Calth musings

I grew up on GW games, I love the universes that they created (until the Warhammer world went kablooey, but that is another matter)... but a while back I stopped buying anything except paint from them as the prices were just too darn expensive. When the Horus Heresy game came out late last year I was interested, but managed to hold off on buying it as I need space marines like a hole in the head... pretty though they may be.

Today Aidan picked up a copy and we've been looking through the very very heavy box full of goodies. Damn it looks nice. The rules are very simple, but that works nicely as a board game, and the scenarios look like fun, especially the dual board one.  I'm still managing to hold off on picking up a copy, but it did make me stop and think... about the same time that Betrayal at Calth was released, GW announced the return of Specialist Games.

I can't help but wonder if Calth was a calculated way of experimenting with a simple ruleset and people's willingness to build multipart models for a board game. The box contains so many Heresy era marines that it was a guaranteed sell to a massive proportion of their current and past followers. 

I can just imagine playing a version of Necromunda on boards like these...

I can see the turn sequence and card mechanics working really well for Necromunda and Mordheim as they add a lot of interactions between the sides and interesting events through the card decks. It wouldn't take too much work to include multiple layers by saying the red outlined items can't be directly passed through, but can be accessed via ladders or walk ways (for example). We shall have to see what happens with Specialist Games over the coming months...

Farming games

I hope everyone that went to Blog-Con is enjoying the weekend and happy birthday to James!

While I couldn't make it, I did have a gaming related encounter this afternoon. My wife works in MERL, a museum about the countryside. Everything in it is somehow related to farming or the countryside, so it was amusing to see a few boardgames appear in their latest exhibition about Collecting 20th Century Rural Cultures. We really want to play them to see quite how weird they are.

Grade Up to Elite Cow seems to be the farming equivalent of Monopoly, but you have to upgrade 4 of your 6 cows to Elite status in order to win the game. BoardGameGeek seems to imply that it's not quite so family friendly because of it's various references to bull semen on the event cards. You can't really complain about that though as it *is* about building the perfect herd of cows. Plus it comes with some neat looking cow counters.

The other game that they have is Agri-Hazard, a game released by the Ford motor company in the 70s that has you buying and building up a farm, growing crops, raising herds of animals and then selling them. Each turn around the board is one year... According to BGG, it doesn't seem to have a proper ending in the rules...  it sounds as if you just carry on playing it until you get bored. Shame really as the name made it sound like you were having to farm in some post apocalyptic world.

Who will be... King Of Tokyo?

That will apparently be me!

Our occasional boardgame group got together again on Monday after what felt like a fairly long hiatus. Rather than fighting off the plague infested hordes of undead, we decided we would go and stomp on Tokyo instead.

Enter King of Tokyo!

This is a fairly simple dice game, with the addition of some very basic board game elements. Each player starts off with their monster and a score board*. The aim is to either kill all your opponents, or score 20 victory points through various means. Each turn you take it in turn to roll the 6 black dice and do whatever it says on the faces. You can re-roll up to three times, holding back symbols that you want to keep in order to get the most effective combo for that turn.

There are (unsurprisingly) 6 symbols that are either Attack, Heal, Power up or victory points (1, 2 or 3). Each Attack symbol causes 1 damage to whoever is currently in Tokyo (or everyone else if you are in Tokyo). Heal repairs one point of damage if you are not currently King of Tokyo and Power Up grants you little crystals that can be spent on the upgrade cards. To gain victory points via the dice you need to have rolled three or more of the same number.

Those are basically the rules in a nutshell. I'm sure some people would play this strategically; plotting the downfall of each others creatures, but we have a 13 year old in our group which throws out any strategy as he's all out attack, even when down to 1 wound. Unsurprisingly, this disrupts everyone's plans and makes the game far more fun. We are notoriously slow when it comes to playing games, but even we managed to get through 4 games in 2 hours.

If you get the chance, I can highly recommend this game, especially for larger groups. It suggests that it's possible to play with 2 people, but I can only imagine that it's rather dull as there's no backstabbing and banter between those players not in Tokyo.


 * In the base game the creature doesn't matter which creature you are, but in the expansion there are specific mutations for each creature.