Review: Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon

So, I’ve played a few rounds of this game and let me give you some pluses and minuses:

Good

1) Great Atmosphere: With the minis and the tile board it captures the full game very well. It really scratches the D&D itch.
2) Nice Intro to 4e rules: a few rounds of this game and my 12 year old will be ready to go to the full game. Even my 9 year old is getting better with the rules.
3) Game likely plays in under 90 mins

Bad

1) Be ready to interpret the rules a bit: Like Full D&D, the rules can be a little gray on how, for example, how a spell works, how a trap affects the group, etc.
2) Bad Cards: Some of my cards curled as soon as I opened them. They are still playable, but this can point to a problem during the treating process of the cards.

Overall 8.75 out of 10. See the video below for more detailed review.

Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon

Well, something new to try. 🙂

So I tried to intro my kids into D&D with mixed results. My kids were around 8 and 11 when we tried.

• Using Dungeon Mapp with the IPad on the TV worked well.  Using it to keep the hit points was OK at best, because I don’t like to make that public.  Also it could use more graphic options, but for the price it worked great.
• The downside was my kids invited other kids their age to play.  My wife and another adult played as well, but I didn’t feel it really worked out.  Too many kids.
• I tried to scale it back to my wife and my kids.  I think that might work at some point, but I can’t trust my sons (certainly not the younger) to keep track of spells used, etc.  Just too much record keeping at this point.  I think my older son is ready, but I can’t focus on him and my younger to keep things straight.  This is something I can DM around, but I’d like for them to learn.
• I’m going to try and figure something out in the summer, until then I picked up Wrath of Ashardalon.

I think this might solve a number of issues…

• I think this will give me the structure needed to keep things in control.
• The watered down version of D&D 4e will show them the ropes of record keeping a bit more.
• I can play on the kids ‘team’ and have fun that way.

I never thought I’d buy a D&D board game (just play the real thing), but I think this might work out.  I’ll do a review later.

Review: Star Trek: Fleet Captains – Romulan Empire

Finally played with the Romulans. 🙂

I’ve talked quite a bit about Fleet Captains. It is a nice two player game that is playable for 4. So what does the Romulans add?

Simply put, it adds a 3rd (or a 6th player if you follow the rules of two players running each faction) player to the game. The Romulan ships are very nice and didn’t come broken like some of the ships in the orginal game.

On top of the ships, the main thing the game adds is a new set of Mission Cards just mostly for the Romulan player: Espionage I must say that the Missions really capture the spirit of the Romulans who are always sneaking around.

Everything else is two tons of chips and cards to support the new player. 🙂

From a rules point of view, there was very little the game added. The Romulans have the ability to add saboteurs to the crew of ships, which can mess up the other player(s). Also those ships, that are able, can cloak by giving up 5 movement points instead of an action if they wish and that is a plus. It was a very seamless addition.

Down side: The game does give some more tiles (10) to make a bigger board, but you really need more for a 6 player game. The recommended board for 3 players is a little too small. You have enough tiles to make this a little bigger board, but my feel is for 6 players you need more.

Long story short: If you like the game, get it! Can we have the Borg next please???

Legendary (Review)

So this is a first of a number of game\app reviews I have coming out of the Xmas holidays. Legendary is a game I talked about here.

The game is basically Ascension with a few twists:

• Instead of having one big deck there are two which you need to build before the game: One of the Villians (the ‘red’ cards in Ascension) and one with the Heros (‘white’ cards in Ascension).
• You are both playing against each other and the game. The Villians can win, in which case everyone loses. If the Heros win, then everyone gets a team win and the player with the highest victory point total gets the Individual win.
• The game can vary quite a bit. The Heros, Villians, Master Villian and his evil plot changes each game. This gives each game a much different feel. So it is less like Ascension this way and more like Dominion.
• The thing I like the least is the setup time. You need to build two decks of cards which takes a little time. More than I would usually want to for a game that’s likely to be 30-60 mins.  I assume this will go quicker as I play this game a bit more.

Clearly the person who created this game looked at Marvel Heroes and took some of the better ideas (like the whole Master Villan bit).

Also the cards are made by Uppper Deck (who make trading cards) and they are of a good quality. The art is really nice.

So do I like it? I give it a very solid 8.5 out of 10. For me, that puts this game ahead of Ascension (which I play a lot on my IPad), but behind Dominion.

Marvel Legendary

First, sorry for the long time between posts. My work schedule has changed and I’m trying to figure out when I can do things in my life. I had to stay up until the middle of the night to post this. Partly because this looks cool and partly it will force me to figure out when to do this besides the middle of the night.

Check out this game:

Super Heros and Ascension? Yea, I’ll get this.

Hopefully it will do better than Marvel Heros.

Lots of cool ideas in this game, but the rules never really quite worked out. I want to give this game another spin however.

Anyway, I don’t pre-order many boardgames, but this might be the expection. I’m really pumped for this and hope it plays half as nice as Tom says (because he is usually overly positive).

Still, looks good. Art is good. I’m there.

Star Trek: Fleet Captains – Romulan Empire

Yep, the game is on pre-order. 🙂

Star Trek: Fleet Captains is a lot of fun. I’ve been trying to get it to the table to play but life is getting in the way with my kids back in school. Maybe this weekend I can get a game in.

I have a number of posts about this game and one of my worries is a number of ships in the box were damaged in the original game. My hope is that Wizk!ds has that fixed this time around.

Munchkin is (Mostly) Evil

OK, that might be a bit over the top, but I saw this video on Geek and Sundry and I had to take my shots at Munchkin…

So before I start ripping Munchkin, let me start by praising it. Munchkin is a funny game. It makes fun of Dungeons and Dragons, so if you played that game, you will get a big laugh out of this. It can be a fun game. So now what’s wrong with Munchkin:

1) Someone usually gets screwed: See how much fun Sandeep had that game? Stuck with bad cards and just wasting his time. That happens to someone in most of the games. That might be OK, if the game is quick, but….

2) Maybe people I know are REALLY good at messing with other players, but this game is 1.5 hours at least. This is a classic bash the leader game. If you are the lucky person to try to win when everyone is out of cards to stop you, then great. Otherwise this can turn into a slow grind.

Sadly many of Steve Jackson’s games are like this: Cute and usually Funny, not enough focus on play testing to get over major flaws in the game. It’s a fun game to play from time to time and that’s about it. People I know will move on to a more well rounded game. If you want to read some other reviews check out the forum on BoardGameGeek.

If you like it, good for you! It’s a cash cow for Jackson, but it’s not for me (and quite a few others), that’s for sure.

Review: Star Trek Fleet Captains (Part 2)

I’ll start off by descriping a game played by my wife and I.

My wife picked playing the Klingons. She was assigned the Ships:

IKS Bortas

IKS T’ong

IKS Somraw

My ships as the Feds were:

USS Venture

USS Defiant

USS Enterprise A

So the game starts out with the Klingons getting a lot of combat missions and the Federation getting mostly Science and Exploration missions. The Feds spread out to ‘explore new worlds’ while the IKS Bortas and T’ong more forward to attack, while the IKS Somraw scouts Klingon space. The Klingons move into Fed space uncloaked and miss their chance to attack the USS Defiant. All three Federation ships pounce on the Bortas and the T’ong and direct their fire toward the smaller T’ong. Some fancy flying keeps the Enterprise from attacking, but the Venture and Defiant pound the T’ong and come close to destroying it. The Klingons cloak and the T’ong limps back for repairs. The Klingons get some Victory Points for the battle and the Feds get a few for building a Star Base and Exploring space. So things are fairly even, but a slight lead for the Fed.

So a new mission pops up for the Feds to rescue an away team from a Klingon planet that is luckily not too far from Federation Space. The Bortas and the repaired T’ong go to the planet and beam up the away team to the Bortas. The Enterprise (with Captain Kirk now in command) continues their mission to explore ‘Strange New Worlds’ and the Venture and Defiant speed to the planet to help the away team. They warp into the area before the Klingon can cloak with full power to the sensors and shields. The Federation is able to overpower the Bortas shields with their combined sensors and beam the team off of the Klingon ship and onto the Venture. The Klingons are furious and direct all fire at the Defiant. Only the T’ong can get a clean shot at the Defiant and she is nearly destroyed. Too damaged to cloak, the Venture and Defiant try a quick retreat with the Venture trying to cover the damaged Defiant, but the attempt fails and the Defiant is destroyed by the Bortas.

The Defiant is replaced by the USS Sutherland.

The fleeing Venture is able to help complete an Exploration mission the Enterprise was working on. Between that mission and saving the away team from the Klingons, the Federation is up 9 to 4 on Victory Points. At this point it was getting late and my wife gives up (very un-Klingon), but the goal of this game was to get the feel of the rules.

So the point of that session report is to simply ask the question: Does that sound like Fun?

If you are enough of a Sci-Fi geek to say yes, then this game could be for you. I liked it a lot. Despite the issues with the game parts themselves (and my wife was tossing a few comments about the game components as well (not positive)), I would buy an expansion if it came out and re-deal with the issues. Hopefully WizK!ds will have learned their mistakes the first time around as well.

There are already some varients rules floating around. There are some good player aids as well to help with the rule book if needed.

If boardgames and Sci-Fi is your thing, I think there is enough here plus fan support as well that you can get a lot of fun out of this game. If WizK!ds makes add-ons to the game, I would buy them in a second. Does the game have issues out of the box, yea it does, but if you can get over that than at least I can say that I’ll get my $70-100 out of this game easily.

Review: Star Trek Fleet Captains (Part 1a)

In my first post I had said that I was missing 4 command posts. Turns out that box insert has a removable piece that was hiding the command posts. Sorry about that WizK!ds, but the other points still stand.

Review: Star Trek Fleet Captains (Part 1)

So, I hope everyone had a good Holiday and New Year’s day. Time to get back to blogging.

I had said before that I was getting Star Trek Fleet Captains (STFC) and Yggdrasil for the holidays. I’m going to start off with STFC.

This review is going to split up into two parts, mainly because I haven’t played the game yet (maybe tonight). However, there was enough about the box itself that it was worth a post.

As you can see there is a lot of eye candy and there should be for a game that lists for $100 (you can get it for $70 at online stores). 24 ships, 400 cards with nice artwork and over 100 tokens… It should rock. However…

Too many owners (like this one from Germany) are getting ships that look like:

Also reported: damaged or missing cards on BoardGameGeek‘s forums for STFC. In my case 3 ships (USS Sutherland and Reliant, Plus the IKS T’ong) had ‘popped off’ the bases, so it wasn’t even a break like in the pic above. With a little bit of super glue and a hair dryer to speed up drying, the ships were quickly fixed.

Also, 4 command posts (big cards that act as your starting point) are missing.

Now Wizk!ds is supposed to have a good and quick replacement program and I submitted my request and we will see how that goes. However, I think it goes without saying that repairing a $100 game is not cool and Wizk!ds needs to follow up with their factory about Quality Control.

The second part is the cards and the tiles for the game board, which are just cards cut to a different shape. The art is excellent with great shots of all the characters, etc. where needed. The cards themselves are on the light side. My wife, who used to deal in such things, said they upgraded the paper by having a pattern on them and they gave the cards a finish, but it was clearly lighter than Card Stock.

I’ve read the rules and the game looks like fun. I’ll report more on the rulebook and game play on part 2. However the game components have some issues. Summary:

• Broken Ships: This is offset by the fact that WizK!ds is good at replacing the ships, but making these minis should be the company’s ‘bread and butter’. Having this many reports of damaged ships does not put the company in a positive light.
• Cards: The art on the cards is very nice but the overall quality of the cards themselves is low. The cards are very thin. People who plan on playing the game a lot should consider sleeving the cards. Not cheap since you have 400 of them.

Still, I think the game is going to rock when I play it in the next day or two. More in Part 2…