Author: Bill H

Reiner Makes You Do the Splits

A way designers try to create tension in a board game is to force a player to divide his attention, usually by offering several sources of points. The idea is you can’t just do one of the things to win, you should be thinking about all of the ways to get points. In most current board games a player can mostly focus on one thing, only dabble at the other stuff, and still get away with it.

Reiner Knizia is having none of that. You will be divided. You will be torn. You will suffer making these decisions. Suffer deliciously. Here’s a quick look a two of my favourite Knizias to see how he splits your gameplay and focus. It’s a lot more interesting than “I’ll pay 4 to go up on the god track too”.

Tigris and Euphrates – Score the Worst

Different sources of points in the game have different colours. When you get a point, it comes in that colour. At the end of the game, the colour you have the least in is your final score. You can have 25 kabajillion blue points, but if you have only 2 red points, your final score is 2. T&E forces you to really think about the other colours and truly divides your attention. Yeah, you figure Johnny’s only a point or two behind you on green and catching up, but you have to do something about your blue points or you might end the game without any points at all. So you let Johnny have it and hope he forgets about his red…

Samurai – Most Mosts

Samurai is another Knizia game with different kinds of points: rice, nobles, and buddhas. At the end of the game, you compare everyone’s scored tokens. If you have the most of a particular kind you’re one step towards victory, but not quite there. To win the game, you have to win “the most” for more kinds of tokens than anyone else. Since there are only 3 kinds of points and only around 20 pieces total to be fought over, these are super-tight, razor-close victories. Only dabbling in another kind of scoring token doesn’t help you: you have to win the most for it to count. Samurai does give an observant player a new option: screw up your opponents. You can burn points other players have stakes in. You can score points for other players so that they tie on points of that type; a tie is not the most, it’s a tie.

Del

Spyfall – Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Sound like I knew Where I Was!

Party Games, there are 23.7 million of them. How to stand out? Put in some rude words? Make people do some silly things? Ask some inappropriate questions? Have a big quiz? They all work because there are lots of different people whose idea of a party differ.

Well here’s one more to add to the mix, and its just different enough to stand out from the crowd to be making quite a splash already.

We’ve tried it out in the Cafe a few times and are aware its not for everybody, but those who will like it, will love it.

Game play:

The game takes place over a series of 8 minute rounds in which you earn points. Play to an agreed number of rounds, most points wins.

Each round select a bag of cards (from a selection of 30, for 30 different possible locations) and give one card to everyone face down. It’ll tell you if you are the Spy OR Where you are.

So this is what you know every round:
– One of you is a Spy (“You mean its the Resistence?” No its nothing like the Resistence)
– You are all in the same location, which most of you know.
– The Spy does not know where they are.
– Only the Spy knows who the Spy is.

In each round the Spy needs to find out where they are OR not get revealed. Everyone else needs to figure out who the Spy is. At any point during the 8 minutes if everyone agrees on who they think the spy is or the spy reveals themselves and guesses where they are; the round ends. Else, after 8 minutes the group must have a guess on who they think the spy is.
To do this players take turns asking questions. The questions need to give players an opportunity to prove they know where they are while giving the Spy room to hang themselves by. If they are too specific though, they will give away the location and the Spy will win, too vague and you’ll run out of time before you can narrow down who the Spy is.
If the Spy wins they get 2 points, else everyone else get 1.

Examples:

Q: What are you wearing?
A: A Wetsuit.

Great we know that you are not the Spy, but you’ve also helped the Spy narrow down their location to only water based places.

Q: Are you a morning person?
A: Yes I am, I have a lot of drive in the morning?

Nice answer, we know we are in a mechanics, a cheeky mention of driving probably means you are not the spy.

When asking or answering the questions, the pressure is on. You need to think fast and come up with something on the fly. Some people can do that and others can’t and will find the pressure quite unpleasant. It is however, a game that you get better at. Practice makes perfect as they say. The first few rounds will be a bit of a mess and the Spy will either give themselves away very quickly or figure out where they are very quickly. It won’t take long before you get better and that is when they brilliance of the game shines through. The subtle Q&A as the Spy tries to give confidently vague answers and everyone else looks for the ‘nudge nudge’ answer that will clear them of accusation.

Fans of Dixit will love this, so will Resistance addicts. You will need to find the right group though. Introverts will likely find the pressure awful and it only takes one person not enjoying themselves for the game to break down.

Its unlike anything else out there though and well worth a try.

spyfall

Murder Mysteries in Victoria

A lot of people ask about whether we carry Murder Mystery games. We don’t, but we do recommend a local fella in town who runs them for you. Like modern games, Murder Mysteries have come a long way since the days of a few envelopes and ‘find the killer.’ Nowadays, you’ll be given a full role, with a background, secrets and even special powers you can use during the game. You’ll be given 4 or 5 tasks to complete in order to get your own personal victory.

I participated in one a couple of months ago, we had about 20 people and it had a 1920’s speakeasy theme. We all got dressed up, 20’s style, and rented the upper section of The Guild on Wharf Street.

I was the city Mayor, with ambitions to run for President. However, I had a drinking problem and in order to fund my illicit boozing I had sold my wife’s engagement ring. I was also having an affair with a local singer as well. My tasks were to:

get drunk (in the game), but not so drunk I embarrassed myself (I also tried to do that in real life as well)
find out who had fixed the horse race and bet on that to get money to buy my wife’s ring back
Not let anyone find out about my affair
Help the detective find the murderer.

So a lot to do in 3 hours, keeps you very busy with little downtime, but lots of laughs and play acting. People will approach you with strange requests as they try to complete their tasks…I had three ladies break into dance in front of me to try and impress me with their Charleston skills.

The cost is very reasonable, usually this works out to about $20-30 a head, which includes helping to find and rent the venue, all the preparation (which is substantial), some food at our event, and not having to deal with the headache of running the dam thing and being free to have fun on the night.

If this looks like an advert, it is. We are not taking any commission here though. Chris, who runs this is a local guy who has been a vibrant member of the local gaming scene (he runs Day of Board Gaming and the Board Game Jam) and has struck out on his own to do this full time. We want him to succeed as its just another great way to bring people together to have fun. If you are interested, please email him at

chris@enigmaticevents.com

or visit enigmaticevents.com for more data.

Dungeon Fighter

What this world needs is a Co-operative, Dexterity, Dungeon crawl that makes you do silly things. Good job we have Dungeon Fighter then isn’t it?

In a nut shell you bounce dice off the table onto a target board to mash monsters up-side the face.

Each of you will take a silly character with some special powers and build a dungeon for your party to wander through. In each room, there is a monster to face, with a daft name, some health to extinguish and gold to grab when you have battered them. ‘Get to the point Bill, how do I do I batter them?’

Dice bouncing my dear child…dice bouncing. The dice must hit the table first and depending on where it hits on the target board you do damage, miss and you start to lose health. If the dice lands weird symbol up and you get to use your special powers. Dice bouncing is a skill you will learn to acquire. Its not one you can put on your CV, unless you are applying here (I will be impressed), but its odd that the more you play this the better you get at it.

You move from room to room beating up the monsters until you make it to the very big and bad boss monster. Beat him and you win…huzzah, what could be easier? Brain surgery for one. On Easy its well hard, on really hard its winning the lottery impossible, but thats all part of the fun.

dfmonsters — Look carefully to see the special shots required to beat these guys. Rolling the dice off your nose for example!

If you run out of the health, you faint, but so long as one of you beats the monster then you move on, but with less life to start with and minus one special power. If you faint 3 times…game over man…if everyone faints fighting a monster, group game over man!

Help can be had by visiting stores on the way, which can give you health potions, shieldy stuff and weapons to lay some extra smackdown…but at a cost. Nothing comes for free here.

You can wear the helm of bravery, but must throw the dice with your eyes closed.
The Sword of Friendship give you a +2 bonus but you have to put the dice in your neighbors hand hold their wrist and throw it.
Rambo’s knife is cool, but you have to throw from under the table…and yes you can combine them i.e. throw with your eyes closed holding your friends wrist under the table, but you’ll miss 99% of the time.

supershot — Throwing behind the back, left-handed, with a catapult, bouncing twice on the table…..

The art is awesome and the humor is bang on and its a riotous good time. You’ll cheer louder than you thought possible when your mate pulls off that 1 in a 100 shot to kill the Crazy Cat lady and keep the party alive.

The components are top quality, with an utterly pointless tower to put the cards in and giant target board for shooting. If you like your games a bit silly, but still a real challenge, this is a game for you. Its hard son, so when you win there is definitely a sense of satisfaction when you finally do it. Something I have yet to do 🙁

dungeon fighter

Railways of the World

Released back in 2005 as ‘Railroad Tycoon’ this train game had a huge impact in my life. Most of us got into modern gaming through classics like Catan, Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride, this was my first game. Its pretty epic in every way, not just the 2+ hour game time, but the GIANT board and feeling of growing a railroad empire.

Its kind of odd that train games are so popular, there are hundreds of games about them, from the simple like Transamerica to behemoths of complexity like the 18XX series. Railways of the World lies nicely in the middle somewhere.

If you are looking to step up from Ticket to Ride to really grasp that feeling of building a Rail Network then this may be the game for you.

In RotW you are trying to make points by delivering goods around the board from city to city using, ideally, your own rail network. To do that you need to get some cash together to make said network and buy better trains that can move the good further. To do that you will need money, which you get through shares!
Shares are the bread and butter of many Rail games and can intimidate the crap out of a lot of newbies. In this case its done in a pretty user friendly manner. You take a share and get some money to spend, but every round you must pay some money back for the share. So you have a choice, take loads of shares and build a huge network and be on the hook for some serious interest payments or go lean and mean, taking just a few and building a tight, efficient network.

rotwboard — So pretty. Except those annoying shares at the front.

The game lasts until a certain number of cities have been emptied of their goods. Moving the goods is how you score points to win the game and also how you earn an income. The further you move the goods the more points you earn. The more points you have the more income you earn.

A round last 3 turns and on each turn you can do one of the following:

1. Deliver a good
2. Build track
3. Upgrade your train
4. Take a card from the tableau
5. Upgrade a city to put new good on it

The heart of your game will be deciding where you build your track. Competition for some spots will be fierce and blocking people is part of the game. Goods of a certain color have to be delivered to a city that demands them. You need to be able to make short deliveries to get your income going, but you need to plan for the longer ones to make the big deliveries to win you the game.

Upgrading engines and cities is necessary but painfully expensive, forcing players into taking more yucky shares. The cards can give you important bonuses and drive a part if your strategy.

At the end of the game you lose a point for every share you have, gain some possible points for a secret objective, most points wins.

I find games that allow you to build something immensely satisfying. Even if you lose, there is something fantastic about having created a great network of rails from a blank board.

rotwcloseup — Brown structures denote a city emptied of goods

Its a pretty thinky game, no doubt about that, but so much fun. Its one of those games you spend half the game standing up looking over the map trying to figure out where you will go next. A classic that needs more love…come down store and let us teach you it!

railways of the world