Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Like so many television shows, Battlestar Galactica was, for us, a great watch for the first couple of seasons or so, but then crashed and burned spectacularly. Note to writers: when you claim to have a plan, you better make sure you do have one instead of making shit up as you go along. Even so, the characters grabbed us enough that it was one of first boardgames we were especially interested in trying. In all, we’ve played it three times now, and while my wife has cooled a bit on it, I still think it’s a wickedly fun game.

Battlestar Galactica is a cooperative game with a traitor element. The players take on the roles of the characters from the show and work together to resolve the various crises faced by the human fleet as they try to escape from the Cylons. The humans win once the fleet manages to jump a certain distance away. At least one player in every game however is secretly a Cylon and wins only if the humans lose. This means that the humans will be trying to find out who the Cylons are to neutralize them and this is where most of the tension in the game lies.

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I’ve finished Hitman: Blood Money but I’ve decided not to actually write a full review. I’m a bit busy at work at the moment and I doubt anyone would want to read a review of a three year old PC game anyway. It’s decent enough with an interesting premise but because it relies so heavily on hard-coded scripts, you basically have to rely on trial and error to know how to complete levels in the proper way. I also find it amusing that most of the upgrades you can get in the game are more or less useless unless you want to play it as an action game.

I’m currently playing Torchlight but I’ll probably have to wait until next week to post my impressions. In the meantime, a survey of the relatively new releases on the market that I’m interested in reveals an embarrassment of riches. Usually, my bottleneck with PC games is playing time rather than cost, but there are so many new games I’m interested in that even cost is going to an issue. Here’s an overview of what I plan on buying over the next few months:

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I may not be enough of a Warhammer fanboy to actually shout, “Blood for the Blood God!” at the gaming table, but I can assure you that this game is so good that it made me want to. Han seemed eager to try out his new game and being somewhat familiar with the Warhammer universe, I was particularly happy to oblige him. This relatively recent release has four players taking on the roles of the four Chaos Gods who are intent on corrupting the Old World, but only one can emerge as the victor.

The Warhammer universe is a pretty depressing place and Chaos in the Old World makes sure you know that. Cultists who worship the Chaos Gods abound, corrupting the land and its people with their foul rituals while horrific demons run around massacring and terrorizing the populace. The entire game is drenched in theme and screams evil, from the design of the board to the detailed plastic figures and the flavor text on the cards.

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I bought Hitman: Blood Money when it went on sale on Steam not too long ago. It’s a game that was first released in 2006, which means that it’s a bit long in the tooth now, and I wasn’t even sure if I was going to like it, but since it only cost US$5 buying it just to try it out was no big deal.

The Hitman series had a certain notoriety in its heyday and was a big enough property that a film was made based on it. The film bombed at the box office however and though there were rumors at one point about a new Hitman game, its developer Eidos Interactive has since been taken over by Square Enix. This means that Blood Money will likely be the last installment in the series at least for a while. Since I’d never played a single game in the series at all, I figured I should at least try this one while I still could.

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I’ve had my eye on the Heroscape set ever since Sean first got a hold of it for CarcaSean. This is after all a game that comes with 30 pre-painted plastic miniatures of varying sizes, a decent collection of plastic terrain pieces which can be used to build 3D maps of many different configurations and lots of dice to fight simulated battles with. True, it’s a game that is marketed by Hasbro as a toy and the various plastic components do have a kiddie feel, but there is something undeniably awesome about buying a complete miniatures game in a box. What’s more the entire thing only costs US$40 at list price which seems like a steal compared to the prices of many other games.

All of this doesn’t count for a whit of course if the gameplay isn’t any good, which was why I was anxious to play an actual session of it before ordering a copy of my own. The rules are simple. At the beginning of every round, each player secretly allocates his four order markers among the units that are under his command. Of these, three are numbered 1 to 3, signifying the sequence that the orders can be executed, while one is a dummy marker that is placed only to confuse opponents. During his turn, he then uncovers the earliest of his available markers and issues orders the appropriate unit. Once all players have exhausted all three of the real order markers, a new round starts.

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Continuing my series of short guides to the different factions of Fall from Heaven 2 (see my posts on the Ljosalfar and the Grigori in my original blog), here’s one for the Calabim. They’re something of one-trick pony faction, and pay a significant price for that trick, but it’s a mighty impressive one. This is because the Calabim are the only faction in the game with access to vampires and once they manage to get the blood engine flowing, they become pretty much unstoppable.

What does being a vampire in Fall from Heaven 2 entail? For starters, all units with this promotion get a small 10% boost to combat strength and slightly increased healing whether they’re inside their own cultural borders or out on the campaign trail. But the real benefit are the three special abilities all vampires have. First, any vampire can gift vampirism to any other friendly units in the same tile, as long as it is level 6 or above. Second, a vampire can feed on a Bloodpet unit, the Calabim version of the basic Warrior, to heal, gain additional movement and be able to attack again.

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My wife and I have played about half a dozen games of Agricola now and I think it’s safe to say that we’re still barely scratching the surface of what it can offer. Despite an intimidating array of boards, cards and small wooden bits, the game at its heart has a very straightforward mechanic and a very easy to understand theme.

Each player takes control of a family of farmers, starting with just a husband and wife, and must guide them towards a prosperous future. Playing through a fixed number of rounds, every turn each player gets a number of actions directly equal to how many family members they have. At the end, victory is determined by awarding points according how wealthy and successful each player’s farm is.

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One of the problems I have when writing about boardgames is that it’s impossible to wait until I’ve played a game several times in order to write about it. This is because for some games it can be very difficult to arrange multiple sessions of a game within a reasonable span of time. Apparently one of the dark secrets of the hobby is that many owners only get to play some of the bigger games they buy a handful of times, sometimes not at all, and yet they keep buying them anyway!

This was the case with Age of Conan, a game that Han brought in to play at CarcaSean and that I probably won’t see again for a long time. This means that all of my impressions and opinions were gleaned from a single playthrough and should be taken with the appropriate grain of salt. As its name implies, this game is set during the fictional Hyborian Age from the stories of Robert E. Howard. Up to four players each take control of one of the major nations of the era and strive to be the greatest empire of all.

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