Words from Thalcos

I was going through some old things today in an effort to clean up my desk at home and I found an old sketchbook which contained the original sketches from Monsters Ravage America, one of the boardgames I worked on at Avalon Hill. (Yes, I know my sketches are amazingly amateurish, especially in these days of Arkham Horror and Pillars of the Earth, but at the time the alternative was no art at all!). In any case, there were two monsters in there that almost made the cut into the original game. The first was Grazorr, the giant ant (who is in a web expansion of MRA), the second was Neptune Zero, a gaunt, bug-like alien who no doubt wants to devour all of human-kind. So, after ten years of never having been seen, here he is!

Anyone have any good stats to give him for either Monsters Ravage America or the updated Monsters Menace America?

My daughter and I have been playing some games lately — it’s certainly fun to see the games she really likes as her reasons seem entirely different from what I’d expect. In any case, here are some of the favorites these days:

• Go Away Monster - A simple, simple game where you draw shapes from a bag and hope it’s a piece of furniture for your room, not a goofy-looking monster. If it’s a monster, you yell “Go away monster!” and toss it on the floor (and lose your turn). My daughter thinks it’s really neat to toss monsters, of course, but she prefers to dig for the teddy bears. She insisted that we play with 2 boards each (nice house rule!) and double our chances for teddy bears. Highly recommended for the young ones, though I can see her outgrowing this before she’s 3.
• Gulo Gulo - I heard about this one on boardgamegeek as a nice alternative to Candyland. The schtick of this game is that you are forced to draw colored wooden eggs from a “nest” with a stick stuck in the middle. If the stick falls… well, you can’t advance. She’s really good at this game (tiny fingers) and had a great time the first time she played, but has since become nervous about it and wants me to always draw the eggs for her. I suspect she’ll like this again with a bit more confidence and age!
• Candyland. Yup, she likes this one. I’ve heard many a rant about this game (all luck, zero choices, tons of frustration) and it’s all true. That said, the game has one strongpoint which I hadn’t considered until now. Drawing that card to see what color you have — to a 2 year old — is like playing a slot machine. My daughter shrieks like she won the jackpot when she draws doubles, and never seems to get bored of that surprise, no matter what color it is.
• Cathedral / Blokus - I find that if I play randomly, we’re pretty much evenly matched in these games. My daughter likes to try to fill up the board and doesn’t grasp the strategy at all, but it’s still fun to cram the plastic pieces on the board.

There it is. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to play some more grown-up games with some grown-ups soon, as I’ve just picked up Kingsburg, E.T.I., and a bunch of Heroscape expansions. And I need to brush up for an upcoming Blood Bowl tournament. Need to decide between the Lizardmen and the Khemri team, but the new mummies (”Tomb Guardians”) confound me…

My two-year old daughter has developed quite an affection for the Gummi Bears — that old Disney cartoon show from the 80’s. While spending some time watching this with her, I’ve decided that this old gem of a show is the ultimate videogame license. Don’t believe me? Let me explain…

For those of you not in-the-know, the whole show takes place in a medieval-fantasy setting: the type that’s home to a hundred games already, so players are quite familiar with it. Castles, forests, caves, and canyon-wastelands are ready made for adventure! Mass market setting? Check.

The gummi world is chock-full of ogres, trolls, gargoyles, dragons, and other baddies of all shapes and sizes. They’re all mostly ruled by the evil Duke Igthorn, a caricature of villainy who wants nothing but to take over the kingdom with his henchmen and his crazy scheming. Igthorn and his baddies are perfect for the videogame world. They’re all stupid, a bit funny, a bit scary, and offer enough graphical variety that players won’t be bored.

Gummi-berry juice. The ultimate powerup, already in potion form. Drink it as a gummi bear and gain access to amazing bouncing powers, perfect for platforming through Prince of Persia-like levels. Jump, double-jump, bounce off walls, bounce off enemy heads — great fun, and perfectly in tune with the license.

Drink it as a human and have super strength. Throw giant boulders (powered by Havok, of course), toss ogres with ease, and launch enemies far into the air. Sure, it’ll wear off, but there’s always more…

(Don’t forget, gummi bears need to make that juice with special berries, hidden in the forest. Collectibles? Oh yes.)

Did I mention that there’s magic too? But even as Zummi Gummi has to slowly learn spells by studying the Great Book of Gummi, players will slowly gain access to these abilities by practicing and using these spells on the various ogres and trolls mentioned above. Level up system with cool abilities? Check and check.

Sound like fun yet?

Wait, there’s more. You see, the gummi bears use “quick tunnels” — rollercoaster-like caves that can jet them from one side of the forest to another. No need for long walks across a dull world, and no need for game designers to try to come up with a justification for Town Portal scrolls! Hey, maybe use this as a sort of vehicle-based minigame for a break between the bouncing and the super-strength pummeling.

Not that you’d ever really want a break between bouncing AND fighting.

Convinced? God of War 3, watch out.

This last holiday season seems to have produced a wave of new people interested in House of Horrors! That’s fantastic… but with new players playing the game it meant that some new issues with the game were found. I’ve made some small updates to the Room cards today which improve the following:

1) The Attic is renamed the Attic Stairs, to avoid confusion with the house level “Attic”

2) Dawn is worth slightly more points

3) Text on the Secret Passage card has been clarified

4) The background art on the cards has been improved!

I’ve got some updates to make soon to the Monster, Item, and Explorer cards, but nothing too major. Stay tuned…

While I’m patiently waiting for the upcoming Nexus Age of Conan boardgame, I Gamefly’d the new Conan game for the Xbox 360. While for the most part it’s a fairly average God of War clone, it does a few things right that I really like.

One, the levels so far don’t leave you any doubts where to go. There’s always screaming natives or pirates or demons in your path, and you can hack through them in fairly short order. So far, the game has a good pace, which is really the most important part of game design (regardless if you’re talking about boardgame or videogame) that many titles miss altogether.

Two, lots of moves (you actually feel fairly powerful), lots of achievements given out for cool things you do with your opponents’ bodies.

Three — press button to pull arrows out of you? Neat. Has any game done this before?

The game’s certainly not perfect, I really wish there was less magic in the game. Conan shouldn’t wield fire-spewing bracers. Ever. They could have played up more of Conan’s thieving, and chunks of levels could have used more polish. Still, it was a nice diversion on an otherwise boring Sunday afternoon.

Back when I worked at Avalon Hill, Christopher Lawrence and I were conspiring to use the Conan license in a card-driven wargame ala Hannibal: Rome v. Carthage or Successors. Obviously, that never happened, but it does keep my hopes really high for Age of Conan.

I’ve always been a big (though not rabid) fan of Lovecraft, read most of the stories, played a bit of the RPG, and even filmed a short version of “The Temple” in college. Nothing like building a cardboard submarine in your parents’ basement!

In any case, I’ve had the chance to play Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Horror game a couple of times now, and I’ve concluded that there are parts of it that still don’t work for me. I don’t think it’s a bad game, it just falls really flat in some areas.

1) Why can’t I die? When a Shoggoth eats me or a Mi-Go flies me off to Pluto, I end up at the hospital. The fact that these characters are strangely invulnerable, over a 3+ hour game, just doesn’t fit with Lovecraft’s stark horror.

2) The pacing. Yeah, this one’s been covered on Boardgamegeek many times (with many house fixes) but the game’s gate mechanism means everything slows down as the game progresses, seemingly getting easier until the final boss shows up or that last gate is sealed. Shouldn’t games get more tense as the end approaches?

3) The big fight with Cthulhu at the end. Or Ithaqua. Or the King in Yellow. Right. Most of the games I’ve seen either end anticlimactically with a gate easily being sealed, or in a giant dicefest with the final Big Bad. Bonus points to those who realize that my own boardgame, Monsters Menace America, ends the same way, but here’s the difference (in my own humble mind, of course). Over the course of Monsters, you can build up your character in many different ways (Infamy, Health, Mutations) and mix and match to your heart’s content. You can “depower” your foes with your armed forces, or block other monsters from achieving their own goals. Thus, the results of the dicefest should largely represent the results of the game. Sure, sometimes someone rolls bad, or Super Colossal Guy wins the game with a sucker punch, but since the game runs an hour (of which most of the time people are howling, roaring, and gurgling), it’s easier to take it in stride. In Arkham Horror, you often times lose your items/blessings/stuff just before the big fight, and you’re no better off fighting the Big Bad than you were four hours before the brawl. Even the stuff that is left doesn’t always help all that much unless you play the game as pack rat who scampers from deck to deck trying to purchase the best anti-Cthulhu gun the game offers. Plus… who the heck in a Lovecraft story ever killed one of those monstrosities with anything less than a steamer ramming one at full speed? The mechanics just don’t work thematically, or well, mechanically.

4) The whole sliding scale attribute system. I’m not sure I get this. Again, it’s a theme stretch (I’m going to intentionally reduce my willpower to throw a better punch?) and mechanically… I’m just not sure what it’s trying to do. It encourages a tiny bit of forecasting – if you see a crash of Shoggoths roaming the city, maybe it makes sense to adjust Sneak upwards, but usually it’s an obvious choice (either you’re going to try to kill ‘em, or you’re not) so there’s not much in the way of strategy you can apply to that choice. And the random card events you’re likely to get along the way can go either way regardless of how you adjusted your character. It feels like the whole system was a band-aid to fix the fact that characters with radically different statistics can sometimes be outright screwed by a random situation or tentacle-waving blob standing in their path. I think a better solution would have been to rework and simplify the system, as all it is right now is a red herring decision-making point that has most players just shrugging and picking left or right on their character sheet.

5) Here it is. My standard number one Fantasy Flight rant. It’s too darned long for what it is. This is especially true for a cooperative game where the tension is artificially created. You often see the ending hours before it’s over. Shadows over Camelot and Knizia’s Lord of the Rings nailed the sense of dread and desperate cooperation in half the play time. I think I’d be more forgiving of the game if it clocked in under 2 hours.

Oh well, can’t love ‘em all! And just to sign-off on a positive note, the game sure has pretty artwork and lots of cool, thematic expansions that makes we wish I really loved it!

I got to cross two boardgames of my list this week. Sadly, two is a small, small percentage of the ones I own but haven’t played yet. (For those keeping score, he winner for the longest I’ve had but have yet to play goes to the German import / dwarving mining game Silberzwerg).

First up was Fire & Axe, the Ragnar Brothers’ Viking game. I’m a big fan of History of the World, and this latest game did not disappoint. It has the things that get me excited about boardgames — a solid theme, great components, clear choices with unclear strategy, and a bit of luck tossed in. Okay, Fire & Axe has quite a bit more than a bit of luck as you need to roll dice anytime you want to sack a city or settle a burned out village. Despite trying to avoid the dice by earning points through peaceful trading and sagas, I couldn’t resist and tried to settle England…. and fared about the same as the historical Vikings, which means I finished last. Still, great game, played fast, and I’m eager to play it again.

I also recently got a chance to finally play the newest Days of Wonder game, Colosseum. Despite some dense rules and a ton of cardboard components, the game is relatively simple and was understood by everyone (including the casual gamer wives) in a turn or two. Though I enjoyed it and will put it on my short list to replay, it definitely seems like one of those games you have to play a time or two before you can really develop some solid strategies.

Two down, lots more to go. Silberzwerg anyone?

I gamemastered a fun game of WFRP this week, randomly plucking one of the scenarios off of Black Industries’ website (the fact that they have over 50 scenarios ready-to-go was a big reason I picked the Warhammer RPG to begin with… sure, I love creating my own like everyone else, but sometimes you just need an off-the-shelf scenario to run with!).

The scenario was John W.S. Martin’s “Sorry Gents, the Bar is Closed” which blended a perfect mix of intrigue, action, light comedy, and combat, as the PCs tried to track down which of three of a halfling’s lovers participated in a grisly, chaos-tainted murder. I’ve usually found that “mystery” adventures are hit or miss — it’s tough to balance giving enough information that players have some idea where to turn to next without providing too much information that they know exactly where to go next. But this adventure worked, giving the players clear choices while making sure each choice had its own red herrings and couldn’t be crossed off the list until other possibilities had been exhausted (amazing how pickled pig hearts have chaos-fearing PCs whispering Nurgle under their breaths…).

In any case, good time had by all, and no one lost any vital organs of their own.

I just posted a brand new version of the House of Horrors rules here:

 http://www.threefates.com/house.htm

 This should clear up a lot of problems and ambiguities with it (especially for players who aren’t familiar with Atlantic Storm!) as I’ve included lots of examples and hints this time around. If you’ve got the patience to print out a deck of cards and give the game a try with your friends this Halloween, please let me know what you think!

 (Mental note to myself to redo some of that card art and format… yipes… I’ve learned a LOT with Indesign and Photoshop over the last 6 years or so…).

This year I’ve gotten a lot of good use out of my PSP. Puzzle Quest absorbed a lot of hours, and Sid Meier’s Pirates! was a great port of the PC game (a game that I bought for PC but never got around to playing that much, so a portable version was exactly what the doctor ordered).

I bought Dungeon Maker: Hunting Grounds on a recommendation, and it’s really hooked me — I decided to play it over Halo 3 in the precious few hours I had free today (though never fear, Halo 3 won’t go unplayed for long). I’ve never played a game before that let you customize a dungeon as you’re running through it killing its monsters. Sure, you need to suspend your disbelief a bit, and the writing in it isn’t the greatest, but the building aspect is just enough of a clever hook to keep me playing. The whole “visit the dungeon once a day” mechanic brings back that old Civilization “just one more turn” addiction mentality. I also really appreciate the lack of a standard level-up procedure (instead, you increase your stats with a nice dinner… yeah, that sounds really weird until you’ve tried it, trust me).

My only big beef with the game so far? I built a nice storage room filled with barrels and crates and realized the game wouldn’t let me smash any of them. What the…? Oh well. If you’re a fan of Diablo-styled games with a nice construction twist, dust off your PSP and give Dungeon Maker a try.