On the table - playing catch up!
Evening, friends! It's Wednesday, 2nd of June and I am on holiday with some free time between writing my new RPG adventure, Secrets of the Black Obelisk (more on that in a future post?). It turns out that I haven't posted here in a while (since April - gulp!), so it's about time for a catch up and look at what has passed across my tabletop in recent weeks! This one is going to be a long one, because May was a month packed full of games.
On the Table...
Super Skill Pinball 4-cade
Super Skill Pinball 4-cade is a roll-and-write game recently featured in Shut Up & Sit Down's 5(6?) Favourite New Roll'n'Write Games video where it first caught my eye. I used to love playing pinball. In fact, I fondly remember one holiday in Wales, back when I was a lad, that was mostly spent merrily playing on the pinball machine that place we were stopping at had in their bar area. These days, pinball machines are few and far between in the UK. So having something that can simulate pinball and do it well seemed like giving a shot.
Now, full disclosure, we did try to get this in the store, but it sold out to allocation, so it is currently on back order. I managed to snag a copy from the excellently named Mutant Dice Games (don't tell Ron!). It is now sold out at most places in the UK. But fear not, it is a WizKids games and sure to be reprinted at some point. Plus, there is another version, Super Skill Pinball: Ramp It Up!, coming out later in 2021.
The game is pretty much your usual roll-and-write affair. You roll some dice, you fill in sections of your player board. Rinse and repeat. You can play with up to four players, all using a single pair of dice that someone rolls. With each roll players select a number on one of the two dice and use that to fill in a section on their player board. Fairly standard stuff. To begin with, your ball starts at the top of the board and will work its way down, bouncing off various features on its way, thus scoring you points, before eventually reaching the flippers and being shot back up.
However, it's the various features on the board that really make the game feel like pinball. You have bumpers where, subject to some lucky dice rolls, you can keep the ball bouncing around and racking up points. You have multipliers you can activate, multiball bonuses that see two balls shooting around the board, spinners, side games... You name something you've seen on a pinball table and you can bet it's here in some form.
I've been playing the game solo and I think this is where it shines. I've given it a go with Elizabeth as well, but pinball is a solo experience in the arcades to some extent - just you and your skill versus the machine. I'm usually not one for solo games where the aim of the game is to get a high score and then try and beat it. But that's what pinball it. And this game emulates that near perfectly. And my god is it addictive too. I've spent several hours just in the past couple of days play through the four different tables that come in the box and had great fun doing so. Being the D&D nerd that I am, my favourite so far is by far and away the feature packed Dragonslayer table (and it's not just because I can rack up the highest score on it!).
If you're looking for a new roll-and-write that its truly addictive, then I can't recommend Super Skill Pinball 4-cade enough. It's a blast!
Hanamikoji
My purchase of Hanamikoji was something of a whim. I'm always on the look out for 2-player games that I can get Elizabeth interested in and Hanamikoji was something that had been on the stores back orders for some time and finally came in stock in early May. Elizabeth is a big fan of manga, so the art work and theme were an easy sell. But Hanamikoji is more than just its anime aesthetics. Inside this box is a very clever 2-player card game that is filled with difficult choices.
The game revolves around the players trying to attract the favour of seven different geisha, each of which are interested in a specific performance item, examples of which include a fan, an umbrella or a tea service. You play cards from your hand that represent these items, hoping to win the favour of each geisha by having the most of the item they are interested in at the end of the round. If there is a tie between the players, the geisha's favour does not change.
However, these items are not all represented equally in the deck of cards. Some geisha have up to five cards representing their favoured item, while others have only two. This is represented on the geisha cards themselves, and also reflects the amount of 'charm' points that each geisha is worth. If at the end of the round you have the favour of four geisha or a total of 11 charm points then you win the game. Otherwise, you shuffle the cards back up and start a new round, with the favour of the geisha each player had attracted carrying over, meaning that there is a continual back and forth as you try to win over the geisha and prevent your opponent from claiming victory.
Where things get tricky is in the actions you can take. Each player has the same four actions, represented on tokens, and you can only take each action once during the round. First up you can place one card from your hand face down to score at the end of the round. The second action is to place two cards face down, but these will not be scored. The last two actions involved you playing cards face up either into three piles of one card each, or two piles with two cards each. In both cases, your opponent first gets to select one of the piles, which the use for their own scoring. This is the ingenious part of the design, because you never know if that cards your playing are actually helping your opponent out.
While perhaps not of the same strategic depth as games like 7 Wonders: Duel, Hanamikoji presents a rules light, simple game that presents difficult choices. It plays fast and is a good contender for a game to throw in a bag to play down the coffee shop (once things eventually return to normal!). If you're looking for an interesting new 2-player card game, you can't go far wrong!
Everdell
Everdell is currently ranked 29 in Board Game Geeks' Top 100. Why have I not played this game until now? That's a difficult question to answer. I had initially written it off as a cutesy worker placement game back when it came out in 2018 and hadn't really investigated it much. That and at the time I was much more invested in RPGs (which is still true today). However, working at Meeple, I've seen this game fly off the shelves. So, with few RPGs being released in May that I wanted to pick up, Everdell got added to my list of board game purchases for last month. And now that I have had a chance to play it I can see what all the fuss is about.
For the most part, Everdell plays like every other worker placement. You have a limited number of workers to use to acquire the cards that represent the citizens and buildings you add to the woodland city you're building, as well as acquiring the resources you need to pay for them. These citizens and building form and engine that allows you to do more and more over the course of the game. And, of course, there are bonus tiles and events to acquire. But where it shines is in how tight the theme is and how well everything works together. It is possibly one of the tightest worker placement games that I have played.
At first, we did think that the game played a bit too quickly to begin with. However, it is something of an illusion. The course of the game is split into a number of seasons, with when you reclaim workers moving the seasons on for that player and releasing new workers into your available pool. To start with, you have only two workers, meaning that the first season passes very quickly (leaving Elizabeth convinced that there was no way that you'd be able to get the maximum 15 cards in your city before the game was over). However, by the last season you'll have six workers and a much broader range of options at your disposal to use them on. Plus some cards will allow you to move your workers around etc.
Overall, we were impressed by Everdell. It appears to scale well, working great as a two player and going to a maximum of four. BGG suggests it is best with three. I'm looking forward to playing it again and can't wait to give it a try with a few more players once we're allowed to meet up once more.
Lost Ruins of Arnak
Lost Ruins of Arnak has been creeping up the BGG rankings, reaching 79th spot in the Top 100 as I write, most likely due to its recent nomination for the Kennerspiel des Jahres. With some extra money coming in from selling off some old computing equipment, Lost Ruins made for the second big purchase of last month.
At its core it appears to be another worker placement game, but deck building is also a large part of the game. However, while these are both central to the game play neither of these two mechanics necessarily dictates your victory. Over the course of the game we played, Elizabeth focused heavily on building up her deck, allowing her to pull of some interesting combinations of actions, while I allowed my deck to run thin, instead focussing on efficiency of resources to gain points via the long research track that takes up the right hand side of the board (through which copious victory points can be acquired if you can climb up it high enough!).
The board for the game, however, is massive - you're going to need a big old table for this one! And this for us is where the game sadly fell a little flat with only two players. A large part of the board is given over to the unexplored island of Arnak, the area you will be exploring over the course of the game. And as you explore, you'll be adding new locations and overcoming their guardians, earning you resources, victory points and preventing your deck from getting clogged up by fear cards (which lose you points at the end of the game). But with only two worker meeples available to your research team and no way to add more, exploration can be slow. By the end of our two player game we had only uncovered five for the twelve possible locations, leaving much of the island unexplored.
Despite this, the game is tight, there are multiple paths to victory and, while it certainly isn't as finely interwoven as in the case of Everdell, the theme of the game does fit (though as archaeologists ourselves, we did have a few problems with it). But I feel that Lost Ruins of Arnak is going to work better with three or four players overall. In fact, BGG recommends a player count of three.
I'd definitely say give Lost Ruins of Arnak a chance, and I am looking forward to both giving it another shot with Elizabeth, as well as playing it with more players in the future. But if you're looking for a meatier game for just two players, I'd say look at Everdell first.
Honourable mentions
Other boardgames that I picked up this month included The King is Dead! by Peer Sylvester, a tight little area control boardgame set in medieval Britain in which you don't play as a particular faction but instead try and game the board so that the faction you have most heavily invested in over the course of the game comes out on top. That or set things up so your influence is spread across all the factions in the case that the French decided to invade Britain. The best part is how you use your hand of action cards, each of which can only be used once throughout the whole game. So, play fast but lack influence in the latter half of the game, or hold back but risk leaving it too late...
The other honourable mention goes to 2018's Spiel des Jahres winner, Azul. Yes, I haven't played it up until now. No, I'm not going into why. Yes, it is good. And if you haven't heard of it by now, have you been living under a rock?! Go play it. It is good.
Off the shelves...
Kult: Divinity Lost
Kult: Divinity Lost is a Swedish horror roleplaying game and an updated version of one of the more renowned RPG lines of the 90's that now uses a variant of the Powered by the Apocalypse rules system. It's not going to be for everyone's tastes either. It's content is grim in a variety of ways and explores pretty much everything that the horror genre has to offer. I'll warn you now that various acts of transgressive horror, including sexual violence, feature amongst its pages pretty bluntly.
The game's setting is ostensibly a struggle between heaven and hell over mankind. In it, humanity used to be a divine species. We were all powerful and indulged in our every fantasy and wish. Then the Demiurge (the fiction's interpretation of god) imprisoned us within the illusion, the world that we see around ourselves today, and our divinity was hidden from us, but never extinguished. The Demiurge maintained the illusion with the help of their Archons, powerful beings that support various principals such as submission, hierarchy, law, community, victory, honour and avarice. As you can see from these, such principals aren't necessarily always to be interpreted as 'good', especially given that the Demiurge and his Archons seek to keep us trapped within the illusion and ignorant of our own powers. On the flip side, both the Demiurge and their Archons have mirrors in Astaroth and their Death Angels (an interpretation of the devil and various demons). Like the Archons, the Death Angels embody various principals, such as power, abuse, torment and compulsion, that are more objectively wrong and evil.
Now, the Demiurge has vanished and the Archons fight amongst themselves, while Astaroth and the Death Angels have begun stretching their influence more freely into our prison, seeking to feast on our hidden divinity and become our new jailers. Thus, the illusion around us is beginning to crumble and we are beginning to awaken. Players play various archetype characters, usually beginning with those that are aware, i.e. have begun to notice that something is wrong with our world. Over the course of play, they may become enlightened as they discover their divine powers and thus become forever changed. If they eventually become awakened then the recover their divinity and, for all intents and purposes, leave play as a super powerful being that can no longer act as a PC.
While the subject matter of the horror in the game touches on pretty much everything and is almost certainly going to put some offâand there are some very unsettling parts withinâit is incredibly well written and the setting can be approached from a variety of angles. The art is beautiful and vile in equal measure. Where it shines strongest though is in the tools it provides GMs to run the game. There is also a passage on 'The Horror Contract' which (while it contains some pretty graphic descriptions of transgressive horror) contains useful information to help someone run any type of horror game.
While the game does discuss safety measures for the gameâsomething that is definitely needed given the subject matter it can stray intoâI did feel that this could have been focused on in greater detail. However, as part of the horror contract it instructs the GM and players to discuss specific topics that you don't want to appear in the game, much like Lines and Veils without explicitly calling it that. It also suggests a stop phrase to pause the game in case topics stray into dangerous territory, very similar to John Stravopoulos' X-card.
So a game that isn't going to be for everyone and one that it packed with information that presents, at times, a difficult read. Definitely one for mature audiences and I can see it being used to run some pretty vile stuff in the wrong hands. But with care from the GM and buy in from players, Kult could provide an excellent horror experience that will stay with you for a long time after the game finishes. It's a recommended read for anyone running horror RPGs.
Age of Sigmar: Soulbound
Much like Call of Cthulhu has its Pulp Cthulhu rules, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay now has its pulp cousin in Age of Sigmar: Soulbound. Leaving behind the Old World for the Mortal Realms of Games Workshop's current fantasy game, Soulbound puts aside the older and sometimes finickity rules set of WFRP for a sleek new d6 system. Players can embody Battlemages of the cities of Sigmar, the mighty Kurnoth Hunters of the Sylvaneth, Witch Aelves of the Daughters of Kaine, gumpy Doomseekers from the Fyreslayer lodges, and tech-savvy Endrinneers of the Kharadron Overlords. This is Warhammer on speed. And it is fantastic!
I am still in the process of reading the Soulbound rulebook, but what I have read so far makes me want to run this game as soon as possible. The system is simple and intuitive. Basically, you form a pool of d6 based on an attribute and skill, e.g. Body and Might. Roll the dice and try to pass a target number set by the GM. Say this is 5, then every dice coming up 5 would be a success. The GM can also increase the complexity of the test, which increases the number of success required. For example a 4:3 test would mean 4s are required to succeed and you need three success to pass the test. Plus, players have a way to mitigate the luck of the dice as well. Each skill has ranks of training (that add dice to the pool) and also focus. This latter mechanic allows you to increase the number(s) on the dice by the amount of focus you have, thus influencing your roll.
I love the system. It's simple, flexible and highly effective! Combat looks like it will be fast and epic, with weapons doing set amounts of damage (some of which may also take into account the number of successes rolled too), which will speed up combat no end. There is no rolling against armour classesâarmour simply soaks damage upâand health is dealt with through Toughness and Wounds. Toughness is basically a soak for punishmentâyou can keep doing through it all until it runs out. It's when Wounds take effect that you begin to slow down. Only when you are mortally wounded do you risk death (or you take so much damage as to die instantly). Even then you can perform a Last Standâsacrificing yourself so your comrades can succeed.
Finally, my most favourite thing about the system is that it comes in with the reason why the PCs are together baked in. They are Soulbound (with the exception of Stormcast Eternals, who are boud to Sigmar anyway)âchosen by the gods and tied together by the intertwining of their very souls. Even though this turns them into the big damn heroes, the game still allows for all kinds of character nuances, given that they are drawn into their fellowship for a whole variety of reasons. You may have the Kharadron who has signed up for a lucrative promise of aether-gold, the Doomseeker cast out from their lodge, a Witch Aelf who has lost the trust of Morathi, and a human Trade Pioneer bent on discovery. It allows the character to be complex but given them a reason to work together. Great stuff!
I suppose the only problem then is the setting. If you're not interested in Games Workshop's Age of Sigmar, then you aren't going to find much to appeal outside of a neat set of systems to run the game. While these might be portable to something else, it would take a lot of work to do so, given that the setting is tied to many of the skills and traits that characters can take. However, if you're looking for a chance to focus in depth on the adventures that take place away from the battlefields of the Mortal Realms and step into the shoes of great (but complex) heroes, you can't go far wrong here.
Knock! Magazine
Those who have read these pages before are probably aware that I have a fondness for old-school fantasy roleplaying games, primarily brought about by my nostalgia for the games of my youth. That and the fact that the Old-School Renaissance (or OSR) churns out some of the more interesting gameable content to use in said fantasy roleplaying games. Enter Knock! Magazine, ably put together by The Merry Mushmenâthe dynamic due of Eric Nieudan and Olivier Revenuâand funded last year on Kickstarter. It seems that 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic have once more ushered in the era of the tabletop zine.
Knock! is huge though - 210 pages that are packed to the brim with old-school weirdness. When it says it is an adventure gaming bric-a-brac, they really mean it. Even the dust jacket it comes with has a setting written on it and the bookmark hosts a random table of weird spells that are produced by a spell book known only as The Anarchical Grimoire of Propylonic Discharges. That gives you just a taste of what delights this tome contains. There is something for everyone, ranging from tables of traps, useless magical loot and what happens when you 'eat the body' to settings, variants on the original B2 Caves of Chaos, suggestions got rules modifications... The list is pretty exhaustive.
If this all sounds interesting, there is some bad newsâKnock! just recently sold out of its first issue (I must have been one of the last to acquire a copy!). However, fear not! The Merry Mushmen are currently funding issue two over on Kickstarter right now. And as part of that, there is a chance to get a copy of the reprint of issue one too. I highly recommend looking into this wonderful mish-mash of flavourful roleplaying treats, even if you're not into the old-school scene. There is something gameable for everyone here.
Kickstarters
Talking about Kickstarters, here are a couple more that are currently funding that you might be interested in...
Firstly, Wyrd Science is funding the second issue of their table top focused zine. You might remember I touched on their first issue in an earlier post, where I highly recommended it. The latest issue promises a celebration of B/X D&D, which is 40 years old(!), a look at new RPGs Wanderhome and Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and interview with Elizabeth Hargreave of Wingspan fame, and a chat with Jon Peterson about his new book The Elusive Shift, which looks at how RPGs forged their identity. Plus, look at that sweet cover!
Also just hitting Kickstarter as of yesterday is ARC: Doom Tabletop RPG. It promises a rules light, tension heavy game of heroes striving to prevent the apocalypse. And it looks rad. You can find out more about it over on their Kickstarter page, plus they have even supplied a quickstart, so you can try before you pledge. It's already funded and hitting stretch goals and is being run by Exalted Funeral, whose Kickstarters I have backed before and who have always delivered.
Wrap up...
Well, I guess that's it for now! I could go on, but this post is long enough already. That and I should get back to enjoying my holiday (so that means back to writing Secrets of the Black Obelisk for Old-School Essentials and playing too much Super Skill Pinball...).
Talking of Old-School Essentials, my pledge for their Advanced Fantasy Kickstarter should be turning up soon, so expect a delve into that at some point. Plus, the hardcover of Impossible Landscapes for Delta Green also arrives in June. This, and the release of the new edition of Deadlands this weeks means that there will be lots of RPG goodness to discuss! Maybe I'll fit a boardgame or two in as wellâI did also pick up Great Western Trail last month but have yet to play it!
If you're looking for some more reading to tide you over in the meantime, may I point out that Senet Magazine just released their fifth issue, which is available to order now. It's a great little magazine that take a deep dive into the boardgaming hobby. Their latest issue includes an interview with Issac Childres, designer of Gloomhaven, a spotlight on the zombie genre, and a whole host of reviews and previews of new releases and upcoming games. Definitely recommended.