Limes takes Cities and makes it better

 Limes might seem like Martyn F did a mashup of Take It Easy and Carcassonne. Which isn’t actually the case. It’s a refinement of his earlier mashup of Take It Easy and Carcassonne, Cities. :D

Short version: you are creating a four-by-four grid of tiles, creating a map. You are also playing meeples down to score specific parts of the map, Carcassonne-style.

Incidentally, the word Limes isn’t being used as a the citrus fruit but the Roman term for borders and border defenses along what would become Germany. So you are building a map of part of the Roman Empire and I got to learn a new definition of Limes.

So, everyone has an identical set of 24 numbered tiles, along with seven meeples. Someone randomly draws a tile and everyone places that tile. It will all seem familiar if you’ve ever played Take It Easy… or Karuba… or Criss Cross… or Rolling Realms. Wow, this has become a really common mechanic. You are forming a four-by-four grid so you won’t use all the tiles and you will end up defining the dimensions of the grid as the game goes on.

You can also either place a meeple on the tile you just placed OR move a previously placed meeple to an adjacent geographic feature.

The tiles are divided in four areas. They can be water, forest, city or watch tower. And all of them except for watch towers are doubled up on some tiles. And, Carcassonne-style, meeples score points in different ways depending on what they are are standing on.

Most points wins. Unless you’re playing solitaire. In that case, just try to do really well. 

Okay. I really enjoy playing Limes. You have to be in the mood for a Take It Easy-style game and it is definitely a light game. But if that’s what you’re looking for, it’s a good choice.

Cities, back in 2008, was a big deal for me. Along with Wurfel Bingo, it was one of the first Take It Easy-style games I tried that wasn’t Take It Easy. And I still quite like it. But Limes is an improvement. You can score using all four types of terrain and each scoring method is distinct.

Now, I have only played Limes online (https://ori.avtalion.name/limes/) The one downside to the physical version is only has enough components for two players. At one point, I had three copies of Cities so I could play up to twelve people.

I had wanted to try Limes for years and it turned out to be well worth playing.

Railroads and Dungeon Crawls

 Now, I don’t mean a dungeon crawl set on a train, although what limited knowledge I have of the cartoon Infinity Train makes me think that might be what that is.

Railroading is when a game master has the game set up so that there’s a preordained set of events with predetermined outcomes. The players effectively become actors in a script that’s already been written, without any acutal agency.

Dungeon Crawls, of course, are adventures that are set in some sort of spatially limited set of areas. Dungeons, castles, temples, caves, ruins, they come in different flavors but they are all a defined set of areas.

Part of me wondered if they were variations on the same idea. After all, there usually is some kind of order in how you go through a dungeon. Then I realized that they weren’t really the same at all.

You see, railroading controls what you can affect, sometimes even what you do. A dungeon crawl just controls where you can go. Maybe. I was once in a party where the party leader specialized in divination. Once he also got access to teleportation spells, he would crack open dungeons like Danny Ocean. (Fortunately, that amused the dungeon master)

The long and short of it is that I don’t like railroading. It turns the game into a movie that the game master is trying to force into existence. It turns the players into being an audience, not participants.

On the other hand, I have both a fondness and appreciation for a dungeon crawl. Yes, it is a controlled and limited environment which leads to controlled and limited choices but everyone knew what they signed up for. It’s transparent and doesn’t have a predetermined outcome.

I have also known plenty of game masters who have suffered from Bruno. Being able to get away from complex politics and elaborate schemes and villages where everyone has detail personalities and just run a dungeon? I am beyond fine with someone needing to just handle some orcs coping with home invaders.

And if someone says why don’t you just play a game like Descent in campaign mode with funny voices, I would say why not? 

Wow, was Grimtooth’s traps its own thing

 I decided to take a virtual trip back to an earlier age in RPGs and look at the original Grimtooth’s Traps from 1981. It is certainly a look back at a time when RPG philosophy was very different.

Grimtooth’s Traps was the first in a series of game supplements that consisted to literally page after page of traps. There weren’t any game stats for any of them (at least in the original versions of the book) Just diagrams, descriptions and snarky commentary. Lots and lots of snarky commentary.

The most entertaining part of the books and probably a big reason why there ended up being so many volumes is that the narrator is a sarcastic troll named Grimtooth who feels that the deadlier the trap, the better. Since so many RPG books from this time period read like engineering text books, the Grimtooth books have a lot of character.

And as a general rule, the traps involve either a crazy amount of engineering or magic. They are wildly over the top , not even remotely cost effective and often ridiculously deadly.

Honestly, I’m hard-pressed to believe a lot of dungeon masters actually used these traps. Not only would they be potential total party killers, they would slow the game down to a crawl, even if you had a party of nothing but thieves.

That said, I can see making some of the larger traps into the centerpiece of a tomb or ruined temple or a mad wizard’s proving grounds. They don’t necessarily have to violate the part of the Hickman manifesto that says architecture should make sense.

I can’t  say that Grimtooth’s Traps and the books that followed it are examples of an era old enough that most Grognards aren’t old enough to remember since they are so atypical. And I think it would take some work to make traps actually useful. But Grimtooth is a fun read.

The Count of Nine is a fun nine cards

 If you’re even just casually into PnP games (which, since I’m a lazy PnPer, is really where I’m at), you’ve heard of Count of Nine. It’s a Euro in just nine cards. No dice or cubes involved.

The game is all about infrastructure building. You are trying to build a big building and that is going to take resources and smaller buildings.

The cards are double sided and orientation matters. When they are in your deck, they are sideways. When you build a card, it goes upright in your tableau. When they are sideways, the resource on the top of the middle is the active resource.

You slide cards and flip them in order to expose resources and potential building to build. When you run through the deck, you can leave the deck unchanged, rotate the whole deck, reshuffle it or rotate just one card. All this can give you access to different resources.

The game ends when either there are no more possible moves OR you choose to end it. Your score is based on the buildings you built MINUS how many rounds you played. So there can be a reason to stop early.

It took me two tries to figure out the game. While the sliding and flipping was kind of different, what needed to click in my head was how the cards interacted. For one thing, you need a crew to build anything. At my current understanding of the game, building a tavern to get guaranteed access to a crew once a round is important. And some buildings require smaller buildings so you can’t build a different building on that card.

Okay. I definitely enjoy Count of Nine. I think it’s fun and well designed. It gives me a legitimate Euro experience in five, ten minutes with just nine cards. After a couple learning hiccups, the game becomes intuitive so you can just shuffle and go.

I do sometimes wish there were more cards. The game can sometimes feel formulaic, particularly if you play it a few times in a row. But the game is well balanced as it stands and adding more cards would make the game less tight.

The Count of Nine is one of those Print and Play games that I would say, if you have the slightest interest, make it and try it. It will be worth the work. It’s not perfect but it’s a pretty cool nine cards.

Pokethulhu is a cute idea wrapped in a meta package

 After I learned that Pokethulhu was actually a thing, I had to find it and read it. Neither one of those things was that hard once I actually knew it existed.

Anyway, it is an RPG that I _think_ was created as a gag and never intended to be played, although it does have a perfectly functional dice pool system attached to it. Yes, we have reached the point where it’s easy enough to throw in functional mechanics into a joke game.

As the name makes blatantly clear, the game is a mash up of Pokémon and the Cthulhu Mythos. The older you are , the weaker your sanity is, so that’s why it’s kids who go out to become cultists and catch abominations. Which is FAR from the strangest thing I’ve seen done it either franchise.

To be honest, Pokethulhu would be a one-note joke that would be immediately forgettable if it wasn’t for one over-arcing conceit. The idea that the game is based on an existing IP and makes constant references to it. It’s like Norman Sprinrad’s Iron Dream only not nearly as disturbing. It’s a step beyond being based on a fake product. It’s like you are playing a game where you are playing a game in that setting.

And it even plays into the mechanics. Players can play chaos cards, causing bizarre effects, but only if another player makes specific quotes from the Pokethulhu cartoon. Which, of course, doesn’t exist.

Having to come up with lines from a cartoon that is non-existent is the most compelling reason to play the game in my opinion.

The single funniest thing in the tiny RPG was a listing for a pokethulhu named Skoobai-Thulhu. In the cartoon, a cultist named Shagai has one and has to use Skoobai-snacks to get it to do anything.

I have seen a lot of RPGs that I have looked and said ‘Man, I want to play that.’ Pokethulhu isn’t one of them. BUT man, was it a fun read!

Nearing the middle of Cozy Grove

 As I wrote a couple months ago, we started playing Cozy Grove. It’s a video game about being gently helping unhappy ghosts let go and pass on. And we’ve made it to about the halfway point.

Short version: the game has kept us engaged and want to keep playing. So, that’s a thumbs up.

Here’s a recap: You are a spirit scout, a branch of scouting that is into wildernesss skills and helping the restless dead find peace. And you are stuck on an island that is full to the bursting with unhappy ghosts. Who are all pretty friendly. At the worst, they are rude but they will still talk to you. You don’t have to worry about the dead trying to horribly murder you.

While there is a plenty of crafting and decorating for you to do, the heart of the game is fulfilling literally hundreds of fetch quests. And, slowly, you find out each ghosts story. As opposed to random, faceless ghosts, you have a small collection of ghosts, each with their own story to explore. 

And so far, those stories range from the melancholy to the seriously depressing.

Every time you level up, the island expands and you get a new ghost so we haven’t seen everyone yet. But none of the stories have been ‘inappropriate’ and forced us to edit them for our seven-year-old.

 

None of the stories are that surprising. We’ve only completed one but they all seem to have plenty of foreshadowing.

Cozy Grove hasn’t been shocking or surprising but it has been a slightly sad way to decompress.

Okay, Tom Baker was great. I admit it.

 I keep going back and forth when it comes to Tom Baker. 

As someone who got into Doctor Who in the mid-80s, Tom Baker was _the_ Doctor. He still holds the record for the most years on the show. He was the iconic version of the character. If people knew nothing else about Doctor Who, they knew about the scarf. 

And there have been so many times that I have felt his time on Doctor Who is so over-hyped. But, to be completely fair, I blame that almost entirely on Graham Wilson.

While my introduction to Doctor Who was reruns of the Jon Pertwee era, a lot of the people I knew who loved Doctor Who had been introduced through Tom Baker. For some, he was their only Doctor. I’ve heard of at least one station (I think it was a college TV station, not a PBS one) that ONLY showed Tom Baker. When they’d get to Logopolis, they’d loop back to Robot.

I think of Tom Baker’s time as breaking down into three distinct parts. Phillip Hinchcliffe as the producer, Graham Wilson as the producer and John Nathan-Turner as the producer. And, frankly, I don’t think Phillip Hinchcliffe’s time as a producer can be overhyped. Those three seasons are such a golden era of Doctor Who that I have seen retrospectives that basically ignore Tom Baker’s other four seasons!

Graham Wilson’s time, on the other hand, was hit by budget struggles, production union strikes and a demand to make the show lighter and sillier. (Mary Whitehall was the murderer of children’s  dreams)  There were still some gems. City of Death is a _classic_ But I sometimes rewatch The Horns of Nimon just to relive my utter amazement that it exists. 

Honestly, as controversial as John Nathan-Turner was as a producer and a human being, I remember having a sense of relief when I first watched his one season with Tom Baker. I was just so tired of the goofy tone of Wilson and the Doctor being so unbeatable. 

Tom Baker’s time had some low points (The Nightmare of Eden anyone?) but it had more high points than low points. It was during his time that Doctor Who had its first time as an international phenomenon. And as singularly unique as Tom Baker is, I don’t think another actor could have done the same. We may well not have a New Who without him.

Okay. Tom Baker’s Doctor was great.

Flipword - my new go to pocket word game

 Flipword is the most recent nine-card word game I’ve looked at. It’s not a huge field but I’ve seen at least five of them so there’s an interest there, at least for designers. And, to be honest, it is the best one I’ve found in case you don’t read anything but the opening paragraph.

It’s a print and play game originally from the 2021 Nine-Card Contest. All you need to play is the cards and some way to keep score. The core concept of the game is dead simple. Each card has a condition on each end and both sides, so four conditions on each card. And by condition, I mean some kind of rule that a word has to follow. Be seven letters, end in T, have exactly two vowels. That sort of thing.

There are rules for a base game but there are also nine more rule sets for playing with the cards. There’s competitive rules, solitaire rules, cooperative rules. They all involve having three (or two or even four) cards out and coming up with a word that fits all the conditions. One actually has players have their own hand of cards, which was neat.

Last year, I tried out and really liked a nine-card word game called Word Chain. The first player comes up with a word and each card involves coming up with a new word that builds from the word before it. I think it’s a really killer design with vast replay value since changing the first word changes the entire game.

But Flipword has a much greater ‘one more time’ factor. I start playing it and then I keep playing it. It is more accessible than Word Chain and I _think_ simpler. I like the design of Word Chain more but I have more fun with Flipword.

Flipword is a game that takes up basically no space, either to store or to play. If you keep score      in your head or just play for fun, all you need the cards. It is super easy to teach and should work for non-gamers and casual gamers. So, it’s been added to my travel bag.

My biggest takeaway from Coco

 As I am perpetually years behind watching even kids movies (and I have a kid so those are usually the only movies I watch!), it was only a month or so ago I finally saw Coco.  It only took me four years.

And everyone I know who watched it and didn’t force me to see it has a lot to answer for.

While Coco doesn’t knock Inside Out down from being my favorite Pixar movie, it is very high in my opinion and enjoyment. Not only is it ridiculously visually beautiful, I really enjoyed the music. I don’t know if Pixar has done any other musicals. 

And keeping with how rare their musicals are, all the music is diegetic (I had to look that word up), meaning all the musical numbers comes from the characters actually performing them within the context of the story. IE, there isn’t an offstage orchestra and the songs aren’t in theater of the mind.

I am not going to give away any spoilers because there must be some people like I was who haven’t seen the movie yet but would like to. But there is a takeaway I want to comment on.

The movie has two protagonists, Miguel and Hector. They both have their own character arcs and personal journeys to make.

However, I believe the actual hero of the story is Mama Imelda. (Okay, just saying that is a spoiler) While she has her own character arc, she is also the one who saves the family in life and in death. Imelda gets things DONE and she is magnificent for it.

I really enjoyed Coco, not the least for its kickass skeleton great great grandmother.

A Rusty Throne is a war game for folks who don’t know war games

 I am both the perfect audience and the worst commentator for A Rusty Throne. It’s a solitaire war game that feels like it was designed for those of us who don’t know much about war games. (My war game days were back in high school and that was a…while back)

It’s a PnP game. There is a board, which takes up only one page and consists of nine areas, and a small deck of cards. Beyond that, all you need is ten tokens for you and ten tokens for the AI king.

The idea behind the game is that the king has gone insane and you’re trying to take over the island kingdom. You know, in order to save the kingdom. I’m sure A Song of Ice ans Fire didn’t inspire the theme at all. Your goal is to control all four of the castles in the board. You lose if you lose your home castle.

The game is entirely card-driven. The cards have symbols for combat, actions for the king and command points that you pay for your actions. 

There are actually only two actions in the game. Adding forces to a castle you control and movement. Combat happens when troops live onto an enemy-occupied space.  And combat is pretty simple and symbol-based. Swords remove troops. Shields block swords. Then add up surviving troops and bugles. Higher number wins and the losing troop is shoved off. If there’s nowhere to run, they are destroyed.

While the game is simple; even for someone like me who isn’t war game savy, it is very procedural. The hardest part is getting all the steps in the right order without missing any.

I have to note that the game balances you being able to think and the king taking actions (sometimes randomly) from cards by making the king a lot stronger than you. The king outnumbers you at the start, goes first (which is particularly strong in battle) and has a higher stacking limit.

One lesson even I have learned is that you are not going to to win if you charge in Leroy Jenkins style. The AI king is stronger than you and you are going to have to use finesse to win.

A Rusty Throne has been an interesting experience for me and it is a game I plan to go back to. Frankly, between the relative ease of play and construction, I think this is a game that you should make and try even if you are just a little bit interested.

A war I never heard of in nine cards

 One of the things that I enjoy about print and play is that you get to see some very experimental designs. I don’t know if Charles versus Peter is actually that experimental. However, since I really don’t play war games, playing it counted as an experiment for me.

The game is about Charles XII of Sweden’s invasion of Russia in 1708. So, the first thing I learned is that Sweden invaded Russia in 1708! The game was part of the 2020 9-Card Contest so the whole game is conducted with nine cards and a bunch of dice.

Oh and it’s a solitaire. You take on the role of Charles while the random number generator gods take the part of Peter.

One of the nine cards is used tracking the status of seven different things. Your supplies, the state of your artillery, the state of your cavalry, the state of your infantry, Peter’s military might, how many key cities Peter holds and what season it is. The other eight cards have maps on one side and tactics and events on the other.

I’ve tried to summarize the rules a few times but every time, I keep doing a bad job. I’ll try to just give an elevator pitch.

There’s two ways to win. You either need to reduce Peter’s military with absolute crushing victories or take over enough key cities. And pick a path to victory and stick to it. There’s not enough wiggle room to try for both. You roll dice pools to wear down a map card’s defense.

When you build the map, you reshuffle the cards you leave behind so you never run out. It’s like building a train track by ripping up the tracks behind you. You have a hand of cards in the tactic side. Events pop up when you move, as you’d expect. 

 

There’s a lot going on in nine cards. Terrain, events, weather, etc.  I still haven’t done a good job describing the game but I’ve only taken two paragraphs instead of seven.

I will say it feels like it’s easy to end up in a death spiral. Once you start falling behind, things get worse fast. Which is apparently historically accurate. As I understand, Peter wore Charles down and disrupted his supply chain. 

Charles vs Peter isn’t my new favorite game but it was an interesting and educational experience. I can’t judge how good a war game it is but I feel like I learned a little something about war games.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2344413/wip-charles-versus-peter-contest-ready-2020-9-card

Arthur C. Clarke can be funny?

 Every few years, I find myself rereading Tales from the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke. After reading The Travel Tales of Mister Joseph Jorkens, I felt almost obligated to revisit the book.

Tales from the White Hart is a collection of club stories, all science fiction tall tales, being told at the White Hart pub. They are all comedic, which makes this only comedy I’ve read by Clarke. (He may have written more and I just don’t know about them)

While the fantastic club story is now a well established genre, Tales from the White Hart is a relatively old example. (Although, looking it up, Gavagan’s Bar is just a little bit older) All of the stories in the White Hart fall firmly in the Science Fiction camp, although some, like the Reluctant Orchard and What Goes Up, are pretty ridiculous. Which is admitted in story :D

Clarke himself is the narrator but most of the stories are told by the hopefully fictional Harry Purvis. And when he isn’t telling the story, Harry is annoyed by that fact. Harry Purvis is a classic Munchausen, someone who has been everywhere and knows everybody. And he gets a bit of development by the last story.

What is interesting to me is that Clarke was apparently friends with Lord Dunsany and actually name-drops Jorkens at one point. However, Clarke’s stories remind me a lot more of Wodehouse’s club stories, like Mr. Mulliner. For one thing, they are flat out comedies while the Jorkens stories I read have more melancholy and wonder. There is a snarky tone running though White Hart. And the gender dynamics of henpecked men and in-charge women also reminds me of Wodehouse :D

But Wodehouse is great so that’s okay.

Tales from the White Hart isn’t the best collection of club stories I’ve ever read. But the stories are consistently good all the way through.

(Okay. Since someone will ask, I enjoy the Callahan stories (although their quality can drastically vary), the Draco Tavern Stories and the Black Widowers (which isn’t fantastical but is by Asimov) more than the White Hart)

My July R&W

 At some point, I’m not going to have learned enough Roll and Writes to justify a monthly commentary. I really expected to hit that point before now. But, nope, not yet.

The first R&W I tried this month was Halloween Roll and Fright. I’m not sure where I actually found it. The board is a six by six grid. You roll three dice and assign two dice as coordinates and the last one as a map element. If you roll doubles, you can check off Halloween critters on a list. 

It… wasn’t good. Between the restrictions that the dice have you and placement restrictions, I found I actually didn’t have a lot of control or choices. 

Next up was a game called Maztec Duel. It was from one of the R&W contests and, from what I can tell, was designed to as PR for a larger game. You used two dice to make several steps of picking out and placing buildings on a grid. It reminded me just a little of Elasund or Blue Moon City in that building took multple steps.

But they crunched the rules down one page. Great for duplexing, laminating and done. But not great for making the rules clear. Even looking at the design forum and other people’s questions, I’m not sure I got it right and constantly looking for clarification dragged the game down.

Then I tried another contest game, Assault on the Colossus. If it wasn’t inspired by Shadow of the Colossus, I don’t believe it. I liked the theme of climbing up a giant monster to kill it but I felt like the dice determined everything and I didn’t have any real choices. There is some dice manipulation but it still felt like there one obvious choice or no choice.

After those three games, Puerto Miau was a relief. A roll and move and write game, Puerto Miau is simply okay. However, it is a fully realized and functional game. Contest games are very much prototypes but it was still nice to play a game where the rules were clear and I had choices.

(At that point, I stopped trying to learn new Roll and Writes and revisited 30 Rails because I was worried it wasn’t as good as I remembered. Fortunately, it was even better)

After that, I started trying Roll and Writes that were more established.

Radoslaw Ignatow’s Time Machine (easily his least inspired title) has you use two dice per turn to set the dials on the time machine. The settings plus connections between dials generate a number which you use to move down the scoring track. Bigger numbers are better but ending on specific points gets you bonus points. I enjoyed it but I felt like had a lot less control than his games with pools of six dice.

As I wrote elsewhere, I _finally_ played Utopia Engine. And it was really good!

The last game I learned in July was Castles of Burgundy the Dice Game. While it doesn’t hold a candle to the full game, I could see how that game inspired the dice game and I did enjoy it. As a solitaire game, my initial impressions are strong.

I know that August see not nearly as many new R&W experiences but there are still unplayed games in the pile.

My July PnP

July. 

I tried to make good use of time in July and it was a particularly productive month.

This is what I made:

Alert: All Hands on Deck

Circe’s Labyrinth (2018 Solitaire Contest)

Race for the Solar System)

Elevenses for One (minimal copy)

Handful o’ Hoodoo

Capital Vices with expansions

Deadeye Dinah (2021 9-Card Contest)

Flipword (2021 9-Card Contest)

Mini Flipper (2021 9-Card Contest)

Kart Dungeon (2021 9- Card Contest)

Capital Vices was my ‘big’ project for the month. It’s been on my ‘to make’ pile for months and it was finally time.

Beyond that, I made or remade a bunch of smaller card games. My copy of Deadeye Dinah had gotten crinkled so I made a fresh one. I wanted a beater copy of Elevenses for One that would fit easier in my wallet so I skipped the backs and the timer cards. (It’s easy enough to keep track of time in my head)

I’m pretty sure August won’t see as much PnP making as July did and that’s fine.