Voting for UK Games Expo Awards - Simurgh (and Mistfall)

UK Games Expo awards prizes every year for the best boardgame in one of a number of categories. For the 2016 awards they are likely to receive 120-130 games to assess, and several have already been sent to them by the publishers. I've offered to help by bringing games to Halesowen Boardgamers. Each game needs to be rated by around 8 people in total - ideally I'd find that many over two sessions at Halesowen, but even a single play with 4 would help towards assessing the game. The first game I'll bring is called Simurgh - a fantasy-themed worker placement game that should play in 1-1.5 hours. I'll bring it along to the next two or three sessions. All you have to do is play the game then give it a rating from 0-5 in five categories.

Another game from the same publisher called Mistfall has also arrived - it is a co-operative fantasy-themed game. If anyone is particularly interested in trying this, then I may be able to bring it along in early January.

Stats Catch Up

Just to note I've finally got round to catching up the stats for the last couple of months, still spending time playing games on my PC, rather than doing things board game related, except for posting about the new Fury of Dracula on BGG. Top game for October - Through the Ages: A New story of Civilisation. Top game for November - Fury of Dracula

See
Stats page for October
Stats page for November
BGG list of October and November.

Game Preview: Kingdom of Kiralysag

Kingdom of Kiralysag is a mid-weight euro game for 3-5 players. It is a retheme and redesign of a game of mine from a few years back set in medieval Hungary. After the Mongols had devastated the Kingdom in 1241, the Kings decide to repopulate the land with guests invited in from Western Europe. The various peoples - Saxons, Bavarians, Walloons, Flemish, Italians - work together to establish and grow settlements, while competing to dominate them. The game worked quite well, but was a little dry. By retheming to a fictional kingdom I have been able to introduce more variety e.g. with a random succession of kings, rather than the fixed order of the original historical game. I decided to go the whole hog and make it a fantasy kingdom with various races available to players. The game design is ready but now I'm working on the graphics, with the aim of having a play test kit finished for January.

A game of Kingdom of Kiralysag takes place over four Reigns. The four kings are selected randomly out of a total of eight. Each king has different attributes - Militaristic, Mercantile, Religious, Cultured - that affect the composition of the decks of Action Cards and Event Cards that are used for each Reign. In a 4-player game there are up to 6 Rounds per Reign (a king may die early, reducing the number of Rounds). At the beginning of each Round the next two Event Cards are placed face up. Then each player purchases an Action Card from among a row of 8 face up cards, which is then replenished. Each card has an inherent cost in coins and favour and an additional cost depending on its position - this mechanism will be familiar from Suburbia or Through the Ages. An Action card enables a player to settle 2 meeples among the 11 settlements in the Kingdom, "upgrade" an existing settler with a profession such as Merchant or Knight, or build a Temple or Ship in a suitable settlement. At the end of the Round the two events are resolved. Some of these events enable players to gain favour from the king and a small number of Victory Points. Other events impose a cost on players. Income is generated at the end of each Reign. A settler in a poor settlement may not provide any income, while a settler in a wealthy settlement may provide one or two coins. Merchants, Innkeepers, Temples and Ships generate additional income. Scoring occurs at the end of the 2nd and 4th Reigns. This consists of majority scoring for each settlement and also, in the final scoring, for money.

Games Played - 11 November 2015, featuring Favor of the Pharoah

Yesterday, Mike asked Dave D to write a blog post. I thinks that's because Mike can't log in to write one (he's forgotten his password - a common affliction these days), but he can reply to one that someone else has written. As I've got some time free, I thought I'd start it off myself. This week we had only 9 people attending. The two Marks and Steve K promptly decided on Agricola as their game for the evening. I was keen to join them, as Agricola is at the number 4 spot on my bgg top 10 list. However, I held back as it wasn't clear how the numbers would work out. Mike subsequently kidnapped a couple of the attendees - Rob L and James S -  for a game of Caylus Magna Carta, something that I very much want to try out, as I like Caylus but haven't tried the card version before. That meant that the remaining three of us - Stan, Dave D and I - were left to form a third table.

Fortunately, another new game was calling out to be played: Favor of the Pharoah, which I'd noticed that Dave had been bringing along for a few weeks. Favor is one of two reworkings of Tom Lehmann's 2006 game To Court the King (the other reworking being Ciub). Tom is one of that rare breed, a professional board game designer, and is the mastermind behind Race for the Galaxy, Roll the Galaxy and a number of Pandemic expansions. Favor is a game that uses dice as a key mechanism other than as random number generators - something that is increasingly fashionable these days, with the aforementioned Roll for the Galaxy and The Voyages of Marco Polo being just two recent, high-profile examples. At first glance, Favor seems as though it is going to be a relatively simple game. On your turn you roll a number of dice and use the results to purchase a tile. Each purchased tile provides you either with an additional die or two to roll on subsequent turns, or some type of modifier that you can apply to one or more dice. I initially though that the game might be something like Machi Koro or Artifacts Inc., but it plays quite differently. Favor might start out being quite simple, but as you accrue extra dice - some of them with special attributes - and various die-modifying abilities the possibilities for the die-rolling element of your turn multiply exponentially. The price for any given tile is either a number of dice with the same value, or a run of values, or some other combination, such as three pairs or a triple and a pair. The aim of the game is to purchase the Queen, who costs 7 dice of the same value. Her purchase triggers the final round of the game, with players then aiming to beat the score obtained to buy the Queen, either with the same number of dice but with a higher value, or with a higher number of dice.

During our game, all three of us occasionally neglected to use some of our die-modifying abilities or even dice themselves, so we were certainly playing sub-optimally, a sign that there is more to this game than first meets the eye. Dave accrued a higher number of dice than Stan or I, and was the first to purchase the Queen tile, with eight 2s. Stan and I had focused more on buying die-modifying tiles, and this stood me in good stead on my very final turn when I was able to achieve ten 3s. Dave had the very last turn, but wasn't quite able to beat the score I had just set. I would be very keen to try Favor of the Pharoah again. We only used a fraction of the available tiles - a different set is used each time, so there will be a certain degree of variability between games.

We finished Favor in under an hour, leaving us time for a longer game. Dave suggested World Without End, which Stan was keen to play. I have played it a few times before and always enjoyed it, though I keep forgetting just how good a game it is. Dave won, though the end result was fairly close, leaving me to think about how I could have played a little better to get those extra few points. I've now upped my rating of the game on bgg to a '9'!

Game design news: This Cursed Rock

This time I'm presenting an early preview of a game by another budding designer, Jim Falkus, who you may have met when he came to the club in August. You can find some details about the game on his blog. In brief, it is a 2-player game recreating the Great Siege of Malta by the Ottomans in 1565. Despite the theme, it is not a wargame, as witnessed by the lack of hexes or defined areas on the game board, which was designed by me! The game takes place over about 20 turns. At the start of every turn each player draws an event card, most of which can be retained for later use. Then each player selects four action cards from their deck of 12 to use during the subsequent Action Phase. There are four types of card: Move, Build, Morale and Combat. Finally there is an Assault Phase, during which the Turkish player may attempt to seize one of the fortified areas on the board. Wooden cubes are used to represent the various types of military pieces: gun batteries, Janissary units, Turkish infantry units, Knights of St John and Spanish infantry units. There are also wooden Personality Discs and various types of markers for gun platforms, additional fortifications, siege equipment and divine intervention!

The game is still under design with early playtesting likely to start later this year. I would hope that it can make an appearance in Halesowen early in 2016.

Game design news

Cromwell is still very much in active playtesting, especially as I have redesigned the cards (each player now has a deck) and created a scenario starting in 1644. However, many years ago I designed a Lord of the Rings-themed block wargame which I may resurrect if there is any interest...

Given the theme and associated copyright issues, it is a game that is extremely unlikely to ever be published, so it is destined to be no more than a very limited edition "fan game". It did receive some playtesting back in the day and showed some potential, but definitely needs a spruce-up in terms of graphics as well as streamlining of the rules - probably a few dozen hours of my time - and the purchase of new blocks. Based on a short passage in Lord of the Rings Appendix A, it is called "The Long Winter" and is set during the Third Age 2758. For scale and complexity it is comparable to the Columbia block games East Front or Victory in Europe. It features 160 blocks, 5 nationalities (Gondorians, Rohirrim, Corsairs, Dunlendings, Easterlings) which can be played by 2-5 players, both land and naval battles, siege combat, supply trains, weather. There is no magic and it is strictly humans, but there is personal combat between leaders to give it a bit of high fantasy feeling.

Games Played - 9 September 2015 featuring The Capitals

We had 11 people last Wednesday and split over 4 tables with 6 games played, Agricola, Acquire, China, San Juan together with 2 new games to the club, The Capitals and Scott's prototype civil war game, currently known as Cromwell. More details follow