Chaos in the Old World Review

A game that my friends brought with them and taught to me was Chaos in the Old World.

In Chaos in the Old World, each player takes on the role of a demon that is attempting to corrupt the world "correctly" (using his version of corruption, not the other demons' corruption) in order to defeat the other demons. To do this, each player takes turns summoning his different units onto the board (each demon has 3 different types of units), and players can also use their summoning points to play chaos cards. After the summoning is complete, the players battle each other (assuming that there are units in the same space that can fight). Finally, the "cultists" that have been played by each demon play "corruption" markers on their spaces (if they are still alive). After this, all that remains are end of turn cleanup activities. This goes on until one of the players has achieved one of the victory conditions in the game or until the end of the 7th turn (in which all of the demons lose for not getting around to corrupting the world fast enough).

The first thing that I liked (no, loved) about Chaos in the Old World was that each playable character was completely different. One of the demons was "Khorne" (which I probably misspelled) - he was the demon of war. His goal in the game was to kill opposing figures in as many different territories as possible each turn. Not only do the different demons have different goals, they also all have different chaos cards, upgrades, units, mixes of units, etc. Basically, playing a different demon requires an entirely new strategy and outlook on the game. This adds amazing amounts of replayability to the game, and is just downright amazing. I have played very few (if any) other games that really brought a completely different element to each playable character in a game like Chaos in the Old World, and yet felt balanced enough that any of the characters had a fair chance at winning the game.

The next thing that I liked about Chaos in the Old World was the replayability of the game. This is because of the difference in the demons. I know I said it in the paragraph before, but I really, really liked it, so I wanted a second paragraph for it.

The "third" thing that I liked about Chaos was the fact that there were different paths to victory. Yes, each demon had a different path he could take, but aside from that, there were actual different ways that each demon could achieve victory. You could win by "spinning the dial" to victory (this happens if you upgrade a certain number of times, which happens if you achieve your demon's goals - such as killing opponents in different spaces like I mentioned before). Another way to win is by getting over 50 victory points. Finally, you can win by having the most victory points when the world is "ruined" by placing too many corruption tokens in it. These different paths really allow the players to try different strategies to see which ones may or may not work well for each demon; they also force players to be aware of the other players attempting to achieve victory while they are not paying attention.

Probably the biggest con to the game is the difficulty of playing the different demons. As I start this paragraph, I think I've already changed my mind. This is not a con, this is a neutral point that is worth noting. In the game, some of the demons are much easier to play than others. For example, the war demon is incredibly straightforward whereas some of the other demons have very subtle abilities that can easily be overlooked. Some players will love this, because they can dive into the different playable characters.  Other players will find it difficult to find people to play the game with as it may be hard to play a balanced game if some players have played more than others - specifically, this may be a barrier to bringing new players into the game. With that said, it is not a great barrier, as the games I have played have all been very close.

With the last paragraph turning into a neutral, the only real con I have to the game is that it is hard to see what is going on. The board, whereas it is beautiful artistically, makes it difficult to see where the territories start and end. Also, with the "dial" aspect of the game, it is hard to see what your bonuses are going to be when deciding whether you should go after bonuses or points - and it is also hard to tell how close your opponents are to victory on the dial.

Overall, I give Chaos in the Old World a 9.0/10. It was a great game, and I can envision myself playing to repeatedly.

Like Fantasy Flight Games? You may also want to try Blood Bowl: Team Manager, Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, and Battlelore (which was formerly Days of Wonder, but is now a Fantasy Flight game).

Nightfall: Martial Law Review

For those of you that have followed my blog for a while, you may remember that I left off my Nightfall review eager for expansions. (And if you haven't read that review, you should check it out here as I'm going to assume that you're familiar with the base game throughout this review and focus on the differences introduced in Martial Law, even though Martial Law is actually a fully playable game without the base set.)  Well, AEG has finally created the first expansion: Nightfall Martial Law!

There isn't really much that Martial Law introduces that is <i>completely</i> new to the Nightfall franchise. The one thing that is introduced is "Feed." Feed allows a player to have an effect continue occurring as long as they can pay the penalty (such as discarding two cards). Aside from this, Martial Law adds depth to a few ideas that were introduced in Nightfall but not all very fleshed out in the base game. For example, in Martial Law there are more minions that are not discarded every combat phase (like what "Bad Smoke" from the base game) , there are new color chains, and there is a new wound effect (in Nightfall, there was only the single wound effect). Now that I've told you the gist of what makes Martial Law unique, lets get to the pros and cons.

The first pro that I have for Martial Law is that some of the minions have effects that occur when they attack. For example, "Lone Hound" causes you to exile a card from your hand whenever he attacks. Another one, "Mad Jake" allows you to inflict a wound directly on another player whenever he attacks. I think that these extra things that occur while attacking add some strategy to the game. For example, with "Lone Hound", he can be incredibly helpful by allowing you to exile wounds from your hand late in the game, but early in the game, he might actually harm you by forcing you to exile useful cards (after all, you have to attack each turn). With "Mad Jake," you have the ability to attack two different players at the same time, since he can attack one player and cause the direct damage to go to someone else.

The next thing that I like is how more of the new Minions stay in play after combat. One particular minion, "Brynna & Taylor" allows you to draw extra cards during your cleanup phase. Therefore, if you can get several copies of them into play, you can get a significant advantage by drawing more cards than your opponents. This also adds strategy in forcing players to decide between whether they want to defend with these characters, and also causes other players to pay more attention when dealing direct damage to a minion. (Of course, these new minions are completely worthless when playing someone using a lot of "Furious Melee" from the first set which deals two damage to each of Target Player's minions. But maybe that just means that Furious Melee is overpowered.)

My next item is really a neutral more than a pro, and that is Feed. Feed can be useful, but the conditions under which Feed is powerful seem to rarely be met. For example, one card allows you to discard two cards to "Feed" an effect to inflict one point of direct damage (how often do you really have a handful of extra cards?). Another problem that I had with Feed was that the payoff for Feed was often minimal. For example, one card lets you Feed by discarding two cards in order to draw one (which can be useful if you are looking for a certain card but normally not very beneficial), and another lets you Feed by discarding two cards to gain three influence (useful, but not really a major gain). Overall, Feed is a concept that I think will become more useful in future expansions, and will occasionally be pretty impressive now (such as with "Bleak Resurrection" which allows you to Feed by discarding a card to bring a target minion from the discard pile into play - which can be really useful if you have a hand full of minions (and worthless if you don't have a discard pile)!)

However, though there are some neat new elements to Martial Law, I felt like there were a few areas that could have been better. First off, the starting cards are the exact same as those from the base set. Whereas this isn't "bad", it is an area that I thought could have been better. There could have been at a minimum new art on the cards (like they did with Thunderstone: Dragonspire), or, better yet, they could have come out with new starting decks that players could have used to mix up the game. Then, players would have had the option of playing with the old starting decks, the new starting decks, or a combination deck made of one of each card from the old and new.  This could have helped with my biggest con from the base game, which is that the first several turns are all the same - everybody waits until his turn and plays Yuri to gain influence.

The next con that I had with the game was that a lot of the cards seemed somewhat bland to me. One example is a card that allows the player to draw one card (with a kicker that each player must destroy a minion). This card really seems to be a filler card that you would only use to continue a chain. Other cards seemed to have very specialized situations in which they are helpful, but for the bulk of the game they would be fairly useless. For example, "Target player discards down to 5 cards and receives 1 wound per card discarded." When is this card useful? When someone has a ton of cards in their hand. When does that normally happen? When they've discarded a ton of wound cards to draw new cards. Which means - this card is really good at picking on the guy that already has a ton of wounds! Several others seem to target vampires or lyncanthropes. Whereas, I knew this would probably occur at some point (why else put the race on the cards in the first place), overall these cards don't seem to be nearly as good as cards that target minions, because they have very similar effects, but are much harder to use (and, to be fair, their effects normally are much greater if they are able to be pulled off).

Overall, I give Nightfall: Martial Law an 8.0/10. I was honestly a bit disappointed with the set. That's not to say that it is bad - it is just that the base set is phenomenal, and this set is "only" good. I would recommend picking up the base set first, and once you've played it enough that you need to mix it up a bit, pick this one up and mix them together.

I would like to thank AEG for providing a copy of Nightfall: Martial Law for me to review.

Punct Review

So, as many of you who have been following the blog for a while know, I have fallen in love with the GIPF Project. Some of the games in the series include Yinsh and Dvonn, which have really ignited my passion for spatial reasoning games. Because of my love for this project, I've been trying to play through all of the games in the series… which leads us to Punct.

In Punct, each player has a series of pieces three pips long; they are either triangles, straight lines, or bent lines. Each of these pieces has one of the three pips filled in. Each turn, the players decide whether they want to place a new piece (anywhere except in the middle of the board), or whether they want to move one of their previously placed pieces. If they choose to move a piece, they can move it in a straight line from where the filled in pip is located. Once they have decided on the new placement of the pip, they can also rotate the piece in any direction they choose. In doing this, they are even able to land on (and cover) their own or their opponent's pieces. Players alternate actions back and forth until one player has connected their pieces in a contiguous pattern from one side of the hex board to the opposite side - at which point this player is the winner. If either player places their last piece before anyone has connected one side to the other, the game is also over - and the player with the most spaces controlled by his color in the middle region of the board is the winner.

Now for the pros. The first thing that I liked about Punct was how you could be sneaky in the game. Since you are not only allowed to move pieces, but you are also allowed to rotate them after they move, a skilled player is able to mask some of his intended movements (as well as block your opponent's potential counter-movements). By placing a bent piece at a different angle than you intend it to wind up, or by placing a straight piece perpendicular to your ultimate destination, you can make it much more challenging for your opponent to decipher your strategy.

The next thing that I liked about Punct was that you had a lot of different pieces available to you. Since there were three different shapes, and the colored pip could be in any of the three pips on that piece, there is some strategy involved in determining which piece to play. This really factors in with the bent pieces much more than the other two (a triangle can be spun so that no matter where the pip is, it can wind up where you want it, and the straight pieces really just have two variations), but it still adds some additional flavor to this game.

However, though I liked some of the strategy of Punct, the game overall didn't quite "click" for me like the other games in the series have. I have spent a decent amount of time mulling this over in my mind, trying to determine what was different, and here's what I came up with - the game doesn't work towards a conclusion. In all of the other games that I have played in the series, each play takes you noticeably closer to the conclusion of the game - whether it is because there are less pieces available, or because more pieces are aligned. In Punct, many moves do not feel this way. Players can quickly wind up stalemating each other by moving certain pieces around the board - instead of really feeling like you're improving your position, you feel more like you are just stalling, which is unfortunate.

The next thing that I didn't like about Punct was that the strategy didn't seem quite as deep. I'm sure that it is, and that I'm really missing something here, but I just felt like the strategy was to get control of most of the center and then build out a straight line as quickly as you can. Once you get close, however, your opponent will start countering your moves by covering your pieces. And then you will counter them by trying to re-cover those pieces. And then you wind up in the stalling situation that I was discussing in the previous paragraph.

My final con for Punct is quite nit-picky. The pieces didn't quite "lock" into the gameboard as well as I would have hoped. Because of this, you had to be careful not to bump the table while you were playing. The pieces did have small protrusions on the bottom of each piece that was intended to fit into the gameboard, but it wasn't quite as snug as I would have liked.

Overall, I give Punct a 6.5/10. Whereas I love the Gipf project, I felt like this title wasn't quite to the level of excellence as all of the other games I have played in it. With that said, I still look forward to playing through the rest of the games in the project, including the Gipf Kits that allow the games to be combined!

If you like games like Punct, you might check out my top ten abstract games, Pentago, and Hey, That's My Fish!

Atlanteon Review

One of the most surprising board games that I've ever played was Atlanteon.

In Atlanteon, each of the players takes turns playing a single piece onto the grid-shaped board. They each have pieces numbering from 0-9 as well as a king piece (and there are 3 towers that are placed on the board to start the game). Whenever a piece becomes completely surrounded, then it is scored; to do this, each player adds up the total number of points they have adjacent to the piece (and the piece itself), and whoever has the higher total scores that piece (except with one of the towers that scores by the lowest total). This continues until one of the three victory conditions is met: 1) a player's king is captured (this rarely happens), 2) a player has scored 11 pieces and has his king on the board (the most common scenario), or 3) one player has captured all three towers (this also rarely happens).

The first pro of this game is the ease of teaching new players, and yet the depth of gameplay. Like Othello claims to be (but Pentago actually is), I consider Atlanteon to be easy to learn but difficult to master. Within a couple minutes, you can teach a new player how to play the game. Mastering the game will take much longer (in fact, I've played it quite a few times and I'm still lousy at it). More than any other game that I've encountered recently (except for maybe Yinsh), I think that Atlanteon balances these two characteristics spectacularly.

The next pro is that I like the different victory conditions. I'll be honest - two of the victory conditions have never happened in a single game that I've played. I've never seen someone's king get captured, and I've never seen someone capture all three towers. However, just the fact that these things can happen is enough. If the only way to win were to capture 11 pieces, then the game would be much easier to master. Having to ensure that you don't let the other player take your king or the towers forces you to play in certain ways that may prevent you from being able to capture as many pieces long-term (because you have to prevent yourself from instantly losing).

The only real con that I've found for Atlanteon is that it will live its life as a filler game. Since the game only takes about 10-15 minutes to play, I have a difficult time imagining people getting together specifically to play the game. (However, it is still a wonderful game for playing while you wait for the member of your group that is inevitably late. Doesn't each group of gamers have one of these? Or 4 of these?)

Overall, I give Atlanteon an 8.5/10. I really like this game. However, since my personal rule on rating (until I change my mind in a few days) is that I won't give a game a 9 or higher unless I can see myself getting together specifically to play the game, I can't rate it any higher. Either way, anybody that likes games like Chess or Hive should definitely try this game.

If Atlanteon sounds interesting, you might also check out Architekton, Gipf, the Innovation card game.