Board? Game Review-Labyrinth



One excellent picture, freshly ripped off of Amazon.com

 Labyrinth. The word brings to mind a twisting maze of stone and rock, with the rapid thuds of the Minotaur's hoved feet booming through the torchlight corridors...

That is, if you have a PhD in Greek Mythology. To the rest of us, our mind fires a blank in the face of such an unspellable nine letter word. Games like Labyrinth take something as appealing as sandwich mold and sterilize it for our young minds. Just look at the box art. The HUMAN SKULL looks like it's going to invite you in for tea and crumpets! (What the heck is a crumpet, anyway?) All this in the spirit that turned the Grimms' story Rapunzel into Tangled and Cinderella into a movie with a G rating.

Rant about children's stories aside, onward.


Most of the tiles on the board are mobile, and on your turn you move a row or column by pushing the spare tile in, shoving another tile off the other side, which is sort of shown in the picture. Then you move your man, trying to get to the next  object shown on your card. Sounds simple, right?
No. Execution is difficult, and takes a bit of brain-power to wrap your mind around.


Pros
Unique idea.
Easy to learn, hard to master.
Plenty of room for messing with your friends' plans, intentionally or not.
Catches the chaos of the Labyrinth. The more players, the more chaos.
Decent artwork, nice miniatures.
Should work well with kids. (I don't know, I don't have kids to play it with)

Cons
Cute. Happy. Fluffy. Bah, humbug.
Almost impossible to plan ahead.
The more you think, the longer your turn, but you win.

Board Game Review-Pandemic

Pandemic was my kick-off into co-operative games, my first one.  I've loved co-ops ever since. Working with your friends instead of against them just makes games more fun, in my opinion.  (I tend to exaggerate my love of back stabbing for humor's sake)


Pandemic is very well-designed in difficulty.  Most of the games I've played have boiled down to two outcomes: the game burns us, or we barely scrape a win. 
So, the basic premise: Each player is a disease hunter, each with their own specialty.  You rush around the world, trying to balance destroying the 4 different kinds of disease before they become too prevalent and finding cures for the 4 by getting someone with 5 cards of a disease type, which players can pass to each other under certain conditions.  You get two cards that can be used for cures each turn, but it works as a timer, because once that stack of cards is gone, you lose.  Nice mechanic: you can discard cards to fly to their assigned cities for free. An example of balancing collecting cards for the cure versus fighting the diseases.


It's a good game that anyone can play, but it has a larger learning curve than Castle Panic, since it is more complex.  The theme is well done, with a little above-average artwork.  They went for a fairly tame theme, which works for me.  Unlike most co-op games, in which the world dies by zombie or alien invasion if you lose, instead, the world merely dies of disease. :)
The stock game might become repetitive, but the expansion adds in a lot of replayability with the different modes of play and additional characters you can throw in.  Unfortunately, the expansion is another $30 onto the already $35 base game.

Publisher Stuff:
Publisher: Z-Man Games
Players: 2-4 (expansion "adds" a 5th, using the exact same rules as with 4 players)
Ages: 10+
Playing time: 45-60 minutes




Summary
Pros:
-Well Designed
-Tense for 80% of the game


Cons:
-Possible for one person to start playing dictator, especially once the tension ramps up

I'd give it a 9.0, I will never turn down a chance to play it. 


P.S. I'm a little out of it since I just had my wisdom teeth removed Friday, so if there are any questions, shoot up a comment and I'll fire back.


P.P.S. I wrote this before Christmas, and I guess I was really out of it, since I never posted it.  But I've polished it up a bit, and here we are!

Board Game Review-Castle Panic

So far, the only game made from Fireside Games. Let's look at the theme-setting writing everyone scrawls on the box.
"The forest is filled with all sorts of Monsters. They watched and waited as you built your Castle and trained your soldiers, but now they’ve gathered their army and are marching out of the woods." No, not all at once.  They form into polite little pairs and run at your castle 2 at a time, so that a tiny stone hut of a castle with absolutely no allies will be able to wipe out an entire orc army.


But those are problems with the plot of Defend Your Castle genre of game, not with Castle Panic.  In fact, Castle Panic catches the most invigorating feeling from DYC games. That is, complete and Utter Panic as wave after wave of evil baddies fling themselves at(and somehow manage to destroy) your defenses.


There are 3 modes of play:
Standard, all the players defend the castle, and, assuming the castle survives, the player with the most points(kills) wins.
Co-op, the players win or lose as a team.
Overlord, one player controls the monsters.


In Standard it seems like the company tried to put in some player spite(or player interaction, a rose by any other name...)(Example: No, I'm not gonna trade you my knight, you'll kill that troll and win!) but, at least with my family, the defenders are so focused providing the optimum protection for the castle that whoever wins is a matter of who's lucky. I guess my family isn't competitive enough.


It's well done in terms of difficulty. Despite my previous comments, a group's first game is well balanced, with either the players heaping curses on that last orc or symbolically crawling from the single remaining tower of their base, ecstatic to be alive. So the first game leaves you with a little more breathing room than Pandemic, which will grind your delusions of how awesome you are into dust the 1st go around. As you get better it's necessary to add twists to the main game to make it harder.  In detail: The game starts off throwing punches, surrounding your castle at the start,  and keeps sending a steady stream of monsters, and mixing up the basic systems with Giant Boulders, moving certain monsters closer, and Boss Monsters.

Player interaction while co-operating is still good, as players must trade cards and plan together to hold off the hordes.

As with all co-op games, you run the risk of having one player become self-proclaimed Head Politician and telling everyone what to do. The fact that 80% of a person's hands changes each turn helps curb that, though, and usually keeps advice to within the pleasantly helpful level.

Meh. The art could have been better, but you don't look for good art from a small publisher's first game.


Fireside Games has released some more Alternate Rules here! I haven't played with 'em yet, but they look great!


This is what I call a moddable game, because, while it's a good, self-contained game, it's gameplay mechanics makes it easy for user made content to fit in.


Summary
Players: 1-6 (or 7 if using Overlord)
Ages: 10+
Game Length: Appr. 1 hour


Pros:
-Co-op
-Has many variants to the game made by Fireside, which boosts the replayability-Simple enough to grasp easily, but still be complex enough to be engaging to "serious" gamers
-Anyone can pick it up and play for an hour, without thinking the game is personally insulting their intelligence


Cons:
-Art could be better/more varied


Neutral:
-Doesn't have difficulty levels, just ways you can tweak the game away from Standard


I'd give this a solid 8.5 out of 10.
Photo lifted from Fireside Games section, here.