Formula D - the boardgame

 On a nice long boardgame night got to do a bit more Formula D. We started with Eldritch Horror, which I haven't played in months. It's a great game, but it can be grueling. I don't think we have beat the game yet. After almost 4 hours of play, with some epic moments but still kind of a slog when you can see your doom coming a mile away, you can sometimes wish you had played something else.  So Formula D was a nice, breezy and exciting thing to play afterwards. 

In the basic set, you have the choice of playing identical divers, or special personality street racers. Last week we started with the Formula D drivers and cars, but last night we wanted to try out those personalities. I like to kind of think of it as they are all pro formula drivers as a career, and our street races are us on our off hours in our personal cars. They are meant I think to primarily used on the road race board on the other side (Chicago, I think?) but last night we went ahead and raced in Monaco. 

The mechanics are fairly simple, and well researched, I think. They cover the starts, the gears, the maneuvers, and especially those tight Monaco turns around the resorts and the marinas. You try to get off to a good (or at least not disastrous) start, gear down when approaching corners (if you don't handle them properly, you can take damage to tires and brakes), and gear up in the straightaways. 

I think for the most part, when running basic Formula cars and drivers, this game probably simulates reality more than any other boardgame I know. You FEEL like you are in a legit race despite some abstractions. For example, ending your turn a prescribed number of times in a curve zone to simulate you taking the turn properly, or the pit stop only delaying you ever so slightly if you need a tire change. But otherwise its reality based. 

Reality goes a little fantasy in a street race out of your Formula 1 suits.  Though in a street racer everybody can use a brief nitro boost each lap, there is more to them than meets the eye. You have all these unique racers who each have a special ability.

 My character from last night, cosplayer Li Tsu, forces any other driver to slow down one space when passing her due to how eye catching she is. Something about her reminds me vaguely of my favorite Destruction All Stars character, Twinkle Riot. 

Handsome Spaniard Montoya can do an extra nitro boost. Tupac look alike Washington can pull his radio out and toss at you to damage your tires.

"Thug life ain't no joke"

 

Race cars are dainty, and the possibility of a variety of damages can happen due to getting to close to each other, or improperly taking a dangerous turn. Those curves can be hell, and mimic the actual layout of the city, its resorts and casinos and beaches. It really kind of puts this kind of race, and a visit to Monte Carlo, on my bucket list. 

Though you have to imagine 
city traffic is hell during the races.

The game is very exciting, and I really appreciate how the feel and play is very different from all my other games. Though my pool of people I know to play games with is somewhat small (3-5 of us), I can see a larger group of board gamers having tournaments and maybe even adding some kind of role-playing element. Kidnapping attempts. Bar room brawls during a post race bar hopping celebration. Maybe fighting each other.

I just knew I would easily find a pic of two guys
in Formula 1 gear brawling. What a
wonderful time we live in. 

OK, probably not. But this is a fun game, and well worth the around hour and half or less to play. The bang for your buck factor is high (though the game tends to go up to 60 bucks for the regular edition). 

Race fans watch in hopes to see this. And we
should maintain verisimilitude and play for this..

"You probably should not have gone
 into 5th gear right before this corner.."

Since I'm trying to limit my board game collection this might be my last purchase for a good while, though I have my temptations. It is a great game to maybe introduce to non-gamers who are turned off by dragons and zombies and what not. A straight forward game that simulates a real life thing. 

And we can all relate to this,
 especially those of us from Los Angeles.

You can have a little fun with it outside the box. I had a habit of doing announcer blurbs during the first game we played. "Lets have a round of applause for the blue car as it takes the lead." Trash talk outside the game as well is perfectly acceptable. Sports fans are dipshits, and this IS a sport. Oh yeah, doing shifting gear, burning rubber, and acceleration noises should be mandatory. 

I never thought I would have interest in a racing game until I saw this a few years ago on Wheaton's Tabletop show. But I hesitated at first because, really, I like fantasy and whimsical man-child stuff. I likes me dragons and zombies. But I think I'm a real world Formula 1 fan now too.

Cheers

Games - to Display or not to Display?

 My geek cred is pretty strong. It started around age 8 or 9 when my parents, avid swap meet and garage sale patrons (like a lot of immigrant types), would occasionally bring me stacks of comics. That started a collection that by adulthood had grown into several long boxes of mostly silver age stuff. 

My next intro to things geeky was probably an old copy of The Hobbit one of my older bros (non-geeks to be sure; oldest brother was a local biker-like badass, and my next oldest was all-city in several sports) left lying around. By the time I discovered D&D around age 13 I had read the LOTR trilogy a couple of times (plus a little Conan and others). So things comics, and things D&D were my main hobbies (besides playing sports myself - a local sports hero's younger brother is going to be forced to dabble). I surfed from around age 14-21, but as I grew up on the beach that was more of a lifestyle than sport or hobby. Comics and RPGS were the lifelong loves, though I pretty much stopped buying comics on the reg by age 25 or so. 

When you are young you love to display things you like. But for me coming up in a time when D&D and other games were more or less underground despite TSR's soon marketing to the general teeming masses, I treated it like a secret society. When I went to the secretive D&D club ("The Fantasy Role Playing Association" - sheesh) after football practice I snuck there with the James Gunn theme playing in the background so as not to be seen by my non-geek friends.

 It was an odd hobby, and I kind of dug the furtive nature of it then. I always stashed my gaming stuff away in drawers and closets in case my sports pals came over (or my earliest girlfriends - though by around 17 years old or so some girls I met were into D&D). Things I displayed were the usual rock posters and such. My D&D buddies were less furtive; they had minis and books and all kinds of stuff all over their rooms. 

I'm still not much of a hobby-displayer. I'm always kind of trying to minimize my life. When I left my hometown for a new city a few short years ago I pretty much tossed out about half my life. Clothes, furniture, and a lot of collectibles. Some action figures, fandom books (including things like my decades old Star Trek technical manual) and other things that were not exactly mint on card. I currently own exactly ONE small bookshelf, and its more for holding a few favored books and gifts from friends. Well, not exactly displayed. More like just tossed on there to keep them off the living room table...

My D&D stuff still stays stashed in a closet, more to get it out of the way than out of embarrassment. But with my current main hobby (outside of video gaming, playing music, and a couple other things) is boardgames. 

Above: me indulging in other things with non-gamer pals 

in Northern Cali...

As I mentioned in other posts, my board gaming passion only started around 3 years ago. My only real boardgame love for decades was Talisman. But I discovered Will Wheaton's Tabletop show and was dazzled by the incredible games being played there. I moved to a new town where I didn't know anybody. I made some friends at the local comic/game shop, but then I found some of the personalities in the local gaming community, especially that of board gaming, kind of boring, outside of my soon to be besties B and L and some of their local friends.

We teamed up to turn non-gamers
into gamers. Nice, eh?

 So with good friends eager to play I started collecting games I had seen on that show (or just saw at a store and had to have). My collection grew exponentially in the last couple years...

Have a couple of editions, but the one with
the phallic standee is a classic.

I'm probably leaving one or two out, but it doesn't take a lot of boardgames to make quite a pile. They outgrew the couple of lower shelves, and I pretty much had them stacked on the living room floor. But with my best friends being out of town for a few months in the earlier parts of the year (they travel to warmer climes to avoid the snow and such we get here near the Sierras), this is kind of my board gaming downtime. So, with pre-spring cleaning they go from the living room into some boxes in the office upstairs until such time as boardgame "season" comes back around.

My board game collection as currently displayed.

In some ways it's kind of a shame. These modern boardgame boxes are beautiful to look at.  I've seen some huge collections of boardgames displayed, and they look amazing. The hosts of my latest D&D campaign must have a hundred boardgames, and they are displayed around the house on a half dozen shelves. And there is a brew pub in town that had hundreds of games available to play. I've played a few games there with B & L, or other local friends, and it's a great atmosphere. I've even gone in there by myself on a quiet Sunday to have a couple ales and just stare at the walls...

So lonely...but fuck, look at all those games!

But honestly, in the spirit of minimalization, I have to resist the shelf thing. As I have for years, I get my artsy display ya-ya's out by hanging stuff on the walls. Mostly things with some personal importance.

More of a religious thing really, 
but counts as a display

Given to me over a decade ago
when Pearl Jam was a client 
at my office. 

Both an art and activity. I like to 
switch different comics in and out
of the frames from time to time.

Just as an aside, there can be a great display out of the box. I gave my pals a beautiful little game that they like to play (it's a two-player game so I don't have it) on their travels, but also keep it out as a nice model display...

OK, so as for my collection of board games, I am going to try and keep it down to the three boxes. But these boxes are pretty much full. There are at least a couple more games I'd like to own, so to fit I will need to eliminate a couple. The most likely choices for elimination are...

Really loving that box art.

OK, well, Munchkin can be fun, but honestly two things turn me off from playing it after the first couple tries. Basically, for what you get out of it, it takes too long. It can take over an hour. Both times we played it was closer to an hour and a half. For a game that is almost all whimsy, it should really be like other whimsical games I like such as King of Tokyo and Epic Spell Wars. A game should take a half hour or less. To me this is the big turnoff. A game that takes upwards of an hour and a half should have a bit more real meat on it. 

As for the Gloomhaven spin-off, well, I have some reasons there that I will save for a later post as the reasons I got it are quite specific. 

But long and short here and to wrap this post up, I will for the time being be keeping the games in the boxes, and my artsy side will just have to stay up on the walls. Out of the way. 

Munchkin and Call to Adventure

 So far I've made posts about boardgames I had played the hell out of in the last couple of years. But on Christmas Day I was able to try two games that are new to me. 

With my nearest family members living hours away, and me hating any kind of holiday travel, I was going to stay in town and hopefully see some of the local friends I've managed to make the last couple years.

My besties B & L (a younger couple who kind of adopted me when I had first moved to my new town) came over to spend Christmas afternoon with me and eat slow cooker chili, drink beer, wine, and cider (maybe a little smokey smokey) and play some games. We had a certain window of time; whenever they would drive the half hour to my part of town they would usually come around 4 or 5 and hang till 9. But a powerful winter snow storm was due at some point. A predicted 4 inches. They have a big truck but currently live in a rural part of town that doesn't have priority for snow plowing. So they came around noon and we put the chili cooker on to bubble and settled in quick to try a couple of new games as snowflakes began to slowly accumulate outside.

Munchkin is of course an infamous game that I have wanted to try since impulse buying the deluxe edition a couple months ago. Call to Adventure was given to me by B & L on the Thanksgiving I spent with them and their local friends. Having not heard of it (it never appeared on the Will Wheaton Tabletop show where I was exposed to most games I currently love) I kind of had doubts about it. 

I spent a couple hours Christmas Eve trying to teach myself Call to Adventure. The rules are a wee bit hard to grasp on whole at first, but as soon as you know the basics you wondered why you thought it was complicated. Its not really. Besides the character/story building aspects, things like memorizing what various runes mean seem hard on the surface but in like two minutes you got it. The first game will go slower mostly from trying to correctly pick out the needed runes for your challenges. But after a couple of turns we were in full swing, not having to look up advanced rules until the need came up.

The second game goes much faster (game one was around an hour and a half, the second a bit less than an hour). 

It's a fairly quaint and dare I say maybe a bit elegant game engine. It goes from awkward to intuitive fairly quickly.  You basically start with an origin card (you are a hunter, farmer, merchant, etc), a motivation card (Bound by honor, seeking vengeance, etc) and a destiny card that spells out your final fate and what points you get at the end for various other cards you obtained that relate to the destiny card. 

Runes stand for the usual character traits; strength, dex, con, Widom. You cast runes representing how many of these you have to defeat challenges that get you more cards to expand your story cards. 

The character and story building elements, that you have a lot of control over, promotes role playing and storytelling by default. B & L are not community theater rpg types by a long shot. But they extrapolated their cards into compelling stories. 

What really struck me was the spirituality aspects built into the game. In my late teens and eearly twenties I had a period of exploring many religious, spiritual and occult things. So I was famiar with rune casting. And there is a lot about the relating of various cards here that reminds me a lot of reading tarot. Exploring the artwork imagery to expand upon the card relations even further helps foster the storytelling fun of the game. 

OK, the storm was on. Snow was coming in sideways. But it was not packing significantly. So my pals decided to stick around long enough to get in a game of Munchkin (it was around an hour).

I personally found it clunky at first. Pulling high level monsters you had no chance against, and constantly having to ditch cards. If you have too many you cannot discard. You have to give them to other players. So it seemed there would be a lot of crap cards going back and forth a lot. But very quickly things started tying together so you could use more cards, and as levels were gained the more powerful monsters you could fight. Just like D&D, how about that? 

It is an amusing RPG parody, but I think the game play has to potential to be kinda deep. I didn't think I'd like it much due to the level of the whimsy in the artwork, but the nods to D&D really won me over.

The storm deepened and B and L hit the road. Our exploring these new games was the highlight of my long weekend, and can't wait to play more. New Years weekend?

I need to play both of these games a bit more to have a final verdict, but they made for a fun few hours. A heavy role-playing game and a not so much one. I'll post more in the future about both games and will also try the solo feature Call to Adventure includes. 

Merry Chirstmas and Happy New Year!

Finally - Betrayal at House of The Hill

 

Around three years ago just when I was getting ready to move to a new town, I only had free antenna TV for several weeks. It was on one of those channels that I discovered Will Wheaton's Geek and Sundry show Tabletop. All the board games I currently love, besides Digital Talisman, were purchased after seeing them on episodes of that show. Dead of Winter; King of Tokyo, Epic Spell wars. My love of board games, never really a thing for me outside of Talisman, had begun. 

Because my travelling friends B and L are back in town for a few months, I went ahead and pushed the button on one I've wanted a long time so I could try it out with them. That game was Betrayal at House on The Hill. The best thing about B and L, besides being my besties in town, is that these games are newish to them as well. The local board gaming community has long since moved on from these games (usually to often abstract worker and resource allocation things I find boring), but they are kind of new to us. Even something like Dead of Winter feels newish, as each game we play seems very different from the last. 

Hilariously, most bad reviews on Amazon for Betrayal are from mothers who bought it for their kids expecting Lugosi Dracula or Karloff Frankenstein to be the foes (versions of these characters are in the game), but found it to have demonic/satanic elements. Well, yeah, if you come up with 50 different hauntings to create the end game, you are going to hit pretty much all genres. Devils, spirits, ghosts, demons, etc. Personally I love the concept of demons, and they are far more fun to me than other creatures you might find chasing Abbot and Costello around in the 50's.

In the game you explore three  floors of the haunted house. The ground floor, second floor, and basement. As you move from room to room you reveal a room tile. Though the room description might be "dining room," "laboratory," or crypt, etc, what is important is if there is a card to be taken and revealed. Three card types in three piles are there and depending on the symbol you will get an item, event, or omen. They might all help or hinder you in some way, but the omen cards are the most important to the game. For each omen you have in play, you must roll under that number each time a new omen is revealed. If you fail, the haunt phase begins. You cross reference the room with the omen just pulled on a chart and you find out what the haunt is and who is the traitor. 

The character cards are two sided, and each opposite side seems to a very different person, though they kept them similar looking enough so the included miniature for each can be used for either. The young high school quarterback on one side, a lineman looking guy on the other side. The male child figure represents either a Caucasian boy or a Japanese boy. A professor, a priest, a fortune teller, a Hispanic lady. All have their own stats. The physical stats being might and speed, and mental being sanity and knowledge. Attacks could harm any of them and reduce them. But you can't usually die until after a Haunt starts. 

So each character goes from room to room, encountering events, items, and omens. These can be helpful or hurtful things (helpful items might be a spear that helps you fight or a set of armor). Omen cards will eventually lead to a Haunt. 

When the haunt occurs, somebody is going to be a traitor. It may be whoever revealed the last omen card, or it could be somebody else. You cross reference a chart with that omen card and the location where it is found, and you have a Haunt on your hands. Somebody maybe turns into a werewolf, or maybe a controller of demons who sends them to hunt you down. There are 50 such haunts, some more powerful than others. One may leave you little chance of winning. Another might be a breeze. But is always fun, and it all pans out as a great little story. And experiencing that story is one of the things I love about it. A game like this promotes role play. In a game like that, I might have my character do something less about what might let him win, and what I think that character would do. Winning is just icing on the cake. 

One downside right now is that we have played like 5 games, and two of those had a repeat haunt. That is not really supposed to happen, you know, with 50 different haunts. I've seen online that people will play a couple dozen games and never get the same haunt. 

Our getting repeats has maybe made us a bit tired of it already. And to be honest, the pre-haunt exploration portion of the game at this point for us has the same rooms and same events and items popping up. So be are taking a break now to play the DandD version Betrayal at Baldurs Gate. 

Yesterday after a Dead of Winter session that had us lose to the apocalypse in record time, we broke open Baldurs Gate and had a run through. It played very much like House, but with fun DandD themed differences. 

I'll probably post at that version after a couple more plays. But I'll say for now that House is a great and fairly easy (until the Haunt) game I think anybody would have fun with, though in my case the replay value is short. But there is at least one expansion for the game, Widows Walk, which adds another level, the roof, and probably some other stuff. I may get that before too long just to check it out and freshen up the main game. 

Cheers

Favorite board game obsessions of recent years part 2 - King of Tokyo

 
When I moved into my new town over two years ago, I spent a certain amount of time at the local comic book/game shop. I got some 5th edition experience there (the game play was about what I expected from a game shop, a type of location I hadn't gamed at for decades), but the most fun for me was the browsing the tons of board games on display.

One of the things I wanted a change from in my move from Los Angeles was my high cable bills. So I just got Spectrum's "Pick 10 option" was getting 10 of your favorite basic cable channels (and also a bunch of the free channels usually available using a TV antenna) available without a cable box; it was all streaming. So I ended up getting my first streaming device, a Roku express. It was on Roku I discovered Pluto TV, a grouping of streaming channels that the next couple of years would be my most watched format. Pluto has channels dedicated to particular TV fare of various vintage. One channel might be all Baywatch episodes. One might be James Bond movies. Another showing endless episodes of Dark Shadows. But Pluto also had channels dedicated to internet shows of recent years, such as a Minecraft gameplay channel, several IGN channels, and Geek and Sundry. It was on Geek and Sundry that I discovered Will Wheaton's board game show Tabletop.

Will and Felicia (rumor has it Nathan Fillion knocked her up at a convention).

I was never much of a Will fan, but in all honesty I think I just bought into what seemed like a geek conspiracy to hate him (for being on Star Trek while they were not, maybe?). Getting to know him on the show I got to like him and his sense of humor. Will's guests would include a long list of geek media personalities from the fringes of movies, tv, and gaming. A virtual "who's that?" of pop culture. Non-household names like Grant Imahara from Mythbusters, porn gal turned D&D convention maven Satine Phoenix, and even the queen bee of Geek and Sundrey (at the time) Felicia Day (one of my secret pleasures was her and her bullying brother Ryan's video game play show Co-Optitude). BTW good news; Zak Smith never appeared on an episode from what I can tell. 

 I eventually would discover several games I love to play, and one I would love to but never did. That first one was Eldritch Horror, a game that looked amazing but once I got it on my table I had a hard time figuring the ins and outs. As usual in a Lovecraft game it was full of rules mechanics that seemed unnecessarily dense and high maintenance. That game has sat unopened on my shelf for over two years. 

But my great board game loves of recent times I actually get to play where on the show, most of which I will talk about in upcoming posts. Games like zombie crisis colony game Dead of Winter, the dream-like Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, Epic Spell Wars (think of it as Beavis and Butthead if they invented a board game), and what I am talking about today; King of Tokyo.

Yes, there is a Mr. Freeze penguin from outer space in this

King was created in 2014 by Richard Garfield, mastermind behind Magic: The Gathering. The basic "plot" is that you play one of several Kaiju. Some are clearly based on existing Toho Studios monsters, like Gigazaur (Godzilla), The King (King Kong), Mecha Dragon (Mecha Godzilla). Some are just plain fanciful, like CyberKitty, a giant...cyber...kitty...

I almost always run Gigazaur (similar to but legally distinct from Godzilla)

Different editions will change up the monsters, and you can even buy separate monster packs with a new monster and associated cards. My favorite of these is Pandakai, a Kaiju panda. 

"Hi keeba!"

The monster you choose doesn't really have any special affect on the game. It all mostly happens in the dice. So, you start with a health total (hit points represented by hearts), zero victory points, and a deck of power/event type cards that flips out three starting cards. These cards can be bought using energy (we like to call them "Energon Cubes" like from Transformers) you can collect based on dice rolls. There are two ways to win; either defeat all other monsters (bring them to zero hearts), or get 20 victory points. Victory points are collected either through dice rolls or card affects. I won't go into detail about the dice, but it is a very cool part of the game. I'm told it works a lot like games such as Yahtzee, where you can roll multiple times to try and get certain outcomes. You might be rolling to collect hearts to heal, or you may try for victory points (gained by rolling multiples of the same number). You can also collect attack symbols to clobber your foes. 

There isn't really a game board to move around on per se. Its just a small board representing Tokyo. When a combatant is in Tokyo all his attacks hit all other monsters. But all other monsters attacks hit him! Plus you cannot normally heal in Tokyo, so your time there will be short. But you can collect victory points by getting there and staying there. 

You can collect energy from die rolls to save up and buy cards. One card might let you have an extra head so you can roll an extra die. Another might depict a dedicated news team who follows you around and gives you victory points due to the press exposure (things like this add great flavor). 

Turns are action packed and the game goes fast. Too fast, I think sometimes. Many sessions will see few power cards get brought into play. Sometimes you are just too busy collecting heals and punches to spend time building up energy cubes. But some cards can be game changing for you, and they add a great flavor, especially seeing as cards can be the only thing that truly distinguishes a character. Sometime we play with slightly higher hit points and a need for more victory to win to have a better chance at bringing multiple cards into play. 

Sessions tend to be short, averaging probably 25 minutes. But the game is so engaging and full of Kaiju goodness you can do several games in a couple hours. Its perfect for if your longer favorite game goes short. And its easy enough to learn for kids too. You can get it for less than 30 bucks, and the price point is amazing for what you get out of it.