Summarizing a friend’s visit

Our friend Nate was in town for a bit and he came over for board games a few times while he was here. This is really more of a journal entry so we can look back and see what we played on this visit, as well as maybe some comments about some of the games.

Okay. Here’s the info dump. First session, we played 10 Days in Africa, Bob Ross: Art of the Chill Game, GEM and HUE. Second session, we played two games of Race for the Galaxy, ORC, RUM and a game of GEM that Carrie was able to join us for. Third session: Autumn, two more games of Race for the Galaxy and Treehouse. This was my first time playing Bob Ross, ORC and RUM and Carrie’s first play of GEM. 

This was the first time I’d played Autumn as a two-player, although I’ve played it a lot solitaire. As I hoped, with the game interesting blocking makes it an eighteen-card knife fight in a broom closet.

GEM continues not to disappointment. Race for the Galaxy is still amazing after all these years. And Treehouse, which Nate and I used to play tons of back in the day, has not aged well.

One delightful surprise was that, after our four-year-old saw me playing 10 Days in Africa, he wanted to play it. He just matches the countries on the card with the countries on the map but it is still a good step. 

Daring to discuss house rules

I’m not a big fan of house rules. Monopoly gets some blame for that but you always have to question the game balance of house rules. And, if you play at more than one table or go to conventions, house rules can really throw you off.

However, when an out of town friend came into town and we tried out some of my unplayed games, we discussed adding some house rules.

In Bob Ross: Art of Chill Game, you start each turn by rolling the Bob die. You see, Bob Ross is painting the picture as well and serves as a timer. Three of the die faces move Bob forward and reveal a chill card, which gives everyone a bonus action or some kind of scoring bonus. The other three faces give the active player some kind of bonus action.

Here were the two issues we found. One, getting more bonus actions pretty much determined the game. Two, Bob sometimes moved so slowly that he wasn’t any kind of factor at all.

We proposed that, at the start of each round, flip over a chill card and move Bob, unless the card had him chill and not move. Everyone gets a chance at each chill card, no one gets bonus actions and Bob keeps painting like a boss the way he should. It flattens out the luck a bit.

Frankly, the Bob die was just a mild annoyance in my opinion. I’d only try this house rule for ‘serious’ gamers. It’s still a light game with three different draw decks so there’s still plenty of luck.

The other game we discussed adding house rules to is RUM. It’s a set collection, Push Your Luck game that’s part of the Pack O Game series.

There’s a lot in the game we liked. However, the parrot card, a key part of the game, caused some real issues. The parrot card, when it appears, ticks the game clock along. When it appears in the beach (a Ticket to Ride style draw row), everyone discards two to three cards. And when you blindly draw it, you discard two to three cards.

The first two parts didn’t cause us any problems. However, my friend kept drawing the parrot card and had to discard at least fifteen cards over the course of the game, which meant he had no chance at all.

When you draw the parrot, you basically skip a turn and you lose cards, arguably losing previous turns. My friend got a hand over four cards only once in our game. We didn’t mind that on the beach discard since that hit everyone.

Now, the parrot is an important part of the game and it defines the push your luck element. But when my friend struggled to get a hand of cards big enough that he was pushing his luck, that was an issue.

House Rules we discussed: Just skipping a turn. Discarding just one card. Discarding down to three so you don’t just keep using your entire hand over and over again.

Or maybe my friend was just a fugitive from the law of averages :)

All that said about RUM, we liked the rest of the game enough that we do want to keep on playing it. We just don’t want another experience like that first one.

In fact, what I take from these house rule discussions is that we liked both Bob Ross and RUM enough that we want to keep playing them.

Belated thoughts on March PnP

While I have slowed down since January, I’m still plugging away at crafting Print-and-Play games. I have an informal goal of making at least fifty in 2018. At my current rate, I will get that by May but I also know that life happens and goals like that go out the window.

Something I’ve found myself doing is occasionally going back and remaking games that I made a year or so ago. There’s some reasons for this: I have gotten better at making components and I have gotten _much_ better at storing completed games :D

For most of my gaming life, PnP was just a casual interest. After our son was born, I got more interested in it but I was more interested in the act of crafting as a relaxing activity and maybe trying the game once or twice. But since I’ve gotten more serious, I want to go back and revisit games that are worth a second chance.

And I want to keep a physical record of these games, be able to take them out and look at them and replay them. Sometimes that’s through my solitaire binder and sometimes that’s through having a physical copy that requires more than dice and dry erase markers.

I’ve started to branch out from exclusively making solitaire games but I am still focused on them. And I also found find myself playing short games that just need the cards I make :D What can I say, I’m playing in between doing real life things :D

Oh. What did I make? Maiden in the Forest, Do Not Forsake Me, Bomb Squad #9, Tag Team, the low ink demo of Tiny Epic Defenders, The Count of Nine, and Murderer’s Row. Plus some Roll and Write games. 

Now to try and get some of them played!

ORC - cursed by being average

Ah, back to Pack O Games. While I have been taking them to events and such, I’ve been just playing ones I already know. However, I’ve had a chance to get learn a couple of them.

ORC is the shortest and possibly the simplest of the second set, despite being officially more complex than DIG. It also clearly comes from the same school as Lost Cities, Battle Line in particular.

Like all the Pack O Game games, ORC consists of thirty skinny cards. In ORC’s case, each card is divided into two sides, each each side being one of six different colored orcs and each card has a one-pip side and a two-pip side.

Randomly place three cards in a line in between the players, making sure that each color shows up once. Six battlefields. You then place draw piles of four by each color, so six piles. The first player gets one of the three remaining cards and the second player gets the other two.

On your turn, you play a card so one end faces of the the six battlefields. The color you play can’t be the same as the battlefield or the same as the color your opponent has played on that same battlefield. (Of course, if you started the battle, that’s not a concern) If you played a one pip end, draw two cards from any draw pile. Play two pips, draw one.

When draw pile runs out, determine who has more pips and they win that battle, leaving one flipped over card on their side to show it. (And, yes, there are rules for ties) When every battle is resolved, you score points based on winning battles and having cards in your hand that match the fields you won. Most points win.

First of all, let me say things I seriously liked about ORC. While I’m colorblind, each color has distinct art. That is a really great choice. I also like how the cards in your hand matter. It not only means that you have another element to consider, you don’t feel like your leftover cards are wasted.

Okay. So what’s wrong with ORC? Well, basically, why would I play ORC instead of Battle alone, which is the better game? There’s nothing wrong with ORC but there’s a deeper, richer alternative. In a broader scope, it’s competing in a big pool of two-player games, even when you’re looking at little, portable ones.

Honestly, ORC’s greatest virtue is that it takes up basically no storage space and has a minimal footprint when you play. Seriously. 

If I was going somewhere and I knew I was going to be playing two-player games, I’d pack something like Battle Line. If I just wanted to pack games for just-in-case (restaurants, plane trips, vacations), ORC would get included. Maybe as a game to play while watching TV.

Honestly, that’s kind of been my experience with the Pack O Game library in general. It’s a diverse game library that always fits in the bag. But there are some games, like GEM, that stand out as games period.

ORC isn’t a bad game. It just isn’t a standout game. I’m sure I’ll still play it and, maybe after a few more games, I’ll find that it’s decisions per minute ratio makes it a hidden gem.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/192830/orc

How Elric grew up from an emo teen

My Elric phase took place back in the eighties. Which meant that I read the Elric books after the short stories were collected into fix-up novels but before Michael Moorcock went back and wrote a bunch more books. In other words, about half the books were written after I finished the series.

For me, the most striking (not necessarily the best) parts of the series are the earliest written, which hilariously includes Elric’s death. (Spoiler, he dies at the end) They were some of Moorcock’s earliest writing and you can tell it was written by someone who was under thirty :D

Not because they’re badly written. Oh, quite the contrary. Moorcock being one of those writers who helps redefine a genre was already clear. 

No, it’s because Elric, in the earliest stories, is basically a whiny emo-teen. He is the scion of one of the most advanced civilizations in his world, one of the most powerful sorcerers in his world and something of a manslut, not to mention he has a God-killing sword. But he is still driven by angst. He’s kind of a weird wish fulfillment character, able to beat whoever he wants and still engage in self-pity.

It really says something about how good an author Moorcock is that those first stories are so compelling and interesting.

Amusingly, at the time when I read the books, the first chronological book was the last one written. By then, Elric was more melancholy and thoughtful than angsty. When I reached the first written stories in Weird of the White Wolf, the third book, the change in his personality was quite shocking. 

I just found out that there are at least three Elric books I didn’t know existed. I have a stack of books to read but I’m going to have to look into that.

Wield and ‘I need an Elric TV show!’

I just finished Wield, a game by John Wick, and I really don’t know what to think about it. 

In the game, you play an artifact of great power, an intelligent magical item that has its own will and goals. Stormbringer from the Elric books (and the real hero, according to some of my fiends, I mean friends) was a major influence.

Which is cool and more than enough to interest me.

However, one of the things that throws me is that you have a second character, a ‘hero’ who is carrying the artifact _someone else_ is playing. More than that, each hero has their own destiny which is gong to be contrary to the artifact’s goals.

And that’s where it gets funny in my head. Playing an artifact or multiple characters doesn’t bother me but having conflicting goals... That doesn’t bother me. I just don’t know how it would go. I’ve played a lot of different RPGs so not having a good idea of what Wield would play like is kind of weird for me.

There’s also a mechanic I find strange. Artifacts have control over their ‘heroes’ and they can give them great power. However, the more power they give, the less control they have. Which makes absolute sense with the idea that the artifact is the real character and the heroes are disposable hit points. But it is weird from a traditional, thematic point of view. I get more of Stormbringer’s sweet soul-drinking power AND I get more autonomy? Woo hoo!

I think what I need to really wrap my mind around is that Wield isn’t about the ‘hero’. You might go through a bunch of them. It is the story and the legacy of a scary magical item.

Which reminds me. Where is my Elric TV show? Seriously. You’d really think that would be a property that would get snatched up in today’s market. I have to assume that the rights must be in some kind of legal limbo but I want my albino emo-teen cursed-sword guy TV show.

Slender is when a cool theme can’t save horrible mechsnics

I tried Slender: The 8 Pages purely because of the theme. It is a one-page, Print-and-Play solitaire game based on a video game based on an urban legend/cryptozoology based on an internet meme.

I find the Slender Man simultaneously creepy and hysterical. I mean, we can trace the origin of the guy back to a specific thread on Something Awful. And the visual of a skinny guy with no face sounds like it was stolen from an old Doctor Who episode from when their special effects budget was bubble wrap and cardboard walls. (And then it seems like Doctor Who stole it back for the Silence)

At the same time, the sheer simplicity of the idea and the visual of the Slender Man cuts through any wool gathering and is just visceral and terrifying. 

The game has you going through a ten-area woods, looking for eight pages with a failing flashlight while the Slender Man hunts you. And you resolve everything by rolling one die with six being lethal failure.

Okay, the gameplay is terrible. As one of the comments pointed out, the only meaningful choice is how to allot two skill points between stealth, speed and search. And since speed and stealth are how you avoid dying at the hands/tentacles/oh-my-god-what of the Slender Man, search is a useless choice.

I gave it the old college try and even tried adding some house rules to make it more thematic. Which just made the gameplay drag and when the game doesn’t last five minutes and it feel likes it is dragging, that really says something.

A year or so ago, I tried a one-page game called The Sword of Valhalla which I found a bit meh. A dungeon crawl with no combat but some nifty bookkeeping. Since then, I have found enough other one-page games that have made me appreciate Sword and, boy, Slender really does that.

At the end of the day, Slender: The 8 Pages reminded me that I shouldn’t ignore all the warning lights just because the theme is cool.