BOARD GAME QUICK REVIEWS FOR GLORY AND HONOUR!

For games played by men (and women) with beards, such as tabletop RPGs.

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Dog Pants
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Re: BOARD GAME QUICK REVIEWS FOR GLORY AND HONOUR!

Post by Dog Pants »

I've not actually managed to play a proper game yet, but come next month I'll be showing Anery's Imperial dogs who's boss.
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Re: BOARD GAME QUICK REVIEWS FOR GLORY AND HONOUR!

Post by Anery »

Smash Up

Card game that doesn't revolve so much around deck building as it does taking advantage. Plenty of backstabbing and getting one over on your opponent.
Game has 8 decks of 20 cards each, these decks are built around a theme; robots, ninjas, pirates, dinosaurs, tricksters, zombies, aliens and wizards. You combine two of these decks and shuffle them together to form your deck. You then draw ten cards from the top and play.
Play consists of taking turns to play cards against objective cards that have also been randomly drawn. Each turn you can play a minion or an action card - or both. Each minon has a point value and that point value contributes to scoring against the objective.
For example an alien mothership may have a "tipping point" of 20 - this means that in order to score the points on that objective there has to be a total of 20 points on that card - total cards, you and your opponents. That card is then scored according to the amount of minion points people have put on that card - person with most points might take 3 victory points, second most take 2 and third take 1.
It's not always that simple as some cards rank the person with the least number of minion points on a card as the one to take the most victory points, or the second place person.
First to 15 victory points wins.

I said there was an element of fucking over the other person.
Pretty much every card you play has special text on it that must be carried out. Like remove an opponents card, or move an oppoents card to another card or even blocking your opponet from playing cards on that objective for a number of turns. I played zombie robots against alien ninjas and the alien ninjas had so much removal that my tide of zombies could barely keep up. Each deck does seem to have it's own way of play like that, zombies get to swarm things, ninjas kill things etc.

Base set is for 2-4 players but there are expansions and rules can be stretched to accomodate more if you have the decks.

Should be good at a bash.
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Re: BOARD GAME QUICK REVIEWS FOR GLORY AND HONOUR!

Post by Joose »

Ive got this, plus an expansion with time travellers, shapeshifters, spies and monkeys. It reasonably simple and good fun. Joose approved!
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Re: BOARD GAME QUICK REVIEWS FOR GLORY AND HONOUR!

Post by Dog Pants »

King of Tokyo

Giant monsters fighting over Tokyo! What's not to like? It's actually more of a dice game than a board game, with the board only representing who currently controls Tokyo. I saw someone describe it as combat Yahtzee somewhere, but that's not really accurate either. Each player rolls dice to either gain victory points, heal, attack the other player(s), or generate power. The objective is to be the last monster standing, or get 20 victory points. The power is used to buy (and use in some cases) special power cards. It's made tactical by letting you re-roll the six dice up to three times to get the combinations you want, as well as how to play the power cards, and the fact that whoever is in Tokyo gets ganged up on by the other players and can't heal. So the game turns into tactical advances and retreats into the city to win victory points before you get beaten to death then escape and heal. It's fast and simple, and has enough tactical variation to remain interesting. I've played a good few games with Sprog and she understands the mechanics of it well enough to compete, although her tactical decisions only really extend to hoarding power and trying to beat me up.
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Re: BOARD GAME QUICK REVIEWS FOR GLORY AND HONOUR!

Post by Anery »

Ghostbusters

This was another Kickstarter project. The premise is that the containment unit has been breached and everything has been let loose - this time Walter Peck was not responsible. Your job is simple, clean up the town.
Gameplay is a cleaned up version of Zombiecide, you assemble a team of four players who can level up by completing certain actions - snaring a ghost, trapping a ghost etc. As they level up they get new abilities, we know the drill we've seen it before. There are no items to pick up in this game, and no threat level to spawn more ghosts as you progress - but that doesn't mean that you can just blast your way through.
Each player turn sees the character use two action points, these can be used to drive Ecto 1 (more on this later) move two spaces or shoot. Each target you shoot at has different values - a hit value which is the roll required to get it in your stream, and a trap value which is the number of streams needed to trap the ghost. You can only maintain one stream at any one time so no attempting to stream several ghosts at once.
The ghost turn sees a seperate dice roll to see what happens, this can mean a portal spawns ghosts (bad news) all ghosts move (and can slime players reducing their action points by one per slime, when all players are rendered actionless the game is over) or, if a portal that is closed gets rolled, ghosts being carried will escape from their traps.
Escaping ghosts can be prevented by returning the full trap to Ecto 1, at which point the ghost is returned to the spawning pool - this is good, if the spirit realm empties the world will end and I think that means you lose. This leads to some interesting tactics involving driving Ecto 1 around (movement of 6 spaces carries all GB currently in vehicle but only uses one GBs action point) to get optimal positioning for ghost drop off and capture.

Oh, and the artwork has been done by the guys who did the comics.
There are other bits and bats but I think that is the general gist, the kickstarter edition I got had some nice extras like additional player characters (including Janine and Lewis) and a series of campaigns to play through culminating with a battle with some well known bad guys.

It's quick, it's simple it's good fun. It's also a tad pricey but if you can spare the cash you will enjoy it, it's also kid friendly.
Last edited by Anery on December 9th, 2015, 4:01, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: BOARD GAME QUICK REVIEWS FOR GLORY AND HONOUR!

Post by Dog Pants »

Ahh, now I remember why I didn't immediately back this: it's the cartoon versions of the Ghostbusters. Not that I disliked the cartoon, it just wasn't the film. Anyway, sounds pretty good. Interesting that the miniatures look like they're wearing masks from Payday.
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