The Secret Lair

Starcraft is an excellent game, but there is a steep learning curve the first time you play. Whereas I’ve gotten together on a weeknight with a single friend and finished two full games, our group of five new players at a recent board game night was unable to complete the game’s second turn in the same span of time.

The Starcraft board game has the same basic elements as the video game, but it abstracts many concepts. It does an excellent job of recreating the video game’s evenly matched yet different races. Terrans, Zerg, and Protoss all play by slightly different rules, but in the end all three sides are equal.

The Board

Like so many recent board games, the playing field in Starcraft is dynamically assembled at the game’s outset. Each player randomly draws two planet tiles, and players take turns placing and joining them. Numbered warp points can also be placed, creating pathways between distant points on the map.

Each planet consists of two, three, or four areas, and each area contains either minerals, vespene gas, or a control point. The two resources can be mined and treated as income, whereas the points are accumulated each turn in an attempt to reach the goal of 15 points and win the game.

Placing Commands

In a turn’s first phase, each player issues commands by placing command tiles on various planets. Each player has two build commands, two mobility commands, and two research commands. Four may be issued each turn. The build command allows for the creation of bases, transports, combat units, workers, and upgraded buildings that will allow for new unit types. The mobility command is issued to move combat units around within a planet, or to move them from planet to planet if a transport is available. The research command allows three separate actions. Firstly, the player may draw a card from the event deck, which grants a number of beneficial effects. Secondly, the player may draw three combat cards from his combat deck into his “hand”. And thirdly, the player may purchase all copies of a single technology and shuffle them into his combat deck. These technologies may be anything from zergling improved carapace to the battle cruiser’s Yamato cannon.

LIFO Stack

One of the game’s most interesting aspects is the fact that when commands are issued, they stack such that the last command issued by a player on a given planet must be the first command played on that planet. This means that if I play a build command on my home planet, and then an opponent plays a mobility command directly on top of my build command, I cannot build until after the opponent’s forces have moved onto my planet and presumably attacked. If I plan to move to a new planet and then build there, I must place the build command first and then the move command on top of it. When five players are placing commands and mixing command stacks, the strategy can quickly grow confusing. It’s actually a lot of fun.

The Combat

The game’s second phase involves executing commands, which is inevitably going to involve combat. When two opposing forces fight, the attacker arranges each side’s forces into individual “skirmishes”, matching up opponents one-on-one, with any extra forces being placed as reinforcements by their owner and granting bonuses to that skirmish.

Through research and at the start of each combat, players draw cards from their race-specific combat deck into their “hand”. These are the cards available to play in combat, and upgrade cards that can be purchased through research will grant special combat bonuses. Most cards list one or two unit types, giving those particular units higher attack and defense, and any other units lower values. In the end, attack and defense values are compared with reinforcement and event card modifiers taken into account, and a higher attack value kills a unit of lower defense.

The Economy

As in the video game, income and workers are a huge deal. Any time you purchase units or upgrades, you place one of your available workers onto the card representing the mineral or vespene gas you’re spending. In this way, the value of the resource and the number of workers available are both taken into account. And if the territory holding the resource you’ve spent is taken by an opponent, any workers there are killed.

Protoss, Terran, Zerg

There are six different factions – two for each race. The Protoss have the most powerful and expensive units, and the Zerg have the cheapest and weakest units. Zerg have a higher build limit, which is determined by their number of buildings rather than by supply depots or pylons. Terrans can have a larger hand of combat cards. And each race has different special abilities to research.

Each faction also has special victory conditions that can end the game early. The overmind wins if he has a base on three different planets. Jim Reynor wins if he controls six areas with minerals or gas. These conditions help to keep the game from taking an extremely long time, but are optional.

After you’ve learned the rules, which will likely take a full playthrough of the game, Starcraft is quick and fun to play. If you’re into complex board games or you like Blizzard’s Starcraft setting, you’ll like the Starcraft board game.

Starcraft
Players: 2-6
Recommended Age: 14 and up
Time to Play: 3 hours average (number of players greatly affects play time)
Price: Up to $99 retail, $45 online

Along with AnimaLogic, Ravensburger Labyrinth is one of the two board games I bought for my daughter on her fourth birthday to introduce her to “real” board games of the non-Candyland variety. Its rules are incredibly simple – my daughter understood immediately. And yet the actual gameplay has been enough to keep my interest. Certainly more than Candyland does.

The game board is a series of sliding cardboard tiles. They’re initially placed randomly to create a random maze full of straight corridors, corners, and T intersections. Many of the tiles have an object printed on them: a map, a gem, a magical creature. At the game’s outset, each player is dealt a number of cards – these are the objects the player must retrieve in order to win the game. The instructions say to deal the entire deck, but I’ve stuck with six cards per player so as to limit the game’s duration.

The game board has one extra tile, and on each player’s turn, he first slides that tile into the maze, pushing a tile out the other side of the board. This slides an entire row or column of tiles one slot over and changes the maze. Then that player moves through the maze to any square he can reach. If you land on a tile containing a treasure from one of your cards, you’ve claimed that treasure.

What makes the game work so well for us is the special ruleset for younger players. Whereas adults must go through their cards in sequence, keeping all but the current card hidden, younger players get to look at their entire deck and fetch the treasures in any order they like. At the end of the game, adults must return to their starting square, whereas younger players win as soon as they collect their final treasure.

Recently, I was playing this game with my wife and daughter immediately before my daughter’s nap time. As is common, she had a meltdown and we had to put her down for her nap. But my wife and I spent another 5-10 minutes and finished playing the game. I think that’s when I realized how good a game this is.

Ravensburger Labyrinth
Players: 1-4
Recommended Age: 8 and up
Time to Play: Average 20 minutes
Price: $23

Along with their 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons product, Wizards of the Coast has released a pair of D&D branded board games: Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon. I could sum this whole review up in saying that the Dungeons and Dragons board games offer a D&D experience simplified into a board game format with no Dungeon Master. In our case, that’s exactly what my wife and I wanted. We’d played and enjoyed Runebound together many times in the past, and although Runebound was a fun game, we’d often have to quit before finishing because a game ran too long. Thankfully, the D&D board games don’t take quite as long to play.

Each game includes five premade characters such as the dwarven fighter and the dragonborn paladin. Character classes are as you might expect. The fighter and paladin are your standard tanks, there to soak up damage and status effects and defend the other characters. The ranger and rogue are effective damage-dealers at range, and the wizard has the best multi-attack powers in the game making him most effective in a game with more players. And the cleric is nearly essential, as she can heal other characters almost every round. These characters each have a selection of at-will, utility, and daily powers, although I haven’t yet identified a functional difference between utility and daily powers in this game, since they’re both single-use.

Castle Ravenloft includes horror-themed monsters such as zombies, rat swarms, and spectres. Wrath of Ashardalon includes more stereotypical D&D creatures such as cave bears, grells, and demons. The board game includes unpainted plastic miniatures for both monsters and player characters. Each time a monster is defeated, the character who killed it gets to draw an item card. Since players can hold a limited number of items per type, trading is allowed.

Player characters move square by square, whereas monsters measure their movement in tiles. Each turn, a player may choose to end his movement at an unexplored edge, thereby adding a tile to the map. When a new tile is placed, a monster is always placed on that tile, and thereafter that monster acts immediately after the player who placed the monster. That player also tracks the monster’s hit points and makes its movement and attacks according to the card’s explicit conditional instructions. This neatly circumvents the need for a Dungeon Master.

Whenever a player ends his turn without exploring a new tile, an event card must be drawn. Ninety percent of the time, these events are bad for the players. They may include adding a monster or trap to the game board or cursing one of the players. Traps are represented by large cardboard tiles that sit on top of a dungeon map tile and persist until disarmed. Any player can disarm a trap, but rogues have the best chance.

All characters begin as level one. It’s possible (although not necessary) to reach level two over the course of the game. When a monster is killed, its card is added to the players’ experience deck. When any player rolls a 20, that character may choose to spend 5 experience points to level up, gaining better hit points, armor class and selecting an additional daily power. Experience points can also be spent to cancel the effects of event cards. If you’re wise, you will do this often.

Each game comes with an adventure book that details a dozen or so different adventures that players can undertake, and these are what make the game truly cool, for each adventure is distinctly different from the others. A Wrath of Ashardalon adventure may have you searching for the dire cavern to slay an otyugh or searching for captured villagers to rescue. A Castle Ravenloft adventure may have you trying to locate an exit to escape the castle or hunting Lord Strahd himself. There are plenty of extra tiles, additional rules, and boss monsters than only appear in specific adventures. A highlight of ours was when we were struggling to kill a beholder and we drew an event card that resulted in Ashardalon the colossal red dragon appearing at the far edge of the map. We couldn’t flee because the only corridor leading away was full of lava (a trap) but we knew that once we’d killed the beholder, we’d have won the game. It became a race against time, and in the end we won – barely.

In playing, I’ve found the number of players to be a huge factor in the game’s difficulty. When my wife and I have played two-player games, gameplay has been very difficult. We’ve had about a 50% success ratio, and we’ve found that we really need to use the fighter and cleric to have any chance of getting through a game without being killed. But when I had a group of six friends over to play Castle Ravenloft, we found the game much easier. In that case, we actually had to borrow a character from Wrath of Ashardalon so that we could all play. This worked well, although in mixing games we needed to select carefully. Many characters have game-specific benefits. For example, the dwarf resists poison, but poison as an effect doesn’t exist in the Castle Ravenloft game.

All in all, the Dungeons & Dragons board games aren’t as complicated as actual D&D, but I wouldn’t call them simple. I’d have to rate the game’s rules complexity at about a seven out of ten. If you’re itching to kill some monsters and you don’t have the time for a full D&D campaign or don’t have the desire to actually role-play, these games make an excellent substitute.

Photos courtesy of Michael Delaney

Castle Ravenloft / Wrath of Ashardalon
Players: 2-5 (Plus one scenario for a single player)
Recommended Age: 13 and up
Time to Play: 1 hour
Price: $45

I was notified via the Twitters that the Interactive Fiction Competition is gearing up for its sixteenth year and the call for entries has been issued. This is always an exciting time of the year for me, because I get it in my head that I Will Write The Game I’ve Always Meant To Write, and then run out of time and assist in judging the real entries. This is is probably a win-win for all involved, considering my last entries was titled “Timmy Fell Down The Well” in which you were a dog who…well…you get the picture.

What is Interactive Fiction?

Interactive Fiction is Zork.

Image via Wikipedia

No, that’s not true. Zork is a subset of the entertainment/edutainment genre known as Interactive Fiction.  Interactive Fiction is, at its heart, a game in which the player directs the flow of the game’s story based on choices they make. The choices directly impact the outcome. Traditionally the label is applied to text-based games where the player solves puzzles to accomplish goals the further the story. People remember the games released by Infocom as the gold standard for games of this type.

Even though Infocom’s heyday is long behind us¹, there is still a fan base for these sorts of games.  Every year these folks come together for the Interactive Fiction Competition.

These games are released for free to the public each year, and the public votes on which games are the best in various categories. Best of all, previous years’ games are archived, so if you want to try your hand, you have sixteen years of games to go through, not to mention all the goodness you can find at the Interactive Fiction Database, a catalog of games which are, for the most part, free.

What Does An Interactive Fiction Game Look Like?

Text on a screen, which allows your imagination to fill in the details, much as you do when you are reading a good book.

Image via Wikipedia

In order to play, you’ll need an interpreter, which is nothing more than a program that can load the game file for you. There is a good list of interpreters on the Interactive Fiction Wiki.

Additionally, thanks to some hard work by some creative people you can also play these games online.  Head over to http://parchment.toolness.com/ and look at the list of games they have if you want to try some out.

Okay. I’m Interested. Any Recommendations?

I’m so glad you asked. I’m going to keep my list focused on the games which are freely available. While it is possible to find bootleg copies of the Infocom games out on the internet, they are owned by Activision and downloading those bootlegs is not strictly legal.  Frankly, most of the Infocom titles were amazing, but I will save those reviews for a future post.

Below is a list of games, a short description, and a sample of their opening text. Clicking the Play Now link will take you to a web-based version of the game which you can, of course, play online.

Anchorhead

My favorite by far. You are a visitor to a the small New England town of Anchorhead and must discover what secrets lurk in the darkness. It’s a Lovecraftian setting, and the writing is wonderfully atmospheric. Best played by candlelight.

November, 1997.

You take a deep breath of salty air as the first raindrops begin to spatter the pavement, and the swollen, slate-colored clouds that blanket the sky mutter ominous portents amongst themselves over the little coastal town of Anchorhead.

Squinting up into the glowering storm, you wonder how everything managed to happen so fast. The strange phone call over a month ago, from a lawyer claiming to represent the estate of some distant branch of Michael’s family, was bewildering enough in itself… but then the sudden whirlwind of planning and decisions, legal details and travel arrangements, the packing up and shipping away of your entire home, your entire life…

Now suddenly here you are, after driving for the past two days straight, over a thousand miles away from the familiar warmth of Texas, getting ready to move into the ancestral mansion of a clan of relatives so far removed that not even Michael has ever heard of them. And you’ve only been married since June and none of this was any of your idea in the first place, and already it’s starting to rain.

These days, you often find yourself feeling confused and uprooted.

You shake yourself and force the melancholy thoughts from your head, trying to focus on the errand at hand. You’re to meet with the real estate agent and pick up the keys to your new house while Michael runs across town to take care of some paperwork at the university. He’ll be back to pick you up in a few minutes, and then the two of you can begin the long, precarious process of settling in.

A sullen belch emanates from the clouds, and the rain starts coming down harder — fat, cold drops smacking loudly against the cobblestones. Shouldn’t it be snowing in New England at this time of year? With a sigh, you open your umbrella.

Welcome to Anchorhead…

Download | Play Now

9:05

A short game with a surprise twist at the end. Perfect for playing when you have a break, or on lunch.

The phone rings.

Oh, no — how long have you been asleep? Sure, it was a tough night, but– This is bad. This is very bad.

The phone rings.

Download | Play Now

Galatea

Emily Short is well known in Interactive Fiction circles for how she can push the envelope of the medium to explore new things. In Galatea, you are a visitor in a gallery who is holding a conversation with a sentient sculpture.  This is less about solving puzzles and more about holding a conversation., There are a great number of possible endings, adding to the replay value.

You come around a corner, away from the noise of the opening.

There is only one exhibit.  She stands in the spotlight, with her back to you: a sweep of pale hair on paler skin, a column of emerald silk that ends in a pool at her feet.  She might be the model in a perfume ad; the trophy wife at a formal gathering; one of the guests at this very opening, standing on an empty pedestal in some ironic act of artistic deconstruction –

You hesitate, about to turn away.  Her hand balls into a fist.

“They told me you were coming.”

Download | Play Now

Past IF Comp Winners

You can hardly go wrong by trying out one of the past winners.

2010: Aotearoa, by Matt Wigdahl: The Fish of Māui. The Land of the Long Cloud. Aotearoa. An entire continent of untamed wilds, and the last place on Earth where dinosaurs still roam. If only you’d come ashore under better circumstances…

2009: Rover’s Day Out, by Jack Welch and Ben Collins-Sussman: Three hundred years ago, the Brazilian Space Agency discovered a rocky exoplanet only 38 light years from Earth. With a surface temperature of 1200 Celsius and nine times Earth gravity, it’s hardly the sort of place you’d take your dog walkies. Most days.

2008: Violet, by Jeremy Freese: Calm down. All you have to do is write a thousand words and everything will be fine. And you have all day, except it’s already noon.

2007: Lost Pig, by Admiral Jota (writing as Grunk): Pig lost! Boss say that it Grunk fault. Say Grunk forget about closing gate. Maybe boss right. Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget. Boss say Grunk go find pig, bring it back. Him say, if Grunk not bring back pig, not bring back Grunk either. Grunk like working at pig farm, so now Grunk need find pig.

2006: Floatpoint, by Emily Short: It is night on this side of the planet. Settled areas are lit: a jagged crescent in the tropics, lining the inland sea. The bright splatter along the top of the curve is Tanhua, as bright from space as New York. The north continent is darker, sprinkled finely with small lights, where the failing climate makes it hard to survive a winter. And the northernmost point, almost lost on the slope of Mt. Cordia, is the original Aleheart Colony, where the first settlers from Earth landed. It is your destination as well.

2005: Vespers, by Jason Devlin: It has been five days, now. Five days since I made the choice. Five days since I closed the gate.

2004: Luminous Horizon, by Paul O’Brian

2003: Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star Foster and Daniel Ravipinto:  In the beginning was the Word, and it was hungry. Enter a steampunk adventure set in a London that might have been. The year is 1885. Bedlam Hospital still stands in Moorsfield, a decaying shell used to house the poor and the hopeless. Steam-driven mechanical wonders roam the streets. Gear-wheeled analytical engines spin out reams of thought onto punched paper tapes. And in the darkness – in the alleys and the side shops – hide secrets.

2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O’Brian

2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold: Consciousness is slowly returning…

2000: Kaged, by Ian Finley: Welcome to the Citadel of Justice. The Inquisitor is waiting

1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth: Young Gretchen could have only imagined the fanciful events that were to occur before finding herself lost in a winter wonderland.

1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre: “Welcome back to the land of the fucking LIVING, bud,” Rob says. “You planning to stick around for a while or you gonna pass out again? Cause one thing I’ve learned about chicks is that they actually DON’T LIKE IT when you pass out on them in the middle of gettin’ it on. You hear me? So if that’s, like, your PLAN, then I’m droppin’ you off and showin’ up solo.”

1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith: Something new in your everyday hunter-gatherer routine: where did this strange edifice come from? Dare you enter and explore the secrets of this… thing, or do you try to face your enemies? Like you have a choice.

1996: The Meteor, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbet, by Graham Nelson: Another day wasted as guest of the Empress, a wretchedly long tour of the breath-taking Boreal Falls, conducted as ever by the Lady Amilia. As if she weren’t bad enough, an honour guard of soldiers, their breast-plates red in the setting sun, march ahead of the procession and protect you from seeing anything unrehearsed. It’s a dog’s life being an Ambassador.

1995: Uncle Zebulon’s Will, by Magnus Olsson: Your eccentric Uncle Zebulon considered himself a wizard, and was rumoured to be very wealthy. But when he died, he only left you one single object in his will…

1995:  A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin: Walking away from a picnic, you are suddenly caught in a country storm. You must protect a bridge from being destroyed. An ultra-linear game.

I Can Haz More?

You can. Check out the following links for more information:

• Brass lantern’s Beginner Resources
• The Interaction Fiction Database
• Parchment
• The IF-Archive
• IFWiki

1. And for an excellent recap of said heyday, I highly recommend Jason Scott‘s documentary Get Lamp. Well worth your time. [↩]

Betrayal at the House on the Hill is currently my favorite board game. Whereas other games I play may give you roughly a dozen scenarios, Betrayal comes with fifty. Five-oh. Fifty different haunted house stories from mummies and werewolves to Dorian Gray and Hellraiser. Well, okay – I’m not one hundred percent on the Hellraiser thing, but I did find a puzzle box the last time I played.

Betrayal includes twelve characters represented by six painted plastic miniatures and six sturdy hexagonal character cards. Each of these character cards contains two characters – one on each side – who can be represented by a single miniature. After randomly selecting a character card, you can choose which of the two characters to use. The character’s attributes are printed on the card as a series of numbers, and you place plastic clips along four of the six sides to point to each attribute’s current value. You have two physical attributes: speed and might, and two mental attributes: sanity and knowledge. They’re used differently in each scenario, but speed determines how many squares you can move, and might affects physical combat. If any of your attributes reach the skull at the bottom of the scale, the character dies. the interesting thing is that each character’s attribute scale is not a linear series of numbers. If your character’s knowledge is four and you find a book that increases it by one, it may not necessarily go to five. The next number on your card beyond four may be five, or it may be another four. It may also be six. Each character is different.

The game begins with characters entering the haunted house and exploring. As characters explore, they reveal new tiles and build the map, expanding it to include second floor and basement tiles. Tiles may have special effects printed on them or require you to draw a card. There are three decks of cards in Betrayal: the item deck, the event deck, and the omen deck. Many room tiles will have a symbol representing one of the three decks. If you are the one to reveal that room tile, you draw the appropriate card. Events often raise or lower your character’s attributes. Items can include weapons, such as the gun I used to murder the other players once when I was the betrayer. And then there are omen cards. Omen cards are special.

Each time a new omen card is drawn, in addition to resolving any other effects it may have, the player who drew it makes a haunt roll. If he rolls lower than the number of omen cards currently in play, The Haunt begins.

This is where the game gets good.

The player who triggered The Haunt consults a chart which reveals the betrayer. Some scenarios may have no betrayer, a hidden betrayer, multiple betrayers, or “none at first”. The player who is betrayer then has to physically leave the room and read the appropriate entry in The Traitors Tome, while the rest of the group reads the appropriate entry in Secrets of Survival. The amazing thing about this is that each side will be playing by slightly different rules and have different goals, and the other side won’t know. The betrayer may be after an item that players aren’t even guarding, or the betrayer may take some action leading the rest of the players to gasp “I didn’t know you could do that!” Likewise, as a betrayer, you may not know what players have to do in order to destroy you or monsters that you control.

The craziness that can evolve from this game cannot be adequately described in a review without spoiling the game’s scenarios. It constantly keeps you on your toes by changing the rules from game to game and by being both cooperative and competitive. For example, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a scenario in which the basement floods and players have to swim around, traversing the basement rooms underwater to find the front door key that would allow them to escape the house. If you stay underwater too long you risk drowning, and somewhere down there the creature from the black lagoon is lurking. By the way, I just made that one up. Any resemblance to an actual printed scenario means that I’m a powerful psychic and subconsciously read the game author’s mind.

I have two complaints about the game pieces. Firstly, the room tiles warp, becoming slightly curved so that they don’t lay flat on the table. Secondly, the clips they give you to track your character’s changing attributes tend to slide around and fall off. You need to guard your character card carefully – if a die roll bumps it, the clips may slide and you may lose track of your attributes.

If you’re looking for a board game to buy, this is the one. It comes with my highest recommendation.

Betrayal at the House on the Hill
Players: 3-6
Recommended Age: 12 and up
Time to Play: About an hour
Price: $42

I purchased AnimaLogic as a gift for my daughter on her fourth birthday because it’s an educational toy. My intent was to use this game to teach her to think predictively in much the same way that some parents teach their children chess. She’s only four years old, and the Fat Brain Toys age usage grid shows a recommended minimum age of five, so I expect her to grow into it.

In AnimaLogic, you’ve got to save a group of sixteen animals from raging rapids by helping them across a river. The trick is that animals can only cross single file, and each animal must be either the same color or the same animal type as the animal that preceeds it. The game has sixty different starting arrangements of varying difficulty.

The game is really more of a logic puzzle than a board game, and playing with multiple players simply involves players co-operating to figure out the correct sequence. It’s got the same painted wooden pieces you see in Euro games such as Carcasonne, and a sturdy spiral-bound book containing the sixty starting sequences.

I won’t generally review kids’ games in this column, but I know that lots of the geeks in attendance at The Lair have kids, and AnimaLogic seems a great game for a geek kid.

Players: 1 or more
Recommended Age: 5 and up
Time to Play: 5 minutes for easier puzzles, longer for more difficult ones
Price: $17

This past March I attended my first convention: PAX East. And while the concerts, the video games, and the panels were all good fun, I was surprised to find that my favorite thing about PAX East was discovering new board games. I didn’t have a chance to play Mansions of Madness or Betrayal at The House on the Hill while I was there, but I did stumble upon a real gem: a board game called Castle Panic.

We’d been browsing PAX’s “board game library”, looking for something fun to play. Everyone else had passed up this game due to its cover art and unimpressive name. But on the back of the box, one phrase had captured my attention. Cooperative tower defense.

And that’s exactly what Castle Panic is. A co-op tower defense board game. The board is arranged in rings, and your six castle towers are at the center. Monsters enter the outermost ring and progress inwards. The rings are divided into six sections, and a d6 determines where along the outer circumference each monster enters. As players take their turns, they play cards that can rebuild walls, attack monsters in specific positions, or have various other effects. At the end of each player’s turn, monsters move inward one ring and more monsters appear.

The co-op aspect really comes into play as you trade cards and plan ahead for where the monsters will be during subsequent players’ turns. Halfway through our first playthrough, we thought we had the game figured out. Then the game threw us a curve ball. The monsters rotated positions and ruined our plans, and a boss showed up and healed the other monsters. Soon a troll was behind our walls where we couldn’t get at him, and before long our last castle had fallen. We had more fun losing this game than I generally have playing any board game.

This game is no Arkham Horror. It plays quickly, and after the first playthrough you’re unlikely to ever consult the rulebook. Monsters’ hit points are tracked by rotating the roughly triangular monster chits to show whether the monster has one, two, or three hit points. Stand-up cardboard markers represent castles, walls, rolling boulders, tar, and additional fortifications. Where special rules are required, they’re generally printed on the card, the monster chit, or at the corner of the game board.

Since PAX East, we’ve instantiated a number of house rules to increase the game’s difficulty. Luckily, Castle Panic makes it easy to add house rules. You can begin the game with no walls, adjust the number of allowable card trades per turn, or play competitively to see who can slay the most monsters. Less co-operation means higher difficulty.

I still don’t own Castle Panic, but in writing this review, I’ve realized that my four-year-old could likely play this game. I think I’m going to have to get my own copy now.

Photos courtesy of Michael Delaney

Castle Panic
Players: 1-6
Recommended Age: 10 and up
Time to Play: About an hour
Price: $25

Confession time: I play a lot of so-called “casual” games. I’m talking about the video games that make hardcore gamers cringe: gem matching, time-management, hidden object games. Games like Diner Dash, Big Kahuna Reef and Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove. For over a year, I had a membership to Big Fish Games and plunked down $6.99 every month to buy titles like Airport Mania: First Flight, Heroes of Kalevala, Mall-a-Palooza and Life Quest.¹

It’s not quite as bad as playing FarmVille on Facebook,² but it’s close.

The truth is, I enjoy casual games. A lot. And I’ve played a nigh-embarrassing number of them in the past eighteen months, both on my Windows desktop and on my MacBook. The full list contains over two dozen titles, but here are just a few:

Windows

That's one cute plane.

• Airport Mania: First Flight. This is the one that started it all; the gateway game I started with when I first joined Big Fish Games. You manage inbound and outbound flights at a series of airports, shuffling planes from runway to gate, to baggage handling, refueling, repair, and even repainting. And the planes are all ridiculously cute,³ smiling and cheering when they arrive at the gate early; frowning when there’s a delay.
• Airport Mania 2: Wild Trips. More cute planes! I’m pretty sure there are new aspects to the gameplay in the sequel, but I’m hard-pressed to recall what they are, on account of those planes are just so darn cute.
• Build-a-Lot. This real-estate mogul game has thus far spawned four sequels, including Build-a-Lot: The Elizabethan Era. Build, buy, upgrade and sell houses, improve neighborhoods with essential businesses, and create a real estate empire.
• Mr. Jones’ Graveyard Shift. Quite possibly the only sexton simulator in existence.⁴ Mr. Jones is trying to earn enough to retire with his septuagenerian sweetheart and it just happens that he works in a cemetery. As with most time-management games, you begin with only the basics and work your way up to high-end accoutrements; it’s class warfare in the afterlife!
• Mystery Case Files: Huntsville. Time-management and gem-matching games are one thing, but hidden object games take geek shame to a whole new level; nothing to build, nothing to move, nothing to shoot, nothing to do. You’re playing Where’s Waldo? on your computer; even solitaire is more active! Despite this, I’ve played Mystery Files: Huntsville—which has the player searching for clues in various crime scenes and adds some puzzle-solving elements to the hidden-object genre (as most recent titles do)—through to completion…twice.

Mac

No tricked-out nametag?

• Diner Dash. If there is a patient zero in the time-management game genre, this is probably it. The basic concept is fairly straightforward—seat customers, serve them food, take their money, and bus their tables—but Diner Dash and its simple mechanic have spawned not only a number of sequels but dozens of knockoffs involving coffee shops (Coffee Rush), hotels (Hotel Dash: Suite Success), hospitals (Hospital Hustle) and beauty parlors (Belle’s Beauty Boutique).⁵
• HappyVille: Quest for Utopia. This game, which is essentially Sim City-lite, pushes the boundaries of my definition of a casual game. Most importantly, it is not divided into a series of bite-sized chunks, (e.g., gem-matching boards, time-management levels) each of which takes 5-20 minutes to play. Instead, HappyVille is a single city that the player must build from start to (ideally) utopian finish over the course of the game. Build farms, homes, hospitals, schools, stores, and other buildings, always with an eye toward what will keep your citizens happy: nearby shopping, schools and safety facilities, but nothing downwind from the farm, please.
• Heroes of Kalevala. The story behind this gem-matching game is based on the epic poem of Finnish folklore. Unfortunately, it is presented without any trace of a Finnish accent, so words like “kantele” and names like “Wainamoinen” lose their character. As with most recent gem-matching games, the goal in Heroes of Kalevala is to clear a board by changing all of the tiles beneath the gems to a single color. In most cases, tiles can be cleared by simply completing a match over them, but some tiles are locked and require specific (and often multiple) matches to clear. Some levels feature ice that must be cleared or spreading pools of tar that must be eliminated before they spread across the entire board. Each hero has an ability that can be used to clear otherwise-inaccessible tiles, stop the flow of tar, or otherwise assist in the clearing of the board.
• Mall-a-Palooza. I caught some guff from Madame Overlord Johnson for playing this game, and deservedly so. There’s a certain amount of hypocrisy in mocking her for playing My Cafe World on Facebook while I’m trying to balance the distribution of Old Navy-like clothing stores and not-really-Radio Shacks in my virtual shopping mall.
• My Kingdom for the Princess. A time-management game with a medieval fantasy twist. The kingdom is in ruins and you must direct your minions to repair roads and bridges, gather gold, build farms and ferry the princess to safety before time runs out. As with most time-management games, the trick for me is not simply completing each level, but managing to do so before the first timer expires in order to achieve a “gold” ranking. This leads to me playing some levels multiple times, trying to find the most efficient way to use my minions’ time to accomplish all the required tasks.

These are the types of games that my hardcore gaming buddies simply don’t talk about, much less admit to playing and enjoying. None of the Olde Fartz—a group that convenes online every Thursday to play first-person shooters, racers, and real-time strategy—has ever copped to playing Diner Dash, must less a game with “Princess” in the title. Am I alone in my enjoyment of both “casual” and “hardcore” (or, as Amazon calls them, “core”) games? What are you playing when no one is watching?⁶

1. I’d still have that membership if I hadn’t reached the point where I simply have so many games that I don’t have time to play them all. [↩]
2. Zyngaaaaaaaa! [↩]
3. Yes, cute! Don’t you judge me! [↩]
4. It’s a niche market. [↩]
5. Not to mention inspiring games like My Cafe World on Facebook. [↩]
6. Be very, very careful how you answer this question. [↩]

Thus far in our tour through some of the deck-building card games, we’ve taken a look the two most popular of these – Dominion and Thunderstone. Dominion succeeds by virtue of being the first of its kind and having elegant, simple mechanics, while Thunderstone takes a dungeon crawl theme and runs with it, adding new things on top of Dominion‘s basics to make a more intriguing game.

That noted, there are a shuffle¹ of deck-building card games that have emerged in me-too fashion since 2008, which some have coined the Sons of Dominion. While visiting our Friendly Local Game Store² recently, a couple of game night patrons highly recommended one of these Dominion progeny for us to check out – Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer.

Vital Statistics: Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer is a non-collectible deck-building strategy card game designed by Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour champion Justin Gary with illustrations by Eric Sabee, published by Gary Games in 2010 with a retail price of $39.99. It handles 2-4 players, and claims to have a playing time of 30 minutes, which is fairly accurate once one is familiar with the game. It is rated as suitable for ages 13 and up, which seems rather conservative – the mechanics and theme could work with younger ages, perhaps even down to 8 years-old.

Theme and production: The plot goes something like this – you are in a fantastic world, barriers between dimensions are breaking, there’s something about a fallen god coming to wreck reality, and the players take the roles of warriors defending their realm. You do this by assembling an army of Heroes and Constructs to fight the fallen god’s minions³, which gain you Honor points for defeating them. Predictably, the person with the most Honor wins the game. While the setting is suitably epic and interesting, Ascension takes a bad page from Dominion‘s book in that it doesn’t fully embrace it’s theme, in that the story of the game implies that winning should have something to do with taking out the fallen god directly… which, in the end, it doesn’t.

The game comes with a durably constructed board that serves to map out where the card stacks go, as well as provide a crib sheet for the rules. While pretty to look at, the board is completely unnecessary, as there are relatively few stacks of cards compared to a game like Dominion, and the rules are very straightforward. That said, as a play aid it allows less experienced and younger players to easily jump into the game, making it highly accessible. Also in the OOOH SHINY category, it includes plastic gem-like tokens to represent Honor points that provide a visual and tactile anchor to the world. The tray in the gamebox is slotted for easy separation and storage of the different card decks involved.

The cards are printed on thick, glossy stock that enhance their look but, oddly, makes them a bit awkward to shuffle. They also are susceptible to some chipping along the edges with frequent shuffling, due to their stiffness. Sabee’s illustrations are very stylized and distinctly done in colored pencil, capturing both a sense of whimsy and the fantastical. The card layout is outstanding: while the art is showcased over much of the face of each card, plenty of room remains for flavor text and specific game mechanics. The three numerical resources in the game – Runes, Power, and Honor – are each clearly associated with a symbol and area on the card face, making them very easy to keep track of⁴.

Gameplay: Ascension deals with three resources: Runes, which allow you to purchase new cards; Power, which allows you defeat monsters; and Honor, which functions as victory points. Each player starts with a deck of 10 basic cards⁵ and draws 5 cards into her hand. The central play area contains a supply of resources that are always available – an infinite number of easily-defeated Cultists that give Honor, and a hefty supply of inexpensive Heavy Infantry and Mystics, which give Power and Runes respectively.

The remainder of the cards in the game are shuffled into a single Center Deck, and the top 6 of these are laid out and available for purchase (or fighting, in the case of monsters) at any time. These cards consist of Heroes, which are played and cycled through your personal deck to give Power and Runes when they are used; Constructs, which function similarly to Heroes except that when played they are not shuffled back into your deck, but instead stay active in your play area and give you continuous bonuses; and Monsters, which are obviously for stabbing in the face. Additionally, Heroes and Constructs all belong to one of four thematic Factions in the game world, each of which has their own particular abilities and strategy. For example, the cards of the Mechana Faction are all expensive to buy, have special abilities that usually work only with other Mechana cards, but are worth lots of Honor. One downside is that the Central Deck contains 100 cards total that are used in every game, which results in less card variety during repeat sessions compared to other games in this genre.

On a player’s turn, she plays any number of cards from her hand of five, and uses the Runes and Power to make any purchases or fights that she can. Any Constructs she plays stay in her play area, while played Heroes, purchased cards, and defeated monsters are placed into her discard pile, and new hand of 5 cards is drawn. Play continues until one player gets a set number of Honor gems, which causes the game to end and the person with the most Honor between their personal deck cards and tokens to win.

Gray’s experience with Magic: The Gathering clearly shines through in Ascension‘s gameplay. As opposed to Dominion or Thunderstone, Ascension has both a greater luck component and more of a sense of direct turn-by-turn competition with your opponents. Having a randomized central deck that you can only make limited purchases from, as opposed to having all the card choices available for purchase at any time, emphasizes short-term tactics based on what’s available as opposed to long-term strategy. Also, being able to see what Constructs your opponents have in play and what purchases they’ve made from the Central Deck gives you the opportunity to guess their strategy⁶ and counter it.

What works well: The game design is very accessible, quick to set up, and easy to play. The art style is unique and well-done. The dynamics of card purchasing and playing Constructs allows for a lot of direct player interaction, and rewards flexible, tactical thinking. The overall package is slick, and simply a lot of fun.

Not so much: The game board, while quite nice, is superfluous and unneeded. The relative lack of card depth makes the game less “fresh” with multiple plays. The theme could have been made more relevant to the finish of the game.

Endgame: Ascension is fun, swift, and has easy-to-grok mechanics. Compared with Dominion, it’s less about deep strategy and more focused on tactical luck-management with more player interaction, giving it a different flavor. With exceptionally straightforward rules and priced $5 less than either the basic sets of Dominon or Thunderstone, Ascension makes for a nigh-perfect “entry level” deck-building game. I forsee this getting a lot of use at my table, and I especially look forward to acquiring the recently released Return of the Fallen expansion to add more card variety.

Next column, I’ll quench my ranting about games not embracing their theme by looking at one that was designed from the theme-up…

[This review is based on personal play with a copy of the game I bought with my own cashy money. John Cmar has no financial or personal interests in Gary Games or anyone involved with the design or production of Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer.]

1. A group of card games, or so I contend. “Bunch” is boring. “Gaggle” doesn’t quite work. As most of these aren’t violent enough, “murder” doesn’t fit. [↩]
2. The Family Game Store in Savage, MD. Game store owners are an excellent breed as a rule, but Steve Sinex and family are among the best. If you are in the area, you owe it to yourself to check them out. [↩]
3. Did I mention that we loves us some minions here at The Secret Lair? Because, really, we do. [↩]
4. As opposed to Thunderstone, which has several numerical resources – XP, light, gold provided, strength, cost to purchase, et cetera – on the face of many card that aren’t as well differentiated from each other, making things confusing until you’ve played it enough to get used to the layout. [↩]
5. 8 of which are Apprentices worth 1 Rune each, and 2 are Militia cards worth 1 Power each. [↩]
6. There are many groups of cards, both inside of and among factions, that work very well together in terms of generating Power or acquiring new cards quickly, for instance. [↩]

If the gameplay of Dominion was expanded to involve stabbing things in the face, along with a dose of MATH,¹ you would have an excellent game – and that game would be Thunderstone.

Wait! Drek… that was putting the conclusion first. Let’s start this a bit more properly:

Last week, I started a tour through the realm of deck-building card games with Dominion, the first and arguably the most popular of this new genre. Subsequent deck-building games have tried to do very different things with the basic gameplay formula that game pioneered, with varying degrees of success. Today I’ll consider Thunderstone, which by keeping the core game mechanic the same while expanding on a specific theme, manages to mostly retain the balance and simplicity of Dominion while making something that is far more interesting to play.²

Vital statistics: Thunderstone is a non-collectible deck-building strategy card game designed by Mike Elliott and published by Alderac Entertainment Group in 2009. It handles 2-5 players, and claims to have a playing time of 45 minutes, although most sessions I’ve run have lasted longer than that. It is rated as suitable for ages 12 and up, which seems appropriate given both the mechanics and mental MATH³ involved.

Theme and production: Thunderstone has a dark medieval fantasy theme that involves abstracted combat, which may not be to the taste of some people,⁴ but still allows for family play with children who are old enough. Each player takes the role of an adventurer who has arrived at the village of Barrowsdale, seeking a powerful artifact called the Thunderstone. The Thunderstone is hidden deep in the nearby Grimhold Dungeon, and much to the complete shock of anyone who has played a game with a dark fantasy setting before, it is guarded by a horde of monsters. The goal of the game is to equip a party of heroes from the village, venture into the dungeon to defeat monsters, and eventually to uncover the Thunderstone, at which point the game ends.

Most of the cards represent people and items you can acquire from the village to aid in your fight for the Thunderstone. Unlike the kingdom cards in Dominion, which all functioned in the same way despite what was thematically depicted on them (i.e., a person or a location), in Thunderstone the thematic distinctions among the different village cards affect gameplay: Hero cards allow you to attack a monster, while you can only use a weapon card in combat if you also have a hero card in your hand that meets the requirements to wield it, for example. Although this does sacrifice a degree of simplicity, it makes the game feel like it was designed with the theme in mind as opposed to giving the sense that a coat of medieval paint was added on after the design was complete.

The cards are of good quality and thin enough to allow easy shuffling, which means that they are susceptible to wear with repeated plays. Artist Jason Engle did excellent work with the art, and the fact that a single artist worked on every card adds further consistency to the fantasy world the game takes place in. Card layout features artwork over two-thirds of each card, serving to pull you in to the experience even more. The only downside to the card design is that there isn’t enough font and color differentiation among the different numbers depicted on each card – representing purchase cost, strength score to wield items, XP cost to level up, et cetera – which can easily confuse newer players as to what each number represents until they’ve play through the game a few times. The box is large and comes with a slotted plastic tray to organize the cards, although the slotting system is a bit crude and is really only good at separating general large decks from each other as opposed to each specific card type.

Gameplay: The bulk of the central play area represents the village of Barrowsdale, and which is comprised of 16 stacks of cards. 4 of these are Basic cards that are present in every game⁵ that represent plentiful, cheap resources. The remaining stacks include 8 types of Village cards,⁶ and 4 types of Hero cards⁷ which are more expensive and powerful. The remainder of the play area portrays the dungeon, where 3 Monster classes⁸⁹ are shuffled together to form a monster deck. The Thunderstone is shuffled into the bottom 10 cards of the monster deck. The top 3 monsters are drawn and laid out in a line, representing their infestation of the dungeon.

Each player starts with a deck of 12 cards of identical composition¹⁰ shuffled as theire player deck, and draws 6 cards into their hand. Each player can do one of three things on their turn: 1. visit the village to level up hero cards in their hand to a more powerful version, and to use their cards in hand to purchase a new card from the villiage, 2. venture into the dungeon to fight a monster, or 3. rest, which allows the player to remove a card from their deck entirely and take no other action. At the end of the turn all cards a player used or still remaining in their hand are placed into their personal discard pile, as are any new cards purchased, and they draw a fresh hand of 6 cards from their personal deck. When the deck runs out, they shuffle their discard pile to form their new deck. This way, players add to their deck to allow them better and more powerful options when fighting monsters in combat.

The combat system revolves around the idea that there is a line of 3 monsters present at all times, and the card at the head of the line is in the “highest” part of the dungeon, while the one at the back of the line is in the “lowest”. All of the monsters have a darkness penalty based on where they are in the line that makes them harder to hit. A player can attack any of the 3 monsters currently revealed in the play area, but attacking one “lower” in the dungeon incurs a greater darkness penalty than attacking one “higher” in the dungeon. When monsters are killed and removed from the line, any monsters present move to a higher position in the dungeon and a new monster card is drawn in the lowest position. This makes it more difficult for players to preferentially target the easier to kill monsters, as freshly revealed monsters will be harder to hit. While not complex, juggling the negative modifiers for darkness and a monster’s special abilities with the positive modifiers from the cards in a player’s hand does require a bit of on the fly MATH¹¹ that can slow the game down a bit on occasion.

Any monsters a player kills are added to their personal deck, and provide victory points, gold for purchasing power at the village, and sometimes special abilities in combat. Additionally, killing a monster grants the player XP, which they can use to level up their hero cards in the village. The game ends when the Dungeon Deck is depleted to the point where the Thunderstone is revealed, and once it makes it to the “highest” point in the dungeon, the game is over. The player with the most victory points in their deck at that time WINS.

What works well: Gameplay takes the straightforward simplicity of Dominion and adds just enough mechanical robustness to make it into a different, more interesting strategy game. The mechanics fully embrace the game’s theme, which makes it very engaging to play. There is a huge amount of Hero and Village card types, ensuring lots of replayability. You stab things in the face.

Not so much: Doing on the fly MATH¹² during combat when multiple penalties and bonuses are involved can be cumbersome at times. Some of the Monster Card types¹³ don’t feel diverse enough when played through the course of a game.

Endgame: You already know my verdict – if the gameplay of Dominion was expanded to involve stabbing things in the face, along with a dose of MATH,¹⁴ you would have an excellent game – and that game would be Thunderstone. I find it to have a different and more interesting flavor than Dominion because of more detailed mechanics with different card types, the combat system, and it being more thematically fleshed out – the story behind the game feels very relevant to the gameplay, which is a good thing. But are there other deck-building games that can top it? We’ll audition a new contender next time.

[This review is based on personal play with a copy of the game I bought with my own cashy money. John Cmar has no financial or personal interests in Alderac Entertainment Group or anyone involved with the design or production of Thunderstone.]

1. *gasp* [↩]
2. At least for me, as I greatly enjoy stabbing things in the face. In games, that is. [↩]
3. *gasp* [↩]
4. Admittedly, my first reaction when I learned about the game was “Oh, yippie, another dungeon crawling RPG-lite card game…”, but any exasperation with the general unoriginality of the concept was squashed once I actually started playing. [↩]
5. This ensures that players will always have access to cards that will allow them to do useful things, especially in the beginning of the game – the militia is counts a hero card that can attack monsters, the torch provides a small amount of light which can aid in combat, the dagger gives a small bonus to attack, and iron rations give a bonus to a hero’s strength – and all cost a minimal amount of gold [↩]
6. randomized from 19 different types included in the game [↩]
7. randomized from 9 types [↩]
8. randomized from 8 classes [↩]
9. I use the term “class” here instead of “type” as monster cards are slightly different; a stack of Village cards of the same type contains 8 identical cards, whereas a stack of Monster cards contains 8 cards comprised of doubles of 4 different monsters that are related in terms of look or abilities, like “Undead – Spirit” or “Enchanted”. In some classes, the individual monsters are diverse, but in several of the classes they are a bit same-y which makes them less fun to fight over and over. [↩]
10. 6 militia for fighting, and 2 torches, 2 daggers, and 2 iron rations for support. [↩]
11. *gasp* [↩]
12. *gasp* [↩]
13. I’m looking at you, Doomknights. [↩]
14. *gasp* [↩]