Category Archives: New Game Weekend

New Game Weekend: Fire & Axe

After a couple weeks spent at home hunched over my workbench working away furiously at my 28MM American Civil War projects, I was finally able to get out of the house for some gaming this past Friday night. I hadn’t been to the Metropolitan Wargamers club in a few weeks, so it was good to get back this weekend. I walked in to a nearly empty club — rare on a Friday night — but in quick order a few other members showed up. I had hauled along my copy of Village to introduce to the guys, but first another member suggested we have a quick run through a different boardgame I’d heard mentioned frequently at the club before —  Fire & Axe: The Viking Saga Game.

Originally published in 2004, Fire & Axe is now hard to come by and used copies can fetch over $100 at times. I’m a little surprised at the long-standing adoration this game has. Of the twenty or so games I’ve been introduced to over the past year, Fire & Axe wouldn’t be near the top of the list although it does have ease of play and short duration going for it.

The game pits 2-4 players against one another as they sail on quests to settle, conquer or trade within various regions of European seas in the backdrop of the Viking age. The game begins with each player’s ship in the Wintering Box in the northernmost edge of the map. Once a ship is loaded and launched, players choose to depart from Norway, Denmark or Sweden. The turn begins with a player choosing to perform seven actions which may include loading goods or troops to their ship, sailing across the open seas or landing in ports to engage in trade, establish a settlement or capture a city. Special “rune cards” can also be collected and played to perform a variety of actions — from strengthening your invading forces or calling on a sea monster to destroy another player’s ship.

Gold is collected throughout the game through trade, conquest and settlement. Specific missions to trade with or take over specific ports can be collected to score additional points. The missions can also have shared success where points in conquering three port cities might be split between two players. Players who complete the most missions for each of the Viking civilizations of Norway, Sweden and Denmark stand to earn additional points at the game’s end. Additionally, missions get more valuable and reach to the farthest edges of the board as the game progresses. When all missions are completed, the game ends and points are tallied.

The game progresses quickly — four of us got through a game in about 90 minutes Friday night. The game is simple to understand after a turn or two, but it all just seemed like a race without enough variety in paths to victory. For instance, I burned up a couple turns hoping to conquer three cities, but some awful die rolls sent me back to the Wintering Box as other players swept in to claim those cities. At the end of the game, another player snatched victory from the would-be winner through one final chance move that stole a few points from the guy who had led up to that point.

I’ll give Fire & Axe another shot at some point since the guys at the club seem to have a deep love for it, but for now I think I’ll be concentrating on games beyond the Viking regions of the northern seas.

New Game Weekend: Tsuro

My Saturday evening of gaming with Metropolitan Wargamers was a busy one. First, I faced off in a 20mm World War II scenario on one of the club’s sand tables, and then I played in a three-player game of Lords of Waterdeep. It was standard fun stuff on a rainy quiet night in Brooklyn.

The surprise of the evening was when one of the guys pulled a box off the shelf and asked if I wanted to play a ten-minute game. Now, most the games I’m used to playing easily take a minimum of 60-90 minutes to play, so I was more than curious as to what this mystery game might be.

The game is Tsuro, and it’s one of those magical games that is both easy and complex all at once.

Tsuro has been around for about 10 years but the game has a feel and design making it seem a part of some ancient Far Eastern culture. It’s subtitled “the game of paths,” and that’s it in a nutshell. Each of the 2 to 8 players take turns placing square tiles on the board’s grid and moving their pieces along the linking paths. When newly-laid tiles touch other player’s pieces, those players also slide their pieces on the ever-changing linked, criss-crossing and overlapping paths. The object is to keep your piece from getting routed off the edge of the board. The last player on the board wins.

I played a couple three-player games of Tsuro in rapid succession. The turns go fast, and I can see how a game played with even more people could turn into a dizzyingly-quick game as pieces slide every which-way on the board’s paths. The game has nothing to read, nothing to count and incredibly simple rules, so I could see this as a fun game for families after dinner or with a few friends on the coffee table on a Friday night.

For another look, check out Wil Weaton’s Table Top for an episode with his friends playing Tsuro and some other quick dice games. Tsuro proves that a game doesn’t have to take all day or have a zillion pieces or complicated rules to be a blast.

New Game Weekend: Village

Lately I’ve been introduced to a number of board games known collectively as “worker management” games. The main mechanic of these games involves each player’s management of their main game pieces representing workers, family members, tribespeople, etc. With varying combinations of placement and removal of these pieces from the game board, the player gains resources, acquires skills, builds structures or otherwise advances in the varying points systems set up for that particular game. The games usually employ the ability to gain additional workers or lose workers over time. Gaining workers usually involves expending more resources to maintain them but also allows a player the advantage of being able to perform more actions within the game.

Lords of Waterdeep and Tzolk’in are worker managment games within fantasy swords-and-sorcery and ancient Mayan contexts, respectively. To a lesser extent, Small World is also a worker management game, where players manage successive rising and declining races of varying expertise and strength in a quest to control the board. The latest game I’ve tried within this genre is Village which plays out in a Medieval rural village with each player managing four generations of workers through their lifecycle of birth and eventual passing.

Each player begins with their first generation of family members born into the game in their “farmyard” and then deployed to the board. Players can choose to play their pieces in various areas of the board — Crafts, Market, Travel, Church and Council. There are also is also a Harvest area and Family space where new generations fo your family are “born” into the game. Placement in each area can allow a player to gain goods, trade goods for points or otherwise earn points over time. Cubes of four colors as well as pieces representing grain, gold, oxen, horses, plows, wagons and scrolls all serve as tradeable commodities within the game. These are all used in a number of combinations to either acquire different resources or score points.

The key to Village is managing the lifespan of your family members, as placement in each area of the board winds up costing passage of life costs marked in a track of hourglasses. Once a certain amount of lifetime passes, a family member dies off and is placed either in the prominent “village chronicle” book or in a generic grave. Timing exactly when your villagers die determines your shorter term acquistion of more goods or resources and long term point score at the game’s end. Each round of the game involves a re-set of the village and an interesting “mass” at the church where players have the opportunity to move up in prestige (and score points) through their prominence of placement within the church hierarchy.

Like most other worker management games I’ve played, Village is primarily competitive with little to no opportunity for collaboration between players. There’s variety to be had as players can choose to focus on one area of the board over others to rack up points. Players also exercise a certain amount of control of the game’s pace. They can agressively move their generations through their lifecycles and rush the game to quicker finish or they can take their time and focus more on points throughout the game.

While I’ve only played two-player versions of the game thus far, I can’t wait to try a three-or-four-person game where compettion for space and prestige on the board will obviously be more competitive. The game moves fast, and in just about 60-90 minutes players can easily cycle through the rise and fall of four generations in this wonderfully imaginative Village.

New Game Weekend: Tzolk’in

This past week’s introduction to a new game came some 3000 miles away from where I typically do my gaming in Brooklyn. I was travelling in Los Angeles for work, and, like any dedicated gamer, I sought out a local gaming group with which to connect. After some online searching, I came across the Westside Gamers who bounce around each Thursday night to a different restaurant or coffee shop in the west LA area. The group typically has about a couple dozen players show up to their weekly boardgaming events, but this week’s gaming night at a Denny’s restaurant in Santa Monica had maybe 30-40 gamers in attendance, many travelling in from out of town for the weekend’s Stragicon convention on West Century Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Each week, the Westside Gamers pick a theme game, and this week it was the late-1960s bookshelf game Mr. President, chosen in honor of the upcoming President’s Day weekend. While a few players hunkered down into this four-player game where two teams of two players  each face off in a Presidential election as running mates on competing party tickets, there was plenty of other boardgaming going on around the tables and booths in the restaurant. Members of the group bring loads of games from their personal collections to their meet-ups, so there was an array of new and vintage card and boardgames to choose from in the piles scattered throughout the diner.

I teamed up with three friends — two from Alaska and one from Arizona — for an introduction to Tzolk’in, a wildly-popular Euro-style game based on the Mayan calendar. The game was introduced in 2012 and has become a gamer favorite for its interesting design and play mechanics based around a series of interlocking plastic wheels which mimic the passage of time on the Mayan calendar. The typical collection of wooden and cardboard chips, markers, cards and tiles make for a dizzying array of pieces to manage, but everything ties back neatly to the rotation of the wheels.

Like a few other Euro-style games I’ve played, such as Lords of Waterdeep and Settlers of Catan, Tzolk’in is a worker management game. Each player represents a Mayan tribe with a group of tribespeople workers to manage. In each turn, players either place or pick up one or more of their workers. Placing workers costs corn markers which are used as the primary currency in the game to pay for the health and upkeep of your tribe. Picking up a worker allows you an action such as harvesting corn or wood, gaining resources like stone or gold, building a temple, earning new technologies, paying homage to the gods or earning points through the play of a special crystal skull piece.

But about those wheels. Workers are placed on the wheels, and as each turn progresses, your workers rotate to more beneficial positions and actions. The game involves a lot of planning ahead as you balance resources gained by a worker on one wheel perhaps to be spent constructing a building or advancing a technology on another. Specific strategies seem like easy ways to win, like focusing on placing crystal skulls or earning praise of the gods in the temples. That said, the game isn’t as straight forward as just focusing on a single strategy, as the interplay among players can shift the strategy throughout the game.

Two of the guys I played with had a couple games of Tzolk’in under their belts, and their quick focus on building up stockpiles of resources and their presence in the temples allowed them to easily come out on top as we tallied points at the end of the game. About halfway through the game everything started to click for me, and I realized where I could’ve capitalized a bit more on my early game crystal skull focus rather than diversifying my gameplay. In all, Tzolk’in has quick play of about 90-minutes for four players, and I look forward to hopefully getting in a few games of this back in Brooklyn.

New Game Weekend: Spartacus

Back in the 1970s and 80s, many popular TV shows — from Happy Days and Welcome Back Kotter to Mork and Mindy and The Six Million Dollar Man — cranked out cheap, simply-designed board games. While these games were based on shows and characters we loved, in hindsight the majority of these games were horrendous in terms of gameplay. I think there’s still a copy of the Dukes of Hazzard Game at my parents’ house, but I hesitate playing it again lest I ruin my fond childhood memories.

Modern shows continue to market themselves through games, although most of these come in the form of versions of Monopoly, Operation, Life, Trivial Pursuit or other established board game brands. I’ve never seen the incredibly popular Spartacus TV show on Starz, but I’ve read about the intense levels of swords-and-sandals-themed sex and violence which make the show a must-see for a certain demographic. About a week ago I had the opportunity to play the board game based on the show with three of the guys at Metropolitan Wargamers in Brooklyn, and this is definitely not a TV board game like most others.

The game is played with 3-4 players with each player representing a “Dominus” or a “house” in the ancient Roman city of Capua where the show’s drama unfolds. The quest for ultimate control through growing your “influence” is the goal of the game through three basic turn phases — Intrigue, Market and Arena.

The “Intrigue” phase allows you to play schemes and reactions via cards that grant positive or negative effect combinations on you and/or other players. The “Market” phase provides a auction-like environment where the players secretly bid for slaves, gladiators, guards and equipment.  The “Arena” phase is where two players face-off in a bloody gladiator tournament where victors bring “favor” to themselves and “influence” to their Dominus.

Spartacus is definitely a game with pretty simple some straight-foward rules, but the rambunctious thrill in the game is in the free-wheeling buying, selling, bribery and double-crossing among players. Your slaves maintain your house resources and often grant additional side-bonuses like the ability to heal wounded gladiators or to earn extra gold by providing, ahem, special services. Combinations of gladiators and acquired equipment makes for stronger opponents within the arena. Guards provide protection from the havock that schemes can rain on your house. All along, players are trading and buying their way through the game. You might bribe a player to allow your gladiator access to the arena for a chance to score victory over a weaker player’s gladiator. Other times, you might share the rewards from a scheme with another player in exchange for  use of that’s player’s influence strength to your benefit.

I played the game with three other players which made for a great dynamic of shifting alliances. One player quickly acquired Spartacus and a full compliment battle equipment making him unstoppable in the arena, so the rest of us cut whatever side deals we could to block going up against him in hand-to-hand combat. While we were busy keeping Spartacus out of the arena, another player quietly bought, sold and traded his way into a series scehemes and slave acquisitions in the market which eventually shot him to the lead and winning with the most influence in the game.

Spartacus plays in a couple hours and has a great design with characters pulled directly from the TV show. Themes and play can be a bit raunchy and graphic at times, and while it’s not designed as a role-playing game, players may naturally gravitate toward taking on the snarling personalities of their Domini. Fan of the show or not, strap on your shield, grab your trident and head to the arena for some wild fun in ancient Rome.

New Game Weekend: Clash of Cultures

Once again, a few hours this weekend at the Metropolitan Wargamers brought me an introduction to yet another fantastically-addictive board game: Clash of Cultures.

Released just last year by Z-Man Games, Clash of Cultures (aka COC) is a civilization-building endevour where each player seeks to exert their expanding cultural influence and ultimately vies for control of the imagined world of the game. If you melded Risk, Settlers of Catan and Sid Meir’s Civilization into one game and then multiplied that times ten, you’d have something like COC.

Play begins on hexagon terrain board with much of the territory hidden and open to exploration and expansion. Each player chooses three “actions” within their turn such as exploring, developing cities, reaping resources from the land, building armies or navies and expanding their culture. You can choose to increase the happiness of your cities or exploit the citizens, with each decision bringing plusses and minuses to the results. Cultural advances in areas such as Agriculture, Warfare, Spirituality, Economics and Science provide limitless variation in how each player chooses to develop their civilization. Different Government focus – Democracy, Autocracy or Theocracy – limits and expands your ability to develop the game world in different ways. “Event” cards insert random famines, bounties, natural disasters and other far-reaching events into the game, while “Wonder” cards provide players the opportunity to focus their resources on building architectural masterpieces while scoring big points. In the end, it is points earned through expansion, building and completing “Objective” cards that wins the game.

This isn’t a casual game, and a significant commitment to a play time of a minimum of an hour per player is required. My three-player game this weekend stretched to 4+ hours, and a week ago I sat in on the end of a four-player game that had run to 5-6 hours. With hundreds of plastic miniatures, cards, resource chips and cultural advances combined with quick shifts in dominance, the game moves remarkably fast but is at the same time administratively challenging.

In the game this weekend, I chose to focus on a massive defensive military build-up (those are my red soldiers filling the center of the board in the photo above).  Another player sank all his resources into building monumental wonders like the Great Pyramids and Great Gardens. The third player held half the territory while likewise building his armies and exploring coastal areas at the edge of the board. In the end, I acted too late with my superior military might and watched as several cities fell into the control of the third player who snuck through the middle in the final turns for a win.

At its heart, it’s the variety that’s making COC so wildly popular at the club in Brooklyn right now. Each game provides an opportunity to try out a different strategy and to see how each new culture clash plays out anew.

New Games Weekend: Small World & Lords of Waterdeep

The first weekend of the New Year brought me an intro to two new games – Small World and Lords of Waterdeep. Both games are based in a fantasy realm with the mechanics of a Euro boardgame, and each offer a different take on some fast-paced group play of control and development of an imaginery world.

Small World

You can pick up a copy of Small World at specialty game shops and in book stores like Barnes & Noble. The game has been around for about three years, but my brother just tipped me off to it being a great game to play with a mix of kids and adults in about an hour-and-half’s time.

Small World comes with four maps on two game boards comprised of different regions of hills, fields, forests, mountains and water areas. Players take on the role of some 14 races including Elves, Humans, Giants, Dwarves, Amazons, Sorcerers and Ghouls. Each race comes combined with one of twenty random special powers such as Commando, Diplomat, Alchemist or Flying. Using a combined special power and race, each player spreads out across the board occupying regions, fighting other races and scoring coins toward victory. Once a race becomes over-extended, a player marks that race in “decline” and selects a new race.

The nearly endless permutations of races and special powers creates immense replay value in the game. One turn, you may have Diplomat Dwarves battling Flying Ratmen. A few turns later, Hill Giants and Mounted Haflings may be vying for control of the board. The art and combinations of races and special powers make Small World funny, fierce and a great entree for players new to strategy boardgames.

Lords of Waterdeep

I spent Saturday afternoon at the Metropolitan Wargamers club in Brooklyn, and the guys turned me on to my first game of Lords of Waterdeep. Longtime D&D players know Waterdeep to be one of the main cities within the storied Forgotten Realms campaign. The Lords of Waterdeep, released just last year, takes the history of Waterdeep as a jumping-off point for a strategy boardgame that can be played by 2-5 players in about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

You begin the game as a Lord with two agents in your employ. Using these agents, you recruit parties of thieves, warriors, priests and wizards to complete Quests selected from a pile a cards. Along the way you also gain and play Intrigue cards which can be used to block or reward other players as loyalties shift. As you complete quests, construct buildings and reap gold, the play quickly switches-up throughout the game as your opportunity to change the turn order and grow your pool of agents and influence.

My first go-around with the game was with a group of experienced players, yet I quickly picked up on the raucous tone of the game as competition grew more heated yet good-natured. Five players seemed a bit cumbersome, and the other guys said a 3-4 person game is ideal. I’d recommend Lords of Waterdeep for veteran strategy gamers looking to bang out a quick, fun game or for a group of players who are looking to graduate from a game like Small World.