Lords of Waterdeep Review

I would like to thank Chris C. for continuing to share insightful reviews (such as this one).

Lords of Waterdeep is one of 2012’s breakout hits.  It has impressed hobby gamers and newcomers alike with its combination of simple worker-placement mechanics and a Dungeons and Dragons theme.

Waterdeep is a major city in the Forgotten Realms universe, and in this game each player is a member of the secret group of lords that run the city from the shadows.  Each lord controls several agents that they will send out each turn to buildings around the city to recruit adventurers and gather money.   These resources can be used to complete quests which earn players victory points, more resources, and occasionally special abilities that last for the remainder of the game.

The game adds player interaction via “Intrigue Cards” which can be played by sending an agent to a particular building.  These have a variety of purposes - some provide resources or allow players to steal from each other.  The most interesting Intrigue Cards are “mandatory quests”, low-value quests that players can give to each other and which must be completed before any other quests.

The various lords of Waterdeep

Buildings come in two varieties.  There are nine “basic” buildings printed on the game board that will be available in every game.  There is also a stack of building cards which is shuffled at the beginning of the game.  Three of these cards are available at the “Builder’s Hall” at any time.  Players may send an agent there and pay a building’s cost to put it into play, providing a new action space for everyone.  They get a bonus for this: any time any other player uses the building to receive resources, they receive a smaller number of similar resources.  Since different buildings are available each game, this adds variation and replayability.

Players keep track of how many points they have earned from completing quests on a score track around the outside of the board.  The game ends after 8 rounds, and players receive additional points for remaining resources.  Additionally, each player reveals which lord card they are holding - most lords receive bonus points for completed quests of certain types.  The quests come in five varieties (Arcana, Skullduggery, Commerce, Warfare and Piety) which tend to require different types of resources to complete.  One lord receives bonus points for constructed buildings instead.

So does Lords of Waterdeep live up the hype?  For me, not really.  There’s nothing wrong with this game - everything about it is competently executed and works well.  I rarely turn down a game because it is fun and moves quickly (about 60 minutes with groups who know the rules).  But the game doesn’t offer anything unique or interesting.  Mechanically, it adds nothing new to the worker
placement genre - it’s a stripped down version of games like Agricola.  It doesn’t leave a lot of room for strategic maneuvering.  Your choices are fairly limited, often nearly dictated by the available
quests.  Players are at an advantage if they start with quests of the types that their lord gets bonus points for or if those quests are more frequently available.  And players with quest types that require rarer resources are at the mercy of the building stack.

A typical player setup

More, the game is thematically disappointing.  The “adventurers” recruited by your agents come in four types, Clerics, Warriors, Rogues and Wizards.  But these are represented just by different colors of cubes.  Quests require cubes of certain colors.  Every group I’ve played with has begun asking for “orange cubes” instead of “warriors” within the first round or two.  Even when I’ve tried to get people excited about reading the flavor text on their quests, it rarely lasts more than a turn.  The theme feels entirely “pasted on”; it could be totally different and you wouldn’t notice because it boils down so directly into getting cubes of certain colors to meet the requirements on quest cards.

I don’t want to be too harsh.  The game is executed well and has no glaring mechanical flaws.  The rulebook is clear and the production is fine (though I still wish for more exciting pieces).  It actually makes an excellent introduction to worker placement games, since it’s mechanically so simple.  I do bring it out with groups that aren’t ready for Agricola or don’t have time for a longer game.  There are a few other games in this space - Stone Age is my go-to for simple worker placement mechanics, but I could definitely see picking Waterdeep instead if the group liked the theme better.

Overall, this game is fun.  But it doesn’t bring anything new to the table, doesn’t seem to have a lot of strategic depth, and the theme fails to engage the groups I’ve played it with.  While Lords of Waterdeep doesn’t live up the hype surrounding it, it’s a fine game that would be worth picking up to fill the “simple worker placement” hole in your collection.
7/10

If Lords of Waterdeep looks interesting, you might also check out Kingdom of Solomon, Le Havre, and Discworld: Ankh Morpork. Or, for a second opinion, check out Play Board Games' Lords of Waterdeep Review.

I would like to thank Wizards of the Coast for providing a review copy of Lords of Waterdeep.

Mage Wars Review

A game that I've been excited to try for quite a while is Mage Wars.

In Mage Wars, each player takes on the role of a mage with the goal of knocking out the opposing mage (in case you didn't get that from the title).  To do this, each round both of the players "prepare" two spells from their spellbook (deck) by setting them aside - these are the only spells that the player will be able to play that round.  After this, players will alternate taking actions with their creatures (mages and and any creature spells their mage had previously cast) until both players have run out of actions.  (The mage gets a bonus action called a "quickcast" action that he can play amidst other actions.)  When a creature takes an action, it can include moving and taking a quick action, or just taking a slow action.  There are a lot of different quick actions, but some of them include casting certain spells, attacking (sometimes), moving again, "guarding" (becoming the target of attacks), and many other things.  After both players run out of actions, they set everything back up, switch who starts the round, gain more mana, and pick new spells.  Once one mage is knocked out, the game is over, and the other player wins.

Mage Wars is really an interesting game, and I'm already finding it difficult to explain most of it.  There is really a lot going on with the game, and this has translated into causing me difficulty in explaining it.  So, really, as my first pro, I will mention that I think that there are layers of strategy in the game.  The first time or two that you play it, you will be overwhelmed.  So, you'll just be doing basic things - cast creatures, and charge forward.  Or, cast some equipment with your mage, and cast giant fireball spells at your opponent.  But, as you play it more, you realize some more things that you can do.  In your next games, you might start guarding more.  Or, you might explore damage barriers.  As you've grown familiar with those, there are more options that you can start to use.  After you have a lot of those things down, then you can explore the deck building options.

It comes with everything you need - and more

Speaking of deck building options, this brings me to my second pro.  I love the fact that they give you extra cards in the box.  This is basically the exact opposite of how Fantasy Flight handles their card games.  In Mage Wars, you have a lot of cards in the box that don't actually go into any of the base decks - they are only there for deck building purposes once you have mastered the basic game.  Now, with that said, I really need to mention one of the things that greatly annoyed me about the game.  There are four mages in the base game, and in the instructions, they tell you the cards to include in each of these mage's basic deck.  However, there aren't enough cards in the base set to have all four of these decks built at the same time, so you're forced to constantly destroy and re-build their decks!  This is awful and makes the setup time much longer than it should be.  Fortunately, this leads back to a pro - Arcane Wonders (the company that made Mage Wars) actually listens to their fans!  I wasn't the only one that hated this, and so they provided an altered version of the starting decks so that you can actually have all four of them built at the same time.  If you're interested, you can see those decks here, under the "Updated Spell Lists" section.

The next pro that I have for the game is that I thought that it brought some new and interesting mechanics to the fantasy skirmish genre.  Specifically, I thought that the quickcast option and the enchantments were interesting.  In Mage Wars, you don't really have an option of interrupting someone else's actions when they are performing them.  The closest things that you can do are a quickcast action and an enchantment.  You can only perform a quickcast action on your turn, but you can do this action before or after any other action that you perform (but only once per round).  With an enchantment, you have to cast it on your turn, but when you cast it, you play it facedown.  You may then immediately reveal the enchantment or wait until a later turn (either player's turn).  When you reveal the enchantment, you have to pay its cost, but it is immediately in play and affects its target.  So, if you see that your opponent is about to attack your mage, you can suddenly reveal an enchantment that will improve your defense.  But, if you hadn't planned ahead, and you have no enchantments (or not enough mana to reveal the enchantment), then you just have to sit back and hope that your opponent rolls poorly.

A heated battle between the Beastmaster and Wizard

Now that I've covered my pros, there are a few things to mention about Mage Wars that are really just things that I think you should be aware of.  First off, all damage is dealt with rolling lots of dice.  This isn't terribly uncommon in strategy games, but it does present a situation where you might play the perfect combination of attack cards just to have the dice go against you and you miss entirely.  Something that adds to this is that there is a "defense" ability in the game that allows you to completely avoid an attack.  To determine if the defense allows you to avoid the attacker, you roll a die.  So, though there is a lot of strategy in the game, the actual results will definitely be impacted by luck.

The next thing that you need to be aware of is that every turn, you can select any two spells from your spellbook - not the two that are "in your hand."  Because you don't have a hand of cards.  You don't draw cards.  They are all available from the beginning.  This is really interesting, but it has some effects on the game.  First, it means that whenever you teach the game to someone new, you better be prepared to entertain yourself for quite a while as they read through all of their spells.  And, when they switch decks and use a different mage, you better be prepared to do it again.  That problem goes away as you grow more familiar with the game.  The greater concern that I have is whether there will be a ridiculous combination of cards that is discovered and it becomes the strategy that everyone uses.  Obviously, there is nothing forcing anyone that plays Mage Wars to use one strategy over another, but I can see a situation where there are a group of cards that become the "standard" opening play for certain mages, just because they are so powerful.  I haven't played the game enough to claim to know one of these strategies, but having seen all of the instant win combinations in Magic the Gathering (that only work if you draw the right cards), I do have some concerns.

Last thing you should know before moving onto the cons - I hate Sleep.  This isn't a con, because I'm not claiming that Sleep is overpowered.  But, when someone casts Sleep on me, it makes me angry enough to want to throw things at them.  I think that part of this is because in the basic decks there are very few counter cards; and so, if someone manages to cast sleep on me multiple times, there is very little I can do about it.  They have basically removed one of my creatures from the game, unless I choose to attack my own creature to wake them up.  Sleep angers me to even think about right now, so I should move on.

Your spellbook - prepare any two spells

With all that said, I do have a major con to Mage Wars.  Teaching this game (or learning it for the first time) is ridiculous.  I already mentioned that every spell in your spellbook is legal to play, so even if the game were incredibly simple, your first game would take quite a while.  However, the game is not simple - it has 45 pages of rules.  And, in those rules, the last 5 pages go over keywords that you will encounter on your cards.  So, now instead of just reading through all of your cards, you're also having to look up what these cards do.  I'm not saying that this makes Mage Wars a bad game.  I am saying that I wish there were some way to avoid this, as it makes me never want to teach Mage Wars to anybody, but to only play it with my friends that already know how to play.  I honestly believe that it will take 30-60 minutes before you start your first game of Mage Wars - if someone is teaching you.  It will take even longer if you are learning it from the rulebook.  And, in that first game, you will probably just be playing somewhat random spells in order to see what happens (and because you feel bad about making the game take so long).  One of my friends likes to point out that everything in it "just makes sense," and so he claims that it's not that hard to learn.  But, even with him teaching it, it still took me over 30 minutes to start playing.  Be ready for this if you decide that you want to try Mage Wars.

Overall, I give Mage Wars an 8.5/10.  The game is actually pretty fun (when Sleep isn't being cast on you).  I have some concerns that a "broken" strategy will emerge in the game (though I hate to use that term and I'm not saying that one currently exists), and I really have no interest in teaching it to new people.  With that said, the games that I've played have been quite enjoyable, and I'd be interested in playing it some more.

If you're interested in Mage Wars, you might also want to check out Summoner Wars, Dungeon Command, and Twilight Struggle. Or, if you're on the fence about it and want another opinion, check out Play Board Games' Mage Wars Review.

I would like to thank Arcane Wonders for providing me with a review copy of Mage Wars.

Puzzle Strike: Shadows Review

Today's review is of the latest game in the Fantasy Strike realm - Puzzle Strike: Shadows.

Puzzle Strike: Shadows is basically the exact same game as Puzzle Strike (3rd Edition).  If there were any rule changes, then I missed them completely.  Essentially, Shadows is what you would get if you loved Puzzle Strike and hated all of the chips - so you threw them out (including characters) and replaced them.  But kept everything else the same.   And, well, I've already reviewed Puzzle Strike.  (If you missed it, here is a link to my Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition Review.)  I also don't really feel like telling you the exact same thing that I've told you before.  And yet, the fine people at Sirlin Games sent me this shiny box and asked me to write something about it.  Where does that leave us?  Well, I suppose it means that I should talk a bit about some of the chips that I thought were interesting.

The first chips I will cover are character chips.  Specifically Gwen's chips.  To me, Gwen is the most unique character that I have seen in the Puzzle Strike chip set.  Why?  Because she punishes you for playing her!  One of Gwen's chips is "Shadow Plague."  Shadow Plague gives you a wound every time that you discard it (such as at the end of your turn - or if someone forces you to discard a chip).  You can only get around this by spending an action.  The other chips that Gwen has are much better.  (And rightfully so!  Otherwise nobody would ever purposely use Gwen.)  One of them gives you an extra action, chip, and attack action (so you net an attack action), and the other gives you an extra brown action, two chips, and lets you force all of your opponents to discard a chip.  Overall, Gwen is interesting, but I think that it takes an experienced player to actually use her well (which I am not - I did not do well when I played with her).

Gwen and Menelker

The next character that I found interesting was Menelker.  Why?  Because Menelker has a chip that lets you remove a puzzle stack from the game.  And, if there is already a puzzle stack removed from the game, then it re-emerges when you select a new stack.  On the surface, this is neat but limited; once you remove your most hated stack from the game, then there's not really much use for the chip.  But then, once you think about it for a minute, you realize that this is actually really powerful - you can remove the most powerful stack from the game, and then when you can afford to buy it, you can bring it back by sending a different stack out of the game!  Thus, you are able to control access to the best puzzle chips.  His other chips are also interesting.  One of them forces each opponent to reveal his hand and discard his highest gem - fairly generic, but useful.  His other action allows you to trash all 1's from his gem pile.  Then, half of them are sent to an opponent (then the chip is trashed).  This ccan be amazing - especially if you either don't use a lot of Combines, or if you've recently been crashed quite a bit (and thus you have a lot of ones in your gem pile).

The third character I will mention is Quince.  Quince's chips are really fairly unique.  The first one is an ongoing chip, and it gives you an extra action and piggy-bank every turn.  However, you must discard it at the start of your action phase if you have an odd number of chips.  It's really interesting to see how long a player can keep this chip alive.  His next chip allows him to pull two chips from his discard pile and show them to another player - who then gets to pick which one he can keep in his hand.  And, Quince is allowed to play the newly scavenged chip this turn.  So, you can try to force players to select your preferred chip by doing things like showing them a nasty attack and your desired chip - and assume they'll select the one that doesn't hurt them.  Quince's final chip is another ongoing.  If Quince's gem pile totals at least three, then no player is allowed to buy a chip that costs more than the total of their gem pile.  This chip can grow very annoying; unless you're not doing well, in which case it hardly affects you!

Some fun puzzle chips

A bank chip that I found interesting was "Bang then Fizzle."  Bang then Fizzle works with your gem pile, like Quince's chip.  Specifically, you can only use it if your gem pile totals four or less.  However, when you do get to use it, you get two extra actions and you get to draw two chips!  This chip is incredibly powerful in the early game, but if you load up on too many of them, then you'll have a hand full of worthless chips later on.

The last two chips that I will mention are both attacks.  One is "Color Panic" and the other is "Just a Scratch."  Color Panic is a fun one - it gives you an extra attack, and it allows you to name a color, and force every other player to discard a chip of that color if they can.  If any of them can't, then you get an extra action.  Nice.  Just a Scratch gives you options.  Either you can give each opponent a wound, or you can trash a wound from your hand or discard pile and play another attack.  The second option is nice, because if your opponents are all jerks and play Just a Scratch, then you'll need to discard wounds.  Of course, you can try to persuade them when you buy the chip that it's just to cleanup your bag, not to attack them; who knows, they might even believe you.

With all that said, I give Puzzle Strike: Shadows an 8.5/10.  Like I said, it's the same as Puzzle Strike.  However, I like the basic Puzzle Strike chip set slightly better than this one (hence the slightly lower score).  If you love Puzzle Strike, then picking up Shadows should be an obvious choice.  If you're interested in Puzzle Strike and aren't sure which set you should buy, I'd encourage you to buy the basic set first - but part of that is because I think that everyone should have to carry around the giant bright pink box that it comes in.

If Puzzle Strike: Shadows sounds interesting, you might also check out Nightfall, Thunderstone, and Pixel Lincoln.

I would like to thank Sirlin Games for providing me with a review copy of Puzzle Strike: Shadows.

Hospice House Featured Charity

After asking about various charities that can use board games (or are in some way related to board gaming), one suggestion that I had was Hospice House.  And, so I followed up with the person that suggested it and asked if they would be willing to share a bit about their experience with Hospice House.  So, I would like to share the following write up from Dale Moore:
  
"Hospice needs games.

It’s been a year since my mother in law has passed away. She ended up losing her fight with endometrial cancer. It was a long fight with a few years of remission, but when it came back it returned with gusto. It spread to the Liver and Bones. We enlisted the help of Hospice. What a wonderful organization. First the family does not pay for the service. What costs above insurance or Medicare is taken care of by the charitable side of hospice.

The Goal of Hospice is to keep you as comfortable as possible during you final stages of a disease that will take your life. They try to keep you at home if they can, but if you are beyond staying at home and your area has one, they will move you to a Hospice house for your final days.
To simply describe a Hospice house, think of it as the nicest nursing home you can think of. Then make it better. The rooms are very nice and clean. The staff is wonderful.

Often times a person moves to a Hospice house when they are in their final days or hours. The family has been called and it’s every body’s final hours with their loved ones. Everyone wants to stay as long as possible to be there.

A Hospice house has large communal waiting areas. Hospice asks for volunteers for many things, one is to cook meals for the families that are waiting.  Often there are kids that are there as well. For a kid hours and hours of waiting gets to be very boring and in these lounges is where they often go to get a way for a bit.
 
Here is where you can help as a board gamer. If you have games you want rid of and you are contemplating a yard sale, donate those intact games to your Hospice house. Those rooms really need a selection of board games that are easy to pick up and fast to learn.
 
Board gamers tend to also be thrift store shoppers. We are always on the lookout for that rare gem at the local thrift store. We pass over a Scrabble, Monopoly, Life game all the time. I suggest if they are cheap, good condition, and intact pick it up. Your Hospice house would be glad to have it in their lounge area.

Back to my story.
Being a gamer I took a box of games with us. My wife and I played Split for a few hours in my mother in laws room. It was a great distraction for us. I always keep some duplicate simple games in the box. When we left I gave those games to the Hospice. At first the lady behind the counter was confused. This is not a donation they normally get. I explained to them to add them to the Family lounges and she then got very appreciative. "

I would like to thank Dale for sharing, and I must admit that I really think that I need to investigate the local Hospice Houses in my area, as I (like he mentioned) generally have extra games that aren't getting played.  But, I was also quite surprised when he said that "the family does not pay for the service."  Conveniently, I have a "close relationship" with someone that is very familiar with how Hospice services work (my wife used to work for a Hospice provider), and so I asked her about this.  She said that, though Dale's situation isn't always the case, yes, regularly hospices will write-off any expenses beyond what insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance) will cover.