Interesting Stuff – Page 12 – Interactivity Board Game Cafe

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

The Online Board Game World!

BoardGameGeek

The undisputed king of all online Board gaming Stuff. Its a huge, ugly and confusing mess to anyone who enters it for the first time, but once you’ve found your bearings the amount of information and resources available is incredible.

The Dice Tower

Tom Vassel has been the #1 reviewer of Board games for the last 10 years. Love him or hate him, he is prolific, with almost 2 games reviewed a day. He also has a podcast to go with it for those who like their gaming updates given to them aurally.

Shut Up and Sit Down

Easily the funniest of the bunch, with quite the creative blog posts and podcast to go with it as well, well worth a read. Plus they are English!

TableTop – Geek and Sundry

The most professional of the bunch. Wil Wheaton, King of the Geeks, sits around and plays some of the most popular modern board games with his pals.

Watch it Played

Pretty much does what it says on the tin. A guy will explain the rules to you and play some of the game to give you an idea if its something you would like to buy.

News from the GAMA Trade Show

This is basically an industry only trade show in Las Vegas. A bunch of networking and stuff happens, but we don’t care about that, just show me the games…

7 Wonders: Duel, A two player version of the game, very little info has been released about the game other than it involves tiles instead of cards and will be out later in the year.

Munchkin – The Nightmare Before Christmas, people love Munchkin and they love TNBC, it will be a mega hit I’m sure.

Fantasy Flight have had their licence extended to include the new Star Wars films, so future expansions of their games will include ships from the new JJ Abrams movies.
Warhammer 40K Forbidden Stars is their new mega game. Usual mini’s, 3 hour game play, with a combat system that borrows a couple of ideas from the one they used in their Starcraft game with a lot of knobs and bells added. Early reviews are very positive (if you are into 3 hour FF games).

IDW will be releasing a bunch of Godfather games
The first game will be a deductive party card game, similar to Werewolf or Mafia, due in August.
The second game will be an area control game.

Chopstick Dexterity MegaChallenge 3000 has been on its way for what seems forever, but finally should be out very soon. Its pretty much what it looks like, chopsticks flying everywhere trying to grab stuff from a bowl. Looks like IBGC gold to me 🙂

Snow tails is to be re-released. Its the best racing game ever IMO (see previous review)

Pingo Pingo looks very interesting. It has has you running away from bear-riding penguins and consulting monkey sorcerers while collecting treasures. It comes with a 15 minute soundtrack and a gun that fires suction cup bullets…B.O.O.M! (finishes post, drops computer and leaves the room, you know like cool people do when they do cool things).

Category: Interesting Stuff