Rebels with a Cause

Dantooine is too remote to make an effective demonstration -
but don't worry; we will deal with your rebel friends soon enough. 

Just being honest: if I had access to a Death Star, I don't know if I could act with the same cold restraint with which Grand Moff Tarkin acted. And now, for the first time ever, thanks to the creative geniuses at Fantasy Flight Games, I can have a Death Star! I can indiscriminately blow planets to pieces! I too can give Obi Wan Kenobi a headache from all the millions of voices suddenly crying out in terror and suddenly being silenced. For now, I have a copy of an "investment" game that I've long had my eyes on: Star Wars Rebellion!

Background

Here's how it started: well, wait. I actually started by reading some gushing reviews along the lines of "OMG play this game immediately." Truth be told, I should just point to that review at that link and just drop the mic. But I have a blog and an ego, so...  After that review, I saw that game time and again at my favorite game store in town. There it sat, staring at me. Beckoning. Requiring. But...the price tag. But...who'd play with me? But...

And then along came a bucket-list trip for me. I've long wanted to get to  GenCon. And finally, early in August, I got the chance to hang out with my most favoritest nerds during the "best 4 days in gaming" and lose myself like a kid in games and game demos and game playing and meal-missing and caffeine-chugging.  I was surrounded by My People in an environment where we can let our nerd flags fly proudly.

GenCon demo with my favorite dorks

Fantasy Flight - one of my favorite publishers of some of the best games I own - have come up with a series of games that allow gamers to interact with the Star Wars universe at any level they wish. Star Wars Imperial Assault is troop-based ground combat. Star Wars X-Wing is fighter-based combat using beautifully-painted minis of your favorite Star Wars fighters (X- and Y- Wings, B-Wings, TIE of every flavor, etc). Star Wars Armada is capital-ship combat between the behemoth starships like Star Destroyers and Mon Calamari Star Cruisers (little fighters are now itty-bitty squadron-sized minis), highly-detailed and beautifully rendered. And finally, there's what you see here: Star Wars Rebellion. This is the whole war, the whole time period around the first-3-movies-that-are-the-second-3. Ships and planets and troops and Death Stars and all your favorite generals and admirals and heroes and villains.

And so all those questions and second-guesses from seeing that lovely box at my game store were washed away in the environment and hype and joy of a gaming convention, and home I came with a 10-pound game in a bag on your arm.

Review

This is a game for 2, 3, or 4 players. I loved the competitive/cooperative feel for the game. 2 players is simple: Empire versus Rebellion. As you add more players, each new player picks a side and it becomes a 2-on-1 or a 2-on-2 battle, complete with cooperation between partners.

Game-play is not that complicated. Each player gets mission cards, and assigns a well-known Hero like Darth Vader or Han Solo to do it. Then: you do it. Sometimes it's automatic, sometimes, the other player tries to oppose it, each of you rolling a number of "successes" on the supplied dice. Each player, one after the other, can also put famous characters in systems in order to activate that system to move troops and ships into it. If there are badguys there, fight. If not, enjoy the view.

Look at all those chances
for millions of voices to cry out

What's the point?

If I'm the Rebel player, I'm doing missions that sully the reputation of the Empire (like shooting all their Storm Troopers off a planet or blowing up a Star Destroyer), and waiting for a moment in the game where you have essentially waited-out the Empire. The game has a time tracker. Time tracker runs out, game over for the Empire.

If I'm the Empire, I'm in a mad dash to find the Rebel base and shoot all the Rebels I see. If I find the base and land on it and beat the Rebels, I win. If I find the base and stick a Death Star next to it and blow it up, I win. But again, if the Rebels wait me out, keep the base a secret, and essentially embarrass the Empire enough (Geez, these little upstarts keep blowing up fearsome ships and punching Imperials in the face...the Empire must suck...), the Rebels win.

There's more fun to it: there's probe droids, capturing and interrogating leaders, turning people to the Light or Dark, blowing up planets with Death Stars, blowing up Death Stars, blowing up.... It's a fun way to participate directly in, and even maybe change the "history" of, one of the most famous and beloved stories of all time.

My only complaint: the combat system is a tad clunky. We had to refer to the rulebook a lot during battles, and then had to refer to a separate (but included) document on rules clarifications a few times. Once we got the hang of it, we got it. But it took several combats before we really felt it. It's a slightly more cumbersome take on Risk's system of successes-versus-successes. That alone isn't so bad, but when you add-in multiple colors of dice, and some ships or troops can only be damaged by certain colors of dice...you get a little clunky.

But that complaint is far, far outweighed by being able to  get so deeply involved in Star Wars.

As for age-appropriateness of game-play: my 11-year-old and I played a game recently.

I believe this picture sums-up how that went...

He's grounded now

A light and fun family game this is not. This is a gamer's game, made for gamers, by gamers. It's an investment in both money and time, and is a few steps complicated enough that it helps to have some solid "I've played a zillion different games" experience under your belt to really grasp the play. If you've played Axis and Allies, you'll get this game. That said, a mild gamer could learn this game very quickly from an experienced gamer and realize some fun and success (just refer to that picture...).

All in all, I recommend this game as among the most interesting, detailed, and fun I've played. The cooperative/competitive multi-player approach is really wonderful. You'll not play this game at a warm, couple-y game night; this is 4 friends, beers, and a Saturday. Or your 11 year old Star Wars fan whose deft planning foils the mighty Empire and secures a better, less blown-up future for the galaxy!

A Better Take on an Old Classic

Kids across America were, at one point in our lives, around the time where Sorry stopped being fun and Yatzee was still confusing and mildly dumb, introduced to a classic board game; a game that ended friendships. A game that strained familial relations. One of the first games (outside of Chess) with minis and a currency. A game introduced by a parent or a grandparent with a sly grin on a rainy evening. That game:

Monopoly.

And then one day, after you beat your younger sibling for the ten-thousandth time, after your uncle or dad beat you for the 100th time, and after you got introduced to games like this and this, you realized that Monopoly got one thing right: it put the MONO in monotony.

I really used to love Monopoly, and we own several copies of several different variations (from regular to Junior to Bugs Bunny to Empire). But as I have said before, we live in a golden era of table-top and board games. Never before has there been such a massive variety of games of various complexities, each one relaying less and less on randomness (though that random roll is still of high importance) and more and more on strategic or cooperative thinking.

Monopoly relies so heavily on the randomized die-roll that there is a point in a game at which victory is unequivocally certain for one player and defeat unavoidable by the rest. The holes in the gameplay become apparent, and the strategy, unlike chess, is fairly straightforward. Though it is possible to win without the vaunted Boardwalk-Park Place bank-breaker, those properties are key, and those properties go to the person who rolls the right rolls, largely.

For those of you who tire of Monotony's monotonousness, but you really want a game wherein property, property value, and a race to build income-rich monopolies are exciting, allow me to direct you to:

Machi Koro!

Cards and "coins," that's all the game is. No meeples or minis or game boards. The cards are arranged in numeric order (numbers on the top of the cards), and each small stack of cards is either a resource or business. Thus, every player gets a chance to have access to resources, but the resources are finite and a player could easily corner the market, so to speak.

Every turn, each player  - up to 4 players - rolls one or, later, up to two dice. The die roll "activates" a resource for whomever controls it...sort of like landing on a property in Monopoly. Some resources pay everyone, some pay the person who rolled it, some make the person who rolled it pay.

What do you do with this money?

Either buy more resources or business in your burgeoning little town in order to make more money, or save your money to buy 1 of 4 landmarks (a train station, a shopping mall, an amusement park, and a radio tower....why those 4 things somehow signify an advanced city, I'll never know, but it matters little). Every player starts with all 4 landmarks "under construction." The first player to buy all 4 landmarks wins!

As you can see, there are several similarities to Monopoly, including the accumulation of properties and wealth, making money off of other players who roll your property, and even buying-up the scarce resources (from wheat fields to bakeries to restaurants and cafes). There still exists even the ever-essential-in-gaming randomized die roll. But beyond that, the similarities end. There is complex strategy in which resources you buy and when to build - or not - your landmarks. Do I buy all the 3 &4, 7 & 8 die roll resources, or a gob of 1 and 2, 11/12 resources? can I win simply by making people pay me, or is there a balance?

Our growing little towns...the race is on between Dom and I!

Here's the key: this is very family-friendly. My 8-year-old twins understand the rules, and understand the basics of the strategy well enough that Dominic was within 1 coin of getting the 4th landmark before I did. All 3 of us had 3 of 4 landmarks within just a few turns of one another. It was a close game, but nobody got blown-out. There are winners and losers, but the losing players are bankrupted and beaten into submission; it's a race, and it's a close one, even if your resource and business cards are scant. Its replayability is very high; we played 2 games in a little under an hour.

There are 2 expansions out for the game as well: Harbor, an Millionaire's Row. More variation, more cards, more landmarks, more game, same easy theme with fun illustrations.

This isn't your father's Monopoly, and that's just fine. Family-friendly, kid-friendly, and quick and easy enough that if you have people over for a game night, they'll be playing in no time and even have a shot as a novice at winning.

The Game of the Path

Wil Wheaton's TableTop, soon to start its 3rd season on YouTube, is one of my sources of awesome games (and one of my sources of lazy Sunday morning entertainment). Manhy of the games I've played with my family and friends have come from either that channel or my good friend Greg (one of our contributors on Gamer Dad).

It was TableTop in which I discovered this morning's game: Tsuro: the Game of the Path.

Tsuro is an impressively elegant game that is easy enough for my 6-year-olds to learn and even be competitive. The premise is simple: each player controls a little dragon. Starting from the edges of the board, each player in turn simply places tiles and moves their dragon along the path the tile creates. The more tiles that are placed as the game goes along, the longer each meandering path takes. The goal is simple: through strategic placement of tiles, force your opponents' dragons off the edge of the board and be the last dragon standing.

Beware! The longer the paths get, the more and more likely it is for you to have no other choice but to move your own piece off the board! Being too clever by half is certainly a pitfall for players.

This is a wonderful family game. One game takes maybe 20 minutes to play, and the twins stayed engaged because they could participate directly (rather than "help mom and dad") and enjoyed the challenge of making winding paths and moving their pieces along (and ours if we were unlucky enough to be on a tile that their new tile touched). In one sitting, all 5 of us played twice and 3 of us played a third time, all in less than an hour.

The game is built for 2-8 players, which is perfect for our family of 5. Though the box says it is rated for ages 8+, again, the twins (at 6) were not only heavily engaged, but Jacob won the first game!

As an aside, I love the artwork for this game. The simple, elegant lines of the cards and even the script suggest the swooping, graceful paths of flight of birds of prey, and the drawings and colors are rich and vivid. The game is as much a pleasure to look at as it is to play.

Simple, fast enough for short attention spans, and strategic enough to be puzzling and interesting, I highly recommend Tsuro.

A Lesson in Extinction

The by-line of the game is: It's a World of (S)Laughter After All!

And that pretty much sets the tone for the game Small World; one simple letter spells the difference between humor and death. 

In this fantastic game, each player (from 2 - 6) controls one randomly-drawn "race" of beings that has one randomly-drawn special ability. Players go head-to-head, conquering open territories and accumulating victory points. The player with the most victory points at the end of the appointed number of turns (5 turns for a 2 player game, 10 for a 3 player game, etc) is the winner. Simple game, simple rules.

The nuances are anything but simple. In fact, they're complex and change a great deal all depending on the race and special ability each player draws. Uniquely, and entirely unlike most strategy games whereby leaving yourself too thin is a sure way to lose, Small World almost encourages players to over-extend their reach. Go ahead and take multiple territories! March your Orc Commandos or Halfling Berserkers into as many open or occupied territories as you wish! Spread out! Conquering empty territories is easy - you just need 2 troops. Conquering enemy territories is easy - you just need one more troop attacking than they have in the territory. 

And then, here's the fun part: make your race go extinct. Overextend your Dragon Master Amazons on purpose, and then flip them over to "put them in decline." You get a new race the next turn...and you still get the victory points from the territories your old race occupies while your new race gobbles up more!

Isaac's Ghouls battle my Sorcerer's and my brother's Halflings

This world gets really crowded, really quickly. Small World.

The basic box gives you 4 different game boards (for the 2, 3, 4, and 5 & 6 player games), a load of races and everything you need to get greedy. A few expansions are available with some new, fun races and special abilities and expanded game boards for an even more crowded little world.

Backstab your buddies. Backstab yourself! This game is no end of fun, especially given all of the possible combinations between races and abilities. Diplomat Skeletons? Been there. Bivouacking Trolls? Done that.

Isaac, my 9 year old, completely understands the game and is quite good at it (we started playing when he was 8). It's still juuust a bit beyond my 6 year olds, but they like to "help" another older player, and they like to laugh at the utterly ridiculous race/ability combos. At 6, they miss some strategic points and honestly don't read quite well enough to read the race and ability cards. A lot of reading in this game.

I highly recommend this game for families, especially with gamer kids starting around 8 years old. It is perfectly absurd, hilarious, a great intro to turn-based strategy games, and a wonderful way to pass an hour to an hour and a half on  rainy day.

The picture above is a wonderful view of the game. Humans in decline as Berserk Halflings rise, Sorcerers in decline just before a new race is picked, and some Ghouls pre-decline. You see a whole list of available races/abilities to the right of the board, from which players pick as they put their current race in decline.

I am the King of Tokyo

From atop the smoldering ruins of Edo castle, Meka Dragon lets forth a fiery blast of mechanically made flame.

For once, the dice favor me.  I have rolled four little claws to deal damage to all the other monsters battling me over Tokyo.  With a sinister glare I remind my kids, my opponents, that I have the Fire Breathing card in play and my neighbors both take an extra point of damage.  With a sigh of relief they think they'll get another turn to unseat me.  Then I reveal my evolution,  Mecha Blast, which adds two more points of damage to my attack, for a total of seven damage.  Alienoid was resting on 7 health, and now he rests in peace.  Boogey Woogey still felt safe sitting on 6 health, but he too was reduced to ash, leaving only Meka Dragon standing.  Neither of my kids could deny that I was the King of Tokyo....Well, at least for a few minutes.

I picked up King of Tokyo a couple months ago and my family and I have been playing ever since.  We enjoy it so much that I carried it to Florida in my carry on and we played several games every morning for a week.  And everyone played, my wife, all four kids and myself.  Not in every game, but we all played!

The premise is easy, everyone is playing a giant monster attacking Tokyo.  Two stats define your monsters Health and Victory points.  Your health hits Zero and you're out. Your Victory points hit 20, you win.  Now, during the game you can purchase cards which affect how your monster plays.

Game play is driven by dice..  Each turn you start with six dice, all of which are the same.  The sides  are 1,2,3, Energy, Damage and Health. Yatchzee style, you get an original throw of all the dice and two rerolls of any or all dice.  When you are done rolling you collect what you rolled. EAMPLE: You end with two dice showing Energy, three dice showing twos and the last die showing three, (E, E, 2, 2, 2, 3) you would collect two Energy tokens and two victory points as the Numbers on the dice need to be collected in triplicate.  So the last die showing three is wasted.  (In one lucky roll, my wife rolled 1,1,2,2,3,3 and earned nothing and discovered the worst possible roll of the dice...!)

So you damage your foes, heal yourself, collect victory points and energy.  Energy is used to buy cards.  The cards are what make the monsters different.  With enough energy collected you can purchase cards like Extra Head, roll an extra die on your turn...(The game comes with two extra dice.)...Nova Breath which allows your attacks to damage all other monsters...Rapid Healing allows you to swap Energy for Health.

And that is about it, there are a couple mechanics I didn't cover like controlling Tokyo, but when it all boils down it is FUN, simple game that the whole family can enjoy.  Roll the dice and spend your resources to become the King of Tokyo!

Since the game release, two expansions have been released to add to the original game.

The first one is Power Up!

In Power Up!, we find a new character Pandakai (Who owns the Evolution, Eats, Shoots and Leaves.) and a new set of cards, Evolutions.

The Power Up expansion adds Evolution cards which help define each monster - The basic game has every monster identical except for cards, the expansion helps give each monster a "feel"...Meka-Dragon is much better at dealing damage.  The Kraken (A Cthulhu type monster.) can take advantage of his sunken temple.  The King (Only missing the Kong.) brings all monkey themed evolutions and Cyber Bunny can wield the Electric Carrot if he plays his dice right...Evolutions add a simple rule, if you roll three Hearts/Health on one turn, you draw an evolution.

The second expansion is going to be hard to find soon, as it was a limited printing for LAST Halloween.   In King of Tokyo: Halloween we find two new characters (The Pumpkin King and Boogey Woogey) complete with their own sets of Evolution cards.  There is also an orange set of dice.  At first this seemed totally frivolous to me, but after so many four player games played on the floor having a spare set of dice on the other side of the board was pretty nice.

The Halloween expansions also introduces costumes.  A monster can wear one costume at any given time, and each costume changes your monster a little.  Wearing the Astronaut?  You win at 17 victory points instead of 20.  Wearing a Vampire costume?  Then you heal one point when you damage another monster.

Overall, I cannot recommend this game enough...Easy..Fun..Accessible for all the gamer levels in your house.

**UPDATE**
On Greg's recommendation, the Smitty clan bought the game as well.  Since then, less than a week ago, we've played several times already.  This game is an absolute hoot.

Giga Zaur wins the day

Thing 2 was the Smitty clan's first official winner, with Thing 1 being the most recent.  I...still haven't beat my kids.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

Gale-force winds blew chilling rain at steep, stinging angles. The gray sky overhead managed to be both depressing and menacing, inspiring a general sense of loathing that only Michigan weather can achieve.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

The recipe was perfect, then, for chaos in the house.  Boys on the edge, casting sideways glances mixed with mistrustful snarls. The situation needed to be defused.

What better way, then, to head-off chaos and insanity and back-stabbing than by a game which is based on: chaos and insanity and back-stabbing! Steve Jackson Games Cthulhu Dice (the maker of one of our family-favorite games, Zombie Dice) saved the interior of our house while simultaneously destroying our collective sanity - more constructively than where the boys were headed!

The goal of the game is simple: you try to destroy or steal your enemy cultists' sanity (those red stones) while hoarding and protecting your own.  All it takes is to declare your target cultist, and a simple roll of the beautiful metal die. The symbol that comes up defines what happens to your prey.  But beware: your target...gets to retaliate! Worse: every now and then, nobody wins but Cthulhu himself.

The boys - as young as they are - easily understand this game, and in a household with the propensity to explode into testosterone-laden violence when too pent-up, this game is a hilarious way to get "revenge" on all of the perceived breakfast table slights, back seat sitting-too-closes, and room entrance violations.  Highly recommended; a single game takes 5 - 10 minutes so it's easy to do a best-of-5 or best-of-7.

FYI: one of the twins - 5 (nearly 6) years old - was the winner of our best-of-7 challenge.  The rest of us were driven insane as J towered above us, a paragon of sanity...and cruelty.

I'm so proud.

Not Your Father's Risk

It's a "gateway game."

It's the game from whence all other strategy games derive.

It's Axis and Allies' dad.  It's Smallworld's grandpa.  It's Settlers of Catan's great uncle.

It's Risk.  And my oldest is finally old enough to play it. This was a momentous day. He's actually younger than what the box says the recommended age is, but Gamers know those recommendations to be lies.  The moment one of our offspring shows interest in a Big Game and the capacity to think even remotely strategically, we're busting-out dice.

Classic Throwdown

But we know it's delicate.  We can't scare them off right away with Axis and Allies; too young, and all they want to do is play with (and lose) all the airplanes and tanks and ships. But clearly, Monopoly is for weaklings and people who really don't enjoy gaming. It's not about easing them into it; for Gamers, it's all-in. It's about finding the right game that takes their mild interest in gaming and explodes it into weekend-long Diplomacy sessions over Christmas break. Risk is one of those perfect "gateway games."

Now: that's an older pic. That was taken well before Christmas, 2013.  But true to its "gateway" nature, Smitty Junior took one look at the next level of game, and insisted on jumping in.  No longer content with simple Risk (though we still play it and he's giving me runs for my money, which freaks me out), we've now entered a whole new world of complicating factors with:
Risk GodStorm.

With a third, neutral army, this contest is a confrontation between the Egyptian pantheon - unfortunately ousted from Egypt - and the Norse pantheon - unfortunately with Thule stricken by the loathed Plague marker.  Minor setbacks for Ra and Odin as they battle over 5 short epochs for control of humanity (I was surprised; I thought Ike would have picked the Greeks, and I was torn between the Norse and the Celts. Nobody GAF about the Babylonians).

This is the first time I've opened this game in 6 or 7 years, and Junior's first time ever.  I've made a few tactical mistakes, and that little bugger has taken advantage of them.  But like the title of the post says: this ain't your daddy's Risk. This version has twists and turns: gods can change the tide of a battle, and can bestow a number of enchanted artifacts and miracles. Just when the age-old Risk tactics seem to have your opponent on the ropes...BAM: the dead walk again, the living crumple to dust, sea lanes become impassable, just to name a few. And this kid? He gets it.  He sees when it's time to deploy a miracle.  Heck, he spread himself thin just to take a serious beating, which in turn put enough of his troops into the Underworld (on the left side of the game board with the colored blobs around it) that he commands it completely. Shrewd move, padawan.

In which I nearly lost to a kid under 10

But alas.  The game lasted every step of the 5 Epoch game - by points alone, it was a tie - but ultimately the Vikings prevailed over the Egyptians. Ra and Set, Osiris and Isis; that venerable quatrain were forced to kneel to the might of Odin's power, Loki's secrets and tricks, Freya's mystery...and Thor's hammer.

Better luck next time, bud.  And I'm sure "next time" isn't far off...