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.

 

Interview: Tristan Hall, from Hall or Nothing Productions

Hello, fellow gamers!

After a small pause during the holidays, I come with something a bit different than usual. While Rory and I were visiting the UK Games Expo back in early June we decided to do some interviews.

So let me present you Tristan Hall, from Hall or Nothing Productions. The designer of the great "Gloom of Kilforth" and the upcoming "1066, Tears To Many Mothers", also a fellow 1 Player Guild member from BGG and a friend of mine.

After many years of development, he successfully kickstarted his first game, Gloom of Kilforth. Though I remember being part of the campaign and it came close to the end. The delivery of the games was earlier in June this year and he delivered on everything he promised. Great gameplay, immersive stories and one of the best artwork ever seen in a boardgame. A review will definitely come at some point.

No wonder his second Kickstarter, 1066, Tears To Many Mothers run much smoother and reached its goal much earlier and funded in the first days of the campaign, after such a good reception of the first game.

We thought it was a good opportunity to get some insight into the games world from a small designer point of view.

Also, if after reading this you want to know more or even get one of his games, you can still late pledge for 1066, Tears To Many Mothers and tomorrow friday 29th o November, Tristan will launch his 3rd kickstarter with a reprint and an expansion for Gloom of Kilforth. I'll update the article with a link to the campaign :)

And now onto the questions, I hope you enjoy it!

Gloom of Kilforth:

• When reading the synopsis of the game I was immediately reminded of some of my favourite fantasy films of my childhood, namely The Never Ending Story, with its intangible and abstract growing menace – and I appreciate this question is the chagrin of fantasy authors, but I’ll ask it anyway: Can you tell me about any of the direct influences (as well as Tolkien that you’ve mentioned) to this game – from both/either other art forms, books/films/music or other games?

I’m obsessed with stories, and I always have been, so influences can come from anywhere, but if I had to list authors I guess anything by Terry Brooks, Terry Pratchett, Weiss and Hickman, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, even the gritty stuff from Iain Banks (or any of his sci-fi stuff as Iain M Banks) and Irvine Welsh, or the sweeping tales from Dickens or Dostoevsky, all of these have fed into my pools of influence in some way or other.

For films, a key moment in my life was watching Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings when I was 5 - I think it maybe had an even bigger impact on me than Star Wars.  All of Ray Harryhausen’s films blew me away.  Anything fantastical from the 80s like Labyrinth, Legend, Conan, Beastmaster, or any of the cheaper sword and sandals B-movies.

For other games it would be a combination of the Arkham Horror board game meets the Dungeons and Dragons RPG.

• As an RPG style game, self-generated narrative is an important feature of the game can you tell me a little about how you devised this system, as you say there are few to no games like it.

Basically I wanted to play a fantasy RPG but didn’t have the time, and I wanted it to be solo-playable too.  All the fantasy games on the market were based on combat - fighting baddies and nicking their treasure.  Which is fine, of course, and I probably bought all of them.  But for me, actual RPGs were more about negotiating with strange people, going on amazing adventures, exploring ancient and deadly locations, saving people by going on epic quests, and THEN fighting baddies and nicking their treasure.  And there were no games that seemed to deal with all of that other cool narrative stuff, so I worked hard to include all of those elements in Gloom of Kilforth.

Interestingly, there has been a surge of fantasy games focussed on narrative experiences recently, so it’s clearly not just me who feels this way!

• With the success of this Kickstarter and “similar” projects like The City of Kings and Gloomhaven – where the border between board and RPG is becoming thinner, and of course with the recent and sudden popularity of the Legacy format, what do you think this means for this new genre/style of game?

I think that narrative games are an excellent direction for the industry, and my usual reason for designing games is because they don’t already exist.  If we have a gamut of excellent RPG style adventure games with great storytelling then I can spend more time playing than designing them!

I love campaign games but I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of the Legacy format.  I know there are two schools of thought on this and that the proponents of Legacy games argue that it’s not just a marketing gimmick and that you can’t get the same tension from a game when you know you can just reset it again afterwards.  But after playing through campaigns of renewable campaign games like Kingdom Death compared to say the one-shot experience of Pandemic Legacy, I just don’t think that games where you have to destroy components deliver a better experience.  I also like to come back and play games that I’ve had for decades too.  That said, there is now a movement of ‘green legacy’ style games where you can play through a changing world campaign game but not have to destroy your game in the process.  I think these will offer the perfect balance of experience in the long run, when people realise you don’t have to buy multiple copies of a disposable game instead.

That said, if the market for disposable Legacy games continues to grow too, that’s cool as well.  There’s nothing to stop us all from having our cake and eating it!

• As a member of the 1 Player Guild, I guess it was important for you to include a solo mode.  Were there any notable/specific challenges you faced when designing that mode of play, was it something you had in mind from the beginning?

I have been a solo game player for as long as I’ve played board games, whether it was playing both sides at Tank Battles when I was a child (never enjoyed playing both opposing sides as much though) to developing full solo/cooperative rules for HeroQuest when I was a pre-teen.  I’m a huge advocate for solo play, and though asking for solo rules for games was kind of frowned upon by some of the gaming community ten years ago, today it seems like including solo rules is par for course, which I think is fantastic.  I certainly set out to do that with Gloom of Kilforth from the outset, as I was often frustrated by games that offered solo rules but forced you to play as multiple characters for the game to work.  As an avid reader of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks as I was growing up I always loved the idea of one hero against the world, so that mode of play was built in from the ground up, meaning that the challenge of achieving that was equivalent to me as the challenge of just designing the game in the first place.  If that makes sense.  Which it might not, reading that back...

• The artwork in this game is incredible, just eye-wateringly beautiful, one of the things I love the most about it,and it is used is in the gender neutrality of the card-flipping, as you say in the Kickstarter video, which side of the card is used has no impact on the game, was the inclusion of this extra art etc important to you at an early stage?  

I’ve always thought that being able to play as male or female in a fantasy game was just common sense, and I think that games like this but which preclude one gender or another are senseless.  If it’s a historical game based on real individuals, you might well be limited to a number of characters of a specific gender, but when you’re creating a new world from scratch there’s no reason to hold back in this respect other than the costs involved for the extra art work.

• Your wife Francesca developed a beautiful soundtrack to the game, something very different and unique, can you tell me about how and why that came about?

Francesca is an amazing pianist, and the daughter of a concert pianist so music is in her blood, literally!  She would be playing the piano whilst I was designing the game in the same room and we talked about how cool it would be if she could score the game.  We went through the themes of the game together, the descending Gloom, the heroes against the odds, strangers meeting and joining forces, epic adventures, and Francesca used the art as inspiration too, to develop piano music to go with it.  I wanted just piano for this soundtrack - like Philip Glass did for Dracula.  And what she achieved is spectacular I think.  If you listen to the music whilst playing the game it provides that extra level of immersion and world-building that really draws you in.  Maybe one day she can score the music to the Gloom of Kilforth movie too!

• With the upcoming expansion, "Touch of Death", will it increase the base game contents or will it add new very different mechanics to the game?  

Touch of Death is a stand-alone expansion to Gloom of Kilforth with a focus on the rising undead threat, so it’s effectively the same game system again, but with entirely new heroes, adventures, rewards, and content.  You can either play Touch of Death or Gloom of Kilforth independently, or you can shuffle them both together to create one epic world and double the content of all of your decks of cards!

• Did you consider anything else to further the immersion into the world you created?

We are launching an artbook Kickstarter for Ania’s incredible work on Gloom of Kilforth soon.

• With 8 years in development what was it you set out to do, and how does the end product differ from that?

I set out to deliver a sort of D&D RPG experience in a box, that could be played in one evening, either solo, cooperatively, or competitively.  In that respect I think I’ve achieved my goal.  But the help along the way from play-testers and backers regarding the rules and gameplay has dragged the concept along leaps and bounds, and with the money from the Kickstarter campaign we were able to hike up the quality of the art and components to a level I had honestly never envisioned.  There is nothing else out there like it for the amount of art and content you get in a single box, and seeing it sitting on my local shop shelves next to the highest rated games out there I could not be prouder of what we all achieved together.

• Have your plans changed at all about attempting a retail release for Gloom of Kilforth?

GoK had a limited retail run in the UK through Esdevium, who sold out and oversold almost straight away.  The same happened with our US retailer The Game Steward.  Both retailers have asked for much bigger print runs and we now have international language retailers and distributors interested, so we will be launching a second print run soon going straight to retail.  But we’ll also be running a Kickstarter campaign to attract direct buyers - and there will be something in it for existing owners of the game too, so stay tuned!

1066 Tears to Many Mothers:

• A great name for a game, where does it come from?

In April of 1066 Halley's Comet was in its perihelion orbit and writers at the time said it was four times the size of Venus and shining with a light equal to a quarter of that of the Moon. Many thought it was an evil omen - the monk Eilmer of Malmesbury Abbey wrote about the event:

"You've come, have you? – You've come, you source of tears to many mothers. It is long since I saw you; but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country."

Which is where we get the title.

• How long have you been working on 1066 TtMM?

The game has been in development for about 5 years.

• As potentially part of the Alt Wars series why start with the Battle of Hastings?

As an English kid growing up this was one of the most fascinating subjects to learn about at school.  Such a romantic notion: Harold as the tragic king fighting for the centuries-long fate of our country, and from a military point of view this idea that the battle could have gone either way at any moment, the whole thing just seemed to write itself into an asymmetrical conflict game in my head.  I loved the idea of making a two player card game like Star Wars LCG or Magic the Gathering but with historical events and characters instead.  And I knew with Ania’s art that we could make history look beautiful in a card game format, rather than a dry hex and chit type affair that lots of war games become - not that there’s anything wrong with those too of course...

• This game so far has picked up two pretty big awards, is this successful enough for you to develop Agincourt?

Award nominations - it’s a big distinction.  But I think people are just as happy that it’s been nominated, especially considering it hasn’t actually even been released yet!  Agincourt was certainly on my list of conflicts/theatres to cover, but as has been pointed out many times, it would pit the French against the English once again.  So I’m convinced now that the second game in the series will be another prominent contender from my list - ‘1565, St Elmo’s Pay’ (Siege of Malta).  And given the success of the 1066 TtMM Kickstarter, I’m confident enough to start development on it as soon as I can.

• Are you planning on doing a retail release for 1066 TtMM, or will you keep it as a Kickstarter exclusive like Gloom of Kilforth?

If the retailers will have it, I’ll sell it.  Gloom of Kilforth did get a limited retail run at hobby shops in the UK and US, and I believe 1066 will too.  But it will be a long time before we’re threatening the shelves of Barnes and Noble, Waterstones or Toys R Us!

• TtMM sees quite a bit of a departure from Gloom of Kilforth, was this born from a desire to create a game mechanically very different, or was i the theme/history that lead the mechanics?  

The history bled into the mechanics of 1066 enormously, and once the main elements fell into place (two armies fighting over the three wedges of troops) it started to come together quite quickly.  Even though it’s an abstracted card game, everything about it is drawn from the history and/or stories of the time, so there are cards for almost anything you can think of that occurred at the battle - the legendary Saxon Hatchet Knight, the stopping the battle for a food break because the bodies were piled too high, the Normans confessing and praying the night before, whilst the Saxons drank and sang, we even have an ‘Arrow in the Eye’ card...

But there’s also an element of needing to prove I’m not a one-trick pony too.  The path of least resistance would have been to release a Gloom of Kilforth expansion straight away, and that will certainly happen soon, but I wanted to show I could design a totally different game altogether, and I think 1066 is, as you say, a clear enough departure.  And wait till you see what’s coming further down the line too.

• Do you think this game will appeal to a different/wider audience then Gloom of Kilforth?  Do you see any risk in creating a game that is mechanically very different?

It was definitely a risk, because we could have got back all the people who enjoyed Gloom of Kilforth by doing an expansion, whereas there was no guarantee that anyone who wanted a 1-4 player epic fantasy adventure experience was going to want a 1-2 player head to head card game based on history.  But I was shocked by the number of backers who came back to support a combination of Ania’s artwork, Francesca’s music, my game designs, and Hall or Nothing as a company I guess.  We also actually drew in more initial backers this time (1,906 backers for 1066 Tears to Many Mothers versus 1,481 for Gloom of Kilforth), I think from the much lower price point, being an established/trusted brand now, and also from the historical element, maybe.  I definitely wasn’t sure we’d reach a wider audience, but I’m delighted that we did.

• After your second Kickstarter for “1066 Tears to many mothers”, as a small independent company producing games, crowdfunding looks like a good system to launch a new game. What are the biggest challenges you faced the first time that you’re doing differently now? What advice would you give to a new designer who is thinking of launching a Kickstarter based on your experience?

Go for it!  It’s a great time for the industry right now, many are calling it the golden age, as people want to escape from screens and spend time with real people and real components around a real table, being sociable, having drinks and snacks and listening to music or whatever.

Make sure your game idea is fully fledged - play-test it a hundred times, and get people you don’t know to play it too.  Take on all the feedback you can, and as long as you put in the time and effort to make your game the best it can be, don’t be put off by too much negativity, because there are games for everyone.  I’ve had to learn the hard way that no matter how beautifully produced, researched or presented your game, there will always be people who will not like it for any number of reasons.  One reviewer said that the art for Gloom of Kilforth was ‘too good’ and broke the immersion for him.  And I recently had a 1066 backer pull his pledge because he found out that Saxon warriors liked to drink ale!  You have to learn to love these differences in people, and realise that for every individual who doesn’t like your game, there will five hundred more who love it.

Platforms like Kickstarter can be incredibly supportive and positive if you keep your backers updated and you are open and honest with them.  But a badly handled campaign with a quiet creator and/or an unfinished game can quickly descend into toxicity.  Stay on top of your project and ask for help when and where you need it.

• Anna Kryczkowska provides the excellent artwork again for TtMM, why have you chosen to retain the same artist, and do you plan to continue doing so?

Have you seen her work??  Seriously though, Ania K is a consummate professional who delivers the highest quality art I’ve ever seen in board games, and in an incredibly quick time frame.  We have a great working relationship too.  Hopefully we’ll get busy enough to require multiple artists to get projects completed, but I would happily continue working with Ania for as long as I’m producing anything creative because she’s a legend

What is next for Hall or Nothing Productions?

For Hall or Nothing Productions Ltd here's a very rough guideline:

• ‘1066, Tears to Many Mothers’ - production underway


• ‘Gloom of Kilforth’ reprint + small GoK expansion


• Ania Kryczkowska Art-book


• Mark Chaplin’s sci-fi epic ‘Lifeform’


• ‘Touch of Death: A Fantasy Quest Game’


• ‘Sublime Dark’ (horror storytelling game)


• ‘1565, St Elmo’s Pay’ (Siege of Malta)

 

That's all folks!

Thanks for reading and special thanks to Tristan for taking the time to answer all our questions!

Review: enDANGERed Orphans of Condyle Cove

Game Name:	enDANGERed Orphans of Condyle Cove	Published Year:	2016
Game Publisher:	Certifiable Studios	Player Scale:	2 – 4
Game Designer:	Jesse Labbe	Run Time:	5 – 40 mins

Condyle Cove is a dark and dreary place.  Stark and devoid of both colour and life.  It’s even more desperate if you are an orphan.  Alone, tired, dirty and afraid, struggling to survive and the odds of that…well, they weren’t great to begin with and they just keep getting worse.

 

 



In enDANGERed Orphans each player is a nameless orphan struggling to survive, you’ll wonder through Condyle Cove seeking refuge and safety where you can, using up your limited Options to try and stay afloat.  When you’re out of Options, the shadows part and the Bogeyman gets you.  If you find yourself running low on Options and truly desperate, you can always visit the menacingly named Kiddie Corner (or cul-de-sac) at the centre of the map and try an Act of Desperation, to breathe some limited life back into your game, but even that isn’t guaranteed.  As you could always uncover the Bogeyman him/her/itself and be lost to the void forever.  Mwahahahahahaha!

Okay, so this game may sound a little morbid and depressing thematically, and you would be kind of right, but let me put it this way:

Imagine Tim Burton had a nightmare and turned it into a board game with a Peanuts-esque artwork.



Interested now I bet, and now you’ve got the right feel for this game.

Playing the game

There are three types of cards in the game. Options – cards that you can play to give you bonuses or be detrimental to your opponents, these also form your life-deck.  Cove cards form the map of Condyle Cove, each card has a special ability which will affect any player on the card, and you’ll use these to map out the game area each time you play.  Acts of Desperation – as the name suggests these are last ditch attempt cards to stay in the game, most of these are “good” cards, and at least one of them is the Bogeyman.  Which is bad.  Very bad.



With that all in mind, the rules are very, very simple.  Move (if you want to), up to two spaces.  Play a card (if you want to), and you can play as many as you like in any order.  Draw two cards (either Cove Cards or Option Cards).  If you get to the Draw phase and are unable to draw two cards then it is game over for you and you always, always have to Draw two cards.  This means that after turn one, you will have to play a card.

Kiddie Corner and the Acts of Desperation (AOD) bring an exciting, and terrifying mini-game of chance into endangered Orphans.  You could argue that they are a little swingy, and you’d be right, but a gamble should be swingy.  If a player ever starts their turn at Kiddie Corner, they must pick one of the six Acts of Desperation cards.  Five of these will reinvigorate their Options deck to varying degrees.  One will end their game.  The next player to end up here, well, their odds just got a little steeper.



That’s it.  That’s the game.  This is a player exclusion game, with the last Orphan standing (alone, oh so very alone) being the winner.  enDANGERed Orphans is a quick, light game, that is full of player interaction and most importantly; fun.  It is simple, slick and doesn’t get in its own way with too many rules (I’ll discuss the rulebook a little later on) or limitations.  Simply play a card, do what it says.  Make a friend cry perhaps. And move along.

It is all Take-That though, and the game is very competitive, which may not appeal to everyone.  You can very clearly see you opponents Options deck deplete like a cardboard hour glass, and you’ll see them grin from ear to ear when they have that one card they need to ruin you (having a good poker-face will really help you out in this game).  You’ll start each turn with the seemingly innocuous yet difficult decision about moving.  Since many of the Cove cards grants an ability based on where you are, or are not, but you don’t want to stay put for too long.  Sure being in the Creek is handy for a while that is until someone plays Swept Away and makes you discard everything.  And as much as it is a risk, you don’t want to get too far away from Kiddie Corner, just in case…



The start of your first game, you might play nice.  You might start adding to the map instead of immediately causing problems for your fellow orphans.  But that won’t last.  Soon you’ll be causing cards to be discarded, you’ll be stealing and shuffling other pawns around the board with near reckless abandon. When you play your second game you’ll be a top–class, A-Grade d*ck with a capital “D”, straight out of the gate.  What’s more, you’ll have even more fun.



There may come a point in this game that a loss can fall a little flat, when you’re running low-ish on Options, and then, through a series of unfortunate events (read as ‘Dick moves’) you can find yourself without any viable options, no way to get to Kiddie Corner and nothing left in your Options deck.  This could just be because the people I play against much prefer watching me figuratively bleed-out, rather than just putting me out of my misery, but I do often feel robbed of a Game End when this comes about.

Now, about the components. 

I will start by saying: enDANGERed Orphans has my favourite board game components to date.  Not only is the artwork great in its dreary horridness but the pawns are utterly brilliant – painted or not these look and feel great.  The neoprene play mats: amazing.  The cards themselves are of the highest quality linen finished stock.  The box insert fits everything – including the expansions, with fully sleeved cards – all comfortably, perfectly.  Even the flippin’ box looks great with its spot UV cover art.  I could keep writing words, but you’re better off just looking at this stuff.  Really.



Fundamentally, enDANGERed Orphans is a card game.  In a basic two or three player game, you can strip the game down to around sixty cards and the standees – which you’ll be able to fit into a deck box.   I went with a Flip ‘n’ Tray to fit the expansions and pawns in to make easier to transport, which also adds it to my #LunchBreakGames series.



Bizarrely, it comes with both standees and pawns.  This is only bizarre because the pawns are so awesome.  I can’t see much use in the standees unless players particularly want to something more specific (since the pawns are both ethnic and gender neutral), like a cat.



There are a few expansions also available; Mr Coleman’s Carnival of Captivating Curiosities, Somewhere Down Lexington Drive, these add a new Cul-de-sac artwork card and different and new Acts of Desperation and some additional standees.  Do you need these to expand the game, or get a fuller game experience? No, they just add some more flavour and character.  The one expansion that mixes things up significantly is the Last Winter of Benny Harris which comes with the game which includes a new Cove and ability to draw a different type of card Last Winter, which are bonus actions, some of which are very bad against your opponents, some are very bad for you.  It’s another mini game, big gamble deck which can make the games a bit longer and a little more fun.



…a little later on

One thing about this game that seems to have caused quite a bit of fuss is the rule book.  Is it a very funny, laid-back, jocular and flippant rule book?  Yes, yes it is, there is a very good chance you laugh if not smirk when reading it.  Is it obtuse, vague and occasionally unhelpful, yeah, it kind of is that too.  Yet, as an intelligent, well humoured gamer you’ll get it.  The rules are very, very simple:

Move.

Play.

Draw.

When you’re out of Options you’re out!



Certifiable Studios have gone with the less is more system here and on the whole it works.  If you are a Rule Hound type of gamer…fix yourself a cup of chai tea and find your happy place before opening this rule book.  If you can play a game comfortably by playing logically, sensibly then you’ll be fine.  This lack of clarity extends to some of the cards too, unfortunately with mixed terminology that again, will upset the thoroughbred rule hounds.  Certain Cove card prohibit cards being “Taken” from your hand, but the language on the Options cards uses “Steal” .  Another location stops your pawn being moved – but is that moved as in “Moved one/two/three spaces” like the movement phase, or does it include being taken from one cove location and placed on another.  As a personal bugbear I would have preferred that the term orphan was used in place of ‘anybody’, or ‘pawn’ or ‘player’ to keep the theme and mechanic more interlocked.  A future edition of this game would tighten a lot of these “issues” up quickly and simply, in doing so it making this game more immediately accessible to newer/less experienced or younger gamers.

So…

enDANGERed Orphans is a very completive game, with lots and lots of Take That, which could very easily make you fall out with your friends. It looks utterly amazing, and has set the bar very high for any subsequent games from Certifiable Studios.  Ironically, considering the theme of the game, it oozes love and affection from its creators and they have wanted to deliver the very best, most fun product they could.  I feel they have succeeded in this.  Yes, it is a glorified card game, but, oh.  The glory of it!



The Good:

Great player interaction

Brilliant components

Amazing artwork

Quick and easy rule set

Exciting elements of luck mixed with light strategy/hand management

Funny rulebook

The Bad:

Full on Take-That game – which some may not like

Player Exclusion –which again, some might not like

The theme may put you off, but stop being a sissy and play it

Obtuse rulebook

Occasionally ambiguous card wording

Semi-pointless standees (they still look ace though)

This game was purchased/ backed on Kickstarter at The "GREEDY BASTARDS" Level

 

Review: Plague Inc.

If you’re familiar with the mobile game of the same name, this board game variant will need little introduction. For those that haven’t heard of it, in this game you are a pathogen, a germ, a dirty, dirty disease with only one goal; the complete and utter annihilation of human kind.  Thematically, this is opposite to the well known and loved Pandemic series of games, but that is where the similarities end.  Plague Inc., will take you on a very different, very competitive journey in your attempt to wipe man from the face of the planet and be claimed the best (or worst, depends on which way you look at it) disease of all time.

 

[caption width="4032" id="attachment_1965" align="alignnone"] A game in play[/caption]

Now, for some people, the theme may be off-putting, I get that.  I could tell you that this is a good game, which is full of interesting choices, a little bit of luck and some great player interaction.  But, if you really don’t like the idea of playing a game based on a Doomsday Event, you’re going to find a barrier that I can’t really help you get over.
You should try though.



Each player begins with a fairly innocuous pathogen, represented by a player mat with some basic stats, limited abilities and space for new Traits to be evolved and added later.  Playing as either a Bacteria or Virus (the Virus offering a slightly more complex game, but you can play a balanced game with a mix of both on the board) each turn you’ll follow a strict order of play that will enable you to affect more countries, evolve your disease, infect and ultimately kill remove countries from the board.  

The complexities, wonders and beauty of the world are reduced to a red-hued world map showing six continents (Antarctica is excluded), each to be made up of Country cards as the game progresses.  These cards display a number of black hexagons which represent the major cities and these are what you will attempt to infect and kill.
In a player’s turn, they will collect DNA points (which act as both victory points and currency) for each County they Control – have equal or majority infection tokens on.  Following this, players will get to choose to add a new, healthy country to the board, or remove a country from the deck in order to [I’m going to call it] mutate and refresh their limited and dwindling hand of Trait cards.  It is at this stage that the interesting choices start to show.



Your disease can’t just pop-up and start infecting willy-nilly.  Far from it, any new Country card added needs to be first connected to a country you currently infect – either on the same continent or via boat or plane.  Next, this new country has to be climate suitable.  Extremely hot and/or cold countries are difficult places for an un-evolved disease to thrive.  You can use these extreme temperature countries to box opponents in or reduce the amount of connectivity they have by discarding country cards that bear the boat or plane icon.  Ensuring that you maintain plenty of climate suitable connectivity.  Of course, your opponents are trying to do the same to you.  However, discarding a country card comes with a ‘cost’, the discarding of your current hand of Trait cards. 

Trait cards represent the symptoms (by and large) of your disease, each card enabling your disease to do some else, or something extra.  Each delightfully named and thankfully bearing no picture other than an abstracted symbol.  These benefits range from making your disease more infectious, make it tolerant to extreme temperatures, more stable when travelling and, probably most importantly, making it more lethal.  Only one Trait can be evolved –added – to your disease each turn, so the manner in which you evolve your pathogen will impact your game.  The cost of each evolution is naturally sliding, the more it does, and the better it does it the more expensive.  This is where the game gets a little swingy, as the more victory points the Trait costs you, the longer you spend recovering from your purchase.  At the end, you’ll get the points back for all active – topmost – traits, but that only helps in game, and does nothing to help you evolve and upgrade whilst playing.
It is with this mechanic that most new-to-the-game players struggle, as they place additional value to the higher costing, more powerful cards.  Spending 20 DNA points in the first part of the game is eye-watering high, so newer-gamers hold on to these cards, clogging up their hand which slows their progress.



Finally, you’ll be looking to wipe countries out.  Once all the city spots are full, any player who controls that country rolls the Death Die, rolling equal to, or lower than your Lethality score – so if you are prone to roll 1s a lot of the time, you will do very, very well playing Plague Inc..  Remember I promised you player interaction, it is here that it really comes in.  Event cards give you all sorts of abilities, some will let you move your disease around a little more freely as a one shot, others will allow you to make a nuclear strike against that country that is soon to score and you’re not in.  You can quarantine other players, stop them, slow them and generally get on their nerves, all in these great little pockets of playing “the good guys”.



These event cards are a welcome and occasionally brutal surprise when playing a game, and any player that occupies a county when it is killed gets one, so even just dipping your toe in and spreading your little, non-lethal disease around will net you a good bunch of these cards.  The Event cards also inject a little more colour into the game, with more illustrative card art, however, these cards don’t fit perfectly from a thematic stand point, where you will be wiping out parts of North America out one minute, and then setting up a travel ban for all of Asia the next.  This flip-flopping between humankind and disease does snatch some of the immersion away – of which, as an abstract game there isn’t an abundance.
Plague Inc. is an example of a game that tells a story, even though it is probably one you don’t want to hear.  There is a healthy dose of replayability as some countries are removed each game, and with two different styles of play and a large Trait deck, you are unlikely to see much repetition.  You’ll play you second different to your first, and different again in your third and so on, learning and improving your understanding of the game each time.  It may be a little morbid, and monochromatic on the table, but the player interaction and competition will keep Plague Inc. as a welcome game on my table or shelf.

Solo Mode:
Plague Inc. also boasts a solo player mode, where you’ll play against the Plague Bot.  This presents an interesting challenge, and a fun little puzzle but it can, if you’re unlucky either kick your ass or just end up limited to the African continent making people sneeze and very little else.

This is a middle weight, competitive area control, hand management game, which is easy to pick up but offers plenty of choices and changes between games.  You’ll have great satisfaction dropping CDC quarantine down on your opponents, and the rare occasion where rolling a 1 is always a good thing.  In this game, you don’t want to succeed too much, as you can risk taking yourself out of the game, so striking that perfect balance where you are slightly ahead but never in risk is an interesting challenge.  As a fan of the mobile game, I’m really excited to see where the board game goes and how it develops with expansions, not that they are needed but they are ripe for design.  As much as this game is a little morbid, it is sometimes a lot of fun being the “bad guy”



The Good:

Turns a very familiar theme on its head

A really good, simple area control game

Great player interaction

Plenty of scope for expansions
The Bad:

Player interaction is very Take-That heavy, which some may not like

The theme could be quite off-putting/upsetting

It looks a little bland in red hues and stark simplicity

Review: Temp Worker Assassins

Game Name:	Temp Worker Assassins	Published Year:	2016
Game Publisher:	Self Published	Player Scale:	2 – 4
Game Designer:	David Newton	Run Time:	45 – 60 mins

If you’ve ever wanted to kill your boss, imagine how much more you’d want to kill them if you worked at Bureaucrat Castle, where your boss could be a Payroll Pirate, a Public Relations Troll or even the Acquisitions & Mergers Viking.  Well now you can! (you can’t go and kill your boss, this isn’t an endorsement, it’s a board game review).  As a top-class assassin you’ll infiltrate the castle-come-office, you’ll stalk your victim, you’ll plan and when the timing is just right, CHLUNK, you’ll hit them with…a stapler.

Temp Worker Assassins is a deck building, worker placement game that takes place over 5 turns framed as days of the week, using your Assassin meeples you’ll scurry off to certain departments, which will invariably enable you to become a more proficient killer by either imbuing you with particular skills, equipment or allowing you to access different Targets.  Alternatively, an assassin can make an attempt on a Target, where the player will begin playing and chaining cards from his/her hand to deal out more or equal damage than the Hit Points of the Target.  On a successful attempt the Target card is awarded to that player for Victory Points, and kill or not, that assassin meeples is set to the dungeon to think about what they’ve done.



 

Once all Assassins are placed, the day ends and they all leave for the night to work and kill again the following day.  After five rounds of this, the game ends and victory points are totted up and a winner is declared.

The core mechanics of this game are very simple, and the streamlined interlinking of Deck Building and Worker Placement make this a very easy game to pick up and play for veterans, and also for newer gamers.  The game pace is such that players will very quickly establish their strategies, patterns and counter patterns, so as each new day begins, there is a flurry of movement as workers are placed, and only as the day wears on, do your options become limited and more thought required – which personally I think makes for a clever and interesting thematic mechanic, as I do far less work in the afternoon too. I’m also more likely to want to kill my boss by the end of the day (again, don’t actually kill your boss).



Like many worker placement games, strategies need to be adaptive, as “Blocking” forms the core player interaction – although there are a few cards that specifically hinder opponents, and in later rounds Targets fall quite rapidly, so if you’re planning on an attempt you have to be fast acting to get the one you really want.  The same is true of plundering the supply line of stationary when you need that last pencil to improve the score of your stapler.  With ten Departments, many with multiple action slots to be filled there is always some choice, more choice than one normally expects to see in such a game.  On occasion this can lead to a little Analysis Paralysis, and every so often a Department falls a little flat in comparison to another.



There are five standard Departments in each game (six in a four-player game), means the large deck of cards provides a wide range of variation and game-on-game variations.  There is even a “Hard Mode” when you’re ready for more of a challenge.  Equally there is a decent array of Target cards that you can’t always bank on that potentially very valuable General Service Golem making an appearance (this Target awards 3 victory point for each Typing Pool Zombie you have killed, where these Zombies are very, very easy to kill, but in themselves worth very little).  Finally, there is a very large deck of Stationary cards, and as these are what you’ll be building your deck with there are plenty of them – here I would lean towards there being too wide a range – especially in a two player game, where circling through them is much slower.  Having a set of cards that were removed in a two-player game would make the deck far slicker.



I’m a fan of deck builders, and this game does a very good job with this mechanic, there is a great deal of satisfaction when chaining card after card into a grotesque stationary-horror tableau of fantastical death.  Unlike some deck builders, where a small, concise deck is preferred, Temp Worker Assassin excels with a larger deck where much of the fun is drawing cards.  The gamble and risk of pulling the card you need is what makes this game for me, and sets it aside from others such as Star Realms or Dominion- where you are limited to the cards you have in your hand.  Instead, Temp Worker Assassin has more of a Texas Hold’em Poker feel, gambling on the next card out the deck being the one you need to make the kill.  No, you don’t need to risk this, and you can build your hand more conventionally – which is how I started playing – but as soon as one player starts taking those risks and hitting bigger rewards the game changes pace completely.

Depending on the spread of Departments, Stationary, and Targets occasionally it can be difficult to play catch up when a player is able to take the lead.  The Bulletin cards – awarded each day for the player who makes the first kill are pretty powerful cards and are certainly worth fighting to gain a couple of.  The easiest way to do this is the Typing Pool Zombies, which aren’t worth a great deal individually, but stacked up, especially with the Golem can be a highly lucrative tactic.

Adam Bolton has done a jaw-droppingly brilliant job with the art work in this game.  As a lifelong comic book fan, the comic book slant on the fantasy artwork can’t be ignored or highlighted enough, and it does something different with an otherwise very tired genre – I’m looking at you Magic the Gathering.



Temp Worker Assassin blends two very simple mechanics and does so simply and seamlessly, and yet feels and plays differently.  The theme is fun and charming accentuated by the brilliant artwork allowing this game stand out from a genre crowded area of tabletop gaming.

 

The Good:

Easy to learn and play

Great variability

Plenty of choice in each round

Amazing artwork

Different and funny slant on fantasy genre

The Bad:

Little player vs. player interaction

Few catch up mechanisms

Gameplay can be a little longer than game weight expectations

I want oversized cards to see the artwork better

I also want custom Assassin meeples – but then I’m just greedy