Holiday games played

by barry Doublet

Christmas and new year gaming

IF you would rather listen, instead of read this blog, there is a video at the end you can listen to instead.

Enjoy

The 7th Citadel (Total plays 23:Played once solo)

Previously in this very long adventure...You are going to have to go back and watch/read my other blogs. So, going back into the citadel after a few bad adventures that left me and the survivors of my settlement a bit battered, was put on a high note after the following chapter. I knew what I had to do. I knew where I had to go because of the description in the story plus the use of the map that I had been building up. This was going to be a cakewalk. Maybe too much of a cakewalk!!! In the previous story, I had learnt to just walk to my destination and not get distracted by the shiny things that popped up along the way or the interesting holes that were begging me to put my hand into. When every I could and whenever possible, I put my head down and walked the walked. Discarding events that could be.

The adventure started to pick up and what followed was a action scene followed by another actions scene. I made the choice to go deep and burn through my deck to get to that slightly out of reach thing. Not every action was successful but I did arrive at the good ending with plenty of life points remaining. But in hind sight, may I should have used a bit of that energy earlier to see what those shiny things were or what WAS down that hole. Walking away from a chapter, not happy just because you got there safely in the end. But with some extra gear would have been a bonus...

Then the following chapter, it all fell apart. Could not find what I needed to find while desperately searching and almost exhausting my characters life points to "0". So I went back to base, which lead to reading the paragraph of this "choose your own adventure" I hate the most. YOU ADVENTURE ENDS HERE. Man! I was aggressively organizing the cards back into place. When you you invest 10 or more hours in a game only to hit a dead end and have to start from the beginning, the frustration blew me over. Is a Fighting Fantasy book, these endings were very frequent. These story did very little to give you clues that turning left would drop you down a deathly spike trap or trying to reason with a vampire that just leaps and feasts on you. Game over. Where this game does give you pointers and advise. But sometimes you don't see it until you replay it. And I hated that with the book, re reading the same paragraphs over and over, like living a Groundhog day. Hence, I won't be coming back to this for a long while. I now now what to do and not to do, but don't want to re read everything again over a 10 hour period.

Dropping from 9 :star: to 8 :star:

Youtube Video

Heroscape: Battle for the Wellspring (Total plays 3:Played once with 7 year old)

This is not my first rodeo with Heroscape. 1 play of this NEW version but 50 odd plays with the original version that came out in the 90's

Heroscape is a skirmish game. You build a battlefield, draft your armies, chose a scenario and GO! This game has great toy factor. And the more you own, there better it is. Each of the expansions has very small changes to the terrain rules, or glyphs that give powers and most importantly new characters.

This is just a small expansion, something easy to set up and play with mini me at a whims notice. We play a basic game because the characters have two mode. Basic mode has one set of stats (move, attack, distance, defence) and only one life point. Where as the master version has slightly different stats, more life points and special actions that they can perform. I have play most of my games of this in basic mode because of the kids. So I can speak for them when I say that this is a great game.

Building the terrain = fun.
Picking the cool figures = fun.
Kicking dad's ass = fun.

This can be a light fun game with your kids or take it up a notch when you play with them later or friends. Basic game is getting up close and launch dice in hopes of eliminating your opponents. Master mode... More tactile, as you use the terrain to your advantage, your special actions to out blast your enemy. And the different scenarios to do more than just wipe out the other player. Maybe have an objective. Again the more you own, the more interesting the game gets and can be more than just a 2 player battle. More players can be added. I look forward to getting more of this and adding it to my collection.

9 :star:

Youtube Video


Era: Medieval Age[/thing] (Total plays 21:Played once with 7 year old)

A game that little Robin dug out to play. A dice rolling, construction game. You could say a roll n write, but that would be an insult to this game. As you are building a city with very sweet buildings into a gridded board but the dice results you obtain dictate what resources, attacks and number of building you can perform that turn.

With a mild bit of interaction from fighting over the buildings you want to build from a limited pool, attacking and defending your city from your neighbours. Plus from lucky/unlucky rolling of your dice that may permit to scorching their terrain, preventing them from building in spaces on their board. This is a slight tower defence game with vast resource/dice management system and 2 dimensional planning, as you try your best to get as many points from the buildings constructed in your realm. Feeding your workers and getting new ones is a fine line that you will be balancing as more worker give you more possibilities but making sure they are fed otherwise you'll losing points.

A game that has just the right amount of luck and strategy to stop it being annoying. Different paths to victory and ways to play with your dice to use them to their maximum potential, makes this a repayable puzzle game. Highly enjoy as it ticks so many boxes.

9 :star: (and Robin beat me)

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Zombicide (first edition)[/thing] (Total plays 16:Played twice with 7 year old)

A very fun, coop game that my son insists on playing. Giving us chance to chat and plan our movements and actions. Playing with 6 heroes kinda makes the game a little easy to get around the board safely as we distribute the kills that equal XP. Having a higher EX means more zombies spawn, making the game even harder.

A very simple action point system, that sees you moving survivors around the board, collection arms and using them to off the undead. We have a bucket load of characters that all have slightly variable powers that you have to take into consideration as they lighten the load of problems that you have on your tail while you complete your objectives. The game doesn't outlive it's welcome, being around an hour per scenario. Art and minis are really cool and not too grotesque for the young. I can not wait to play as Batman to take our a zombified Superman.

9 :star:

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Glow[/thing] (Total plays 9:Played once with 7 year old)

This light dice rolling adventure, I use to take too seriously. Putting a lot of thought and planning into each outing that we undertook. But after have really bad final scores, sometime being more than 50 points behind third place, I would get frustrated with the game. But now I have realized that this is just a LIGHT activity, as you game leans more on the dice rolling than your strategic picks of other heroes you recruit or the dice you save.

The game is about the 8 days that you spend recruiting 8 other heroes to help you bring light back into the world. A nice fantasy theme where one player, the one who collects the most light, will have bards writing songs about them and live on in infamy. Each hero you recruit has their own baggage/power/malediction that you will hopefully use to collect footsteps (jokers), light (points) and reroll tokens. As having only one roll of the dice you have collected may not produce the results you require. You can also lose light/points to reroll dice until you get what you want or see how far back you've crawled on the point track.

The great thing about the game is the dice rolling, the results you get and the fact that you use these results multiple times to activate your other heroes powers and to traverse the world, collecting light. Having a few successful first few rounds will give you a leg up in the game, but there is always an opportunity to catch up. Ganging up on a leading player is also a possibility as you draft heroes at the beginning of every round. Taking the most advantageous hero, either because they give you more dice or have a power that you can achieve easily can help you catch up. As well as hinting to the current player to take one instead of the other to screw over the leader, is always a gigglesome thing to do. And I now believe that this game game is created to have a gigglesome time with dice and should not be taken to seriously. Since I fell upon this theory, I have been enjoying the game more. Playing wildly with no strategy but purely for the fun.

7:star:

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Ghost Blitz[/thing] (Total plays 3:Played once with 6 players)

New year party game. Played this smaller version of the game with 5 objects and not the larger Ghost Blitz: 5 to 12 that has 7 objects. Very easy to teach while player. Some players were head scratching at the beginning but quickly took up the baton and turned up the pressure on us experienced gamers, as they begain to quickly swipe up the correct object that was or not represented in the image. 5-10 minutes of fun were had.

8 :star:

Youtube Video


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Pluckin' Pairs (aka Qui Paire Gagne)[/thing] (Total plays 9:Played once with 6 players)

The pleasure of simply pairing up 11 random images of object in some cohesive manner that you hope others will think of, under the pressure of a timer is what this game about. A gameshow feel is what I get from this every time. Extremely easy to teach. While explaining the game, some players could not se the game in the game until we started scoring the first round. And then... BOOM! Giggling at others started.

Yes, it is a simple premises but it can lead to deeper understandings of the though process of others. As the fun in the game is, not scoring lots of points because lots of the other players made the same pair as you but in the explanations of "why" someone paired those images. Sometimes it logical. Sometime it's chaos. Sometime is ridicules. A game that doesn't outlive it's time at the table and is great with groups.

8 :star:

Youtube Video

Outlivel (Total plays 7:Played once solo)

I was feeling in the dumps and got this out and recapped the rules while playing. There is a solo version of the game that is very easy to interact with, as it's a small deck of cards that tells you where the opponent teams move to.

The ultimate worker placement game in my opinion. As it's about moving your 4 teams onto other spaces that you are not already occupying. This leads to some devious calculations as you need those same resources that you picked up last time, but now have to shuffle about and get a different team to search for them. And hopefully there will be some left, as your opponent could possibly take a vast majority of them before you arrive. Timing and planning is the key here. Also, if you send a small team of 3 to collect 3 things, another player could send a larger team to the same location and bully you into giving over some of your loot. Unless you have some ammo to back you up and hold them off.

This is only part of this post apocalyptic game. Scavenging for resources and food. The other part is managing your shelter. Which includes, staving of the radiation that seeps in through the air ducks, feeding your people, building rooms and manning them and repairing items that were found on the surface. Rooms and items are power up to be more efficient in the world. Helping scavenge more loot, helping against radiation, generally break some of the rules to give you a foot up and score more points.

The game is more about forward planning, and not so much the shocks of something new happening and devastating your plans. That can only be done with the other players taking what you want. Play with the AI was ok. Good for if you want to learn how to play. A game doesn't take too long either. Around an hour. 6 rounds of scavenging and base building and then it's over. With so many random hero characters and events, to the many items that can be repaired and rooms to be built, this game has a lot of legs. The underwater expansion hasn't been touched yet. I can't wait to play with a group again, this fantastic worker placement game in a fallout world.

10 :star:

Youtube Video

The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow (Total plays 1:Played with 8 players)

We use to play Werewolf at school with a class of 28 students, were 2 of those students were Werewolves. It was fun, as long as you were not the first one killed. Not being killed was interesting as you were trying to guess who were the Werewolves and who would be killed next. If you were killed, you had the joy of watching you class friends and enemies play while you could see the carnage of wrong guesses and finger pointing.

This version was not the same. Maybe it was the smaller group? Maybe it was because their were some strangers to me (my daughter school friends)? Maybe it was the alcohol? But it was not fun. Some players didn't understand what they were supposed to do (my wife) and some players forgot what their roll was (me) because the roll card you are handed has just abstract art on it. No text. Remembering which card is which is a bit of a problem. And if you ask, you break the game.

There are more rolls in this version. Hunter. Seer. Cupid.... Not just the wolfs themselves. Not particular difficult to learn over a little time. But time we didn't have as players were not really understanding the game and didn't want top play. So this game didn't go down well. So I'm not going to rate it as I know it's a OK game, but we had a bad time playing.

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WolfWalkers: The Board Game[/thing] (Total plays 8:Played once with 7 year old)

A co-op game, it can be semi co-op too, where a die roll tells you what to do and hopefully what tiles to reveal, giving you the chance to buy them. Sounds dull but there is some magic and charm in this film tie in game.

The die will tell you which space to go to, but you have to walk down each path open to you to decide which is more beneficial for you and the group. Traveling some roads may give you currency to buy revealed tiles while other may put you in a space that allows you to reveal 1 or 2 tiles for purchase. Some tiles when revealed will move the guards, who will block your path, preventing movement down some routes. Maybe even arriving at your hideout and making your family fail it's quest of finding the wolf spirt. 3 tiles, a head, body and tail. If collected, will win you the game. But to shake it up, there are 3 coloured wolf spirts.

There are a selection of tiles with different ability's that can make your playthrough from very simple to a bit challenging. Great for very young children and slightly older. We had fun in a race to be the first to find the spirt. Winner being not me :D

7 :Star:

Youtube Video

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