Magic: Archenemy

You might remember that in the past I did an episode of the show looking at Planechase, a new way to play Magic: The Gathering. I loved it then, and I still love it now.

So it’s exciting to see that there’s a new multiplayer variant for Magic coming out this month. It’s called “Archenemy”, and lets one player play a Big Bad who is tasked with destroying all of his opponents.

You can read all about it HERE, but you can be sure I’ll be looking at it in more detail if I get my hands on it.

CHOOSE, WEAKLING! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Looks amazing, no?

I Heart Tom Vasel

Tom Vasel is my hero. Just wanted to say.

See, Tom Vasel is also a board game reviewer. If there’s a game out there, he’s reviewed it. And he’s brilliant at it. He also seems to be a lovely man. A family man.

I love him. Here’s one of the reasons.

A couple of months ago he reviewed a terribly dry Eurogame called Vasco da Gama, and he didn’t like it. This meant that he incurred the wrath of fans of that game. You know the kind of thing. That ridiculous internet outrage that we so often see when someone has the balls to speak their own mind.

Here’s Tom’s brilliant, beautiful response:

DowntimeTown – Dixit

The bold Dixit!

DowntimeTown – Dixit from Robert Florence on Vimeo.

ZOZ!

Thank Frazetta

Sigh.

Frank Frazetta passed away recently.

I first became familiar with Frazetta’s work when I saw the cover of a fantasy novel my sister’s boyfriend was reading. I must have been nine or ten years old. I can’t remember the name of the book, but the image is fresh in my mind. A muscular hero, under a strange sky. A beautiful woman, almost naked, on her knees beside him. Her arms around his waist. Her eyes turned to him with longing. A serpent of some kind rearing up behind them. Lush, wet jungle all around.

That’s how I remember the image. But I can’t find it anywhere. I think my mind has maybe created a new image over the years, filling in the blanks, working purely on a memory of eroticism and wonder. The image was something like that, though. I can feel it.

I remember the name. Frazetta. “Who painted THIS?” I needed to know. Frazetta. Frank Frazetta. A manly name. A hero’s name. Frazetta. A sexy name. I remember thinking that Frank Frazetta must have spent a lot of time with beautiful women. I remember thinking “Wow”.

I remember trying to read the book. The words couldn’t live up to that cover. The words were dry and sexless. They say “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” They could just as easily say “Don’t let Frazetta fool you.” We’d know what it means. Frazetta could make anything look good.

When I was a teenager, and every day was an awkward climb out of a pit full of hard-ons, it was Frazetta’s women I had fantasies about. There was no internet back then, to give us disposable videos and jpegs of worried, lost, bruised women to misguidedly lust over. What I had was books. Books that fell open to special pages. Book covers that filled my head with incredible, strong women. Savage women who could fight jungle beasts. Women with lumps and bumps and curves and huge hair.

I remember thinking “Wow”.

BOOM! Nae danger!

I think Frazetta’s women were probably the main reason why I got so heavily into Fantasy fiction. Frazetta’s women led me into roleplaying games, and eventually down the path into board games, and here. I would have followed Frazetta’s women anywhere.

Frazetta showed me the truth. He showed me that women are strong, and didn’t need saved. Frazetta is the reason why I’ve been with the same girl for fourteen years now. She’s strong, too. And a bit savage. I worry for the young guys out there today, who form fantasies based on what they find on porn websites. I worry for the women they will meet.

Some say that Frazetta’s work is sexist. The words above are my response.

Thanks, Frank.

Just...sigh.

DowntimeTown Zombie Special Upcoming

Zombies. Everywhere.

Just popping in to let you know that I’m working on a Zombie special of DowntimeTown.

This will be an extra-long episode, looking at zombie themed board games.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people are drawn to zombie themed games as their first board game, so this will hopefully serve as some advice for those people.

Also, blood.

(Before then, a new DowntimeTown in the week ahead, about a wonderful, special game)

I Bought New Games

I must admit that I bought some new games at the weekend there.

One thing I bought was an expansion for a game that I’ll be covering in the next episode of DowntimeTown. That’s your only clue. Can you guess what it is? A game with an expansion. That narrows it down, eh?

Then, I bought Martin Wallace’s Brass.

It’s a game about the Industrial Revolution in Lancashire. What? Shut up.

Brass! Brass! Braaaaasss!

I was also in the market for a two-player game for me and my beloved to play. It had to be something that had us at each other’s throats. What better than a board game about the Cold War?

One of the best game covers EVER.

I will report back to you soon on these hopefully wonderful new games. Wish me luck!

ZoZ!

Zerg Crush

Not an ideal set-up, but this game is seriously big.

Didn’t get to bed until 5 in the morning last night, because of an epic session of Starcraft: The Board Game. Five of us were playing, and the game must have been almost 6 hours long. We’re a really slow group. We deliberate over every decision, heads in hands, moaning and wailing, shitting ourselves. We’re a group of players who really, really want to win.

The game took an age to set up. It was our first play, and none of the chits were even punched out of the boards beforehand. That’s very unlike me. Usually, when I get a new board game, I like to get inside and punch everything out, bag everything up, fiddle with stuff. Starcraft was a Christmas present, so I never quite got the time. That meant that yesterday I had to read the 40 page rulebook from cover to cover, punch everything out, assemble everything across two (YES! TWO!) tables, explain the whole deal to the players, and then play. So, add all the prep to the play time, and we’re talking about maybe 9 hours of Starcraft-related geekery.

But, man alive, what a game. I’ll probably talk about the game itself more at a later date, maybe even sling a video up, but I just had to scribble down my next-day feelings. It was tense and exciting from start to finish. Everyone was still upright and conscious at half four in the morning, when the last few orders were being carried out and the last few marines were being squished.

What amazed me the most was the fact that this strategy-deep, quite thinking-heavy board game still managed to feel like Starcraft. I was a Zerg player, and at the start I thought, okay, we’re all inexperienced players here. Let’s try an old-fashioned Zerg Rush! And hey, it worked! I got a conquest point victory, having spread my foul seed all over the table. In the game, I mean.

The great thing about the game is that I think everyone sort of felt that I’d won by a fair distance. But I hadn’t. I’d won by one point. If I hadn’t claimed that single Conquest Point, two other players would have been tied for a win. That’s how tight it was in the end.

Oh man. Theme, theme, theme. Loved it. LOVED IT.

LOVED IT!

Richard prepares his Yamato Gun. He's a Hot Yamato.

DowntimeTown – Summoner Wars

DowntimeTown – Summoner Wars from Robert Florence on Vimeo.

ZOZ!

DowntimeTown – Horus Heresy

The Heresy Revealed!

DowntimeTown – Horus Heresy from Robert Florence on Vimeo.

ZOZ!

Dominion Review

If you haven’t heard of Dominion, then you’ve probably just accidentally stumbled onto this site while looking for Sasha Grey videos. Anyone who has even a passing interest in tabletop gaming will almost certainly have heard about this juggernaut, this behemoth, this Dominion.

I like this game. I hate that font.

Dominion is a card game. It comes in a big old box, a “standard” sized board game box. But all that you get inside is a big stack of cards. Most of the cards are multiple copies of the same card. Your first impression when opening the box is “Oh, is this it? Oh shit. Oh shit. Should have bought Dungeon Twister 2!”

It works like this – you start with a small deck of cards, and draw some into your hand. Then you can spend cards from your hand to buy new cards from those laid out on the table. Then you discard the cards you buy. Then you discard any cards from your hand you haven’t spent. And that’s the game.

That really IS the game. When you get through your discard pile, you shuffle the whole lot into a new deck, and draw another hand. Your deck grows throughout the game, as you buy cards. Essentially, the game is the deck-building aspect of CCGs distilled into a half hour of quick thinking and strategy.

You win the game by having the most victory point cards in your deck at the end of the game. There’s a land grab for these cards near the end of the game, because the cards are entirely useless in the early part of the deck building process. You can’t spend them to buy cards, so they just clog up your deck like hateful things. And yet you need them to win. And so it becomes a game of immaculate timing. A game of judging just when to start making a dash for the prize.

So what about these cards that start on the table? The ones that you can buy? Well, some of them are treasure cards, and it’s essential to cash in regularly. For example, you can spend a few of your small change treasure cards to buy one treasure card of a higher denomination, and that will, when you get those discards reshuffled, put some extra funds into your deck. You can spend three of these…

...to get one of these.

The key thing to remember is that everything that you spend and everything that you buy goes into your discard pile and WILL come back into your deck. So you’re not really burning six coins to buy three in the example above. You’re burning six to secure nine.

Then there are the Action cards. These can be played at the start of your turn, and do various rule-breaking things. They allow you to draw more cards, offer additional opportunities to buy, additional opportunities to play Action cards and additional opportunities to fuck your opponents over.

There’s a real sense of building a little engine, a little economy machine, and in each turn you find yourself analysing the best way to get maximum productivity from your deck, and the best way to react to whatever process your opponent has in motion.

It sounds dull. I know it does. I’m sitting here explaining it and I know it sounds dull. But it isn’t. It all moves at a fair clip – draw, play cards, discard, discard, shuffle, draw. There’s a real thrill in watching your deck grow bigger with every turn, and when you’ve made some good buying decisions and find that a draw turns out a perfect little hand that you had visualised a few turns earlier, it’s as satisfying as cleaving a skull in Warhammer Quest or shooting a Genestealer in Space Hulk.

Okay, maybe not THAT satisfying.

There are 25 different Action cards in the base game, and you only ever play with 10 types at any one time. That means there’s a huge amount of replayability. The mind (okay, my mind) frankly boggles at the possibilities. Then there are the two new titles that are already on the market. Dominion: Intrigue, and Dominion: Seaside. Both introducing new cards to the game, both firmly on my Want List. This is a game that looks like it could run and run, and looks like it certainly intends to.

I’ll say one thing, though. Dominion is a fun game, but it might not be for everybody. Despite its current reputation in gaming as the monster that has forced everything else off the table, I think that there might be people out there who find it all a little bit sedate. You’ll get out of Dominion what you put into it. You’ll definitely enjoy it more if you’re the type of person who will notice the elegance of its design. It’s a gamer’s game, I think. Yep. Yep. That’s what I mean.

“It’s a gamer’s game.”

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