Review: Gobblin' Goblins

Game:	Gobblin’ Goblins	Release Date:	2017
Designer & Artist:	Angela Dickens / Dan Prowse	Player Count:	2 - 12
Publisher	Self Published	Play Time:	20 - 30 mins

Goblins are disgusting creatures.  They’re truly horrid little monsters, but.  But, at least they turn the TV off and all sit around together to have dinner, and whats more, they all clear their plates.  Sometimes, they’ll even eat the things they hate without any drama.  Occasionally they’ll eat foods they’re actually allergic to as well.  Well, let’s face it, goblins are not known for their overwhelming intelligence, are they?

Gobblin’ Goblins is a horridly-charming, family oriented hand management and set collection game, the aim of which is to “Gobble” as many agreeable cards as possible before the deck- and food - run out. Each turn players will play a card from their hand, by either placing something putrid and disgusting on their plate (their play area), or by making use of one of the limited action cards which often will force their opponents to eat something they don’t want to, or, somewhat repulsively, regurgitate a card (at no point are cards actually eaten in this game, it isn’t some sort of extreme legacy game) back into play.



The mechanics are very simple, play a card, collect a new one.  Once a player has either three of a kind, or a set of six different coloured cards played out in front of them, those cards are immediately Gobbled, taken out of play to be scored later.  This snappy, simple mechanics prime Gobblin Goblins for younger and newer gamers alike.    

Instead of playing a “food” card, you can instead use an Action Card to effect play in some way or another.



Distraction cards, which can be played out of sequence allow you to mess with other player’s played cards, usually stealing a card, or shifting something you don’t want - basically upsetting someone.  It is with these cards that a player can have the most player-versus-player impact, either messing another player’s plan/plate up or by simply forcing them to eat what they don’t want to.  Used correctly these cards are very valuable.  



To mix things up just a little, each player will take on a Goblin type, no, not mountain or forest goblins, that’s so Middle Earth, this is the twenty-first century!  We have Geeks, Snobs and Hippies to choose from.  Each with their own special power/twist.  These role cards come with a gruesome full picture of one of these goblins, and tell you what each one loves (worth extra points at the end), hates and is allergic to - cards you want to avoid.



The artwork is delightfully delinquent, and the “food” on the cards is equally childishly fun.  There is no doubt this game is squarely aimed at younger and family game times, with cards such as the White Dog Poo Cone which never fails to bring out fits of laughter from younger players and a chuckling grimace from adults when you declare you are eating some Cat Sick.  It is here that the game really shines, the very simple mechanics of the game lend themselves to be ideal for new/younger gamers and the aesthetic of the game shows you that in buckets (of maggots or puss, or something equally gross), inviting you in, to hang up your grown-up world and just be silly and childish.

For the slightly more mature gamers, there is still enjoyment to be found here with a light filler game, though the game may lack the necessary player-versus-player bite needed to make it more, well, nasty - but this is something that Kickstarter Stretch Goals could easily add.  

(It also makes for an excellent drinking game, if you feel inclined to take some of the action cards a little more literally.)



If you like your games to be deep, strategic and deeply layered in theme and setting Gobblin’ Goblins probably isn’t going to be for you.  If you have a son/daughter/niece/nephew etc. that you think would benefit from joining this fantastic cardboard hobby, you won’t go far wrong with this starting with this game.  It is very simple, very easy to learn and above all it is fun, in that good old fashioned, childish mirth-filled way that 7 year old’s revel in and we adults wish we could remember how to.

Gobblin' Goblins is live on Kickstarter from 27th October 2017

 

This review is based on an advanced prototype copy of the game provided by the publisher, as such, it may be slightly (or very) different from the final product.

Review: Pax Porfiriana

Game Name:	Pax Porfiriana: Collector’s edition	Published Year:	2012
Game Publisher:	Sierra Madre Games	Player Scale:	1-6
Game Designer:	Phil Eklund, Matt Eklund, Jim Gutt	Run Time:	120 min

¡Bienvenidos a México!

Pax Porfiriana, Latin for "The Porfirian Peace", refers to the 33-year period in the early 20th Century where dictator Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico with an iron hand until toppled in the 1910 revolution.

Your objective in the game, as a rich businessman of the time, is to topple president Díaz. Being a competitive game, you are going against each other to see who gets the position after him. This indeed not a story of friendship. You can topple in different ways, depending on the actual regime while the topple happens, but you only get 4 chances to do this in the whole game, otherwise, there is a Mexican stand-off at the end and whoever has more gold wins.

How it plays?

The game goes in a sequence of turns until the las topple cards get played. Each player performs all the four phases and then play goes to next player.

The first phase is the action phase. Each player gets to do 3 actions (or 2 if jailed) and there are a lot of options to choose from. You can purchase cards from the market, play or sell cards from your hand, upgrade in play cards, move troops around or speculate in the market.

After this, if there is a headline card in the 0 space of the market it gets played and then the market is restored, moving cards towards the lowest cost and filling up the empty spots. Finally, you get your income based on your enterprises without unrest, extortions and connection cubes.

You see that there are lots of options and moving gears in this game, even if the gameplay is quite easy to pick up there is quite a fair amount of complexity in the gameplay. All the meat in this game is in the cards though, the game comes with 220 cards, and depending on the number of players you will play only with half or a third of the cards, so every game can be very different and it will help keep that game fresh. Also, each player gets a Hacienda card, which will grant a special ability and your initial income.

There are 6 kinds of playing cards in this game. The enterprise cards are businesses that you can purchase are where most of your income will come from. There different kind of businesses, some of them they depend on the kind of regime in play as it affects the mines production and economy, others are more stable and can be improved (but beware as they become juicy targets for others to exploit too!) or depend on other enterprises in play.

The partner cards, they are people that you get for your cause and they are faction related. They will give you different abilities or prestige points.

Troop cards are military units that you can use either to defend your businesses or to extort another player's enterprise.  They are faction related also and most of them they can only be used in one of the 3 regions of the game (Sonora, Chihuahua and USA) as they have jurisdiction. Once you pledge for one of the causes you can have troops as a private army.

Black cards represent defamations, lawsuits, assassinations and other dirty tactics against your political rivals. And orange cards represent bandits, strikers, etc. that will create unrest and steal from your businesses. These two types when used the victim usually gets a reward in prestige points.

Finally, we have the headline cards. These act as events and also include the topple cards. These also can trigger a Depression in the game, if two bear cards are played in a row, and the only way to go back to business as usual is playing two bull cards in a row.

This more or less covers all the interactions in the game, there is one last thing, as I've talked about different regimes but I haven’t explained yet. There are 4 different regimes: Pax Porfiriana, Anarchy, Martial Law and US Intervention. These will affect the income of some of your enterprises and how the topple works as each regime is associated with one kind of victory points. When you try to topple, you will need a number of certain prestige points greater than Díaz basic 2, plus the sum of the opponents with the least points of that kind.

Solo game

As you can see from the gameplay this game doesn't seem very solo friendly as there is quite a lot of interaction between players, but it does have a solo variant that you can play. In this case, you will go against Díaz itself. I haven't particularly played it yet solo, but it does look like it makes a very interesting game.

Also, there is a variant made by Ricky Royal that is highly regarded in BGG's 1 Player Guild, if you want to take a look here are the written rules and the videos of Ricky playing it on his YouTube channel (Box of Delights). Definitely worth to give it a go and I'm particularly looking forward to it.

Opinion

I will start saying that I like Phil Eklund's games, they are very particular designs that are not for everybody and usually, the rules are not easy to digest. Nonetheless, I haven't played one of his game that hasn't been rewarding to learn to play it. They are all science or history based and have very intelligent and interesting mechanics. This one is probably the easiest Phil Eklund game to get into that I have played.

This is the first game in the Pax series, it was highly regarded in the 1 Player Guild and in BGG in general so I was looking forward to playing it at some point. I wasn't disappointed at all. It makes for such an interesting gameplay the whole game. Turns are fast, there is a ton of interaction between players and is a deep game. With so many cards and different types of them, it makes for a lot of variation in the game too, you never know what will happen or what will come out in the market. Things can change a lot from turn to turn too so is quite a dynamic game, and getting that victory condition when the topple card comes is very hard to achieve.

The interaction between players is great, but you need to be careful as when you do something to someone else you usually give them a plus in prestige points, and a point in this game can give you the victory, such a brilliant design. This game feels a bit like a COIN-lite game but more focused on the economy, for those who don't know me, I'm a big fan of GMT's COIN games, they are my favourite system, and the interaction in this game with the factions and between players reminds me a bit of that system, with a bit less complexity and a bit shorter too.

Pros: High interaction between players, very rewarding gameplay and lots of variability.

Cons: The artwork and game pieces are not very attractive, so that may put some people off but it won't matter when they start playing. This is quite common with Sierra Madre games, though they are doing a great job in their new releases to improve the aspect of their games without increasing the price to crazy levels. Looking forward to keeping getting their games.

You may also like: Pax Pamir, Pax Renaissance, GMT's COIN games.

That's all folks, I hope you liked it and hopefully, I've convinced you all to try a Phil Eklund game at some point!

Review: Ominoes

Ominoes.  A game for Pharaohs, for Rulers and Sovereigns all.  A game for dice chuckers, a game for those that love and hate Chance in equal measure.  For those that want a generous sprinkling of strategy over their polyhedrons in the morning. And for those that just want a quick tabletop hit, but don’t have time for the chits that comes with those bigger box games.  

A Confession:

Now, while writing this I’ve spent a truly inordinate amount of time trying to concoct a silly story about how this game was played by ancient Egyptians 4,000 years ago.  I also spent far too long looking for hieroglyphs of people playing a board game, of ancient looking dice and so on.  All this for the simple aim of duping you, dear reader, into believing, even for a moment that Ominoes is really a modern re-skin of an ancient game such as Chess, Go, or the Royal Game of Ur.  But, to do this would have been to cheapen the accomplishment of the designer, Andrew Harman.  It also wouldn’t have been particularly funny.  Why would I want to do this?  Simple: Ominoes is startlingly simply to play that it feels like it belongs alongside those ancient games I mentioned before.  It’s hard to believe that this game didn’t exist before Andrew and YAY Games brought it into the world.  It has an almost ageless quality to it.

A dry description of this game may include words such as abstract, area-control, and pattern-recognition and dice.  My description would only involve three words. Simple. Elegant. Fun.

I was reminded of the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

And there is nothing in this game, nothing, that doesn’t need to be there.  It is incredibly lean, and from this stripped back stance the game gains, no, it earns its elegance.  And it does so in spades.

How to roll dice:

So, the simple rules:  Players need to orthogonally connect four or more Ominoes (dice) that show their respective coloured symbols – this can also include the two different types of wilds – once this is done the Ominoes are scored (1 point each) and removed from the board.  First player to reach the agreed-upon target (depending on players, and/or how long you want to play).

1. In your turn, you’ll roll an Omino.


2. Then you’ll move another Omino with a matching face exactly three spaces.


3. Finally, you’ll add the Omino you just rolled.

Other than the fine print, that is how to play (the YAY-Ra wild allows the roller to move any Omino, and the Omniotep allows the roller to re-roll and replace any other Omino).

SPOILER ALERT (it’s not really a spoiler alert, I was just being melodramatic)

The first time you play this game, it will take you a couple of turns to truly realise how deep the strategy is.  You'll also quickly come to relise that with pretty much every turn you'll be interfering, frustrating and in any other way peeing off your opponents.  

On your subsequent games, the gloves will be off and you’ll come out swinging.  There is this moment I look for now when I play this with others for their first time.  Newbies and veterans alike have this “Oooh” moment when they do a surprise double-take.  The best analogy I can think of is eating a very nice cake, and then suddenly finding it has a gooey sweet centre that you had no idea was there.  If you’re not a “cake person” I hope you can still appreciate the metaphor here.



What I’m getting at, is the surprise that this game packs, is, well surprising.  The game is just a bunch of dice - brilliant, wooden chunky dice with colourful filled engraved icons - and a gridded board.  That’s it.  No cards, tokens, chits.  Certainly no miniatures and not even a whiff of custom meeples.  The game doesn’t need them.  Yet, there is so much game here.  That is why this game feels “classic” like it should have been designed 3,00 years ago, not in 2016.

Two and Three-Player Games

In a two -player game, the rules change every so slightly, each player not only collects sets of their deity/colour, but they will competitively complete sets of the other two that are not in “direct play”, so both players will be trying to finish sets of Ra (Yellow Suns) and Khepri(Blue Scarab Beetle).  In a three-player game, all players can score from the one missing deity/colour.  These changes really help keep the balance, and in fact, make the two-player game far more competitive.  As the board fills up finding just the right spot to not give away point to you opponent becomes harder and harder.

Advanced Games

For those players that want a little more of a challenge, Ominoes answers with Indy’s much despised Snake Pit.  At the centre of the board, there is a two-by-two square “Snake-Pit” that cannot be entered at all, which adds a further level of difficulty very simply.  I’ve found that many newcomers to the game assume that the Snake Pit can’t be entered from the get-go, which makes it an important distinction to make when you play for the first time, as it is much more challenging with the advanced ruless in play.  

With each play of this game, you will face a different problem, regardless of the player count, as Ominoes is, at its core a luck based game, therefore what you roll will determine how each game plays.  Regardless of experience as a gamer, or with this specific game.  Ominoes keeps you on your toes.  There will be games where you roll nothing but little Green Hawks (Horus), and the following game you won’t see one.  Making this game very accessible and, quite simply, very good fun.

Accessing your inner Om

Ominoes does a great job getting around the issue of colour blindness and eyesight issues (for the greater part), all the icons are distinct and clear, even if you can’t make out the colours.  The fundamental depth of this game comes from pattern recognition, you can never truly plan ahead too far, or anticipate your opponent since so much of the game is based upon the roll of a die.



 

All of the above combine to make Ominoes a game that can be played by young or old, experienced or new gamers alike.  And I mean really alike.  This game creates a very level playing field to enjoy some fantastic dice chucking over and over again, with such a very short play time, even with the max player count you can play multiple games within an hour.  This is a perfect breakout game, travel game - especially with the far more transportable Travel edition, which includes a neoprene “board” - or even if you just want to play, have fun and don’t have much time - you won’t get much better than Onimoes.

N.B. The travel version of Ominoes is shortly to be released and at present will only be available direct from YAY Games along with the kick-ass pop-up dice tray



This review is based on a full retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.