, you can do that.
Savage Worlds offers a great way to have umptytump figures on the table without it taking all day to work out what they look like and what they can do. The officers and NCOs are special cases but even they are just modified mooks ("extras" in Savage Worlds-ese) that take no time at all to stat up.
And now Precis Intermedia offers a way to get the figures you'll need on the table without the need to set aside a year or two for sourcing, buying and painting the army.
Because, lets face it, you are hardly going to need those minis very often after this. You aren't a Civil War wargamer, you are a Deadlands:Reloaded GM. And most of those minis are on the table in order fo rthe players to kill them. Why waste hours or days painting a mini that is designed from the ground up to last maybe less than one game turn?
The bags of plastic stands can come with some sticker shock, but a bag of a hundred works out to just under 2.5 cents each, and they'll be misplaced before they wear out.
Everyone loves a well-painted miniature on the tabletop, and there are some beautiful miniatures that make every warm-blooded GMs juices start flowing. I have boxes full of 'em.
What I don't have in much supply is painting talent or time. Or, if I'm honest, the desire to paint minis any more. I collected GW armies in the past and the assembly-line technique that is required for them pretty much killed the pleasure I got from the finished articles.
Yes I still buy evocative Zulu War-era British minis because I love them and can visualize them making a brave last stand against a horde of savage High Martians (in a Space 1889 game).
But most of those actions that have seen the tabletop have been fought using the cardboard minis that came with the Space 1889 supplements.
Resources:
Precis Intermedia
Pinnacle Entertainment Group (PEG) - home of Savage Worlds
Chessex Battlemats and Megamats
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Monday, October 27, 2014
Blast From The Past
Yesterday, while waiting for the guy with Mars Attacks to show up (he never actually did due to his inability to understand the difference between afternoon and evening) I showed the proud owner of the Ogre reprint how to play his game.
This game was famous in its day and still has a strong following (a recent Kickstarter campaign for a huge version was extremely successful and you can find Ogre in a box the same size as they pack G Scale train sets in if you look), but GenCon saw a reprinting of the game in its glorious no-color original baggie version.
Actually, as I told the proud owner as he watched me showing his friend how to play it, the set he had was much better than any of the monochrome versions put out "in the day" since it featured real wargame thickness card counters that were pre-punched a-la SPI, not two sheets of thin card you had to cut up with scissors.
It was fun to watch the faces of the others as I explained that one side got only one unit, the eponymous Ogre, and the other a slew of infantry, tanks and hovercraft (aka "G.E.V.s"). Then it was fun to watch again as they absorbed the stats of that one unit and realized it was a damn-near unstoppable leviathan bristling with weaponry.
Jackson did a really good job with this game, crafting something that was fun and easy to pick up and play, highly portable (it packs down to about the size of a large phablet), and balanced so that two players of roughly equal ability should find it tough on either side of the battle.
The "balance" part of that is a very hard thing to do, but is vital for an enjoyable game. No-one enjoys a game that provides an easy win or easy loss.
The game has a hex-grid map, mostly blank but for the features that block movement (but not line-of-sight). The army player must try and take as much advantage of these as possible while not boxing his own units in. He must also understand that the infantry, tanks, GEVs etc are expendable in the long term, yet must get as much damage infliction out of them as possible before ythey are inevitable ground under-tread.
The Ogre player must trundle ponderously down the board and around the craters and ridges (one version of the game had a color map that depicted these in glorious color and isomorphic three-d), trying to stay in the game until he gets within range of the command post, which is his first objective. When that is destroyed he must then exit the map at the bottom (so that the Ogre has crossed the length of the map).
The army player must decide whether he will attack the mobility of the Ogre by targeting tracks or go for the weaponry mounts. Leave the Ogre too mobile and it will ram the CP and gain at least a marginal victory. Bringing it to a standstill will involve being in range of its formidable weapon arrays and that will result in fast attrition of the infantry and armor units you need to get the job done.
As we played, the younger guys, who had never played an old-style card-and-counters wargame and so had never been exposed to the concepts that once were staples of almost all of them, marveled at how straightforward the game was, how playable it was, and how rich the tactical possibilities were.
For me it conjured 1982, and meetings of the Coventry Wargame Society and the Lanchester Polytechnic Game Society, both of which were the source of many hours of pleasant company and interesting conversation in addition to demon wargaming.
It also served to demonstrate the truly diabolical die-rolls I could get - I had boasted of these to them but could tell they thought I was laying it on thick. After one round in which ten consecutive attacks were miserable failures, even the "sure thing" ones, they became believers in my power to distort the local statistical field.
Anyway, if you want to try Ogre in an affordable and portable form, I recommend looking for this version. It costs, I'm told, less than 4 dollars. I saw it for a shade over 6 bux at Amazon. The semi-portable version will set you back about $150.
Resources:
Ogre, Pocket Edition
Ogre, Over-The-Top Edition
This game was famous in its day and still has a strong following (a recent Kickstarter campaign for a huge version was extremely successful and you can find Ogre in a box the same size as they pack G Scale train sets in if you look), but GenCon saw a reprinting of the game in its glorious no-color original baggie version.
Actually, as I told the proud owner as he watched me showing his friend how to play it, the set he had was much better than any of the monochrome versions put out "in the day" since it featured real wargame thickness card counters that were pre-punched a-la SPI, not two sheets of thin card you had to cut up with scissors.
It was fun to watch the faces of the others as I explained that one side got only one unit, the eponymous Ogre, and the other a slew of infantry, tanks and hovercraft (aka "G.E.V.s"). Then it was fun to watch again as they absorbed the stats of that one unit and realized it was a damn-near unstoppable leviathan bristling with weaponry.
Jackson did a really good job with this game, crafting something that was fun and easy to pick up and play, highly portable (it packs down to about the size of a large phablet), and balanced so that two players of roughly equal ability should find it tough on either side of the battle.
The "balance" part of that is a very hard thing to do, but is vital for an enjoyable game. No-one enjoys a game that provides an easy win or easy loss.
The game has a hex-grid map, mostly blank but for the features that block movement (but not line-of-sight). The army player must try and take as much advantage of these as possible while not boxing his own units in. He must also understand that the infantry, tanks, GEVs etc are expendable in the long term, yet must get as much damage infliction out of them as possible before ythey are inevitable ground under-tread.
The Ogre player must trundle ponderously down the board and around the craters and ridges (one version of the game had a color map that depicted these in glorious color and isomorphic three-d), trying to stay in the game until he gets within range of the command post, which is his first objective. When that is destroyed he must then exit the map at the bottom (so that the Ogre has crossed the length of the map).
The army player must decide whether he will attack the mobility of the Ogre by targeting tracks or go for the weaponry mounts. Leave the Ogre too mobile and it will ram the CP and gain at least a marginal victory. Bringing it to a standstill will involve being in range of its formidable weapon arrays and that will result in fast attrition of the infantry and armor units you need to get the job done.
As we played, the younger guys, who had never played an old-style card-and-counters wargame and so had never been exposed to the concepts that once were staples of almost all of them, marveled at how straightforward the game was, how playable it was, and how rich the tactical possibilities were.
For me it conjured 1982, and meetings of the Coventry Wargame Society and the Lanchester Polytechnic Game Society, both of which were the source of many hours of pleasant company and interesting conversation in addition to demon wargaming.
It also served to demonstrate the truly diabolical die-rolls I could get - I had boasted of these to them but could tell they thought I was laying it on thick. After one round in which ten consecutive attacks were miserable failures, even the "sure thing" ones, they became believers in my power to distort the local statistical field.
Anyway, if you want to try Ogre in an affordable and portable form, I recommend looking for this version. It costs, I'm told, less than 4 dollars. I saw it for a shade over 6 bux at Amazon. The semi-portable version will set you back about $150.
Resources:
Ogre, Pocket Edition
Ogre, Over-The-Top Edition
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Well, It Has Been A Quiet Year Here In Deer Park
I really have been too busy playing games to talk about them much. Sorry.
I currently run a once-a-month Delta Green game that is crowding on four years of slithery fun and a twice monthly Deadlands:Reloaded game (currently running The Last Sons campaign). They sort of suck a lot of time out of my schedule. Not only that, I finally managed to get into a twice-monthly game of Pathfinder (Rise of the Runelords campaign) on the other side of the screen, which is proving a lot of fun too.
I didn't get to play Numenera because every time I scheduled it something happened to screw it all up. The last attempt was scuppered because someone changed the event time on a meetup calendar and half the people showed up for the earlier time and half the newer, later one. I've become less enchanted with the setting, the game system and Monty Cook's writing over the last year anyway and am entirely unworried about getting it played now.
A shame, as the setting has a lot of potential. Cook just doesn't want to use it intelligently. He sees the process of adventuring in a fundamentally non-understandable milieu to be fascinating, which would appear to be at odds with the opinion of the rest of the world plus one dog. He also developed the setting as a scattering of ideas with no real framework in which to knit them together coherently.
Neither did I get to play in the much anticipated Metal, Magic and Lore game I made a character for, because the game folded after one session and I was scheduled to enter on session two. Oh well. I doubt anyone will run it now either. The momentum for what is a limited-audience game has been lost.
I was in Canada in August for what may well be the last Retcon - general attendance was dramatically down on previous years apparently, which is beyond sad. A small local game con is an ideal place to meet new gamers and promote the hobby. But it seemed this time that the organizer was distancing himself from the affair, and if he isn't engaged he shouldn't expect others to be either. Promotion for it was minimal too, to the point I doubted it would convene at all for the longest time.
A local game store has closed its doors, a victim to hard times, failure to understand the financial realities of running a game store and the clientele looking in the store but buying on the web. Congratulations people. You saved a few bucks on your game. Only problem is you have nowhere to play it now.
So what's new?
Board game-wise I obtained a few little gems.
Red November, a rather hysterical game set in a Gnome Submarine in which everyone runs around trying to stop the wretched thing sinking before the game ends. Lots of fun. Uses a neat mechanic wherein each player can do whatever he wants in a turn, but then has to advance his personal clock to account for the time used, which precipitates (usually dire) events that the others must usually deal with. These include fires, floods, drive malfunctions, powerplant malfunctions, missile payload malfunctions and, later in the game, the hull being hugged to death by The Kraken. Good for kids over, say, six too, with an adult to decypher the usual godsawful rulebook.
No-one writes proper rulebooks any more. What happened to the rulebook writers from Parker Bros., Waddingtons, or (for the serious gamer) Avalon Hill or SPI? Post-RPG rulebooks are a nightmare to use in-game for special case rule resolution.
Tokaido is a placid game for up to five people based on a traditional pilgrimage to Edo in which one gains points by collecting souvenirs, eating fine food and conversing with interesting people. I like it but it may lack oomph for some.A good game for a crowd that hates conflict games and cannot take the complexity or time-investment for Catan.
King of Tokyo is a light-hearted game about warring giant monsters seeking the rights to call Tokyo their own. It uses a dice mechanic and simple rules, augmented by the inevitable cards to mix things up. Not a fan of the over-use of cards to futz with the rules of a game, myself. That said, King of Tokyo is an excellent way for 3-6 people to waste twenty minutes or so. The rules are simple, the rulebook only mildly annoying in its lack of clarity (the artwork is a bit noisy) and the game fun.
I can't remember if I mentioned Schlock Mercenary: Capital Offensive which is a nice two player game set in the world of the webcomic Schlock Mercenary. Not hard to learn and quite enjoyable, it stands out by being a game that gives the buyer more playing pieces than there are rules for in the game. They say it's so you can DIY some stuff of your own. I reckon they ran out of time. Fun, like I say, with diced movement allowance and a simple, quick combat mechanic. Expensive to obtain, though, with a post-kickstarter set going on Amazon for about $45.
I played a game of the new Mars Attacks board-come-tabletop-war game over the weekend. This uses a printed map playing surface divided into large squares (they looked like three inch squares to me, but I didn't measure them) and miniatures of Soldiers, gifted civilian heroes and heroines, and , of course, Martians to depict battles from the rare gum card series of the 1950s.
It is a lavish production with high quality art on the map and the inevitable cards, great sculpts of each subject, clip-together terrain (busted walls and improvised barricades) and eight-sided dice.
Each square can hold up to six minis, attacks are figured on a base of dice pools. Three dice for an attack, four if the target is "in the clear" and more if you have cards and use an action to aim. defender rolls three "survival" dice and adds more dice if he/she has cards to play. Each player is striving to achieve the number on their mini's stat line - usually a five for shooting attacks by a soldier and six for survival - or better. If the attacks beat the number of survivals, the mini is dead.
Where the wheels start to wobble a bit is in the fine details. The designers couldn't decide whether they wanted a board game with movement demarcation/ranging squares or a tabletop wargame without them. So they encumbered the game with some of the worst clutter lifted from the Charlie-Foxtrot of Warhammer 40k. "If you can see part of a model you can shoot it".
Models may be anywhere in the square but if you move one to a different place in the square - to avoid the consequences of that quoted rule - it costs movement even though the model has gone nowhere and since there are no "sub-squares" the rearrangement cannot be checked or verified. So dispute is possible where none is called for - in a board game.
People play board games for a different kick than they play tabletop games and a different kick again when they play RPGs. In a board game there really is no excuse for introducing uncertainty of this nature as it can only ever lead to dispute. Just look at the arguments that games of WH40K precipitate. Those blistering rows eventually inculcate a ridiculous mindset in which people cannot, for example, agree that four inches is not less than four inches (an actual dispute from an observed game of WH40k between two college science undergrads).
With board games it is possible, desirable and I say mandatory to tie down everything with all cases covered by explicit rules. How many "explanatory" examples could have been saved if the authors of Mansions of Madness had simply said "there is no such thing as a one-ended ladder", or the writers of Mars Attacks either called for printing of a finer grid of squares inside the larger and insisted each model occupy one of them for purposes of line of sight or simply said "if line of sight is traced through an obstacle, cover is granted"? Did they learn nothing from the various iterations of WH40K and the authors' struggle to write a coherent LOS rule that worked without causing fisticuffs?
Anyway, once sensible house rules have been instigated to counter the lack of having a pair by the game designers it plays well. The cards introduce too much randomness in my opinion but I am in a very small minority. I still had fun playing it and look forward to doing so again.
Unfortunately, it is a Kickstarter-funded game and so is likely to be expensive for the aftermarket.
More to come.
One day.
Resources:
Mars Attacks Boardgame
Schlock Mercenary:Capital Offensive Boardgame at the Schlock Mercenary webstore
Tokaido explained by the designers
King of Tokyo at IELLO Games
I currently run a once-a-month Delta Green game that is crowding on four years of slithery fun and a twice monthly Deadlands:Reloaded game (currently running The Last Sons campaign). They sort of suck a lot of time out of my schedule. Not only that, I finally managed to get into a twice-monthly game of Pathfinder (Rise of the Runelords campaign) on the other side of the screen, which is proving a lot of fun too.
I didn't get to play Numenera because every time I scheduled it something happened to screw it all up. The last attempt was scuppered because someone changed the event time on a meetup calendar and half the people showed up for the earlier time and half the newer, later one. I've become less enchanted with the setting, the game system and Monty Cook's writing over the last year anyway and am entirely unworried about getting it played now.
A shame, as the setting has a lot of potential. Cook just doesn't want to use it intelligently. He sees the process of adventuring in a fundamentally non-understandable milieu to be fascinating, which would appear to be at odds with the opinion of the rest of the world plus one dog. He also developed the setting as a scattering of ideas with no real framework in which to knit them together coherently.
Neither did I get to play in the much anticipated Metal, Magic and Lore game I made a character for, because the game folded after one session and I was scheduled to enter on session two. Oh well. I doubt anyone will run it now either. The momentum for what is a limited-audience game has been lost.
I was in Canada in August for what may well be the last Retcon - general attendance was dramatically down on previous years apparently, which is beyond sad. A small local game con is an ideal place to meet new gamers and promote the hobby. But it seemed this time that the organizer was distancing himself from the affair, and if he isn't engaged he shouldn't expect others to be either. Promotion for it was minimal too, to the point I doubted it would convene at all for the longest time.
A local game store has closed its doors, a victim to hard times, failure to understand the financial realities of running a game store and the clientele looking in the store but buying on the web. Congratulations people. You saved a few bucks on your game. Only problem is you have nowhere to play it now.
So what's new?
Board game-wise I obtained a few little gems.
Red November, a rather hysterical game set in a Gnome Submarine in which everyone runs around trying to stop the wretched thing sinking before the game ends. Lots of fun. Uses a neat mechanic wherein each player can do whatever he wants in a turn, but then has to advance his personal clock to account for the time used, which precipitates (usually dire) events that the others must usually deal with. These include fires, floods, drive malfunctions, powerplant malfunctions, missile payload malfunctions and, later in the game, the hull being hugged to death by The Kraken. Good for kids over, say, six too, with an adult to decypher the usual godsawful rulebook.
No-one writes proper rulebooks any more. What happened to the rulebook writers from Parker Bros., Waddingtons, or (for the serious gamer) Avalon Hill or SPI? Post-RPG rulebooks are a nightmare to use in-game for special case rule resolution.
Tokaido is a placid game for up to five people based on a traditional pilgrimage to Edo in which one gains points by collecting souvenirs, eating fine food and conversing with interesting people. I like it but it may lack oomph for some.A good game for a crowd that hates conflict games and cannot take the complexity or time-investment for Catan.
King of Tokyo is a light-hearted game about warring giant monsters seeking the rights to call Tokyo their own. It uses a dice mechanic and simple rules, augmented by the inevitable cards to mix things up. Not a fan of the over-use of cards to futz with the rules of a game, myself. That said, King of Tokyo is an excellent way for 3-6 people to waste twenty minutes or so. The rules are simple, the rulebook only mildly annoying in its lack of clarity (the artwork is a bit noisy) and the game fun.
I can't remember if I mentioned Schlock Mercenary: Capital Offensive which is a nice two player game set in the world of the webcomic Schlock Mercenary. Not hard to learn and quite enjoyable, it stands out by being a game that gives the buyer more playing pieces than there are rules for in the game. They say it's so you can DIY some stuff of your own. I reckon they ran out of time. Fun, like I say, with diced movement allowance and a simple, quick combat mechanic. Expensive to obtain, though, with a post-kickstarter set going on Amazon for about $45.
I played a game of the new Mars Attacks board-come-tabletop-war game over the weekend. This uses a printed map playing surface divided into large squares (they looked like three inch squares to me, but I didn't measure them) and miniatures of Soldiers, gifted civilian heroes and heroines, and , of course, Martians to depict battles from the rare gum card series of the 1950s.
It is a lavish production with high quality art on the map and the inevitable cards, great sculpts of each subject, clip-together terrain (busted walls and improvised barricades) and eight-sided dice.
Each square can hold up to six minis, attacks are figured on a base of dice pools. Three dice for an attack, four if the target is "in the clear" and more if you have cards and use an action to aim. defender rolls three "survival" dice and adds more dice if he/she has cards to play. Each player is striving to achieve the number on their mini's stat line - usually a five for shooting attacks by a soldier and six for survival - or better. If the attacks beat the number of survivals, the mini is dead.
Where the wheels start to wobble a bit is in the fine details. The designers couldn't decide whether they wanted a board game with movement demarcation/ranging squares or a tabletop wargame without them. So they encumbered the game with some of the worst clutter lifted from the Charlie-Foxtrot of Warhammer 40k. "If you can see part of a model you can shoot it".
Models may be anywhere in the square but if you move one to a different place in the square - to avoid the consequences of that quoted rule - it costs movement even though the model has gone nowhere and since there are no "sub-squares" the rearrangement cannot be checked or verified. So dispute is possible where none is called for - in a board game.
People play board games for a different kick than they play tabletop games and a different kick again when they play RPGs. In a board game there really is no excuse for introducing uncertainty of this nature as it can only ever lead to dispute. Just look at the arguments that games of WH40K precipitate. Those blistering rows eventually inculcate a ridiculous mindset in which people cannot, for example, agree that four inches is not less than four inches (an actual dispute from an observed game of WH40k between two college science undergrads).
With board games it is possible, desirable and I say mandatory to tie down everything with all cases covered by explicit rules. How many "explanatory" examples could have been saved if the authors of Mansions of Madness had simply said "there is no such thing as a one-ended ladder", or the writers of Mars Attacks either called for printing of a finer grid of squares inside the larger and insisted each model occupy one of them for purposes of line of sight or simply said "if line of sight is traced through an obstacle, cover is granted"? Did they learn nothing from the various iterations of WH40K and the authors' struggle to write a coherent LOS rule that worked without causing fisticuffs?
Anyway, once sensible house rules have been instigated to counter the lack of having a pair by the game designers it plays well. The cards introduce too much randomness in my opinion but I am in a very small minority. I still had fun playing it and look forward to doing so again.
Unfortunately, it is a Kickstarter-funded game and so is likely to be expensive for the aftermarket.
More to come.
One day.
Resources:
Mars Attacks Boardgame
Schlock Mercenary:Capital Offensive Boardgame at the Schlock Mercenary webstore
Tokaido explained by the designers
King of Tokyo at IELLO Games
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