Black Orchestra

The only way to win is to assassinate Hitler!

This five person co-operative game takes place in Nazi Germany, and as one of the members of the titular Black Orchestra you must keep the Gestapo off your scent while you plan, prepare and ultimately try to kill Hitler - not easy given his military support and his penchant of hopping around the board. It's a game of planning and dice rolling, and while turns seem to go quickly the game does run quite a while. The expanding and contracting map which follows the seven event stages (which in turn follow the war) are a nice touch, and evading his lieutenants and building a conspiracy dice pool is a fun mini-game in itself.

For our first game, the plan was to ambush him in Prague. The team had gathered there and my wife managed to lure Hitler from the Eagles Nest. It was then up to DL, who rolled 6 dice (1 for passing the mandatory requirement, 2 for all of us being there, 1 for having a key item, 2 for using a one shot card) requiring three successes (Hitler's weakest in standard mode) - we had worked hard to reduce his military support for this very event! Alas it failed and he got away while we separated to collect more gear to try again.

Near the end of the war, we regrouped in Prague to try ambush him again - luring him from the Eagles Nest once more and DL this time had 8 dice requiring 4 successes. Still failed! Being reckless I opted to try snipe him instead, having 4 dice and requiring 4 successes. My attempt was so sneaky, no one even knew there was an attempt as I completely missed. They probably thought some local was duck hunting!

DL managed to stall Hitler's departure back to Berlin with a delaying card, but was subsequently jailed by the Gestapo soon after (game over if all of us are jailed simultaneously) and with the end of the war looming (which ends in failure for the team) I had one last chance to try kill Hitler with a hidden bomb. As my mom and wife had reduced his support again I now had three dice (as the bonus items were now either used or on map areas no longer accessible as the Germans had been pushed back from there) and required three successes... and I got him. We won with 2 turns left to spare!

They have a "win" card too!

This was quite a hard game to find, but it is definitely worth it. It does run a bit long though, and is comparable to Eldrich Horror in game-play time and dice difficulty. As a bonus, you might end up learning some history too! Highly recommend it, I give Black Orchestra 5 plots out of 5.

Insight: Hitler is weakest at the very start and at the very end of the war.

Re-review: The true horror of Eldrich Horror

The answer is time.

I think I view Eldrich (and probably Arkham) Horror with rose tinted glasses, as they fill that whole "everything is doomed" bill so nicely. Only now that I'm getting them replayed or maybe because I'm trying to design a game of my own do I see the flaws more clearly.

Even after cutting Arkham's game time by half, "It is a long game," is still an easy phrase to throw around. Yes the amount of components make it long to set up, but the "long" part that is poorly designed - at least time management wise - are the actual encounter cards.

You look at the clock. Roll for sanity!

What!? But those give the story and the theme of the game! Yes they do, and they are fantastic. But they only apply to ONE player at a time - and I see now that it's a pretty big draw back. It's almost like everyone plays together in the fast "action" phase, then the momentum stops again when reading out the cards or indeed, fighting monsters.

Even if said encounter only takes 2 minutes, in a six player game that's 10 minutes of each player idling while the others have their encounter. In Police Precinct, you similarly have individual encounters but every other player has an opportunity to assist you. It doesn't make sense logically, but game play wise it keeps everyone invested in what's happening. Glasses off, score adjustment: -0.5.

Today I Smiled: Too Much of a Good Thing?

My little cousin stayed over for a night of boardgames and did we go through a whole bunch! Won two rounds of Pandemic (easiest level then easiest with mutation), lost two rounds of veteran level Flash Point: Fire Rescue, lost one and won one novice round of Forbidden Desert, and surprisingly won two games of Eldritch Horror, without any detective casualties, against Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth!

We then moved onto more competitive rounds of regular playing cards and a game my cousin calls "Chinese". She won 4 out of 5 of those, followed by me winning two rounds of Bluff and finishing off with two games of Lords of Waterdeep where once again my wife proved she was the ultimate Lady of Waterdeep winning both games by a huge margin. As you can imagine a little bit of board game fatigue has since followed. :P

I've also finally gone through all the "vigilance quests" (just shy of 200, counting repetitions) introduced in Neverwinter Online's Elemental Evil and am now level 70 on my rogue. At least you get a lot of good gear for going through all of that - an artifact main hand and off hand weapon to boot! I normally put video links at this point, so for those who don't play or haven't reached any of the dragons, here's a clip taken by my brother. That's me with the knives and the weird helmet! Or, if that doesn't interest you - have a trailer to Batman vs Superman instead. :D

Hope you all have a great day!

The Witcher: Adventure (Board) Game

Where good components don't make a good game.

Which is a pity since the components are awesome.

As my brother said this game lacks something, and I think that something is excitement. This is a shame given that the components such as the board artwork, the figurines, cards and dice are all of top notch quality. The combat system is pretty decent too where injury and curses could prohibit your choice of actions, and having character specific dice and card decks I found to be fantastic. Alas it is in the main game design where the failure lies.

First of all it isn't cooperative which is odd given that the playable characters are actually friends. Instead it is a victory point race - one which is pretty hard to catch up in if you get unlucky early. The winners keep winning sort of thing. The other problem is the gathering of clues, which you need x amount of to trade for "proofs" to complete a quest. Given that you gain a clue by moving and investigation seems to have a 50% chance to screw you over (the true percentage is only 25%) turns were basically spent wandering back and forth between two or three places.

This is the first game in my collection where players got "bored", not really caring what to do because nothing seems to matter. It doesn't help that each player you add also adds around an hour to the game, so while my two player tests went for two hours a four player (max) game went for four. Four boring hours, not the four nail-biting hours of Zombicide 2 or the nightmare inducing hours of Arkham/Eldrich Horror.

In short, this game is a let down (especially to Witcher fans) and I give it only one clue out of five. I wonder if there's a way to fix it... For now though all I can recommend is for everyone to stay away from this title.

Zombicide Season 2: Prison Outbreak

I got this cooperative board game as an early Christmas present and so far, I am having a blast trying to survive in the exciting (and terrifying) zombie apocalypse theme it creates. With nine double sided, interchangeable boards, around 80 good quality figurines, and 11 grueling missions that come with the game I can see that it will be keeping us busy for quite some time. The ever increasing and mostly shambling zombie horde also handle themselves, which is a big plus - meaning no one is stuck as an antagonistic game master.

You just get stuck with antagonistic zombies. :P

Players have a choice from 6 characters who have differing abilities from each other and from their "Zombivor" version - what you turn into if you get wounded twice by any zombie. You are still on the same team, but your character has traits that lead them to be more violent instead of traits that let them move around more for example.

While maps offer a suggested playtime length, I suggest you ignore those because I've clocked my current games of 4 and 5 people going as long as a game of Eldritch Horror, especially on maps with many tiles. Setup time is slightly shorter though. Also, having scenarios spelled out in the book is great as it has gives an overall story as you play through the vastly different missions. As fun as it is, there are two big flaws in the game for me and I will go into both of them right now:

Player Elimination

If you take five wounds while in Zombivor mode you are out of the game. While we have come really close to it, this hasn't happened in any of our play throughs yet. However, I can see that if it does that whoever is eliminated is not going to hang around for x hours while the rest of the mission plays on. Even Eldritch Horror with its high mortality rate lets you respawn as someone else (unless you run out of characters) to keep all players really invested and often only in the end game does it kill people off permanently.

Ranged Combat

The above might have been an oversight but this here is plain stupidity. Say I am shooting into a tile that has a friendly character and zombies. I roll the dice and discover I hit six times. Each hit will hit the friendly character(s) first until they are dead before I start hitting zombies. Doesn't matter if there's one zombie or 70 zombies, you will hit your allies first (unless you have the sniper perk). I wouldn't mind if it was a chance to hit friendlies like if your rolls had 1 or 2's or something but a guaranteed 100% to hit your allies regardless of which direction you are shooting from, or elevation (shoot from towers) is just stupid. The result is guns being almost useless in tight quarters.

Other than that this is a really fun game and one that will make the hours fly by as you and your team work out how to complete each objective while minimizing casualties. I give it 4 chainsaws out of 5!

Score after re-review: 3 chainsaws out of 5.

As an aside: Finally won a game of Forbidden Desert starting on Elite level! Not sure how we pulled that off but it sure felt great! :D

Eldritch Horror

Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian monstrosities are again awakening and threatening to do nasty things to the world, and once again it is up to intrepid investigators to try stop them. Much like Arkham Horror before it, Eldritch Horror is  a cooperative board game where players must run around the board to shut gates and gain clues to defeat whichever main bad guy you happen to be playing against at the time.

Unlike Arkham though, Eldritch Horror has a world wide scale with a world map as the board and each Eldritch abomination has it's own specific way of being defeated by means of its custom tailored mystery deck. Simply solve three (out of four randomly shuffled, one at a time) before it wakes up and you win.

That is not easy to do as investigators go insane and/or die permanently during the course of the game (and often through events out of your control) it is not wise to get attached to your selected character. Player elimination is avoided by letting them pick a new investigator at that point (provided the main baddie hasn't woken up yet) however there are only 12 in the base game and one of the losing conditions is that if all 12 die it is game over. No resurrection here!

Picture post game: Defeat! >.<

Eldritch is still a big game and takes a bit of time to setup and play, but because of clever streamlining it is only around half the time it takes to setup and play Arkham. This is partially because out of the 40 or so ancient one cards available you only use around 16 per game, and once those run out the players lose regardless at what stage the game is at. That for me is a huge positive, and despite the board and the dice being rigged against you it still makes for an awesome experience.

Another positive is the customized research decks against each ancient one. For example while facing Azathoth (rather, trying NOT to face him), there'll be a number of meteor showers and most likely an alien moon showing up now and again which doesn't happen if you face one of the other horrors.

The double sided cards are another great mechanic, and you are not allowed to read the flip side until the time is right. Spells are a good example. There are many copies of the same spell, but where one might flip to reveal added advantages, others might flip to reveal that by casting it you've just woken up the ancient one a little more, or slowly go insane, or accidentally insta-kill another player!

It does have a minor problem with somewhat thin card decks which means seeing repetition within a single game, but other than that it all goes swimmingly well (usually for the ancient ones). This problem is quite likely fixed with the expansion Forsaken Lore which adds a whole bunch of cards.

For me it does replace Arkham Horror due to the speeded up and polished mechanics. I give it four and a half tentacles out of five.

Re-review score: Four tentacles out of five.