Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (Deluxe Edition) Review

I recently received the gift of gaming from my wife (thanks, wife) in the form of Lord Of The Rings: The Confrontation Deluxe Edition.

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation is Stratego on steroids (or, put another way, what Stratego Legends wished it could have been). One of the players selects the role of the free peoples, and the other player takes on the role of Sauron's minions. In order to win, the good guys must get Frodo to Mordor (as in every Lord of the Rings game), and the bad guys must either kill Frodo (again, as in every LotR game) or get 3 of their units in the Shire. To start the game, each player takes their 9 units and places them on their side of the board to where their opponent cannot see them, with 4 of them in their back-most territory (Mordor or the Shire). From there, the players will take turns moving one of the units forward. If their unit enters the same region as an opposing unit, then they will battle. First, the units are revealed and the special text of each of the units will occur (good guys first). Next, each of the players will select one of their fight cards to play, and (if they are text cards), these will resolve (bad guys first). Finally, if nobody has wimped out of the fight and retreated somehow, then the units will compare their strength total, and whoever has the highest total wins (and in a tie, they both die).

The first pro that I like about The Confrontation is that the sides play very differently and are thematically tailored pretty well. If you are playing as the free peoples, then your units are weaker but are more tricky. They have several units that are able to run away, kill certain units instantly, etc. If you are playing as Sauron's minions, then your units are much stronger, but fight primarily with brute strength.With these differences, you will obviously have to have a much different strategy depending on which side you are playing.

The next pro about The Confrontation is that it is ridiculously replayable. This is especially true with the Deluxe Edition. I believe that there are about 5 different variants on the game that can be played. Each unit has two different sides that can be played, and there are also some "special cards" that can be used in a couple of different ways. And then there is even the previously mentioned difference in using the free people versus the minions of Sauron and the replayability involved in switching between sides.

The main con of The Confrontation involved the special movement rules involving the mountains. The middle territories were mountains, and they prevented units from moving sideways in them, unless something specifically stated that they could. This causes you to constantly be referring to the rulebook to see if they really can move through the mountains there or not, and really should have been simplified somehow.

The other thing to note about The Confrontation is that I think it will ultimately live its life as a filler game. Like Stratego, I don't really see a lot of people getting together specifically to play it. I think that some people may do this, as it is a very good game, but it is brief enough that I don't think that people will make a point of meeting up to play it.

Overall, I give Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (Deluxe Edition) an 8.5/10. As a disclaimer, my wife would horribly disagree with this score, as she hated the game and thought that the sides were unbalanced - you may want to be aware of this if you are considering buying this to play with your spouse. However, as a whole, I would recommend checking this out if you like how Stratego works.

For more reading, you might check out the Board Game Family's Lord of the Rings: Confrontation Review, or my reviews of Mage Wars, King of Tokyo, and Mice and Mystics.

Power Grid Review

A game that regularly hits my gaming table is Power Grid (shown in the picture with the Power Grid: New Plants Expansion.

In Power Grid, each player takes on the role of a power company that is attempting to power the most cities. In order to do this, however, he must both own power plants to generate the power and build enough infrastructure to transmit the power to the cities. How this works in game terms is that at the beginning of each round, new power plants will be auctioned off. After this, resources will need to be purchased to power the (non "green") plants. Third, the players will purchase "cities" (which represents bringing power to that city), by paying the connecting cost from one of their other cities plus the cost to build the city itself (10, 15 or 20 depending on how many other players are already there). Finally, each player will power their cities and generate income (and the resource market gets restocked).

There are several things that I like about Power Grid. The first thing I like is the mechanic where whoever is in last place gets an advantage for that round. This seems to be a trademark mechanic for Friedemann Friese (the designer), because I have also seen this in Furstenfeld. Either way, I like it as it adds a new level of strategy to the game - when should you go ahead and take the lead (and have a slight disadvantage) as opposed to purposely staying behind. Fortunately, the advantage given to last place is useful enough that it is worth sometimes staying behind to acquire it, but small enough that it does not prohibit someone from wanting to be in the lead. It is an incredibly nice balancing element that keeps almost every game of Power Grid very close all the way until the end.

The next aspect of the game that I like is how the auctions work. In many games, there are a certain number of whatever that are available each round. Starting with a certain person, they choose one of the things to auction and once they have bought it there is one less item available on the market. In this situation, the person who picks last has a bit of a disadvantage because they have no chance of getting something at list price, and their options are also very limited. This is not the case in Power Grid. Instead, you can see both a "current" and a "future" market of power plants. Whenever a plant is purchased from the current market, a new plant comes out and the cheapest one from the "future" market goes into the "current" market. This does two things: it makes it advantageous to go last (and hence the person losing gets that position), and it also makes you strategize when you want to lose auctions in order to get to the plants in the future market. Again, this is a really nice mechanic - I like it a lot.

Another pro of the game that keeps it balanced is the diminishing returns on powering cities. For the first city that you power each turn, you get around $15. However, if you power 20 cities, you get $2 more than if you power 19. This is another aspect of the game that keeps it very balanced and keeps all of the players close together throughout. Also, this gives the players more to think about - should I burn the resources to power these cities this turn, or would it be better to keep them just in case (the winner is the person who powers the most number of cities on the last turn). After all, sometimes you can actually lose money on powering cities if the resources needed are in high demand.

Overall, I give Power Grid a 9.5/10. This is one of the best games that I have played. I was incredibly skeptical when I saw the theme (I used to work for a power company, and so I didn't think it was very exciting), but it is a well balanced, well implemented, innovative game that I have thoroughly enjoyed.  If you have never played Power Grid, I think you should either go buy a game or convince your friends who have a copy to bring it so that you can play it.

For some more opinions on this one, check out Games With Two's Power Grid Review, or this other Review of Power Grid by Play Board Games. Alternately, for even more reading, check out my thoughts on Mice and Mystics, Risk Legacy, and King of Tokyo.

Mutant Chronicles Review

One of the games that amazed me with how quickly it died off was Mutant Chronicles: Collectible Miniature Game. (And so I got it free. I'll play most any game if it's free. Keep that in mind if you're a game company looking for someone to review your games.... anyway, I digress.)

In Mutant Chronicles, each player constructs an army of units, order tokens and special cards. These are all marked as Gold, Silver, or Bronze and the players are allowed to use a certain number of each rating. Once they have constructed their armies, they place them on the game board. Each round consists of the players taking turns back and forth by placing two order markers on their unused figures until they run out of figures or orders. Depending on the rank of the order used (Gold, Silver or Bronze), the player can take up to 3 actions with their figure. The actions can consist of moving, attacking, taking a special action or guarding (but they can only perform each action once). To attack, they must have a clear line of sight, and then roll special attack dice to determine accuracy and hits. Going "on guard" allows the figure to attack one enemy unit when it moves (assuming that your unit has clear line of sight), and moving and special actions should be self-explanatory. Rounds go on until one of the players reaches a certain number of victory points - by destroying figures or by controlling victory point locations (or a combination). Once the pre-defined number of points has been reached, the game is over.

The main thing that I liked about Mutant Chronicles was how they broke down the dice (and determined accuracy). Each unit got a certain number of dice when attacking (for example 2 green dice). The different dice represented the different kinds of attacks: green for example, was light, long range fire. After the dice were rolled, you used the highest number on any of the rolled dice to determine the accuracy of the attack; if you rolled an 8 and were within 8 hexes of your target, then you scored hits with all of the damage icons that were rolled. If your accuracy was less than your distance, then you missed.

The next pro that Mutant Chronicles had was how the orders worked. First,  I thought it was interesting that when building armies your order markers were factored in. Secondly, which order to use and when you used it was important in the game. You wanted to make sure you got the most "bang for your buck" with your gold orders, since they both give you the most actions and cost an important spot when building your army. The orders also were able to do some other interesting things like buying back your special action cards. Overall, I think the interplay of the orders with the units and cards would allow for some very interesting army building strategies.

The final pro of Mutant Chronicles was the production quality of the figures. The figures (as seen in my poorly taken photo at the top) are top notch. I don't know that I've played another game with such high quality figures.

However, this leads directly into the reason that the game died: it was overpriced in my opinion. I paid nothing for my set, and so I feel that I got a bargain, but the list price of the game was about $15-$20 for a booster that contained 2-3 figures. The pricing was closer to Warhammer, but I think that the target audience was more like the people that play Heroscape (in which you got twice as many figures for quite a bit cheaper). This factor doesn't really affect the gameplay, so it doesn't affect it's score in my opinion. I just thought it was worth noting.

Now for the actual cons. First, though the figures production value was incredibly high, the map was pitiful. It was a fold-out piece of paper (not even cardstock). In addition, the map was incredibly cluttered and thus it was very hard to see what was going on. I think that if I were to play this game more often, I'd at least attempt to use my Heroscape terrain as I think that it might work (I haven't really checked the scale - I know that the Mutant Chronicles figures are quite a bit bigger, but I think the size of the terrain on their map is comparable to the size of the Heroscape terrain.) As it was, there was only one map included with the game, so there was no versatility and no way (out of the box) to change the fact that I didn't like the default map.

The next con of the game was the unbalance between the different factions. This part may be a figment of my imagination, but since I'm the one writing the reviews I get to pretend that it's factual. All of the humans that I looked at except for 1-2 seemed to be long range sniper figures with very few hitpoints whereas the demons all seemed to be close range heavy hitters with lots of hitpoints. This is normally a decent balance, but ideally you want to build armies that include both types. This may be because the game went away so quickly, but there didn't appear to be enough diversity to do this. Also, when using the default map, there was too much clutter to actually get long range shots off on your opponents and thus the humans are reduced to running to claim Victory Locations and hope that they can take down a few demons before they get slaughtered.

Overall, I give Mutant Chronicles a 7.0/10. The gameplay was not too bad, and the figures were incredibly nice, but the game didn't seem to live long enough to mature into a title that would keep my attention for longer.

Mr. Jack Review

As I've been playing through my latest wave of games, one of the ones I held out the most hope for was Mr. Jack.

In Mr. Jack, one of the players takes on the role of Jack the Ripper who is posing as a detective. The other player takes on the role of the detective who is trying to determine which person Jack is impersonating. (I have no idea why it is based on Jack the Ripper - it is basically Hide and Seek as a board game). Each round there will be 4 of the 8 characters flipped. Next the players alternate controlling these characters in a 1-2-1 pattern (I go, you go twice, I go again). To mix it up a little bit, each character also has a special ability like lighting gas lights, moving manhole covers, etc. Once all 4 characters have moved, the player who took on the role of Jack announces whether he is witnessed - and the detective then eliminates all of the characters that can logically be eliminated. This continues until 1) Jack escapes (he had to not un-witnessed the previous round), 2) the detective accuses a character (if he is right he wins, if he is wrong he loses), or 3) 8 rounds have passes and Jack has not been caught.

The biggest pro of this game is that it is a game with actual gameplay value that could be played with children. Now, with that said, for some reason the publishers decided to name it after Jack the Ripper! I have no idea why this is. They took a game that is incredibly kid-friendly and named it after a mass murderer... bravo. (Just gloss over this fact with your kids). Either way, there is a decent amount of strategy and thinking that goes on in the game, and yet the rules and gameplay are simple enough that it could be played with just about anyone - it says 9+, but I wouldn't really be shocked if a 7 or 8 year old could play it.

The other thing that I liked about Mr. Jack was that they added enough variety to each of the different characters that you actually must determine what the best moves are from round to round. It is interesting to try to figure out the best way of having Jack blend in (or completely isolated depending on which role you're playing). All of the different character abilities were used and important in the games that I played, and so I liked that there weren't any characters that were useless.

Now for the gigantic con (if I only have one, shouldn't it at least be large?). I thought that the gameplay got stale pretty quickly. There aren't that many different ways that you can try to hide. Here's the strategy: if you're the detective, split the characters that you are unsure of into as even of groups between witnessed and un-witnessed as possible to eliminate the most each round; if you're Jack, do the opposite. How many times do you need to do this?

Overall, I give Mr. Jack a 7.5/10. For a game that can be played with kids, I think that it's phenomenal (thus the high review - if it were for adults only, I'd give it something closer to a 6.0). With that said, I don't have kids, so I don't really plan on keeping my copy.

If you're looking for games that can be easily taught, you might try the Monopoly Deal game, as well as Sorry! Sliders (which is a dexterity game), and Ticket to Ride.